There is a wide variety of complex dashboards listening platforms from companies like Radian6, Nielsen and TNS Cymfony that allow marketers to listen to social media chatter day in and day out. However, you can't just monitor current social media conversations to get an accurate view of your brand's social media buzz. You need a beginning and an end to make a complete story.

Say you are just about to launch a bold new campaign. You have your alerts set up, your analytics dashboard built and ready to go. You watch excitedly as the results start pouring in from Twitter, forums, blogs and news sites around the world. Woohoo!! You're off to a good start. Next week, you come back to your dashboards and there isn't so much as a tweet from your online audience. What happened?

Constructing a Beginning

First, you've got to find a proper starting point to begin your social media metrics. Agencies cannot work in isolation here because they are often not privy to historical data, particularly if they are the first agency you've had handle your brand's social media. Without proper context, "success metrics" are impossible to obtain because it would be impossible to piece together the success story. For example, social media success could have originated from a major PR piece that lead to four blog posts that lead to coupon downloads and foot traffic to the store.  Here's how you get to the beginning of that story:

• Keep an inclusive calendar of key campaign dates that incorporate all channels. This can include when commercials first aired, important TV buys, PR events, magazines hit shelves and home page takeovers.
• Create a watch list of influencers that are being reached out to including bloggers and journalists.
• Create a watch list of unique terms that are associated with key campaign tactics such as TV shows, publications and even taglines.

Constructing an Ending

This is where a great relationship between your community manager and your analytics team is crucial. It is easy to fall into the trap of confusing correlation with causation. It can be difficult to remove that problem completely from your analysis, but here are a few tips on how to set an ending to your social listening measurement story:

• Use your listening platform to its fullest. Keep a close monitor on sentiment and "intent to buy" or "change in behavior" keywords. That way you can see if the volume of online chatter grew as a result of campaign tactics as well as indications of change in opinion or behavior
• URL tracking FTW!! Get to love Bit.ly, it is your friend. Certainly make sure your community manager is using it to track clicks and spread content throughout all available social channels. If marketers want to go for the gold, they can make sure influencers and bloggers are tracking their links, too.
• Consider partnering with a video tracking company such as Visible Measures to see how your videos spread across the social web, and how that tracks back to incoming traffic on your site.

Just like fairy tales, there can be no “happily ever after's” in social media without a “once upon a time.”  Context is king within social media – especially for measurement – so establishing a timeline within campaigns often takes the cause/effect guesswork out of metrics.  This provides a clear view of what marketing tactics are truly working for your campaign and allows marketers to focus on their strengths while hedging areas where their strategy may be weakest.

Recently, I was invited to spend a Sunday at a friend's house and be part of her weekly cooking show. Like any good guest, I dined exquisitely and overindulged for the camera. The rest of the day was a roundtable of good laughs and creative thinking with like-minded people. I took a moment and stepped back to realize that I had never met any of my fellow foodie friends before—at least not in person. They were all fellow Tweeters I follow on this social media phenomenon called Twitter.

By no means do I consider myself a social media expert. My 530 followers on Twitter are meager compared to Ashton Kutcher's four million. Even Darth Vader has 133,500 followers! Twitter has become so powerful that brands like Southwest and Best Buy have dedicated staff running their Twitter accounts. But I feel I've discovered something that very few have: I know how to reach Twitter's true ROI.

If you play in the social media space, you know that its purpose is to build relationships. But what do we gain in return? Some gain knowledge; humor; and some…well…the ability to waste time. While I use social media for all those things, I began to realize the obvious notion that I'm connecting with real people. Soon, I evolved my Tweets from self-promotional to conversational. And people responded in kind. Friendships with like-minded people formed and the sharing of knowledge in my field was helpful and satisfying.

