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Commit personally: Senior executives need to understand what they want from digital and social. Fortunately, the highest-level goals are generally quite clear. Companies have unprecedented opportunities to build steadily strengthening connections to customers, prospects, and partners. As a result, they can achieve higher margins, lower acquisition costs, and lower customer churn, thereby raising customer lifetime value. Clearly laying out these expectations is a great way to start.

6 Senior-Level Steps To Digital Marketing Success

Understand customers.

The Year Ahead For...Social media

Social media is antifragile. It is thriving in a world of increasing technological development, complexity and uncertainty.

In 2013, social media will

Among CEOs of the world’s Fortune 500 companies, a mere 20 have Twitter accounts.

As social media spreads around the globe, one enclave has proven stubbornly resistant: the boardroom.

A new report from McKinsey Global Institute, however, makes the business case for social media a little easier to sell. According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by the business consulting giant, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value. At the high end, that approaches Australia’s annual GDP. How’s that for a bottom line?

This is a very appealing metaphor, because it largely absolves anyone who was involved in the media from any blame for failing to see the writing on the wall or failing to move quickly enough to change their behavior or their corporate culture.

But is this true? Disruption guru Clay Christensen, also associated with Harvard, has written about how industries — including the car-manufacturing business and the steel industry — have failed to adapt because they didn’t appreciate just how disruptive new entrants or new technologies would be. And it’s arguable that the media industry in the 1990s and early 2000s also failed to appreciate just how disruptive the web would be to their business and to journalism in general. Should we blame them for that? I think we should blame them a little, and here’s why: because there were senior people in the industry who saw the disruption coming — saw it clearly, appreciated the implications, and talked about the potential damage. These weren’t voices crying in the wilderness, but fairly powerful players. To take just one example, there was Knight Ridder excecutive Kathy Yates, who ran the company’s digital unit, and eventually grew frustrated with the industry and moved on to Women.com and then CBSMarketwatch.

Why the spike? A good chunk of it, I assume, has to do with the death of Whitney Houston the day before, and viewers who wanted to see how the biggest stars in music responded to the loss of a peer.

Big, live TV events are big events on Twitter and Facebook, which generate lots of online chatter and drive more eyeballs back to the TV screen, where they inspire even more chatter. Cue virtuous cycle.

. It says it attracted a million visitors to the various sites and iPad/iPhone apps it operated over the three days leading up to the show. It says it attracted a peak of 165,000 concurrent viewers to a livestream of pre-Grammys red carpet coverage Sunday afternoon.

There are great reasons for why The Stream triumphed. In a world of infinite variety, it's difficult to categorize or even find, especially before a thing has been linked. So time, newness, began to stand in for many other things. And now the Internet's media landscape is like a never-ending store, where everything is free. No matter how hard you sprint for the horizon, it keeps receding. There is always something more.  Nowness also transmits this sense of presence, of other people, that you get in a city when you go to a highway overpass and look down at all the cars at any time of the day or night. Things are happening. I am not alone. Look at all this. 

Schonfeld cited Betaworks CEO John Borthwick's thinkpiece, "Distribution Now," which he wrote in April of 2009, just as all this was really getting going. Borthwick concludes his post on the rise of The Stream with two quotes from musician Brian Eno. The old (and better) one begins like this: "In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that 'interactive' anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is 'unfinished.' Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. "

I am not joking when I say: it is easier to read Ulysses than it is to read the Internet. Because at least Ulysses has an end, an edge. Ulysses can be finished. The Internet is never finished. 

Jim refers to ideals as the 400 percent advantage. Why? Because the brands identified as The Stengel 50 by Millward Brown Optimor have outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of four over the past decade. Representing a wide variety of product and service categories they are united by one common factor; they operate in harmony with their ideals.

Ideals provide the “North Star,” the compass bearing by which these companies steer through good times and bad. Particularly noticeable from the chart comparing the Stengel 50 and the S&P 500’s performance over time is the rapid recovery of the Stengel 50 from the recession in 2008. These companies are not hindered by their ideals in tough times, they are helped by them.

Ideals probably have their strongest influence through the people who work on a brand, but can also have a positive effect with customers and consumers, not least in how their communications are received. In Grow, Jim reports work conducted by Millward Brown’s neuroscience practice, showing that people find the Stengel 50 brands to be more empathetic, more ideals-based and more memorable in what they stand for than their competitors. The end result, people are more likely to want to share the advertising with others.

Highest rise in marketing spend in six years

  The latest IPA Bellwether survey published last week shows a sharp upward revision in marketing budgets in Q2 2013. The rise is the highest in almost six years.

"These are very positive and welcome figures indeed. It is no surprise to see internet spend comprising the lion’s share of the increases - a trend that is only set to continue. Digital no longer represents a tick–the–box exercise for companies; it is clearly an essential revenue driver and fertiliser for the green shoots of economic recovery.”

In an interview with The Paris Review twenty years ago, Don DeLillo mentioned that “lists are a form of cultural hysteria.” From the vantage point of today, you wonder how much anyone—even someone as routinely prescient as DeLillo—could possibly have identified list-based hysteria in 1993.

prioritizes

The list gives a structure—a numerical narrative—to a text that would otherwise lack any kind of internal architecture. If you wanted to write something about, say, the phrases people use on Twitter that you find highly irritating, you can get away with not making any kind of over-all, analytical point by imposing the framework of a list. The enumeration itself, the getting to the end of the counting, becomes the point of the writing (and the reading). It’s not simply a jumbled heap of complaints about how people talk on Twitter; it’s a list, and in this sense it means business.

Are companies that have made headway in introducing a social collaboration platform into their enterprise having success getting employees to participate?

According to one recent study not really.

munications was also so highly ranked indicates that this function may be carvi

But spare a thought for the poor admen. Their industry is going through a particularly difficult time. Not only are they confronting a proliferation of new “channels” through which to pump their messages; they are also having to puzzle out how to craft them in an age of mass scepticism. Consumers are bombarded with brands wherever they look—the average Westerner sees a logo (sometimes the same one repeatedly) perhaps 3,000 times each day—and thus are becoming jaded. They are also increasingly familiar with the tricks of the marketing trade and determined to cut through the clutter to get a bargain. Scepticism and sophistication are especially pronounced among those born since the early 1980s.

A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that 46% of American “millennials” use their smartphones to check prices and online comments when they visit a shop.

Many companies want to go further and bypass conventional ad campaigns altogether. It has long been known that “earned media”—word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, family and news articles—are highly trusted. Nielsen’s studies show that strangers’ comments on social media and online forums are also now seen as credible sources, rivalling traditional “paid media”.

These companies excel because they don't spend time and energy building formal business cases in order to justify every dollar spent on customer-centric initiatives

American Express overhauled its customer care employee training program and now spends 70% of the time focused on skills such as actively listening, assessing customers' moods, and helping customers understand the value of their relationship with the company. All that time and effort has paid off as customer spending increased, attrition decreased, and customers who learn about their card benefits and features from customer care employees show an average increase of more than 10% in advocacy.