Image by CRUSTINA! The big digital media shift in 2013 has little to do with new mobile applications or social networks. Rather, it revolves around how brick and mortar businesses — and in particular stores and entertainment venues — integrate social into their physical brand experiences. Some folks dub this trend Clicks and Mortar, the integration of online into our everyday physical whereabouts. Recently, I attended the Ivy League Sports Symposium, and, whether it was MLB or the Tough Mudder franchise, everyone was talking about the live fan experience from a participation perspective. For example, new stadiums are developed with incredibly robust wifi networks for in game experiences. The trend extends well beyond sports. Burberry recently invested significant dollars to …

Image by Eyesplash Greg Verdino turned me on to a fantastic article about the rise of the Customer Experience Officer. The article rightly discusses the real trend of branding today — the comprehensive user experience. By focusing on the comprehensive user experience, research shows brands strengthen return on investment (ROI). Geoff Livingston on Google+

Forrester recently updated its Technographics profiles (made famous in the book Groundswell) for global social media consumption, surveying 95,000 consumers across 18 countries in North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. One primary finding was the lack of commenting occurring in mature western markets, including the United States. Adoption is pretty much complete in the U.S. (86%) and globally. Almost everyone who is online also is using or has used social media. Comscore recently corroborated this data, saying 83% of the world’s online population participates in social media. But, most of us in the United States are not social and care not to converse. The Forrester report finds that 2/3 of the US adult social media population doesn’t comment. This …

Image by Walmart Stores Wouldn’t it be great if customers ran marketing? No, I don’t think it would be great. In fact, it would suck. It flies in the face of the way business occurs. People within a company determine how to build products for, market to, and serve customers. A customer centric business model is smart and often the mark of a successful company. Great companies exist to serve these customers. Today, the social business movement (an unfortunate term born to be clichéd from the get go) seeks to reinvigorate modern companies with a listening-based customer-centric model. But let’s be clear here, customer centric does not make your CMO a customer. The customer has no interest in showing a …

The Amazon Kindle Fire launched with great success this holiday season. Sales have outpaced Amazon’s forecasts, and manufacturing has stepped up. But the iPad competitor has quality issues with more than 30% of buyers rating the device negatively to neutral (1 to 3 stars). The New York Times ran an extensive piece about customers many Fire foibles. In it, Amazon promises an over the air update this week (one that has yet to arrive). My 3 star experience with the Fire matches these less than thrilled customers. A suddenly dead Fire in the middle of a road trip prompted a tour of the Amazon site and resetting the device. Further issues include its movie watching capabilities, in turn turning me …

Marketers can learn from the horrible debt debate and the resulting downgrade of U.S. credit. The pursuit of personal and partisan agendas by all parties — but most notably Tea Party extremists and to a lesser extent liberal Democrats — cost the nation and to some extent global investors alike. All parties came out looking worse for the wear. While posturing to be idealogically right, the utter loss of respect in the eyes of their customers — the American citizen local and national, as well as global investors– cannot justify hardline stances. As a result of this gamesmanship, Congress now enjoys record low disapproval ratings. While making “We passed our bill, they won’t compromise” statements, Congress failed to enact the …