That Sunday I realized that my new friends were coming from social media outlets like Twitter and LinkedIn. Most of you are probably thinking, “I have enough friends. Why seek out more?” I'll tell you why. There was another reason we were all gathered together that Sunday afternoon, besides the delicious food @cyuskoff made: We were all nerds in our artistic fields. From photographers and writers to creative directors and television producers, we bonded over the same funny blogs we read and argued about who's going to buy the new iPad. Some may call this networking. And you would be right in a sense. But networking is such a formal way of making connections. Social media makes it more personal, since we are connecting as peers and friends. So now when I ask my new friend @jonathan360 to link this article to Digg, it's less of a business request and more of a favor. Or if I need creative help, I can ask @mayhemstudios for a consultation. Now I have laughs, handshakes and a Sunday afternoon to go along with that Twitter name and headshot. That goes a long way, where a simple business card can't.

This isn't an instruction manual to social media. It's just a reaffirmation of something we all already know: Personal connections mean more. Is this going to help you get more followers? No. Will it help your next collaborative project and career? Definitely. So today I no longer look at my follower count but instead my friend count. I have 32 friends on Twitter.

Time and again, mobile coupon redemption rates have proven to be exceptional when employed as part of both pilot and real-world marketing programs.

As Mobile Marketer concisely put it, “According to Forrester Research, 30 percent of consumers would like to receive mobile coupons….Redemption rates for mobile coupons range from 5% to 15%, which is much higher than typical print coupon rates of 1% or less.”

Thus I'm a little puzzled by a survey from Honeywell and Harris Interactive that eMarketer has teed up with the headline “Consumers Slow to Take Advantage of Mobile Coupons.”

Really? According to the survey, 50% of 18-to-34 year-olds said they would be willing to share their mobile numbers with retailers in order to receive coupons. To me that screams “green light.”

Maybe the issue is how the questions were phrased – something that has been shown to substantially impact polling in political campaigns. Obviously, if you ask somebody if they want more advertising in their lives, they'll probably say no.

But as this generation ages, digital life, specifically organizing one's activities, shopping and entertainment through mobile devices, will become the norm. In fact, it already has. What's lagging is significant participation by major brands, which will drive mobile coupons as an established marketing channel.  

• Mobile couponing can take several forms:
• 2D bar codes
• QR codes
• Text coupons
• Calls-to-action driving customers to mobile Internet sites
• Calls-to-action driving customers to mobile apps
• Mobile sites that are themselves coupons
• Mobile apps that are coupons
• Some combination of all of the above

I've already moved past the question of “whether or not mobile coupons will catch on.” They will. Trust me. The real horse race is which of these competing technologies, and factions within the ecosystem, will win the day to power mobile couponing and other marketing efforts for major brands.

One last thing to watch out for: The killer app that could permanently dispense with any confusion in this arena will be cloud-based “closed-loop redemption systems.” These systems will allow a retailer to redeem a coupon from any of the above listed channels within their cloud, and will also give retailers the opportunity to seamlessly push coupons out to multiple channels.

Happy couponing, everybody.

www.MobileDemystified.com.

Brand advocacy is a term that is thrown around a lot within the social media spectrum. Conversations usually center on finding brand advocates who will serve as a social media lightning rod and generate an avalanche of user-generated content from a community based on their actions. Marketers are just as likely to find these mythical advocates as they are to track down Big Foot riding a unicorn.

Igniting a social media avalanche does benefit greatly by finding exceptional advocates; however, marketers can't simply rely on finding the right catalysts to spark success. Here are five myths brands need to free themselves from before they can deploy a successful brand advocacy program:

