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Offer excellent customer service  As the online channel matures, and growth slows, customer service (and customer experience) will be the key differentiator. It can also trump price in some circumstances.  For some purchases, price online will be the deciding factor once customers decide to buy a certain product, but they will also appreciate great service and the personal touch. 

Recent reports suggest that for every £1 spent online, the internet influences £3 spent in stores. Google and others are working to bring all the tools that made finding great products online easy and rewarding to the real world.

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”.

Multi-channel marketing has been the talk for quite some time, but it seems many loyalty marketing professionals still struggle with creating a consistently seamless experience for multi-channel loyalty. Your customers can now shop online or in-store, may contribute to your social media spaces via mobile, and engage with your brand on Facebook. Does your loyalty marketing program track and reward all the different types of engagement and brand love that your fans are displaying? Or are you stuck in a one-track mode, dishing out rewards for only one, narrowly defined type of action? Look ahead and keep watch as the technology avail

able shifts to accommodate rewarding ALL the little ways your customers demonstrate their loyalty -- and get on board!

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.

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?

Once upon a time, the hush-hush plans and special-access security clearance would have been about some cutting-edge sneaker technology: the discovery of a new kind of foam-blown polyurethane, say, or some other breakthrough in cushioning science. But the employees in this lab aren't making shoes or clothes. They're quietly engineering a revolution in marketing.

Nike Digital Sport, a new division the company launched in 2010.

On one level, it aims to develop devices and technologies that allow users to track their personal statistics in any sport in which they participate. Its best-known product is the Nike+ running sensor, the blockbuster performance-tracking tool developed with Apple (AAPL). Some 5 million runners now log on to Nike (NKE) to check their performance. Last month Digital Sport released its first major follow-up product, a wristband that tracks energy output called the FuelBand.

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.