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Marketing will no longer be just about acquisition: Loyalty and customer acquisition will still be the top two strategic programs for marketing organizations, but by 2020 they are separated from pioneering new and emerging technologies to engage audiences by only 1.6 percent.

Innovation will focus on small screens and no screens: Mobile devices and networks (59%), personalization technologies (45%), and IoT (39%) are the three technology-specific trends that will have the biggest impact on marketing organizations by 2020.

Raising customer loyalty and better brand perception are the two top benefits (both 53%) marketers aim to realize through a more positive customer experience.

This year, we expect to see more brands rely on Messenger as a platform to market and sell products to highly targeted audiences.  With Facebook’s new Messages Objective, brands now create ads that allow prospective customers to immediately be connected to a live customer service representative or bot. Sephora, the multinational cosmetics chain, saw an 11 percent increase in makeover bookings with used Facebook’s targeted ads along with Messages Objective.

Terms You Should Monitor What should you track with these tools? Consider the following: Mentions of your brand name. Mentions of your CEO or important executives. Competitive brand mentions. Relevant industry terms. Key influencers.

Keep an eye on your brand mentions. Check in periodically and use email alerts to stay on top of discussions as they happen. Use your crisis scale to assess problems. Then, respond accordingly.

To determine how many negative messages constitutes a crisis, Hootsuite recommends setting crisis thresholds.

Using your crisis scale, establish who is responsible for managing the response at each level. It might look something like this:

Your employees likely all have their own social media accounts. When disaster strikes, they may not know what they can (and can’t) say about the issue publically. So, it’s important to make sure they don’t go rogue or leak information you don’t want to be released. This could make a bad situation worse. Get in front of this with a documented response plan.

Craft Emergency Response Messaging Templates When a mistake happens, you may not have time to issue a detailed response right away. However, you’ll need to say something to acknowledge you’re aware of the issue before things get out of hand.

"It's not that hard to know these days who are the folks likely to be influential in this conversation," Matthews said. "You know what the top 10 issues that you might face are, and you know who is likely to be the most influential when those stories break, the people who might take your side or be opposed. ... Ask yourself how do you engage them. What is the content you can bring to bear that articulates your position rather than letting the public run wild. You can never control the conversation, but you can make sure your side is heard."

"It really helps you find your skeletons in the closet," he said. "You have to have a mindset that you are grateful your customers are telling you what you are doing wrong, and you have the opportunity a chance to fix it.

when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks

I’ve been trying to get Facebook to disclose shadow contact information to users for almost a year now. But it has even refused to disclose these shadow details to users in Europe, where privacy law is stronger and explicitly requires companies to tell users what data it has on them.

To test the shadow information finding, the researchers tried a real-world test. They uploaded a list of hundreds of landline numbers from Northeastern University. These are numbers that people who work for Northeastern are unlikely to have added to their accounts, though it’s very likely that the numbers would be in the address books of people who know them and who might have uploaded them to Facebook in order to “find friends.” The researchers found that many of these numbers could be targeted with ads, and when they ran an ad campaign, the ad turned up in the Facebook news feed of Mislove, whose landline had been included in the file; I confirmed this with my own test targeting his landline number.

“I think that many users don’t fully understand how ad targeting works today: that advertisers can literally specify exactly which users should see their ads by uploading the users’ email addresses, phone numbers, names+dates of birth, etc,” said Mislove. “In describing this work to colleagues, many computer scientists were surprised by this, and were even more surprised to learn that not only Facebook, but also Google, Pinterest, and Twitter all offer related services. Thus, we think there is a significant need to educate users about how exactly targeted advertising on such platforms works today.”

There are certainly creepier practices happening in the advertising industry, but it’s troubling this is happening at Facebook because of its representations about letting you control your ad experience. It’s disturbing that Facebook is reducing the privacy of people who want their accounts to be more secure by using the information they provide for that purpose to data-mine them for ads.

When I asked the company last year about whether it used shadow contact information for ads, it gave me inaccurate information, and it hadn’t made the practice clear in its extensive messaging to users about ads

products with answers from official brand reps get 100% more questions than others – suggesting that, upon seeing that the brand is engaged, shoppers are more likely to ask questions (when they may’ve otherwise left the site to look elsewhere).

After a consumer answers a question or submits a review, never leave them at a dead end; once someone contributes, they’re more likely to contribute again. Take them to a thank you page that includes a few more related, unanswered questions.

Approximately two-thirds of the marketers indicate they will outsource one or more projects involving content creation, creative development, ad unit creation and online production/services.

Event spending will rise sharply as 70% of respondents plan on increases for 2012 with a significant shift to small/local roundtable programs and virtual events.

An amazing 95% of the respondents watch tech videos and three-quarters of them share or post video.  What respondents look for in video varies from one region to another with in-depth product reviews and how-to videos being of most interest.  Most people said they watch on their computers with the majority of viewings after business hours and on weekends.