• They aren't out there looking for you
  Guess what? People have been sharing tips and advice on products brands they use and love long before advertisers realized the power of word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing. Consumers will continue to do so regardless of a brand's interaction, to help their friends, being acknowledged for their expertise, and sharing something they have found. It's the brands that need these people to help them authenticate and speak to potential customers they can't reach with ad dollars. However, marketers cannot expect these advocates to fall into their lap. If marketers don't have a CRM program, a strategy to reach out to bloggers and loyalists in niche forums, or any other venue for consumers to raise their voice, then you don't have a brand advocacy strategy.
• Some of your best advocates might not be your current customers
  What many brands fail to realize is that sometimes advocacy has nothing to do with a particular product and everything to do with a lifestyle. People who love Jeep, for example, may be fans of the brand in spirit as they associate with the car maker's branded outdoor adventure lifestyle long before, and even long after, they are owners of the vehicle. Some of your brand's biggest loyalists might not be talking about the company at all but talking about other products or activities that fit in with this lifestyle, including GPS devices, off-road trails and quality tires. While a truly great advocate will be able to speak about a product passionately and authentically, marketers shouldn't limit their search to current customers.
• It's not the size of your pool of fans, it's how you use them
  Coca-cola has 4 million fans. FAGE Greek Yogurt has 36K fans. Does that mean that Coca-cola is over 100 times more successful than FAGE in terms of brand advocacy? Well, that depends. What is the value of an advocate for Coca-cola versus FAGE or any other brand for that matter? I find myself asking, what does Coca-cola even need a Facebook fan page for? Coca-cola does not lack in awareness, but the purchase decision is largely made in the last steps at the grocery store as the result of a sale or coupon or is tied to beverage brand loyalty. But for FAGE, a small-time yogurt brand without much awareness, each one of their 36K fans could represent an opportunity for a new customer, coupon-pusher or a new voice piece to spread awareness to their circle of friends.
• A Facebook fan does not directly equate to a brand advocate
  For many people, becoming a “fan” of a brand on Facebook is as meaningful as acquiring a new bumper sticker or a patch on a heavily collaged backpack. It's a symbol of a lifestyle, it's a funny statement to their friends and is as temporarily interesting as the flow of the newsfeed that day. Ninety percent of the time a user spends on Facebook is in the newsfeed, so after they hit that “fan” button they likely will never return to your fan page. So while your fan page might say 10,000 “fans,” that doesn't mean you have 10,000 “advocates.” What it does mean, however, is that you have as many as 10,000 opportunities – but realistically probably much fewer – to create advocacy.
• Recognition, while always important, is not one-size-fits-all
  Some advocates are altruistic, so in love with your brand and what it means to them that they aren't particularly looking for a reward. Others need to be motivated by the allure of something a little extra to come out of their shell. In either case, recognition can't hurt as it lets people know their participation is appreciated as they further the brand's awareness goals. However, approaches to recognition are not one-size-fits-all, as they have to be evaluated closely by audience and by industry. In other words, what does your audience want? The prize of “front page of YouTube” exposure that might appeal to the 18-year-old girl posting a video of herself singing about a new energy drink is likely going to terrify the middle-aged man or woman opening up about their use of incontinence products. Both should be rewarded, but not in the same way.

With the right mixture of targeting, motivation and recognition marketers can create the wave of user-generated content and goodwill that they crave from their social media strategies. There are many ways to do this but developing a stable of knowledgeable evangelists is a boon to marketers. Rather than simply locating brand advocates, marketers must also inspire evangelists within their community by delivering fun, engaging social media experiences to create a thriving online community. Once a community is effectively promoting members from within to carry the brand torch, marketers can claim victory in the social media space.

2009 was not kind to most retailers and there were very few positive stories when it came to sales results. A rising unemployment rate and a drop in consumer confidence both weighed heavily on consumer spending the entire year, and with the unemployment rate still at 10% for December, we'll see this trend continue for at least the next few months.

But the news is not all bad. The State of Retailing Online report from Forrester recently predicted that online sales will see a 13% increase in 2010. That would be welcomed news for online retailers and e-commerce executives. However, when we look at retail as a whole, most analysts are predicting that overall retail sales will be flat. So, based on these two data points, online sales growth will mainly come from channel shift and not overall economic expansion.

Since the sales growth will come from online versus traditional retailers, I thought I would make 6 predictions for 2010 on the innovation that will help us get there:

• Channel Integration. In-store pick-up and inventory availability checks for multi-channel retailers are becoming the norm. Those that don't offer these options are already behind the curve. We will continue to see an evolution in this type of cross-channel integration, primarily because enhanced services are one way to maintain product margin. We will also begin to see evolution in same-day delivery and delivery to 3^rd-party locations based on GPS. The technology is already in place, so why wouldn't retailers offer customers the option to have their groceries delivered to them at their local coffee shop? Finally, I think we can expect to see in-store pick-up continue to evolve with add-on services such as valet parking and more drive-through windows.
• Shift in Marketing Dollars. We will continue to see a shift of traditional media budgets to the online channel. This is an obvious one, but retailers will be faced with a variety of new challenges they haven't considered before. As these dollars shift, new issues will emerge, such as how to handle vendor funding, what the right mix is, how online activity affects offline behavior and even a new set of KPIs. All of these issues require leadership within the organization or a solid agency partner to resolve.
• Google as a retailer. Google recently launched its first branded handheld device called Nexus One in partnership with HTC. Surprisingly, this was the first time Google has gotten into the retail business by selling the phone direct to the consumer. While many are looking at this move as a way for Google to compete with Apple and other device manufacturers, I do not. This is simply another Android phone and I believe it signals the beginning of something new for Google. It's not the last we'll see of them “selling” direct.
• Mobile. There will be a lot of activity in the mobile space this year. Almost every conversation we have with clients or potential clients includes mobile. We will continue to see a lot of apps launched, but most won't provide much value or “staying power”. Retailers clearly haven't figured mobile out yet and will continue to have trouble gaining traction (aka commerce) on smaller handheld devices without a real value proposition. Having said that, retailers should begin to dip their toes in and look for opportunities to "build the channel" by growing their mobile phone list, ensuring their brand is represented properly on the smaller devices and making sure their infrastructure can support mobile initiatives as they evolve and best practices are developed.
• Discounts. Price and savings will continue to be the message of the day and will dominate the marketing you see from the Sunday ads to emails. I really don't see that changing for most of the year even with some of the innovations within the channel.
• 3D. ESPN and Discovery just announced the launch of a 3D network, and Sony and Panasonic announced that they are releasing 3D televisions in 2010. This will be a big challenge for retailers and agencies alike this year (although a big sales opportunity in the CE category). I definitely see this evolving throughout the year and changing the entertainment experience, eventually moving to the personal computer and even the handheld. Like mobile, retailers and agencies will need to figure out how to take advantage of this trend by creating user friendly “site experiences” that capitalize on the technology. We can expect to see companies like Adobe Scene7 leading the way with 3D product image technology.

We should have an interesting 2010. Retailers have some big challenges ahead, but these challenges also create opportunities for innovation.

Pat Duncan is an Associate Partner in Rosetta's Consumer Products & Retail vertical

Get consent and give users a chance to opt-out. Seems like a pretty straightforward and simple rule for any direct marketer to follow, right?

When it comes to SMS, the same rules apply. Mobile messaging is, was, and always should be a permission-based medium for communications. That's the best advice I can give to ensure your program is above reproach: Get consent up front, and give an option to opt-out later.

Lawmakers aren't turning a blind eye to the growing problem of SMS spamming. In December, a new ruling out of the Federal District of Illinois held that SMS marketing messages are to be treated the same as calls from automated dialing systems, pursuant to the 1991 Federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). This was consistent with the ruling this past June in the Satterfield case, which held that unsolicited text messages to mobile phones sent by a retailer may constitute as a “call,” in violation of the TCPA.

In short, the TCPA requires a level of expressed consumer consent as a prerequisite to receiving “calls.” Making sure your SMS marketing strategy does not fall into this grey area is critical.

There are lots of nuances as to how marketers collect consent, so consulting your neighborly industry experts about the MMA best practices and carrier guidelines is always a good idea.

Below are five rules to live by to ensure happy SMS customers:

• Develop a mobile-originated message where the consumer can join by texting a keyword to a short code
• Get express consent prior to sending any SMS messages and use approved single opt-in message flows
• Never push your mobile list to any other partners who may send SMS messages
• Never send a message to a user who has unsubscribed. There is no "winning back" allowed in mobile
• Never buying a list of cell phone numbers from any vendor, even if they guarantee that the numbers are “opt-in” numbers

The question of whether texts should be treated as “calls” will likely rise again, but whatever the courts say sending unsolicited texts hurts your campaign, your sender reputation, your relationship with the consumer, and potentially your wallet. (Legal fees ain't cheap.)

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck – you know the rest. And if it feels like you might be pushing it with the guidelines, you probably are. In the long run, skirting the rules to blast out unsolicited messages does no good for your brand.

View Matt's blog at www.mobiledemystified.com

Despite the fact that Facebook and Twitter have become household names, social media measurement continues to elude marketers. While most marketers point to low-hanging fruit such as the number of Twitter followers or the number of times a video was viewed on YouTube as key social metrics, these numbers don't really mean anything without context. Number of Facebook fans – or any other simplistic metric out there – is not relevant to every brand's social media goals. That's the dirty little social media secret: the magic metric doesn't exist.

Do 1,000,000 Facebook fans make your brand a social media success? How about 100,000? Even if this number is in line with a brand's expectations, it doesn't give marketers any information on how they can adjust or optimize their program or how their social presence stacks up against their competitors. Too often, marketers become stuck in one of two ways: either they focus too much on influencing their community's day-to-day activities without a bigger-picture objective or they steer their communities toward singular goals or behaviors. Social media is not a one-off campaign or a one-way channel. It is a living, breathing communications platform that requires daily maintenance, strategic vision and benchmarked metrics to cultivate long-term success.

Rather than searching endlessly for a silver metrics bullet, brands need to first find a way to tie specific business objectives to the daily health of their social media campaigns. Tying business objectives to metrics also allows brands to know what tools they need to deploy to measure their social media success. If marketers' business objective is to influence brand perception, then conversation sentiment – rather than conversation volume – is what should be monitored and measured. The size of the online community is only as useful as the effect they have on overall online chatter about your brand. In this case, a listening platform with sentiment analysis would be an important tool in a marketer's social media tool belt.

In another example, if a brand's objective is to foster and empower brand advocates then the number of fans is important but only when coupled with the measurable influence of those advocates. Content tracking tools and techniques are critical for this objective because they will allow marketers to tell the story of where and how their content travels throughout the Internet.

Connecting the dots from number of fans to daily engagement to the spread of viral content is not impossible, it just takes work, which is why most people aren't measuring ROI.  Avoid cultivating a mob of fans simply because that's what marketers are “supposed” to do and instead tailor your social media plans with business objectives. Start with the metrics that are easiest to connect back to your objectives and then work slowly out from there, testing and optimizing along the way.

It's been difficult to get into the holiday spirit with the unseasonably warm weather most of the country has seen. Yet, as we made our way through the Thanksgiving weekend, the traditional start to the holiday shopping season, several retailers have shown that they aren't going to let these tough economic times affect their creativity or dampen their results. Here some observations about the holiday selling season thus far that offer valuable lessons for retailers:

Macy's and JC Penney take a Cause Marketing Approach

Macy's is running a campaign called “A Million Reasons to Believe” that all marketers should check out. This is a cause marketing effort that brings together a lot of tactics including social media, gift ideas, social responsibility and a fun online experience. They have also done a good job of tying their online and offline experience together. Check it out if you haven't at http://social.macys.com/believe2009/. JC Penney has also gone down this path with their “Angel Giving Tree.” While I didn't think it was executed online as well as the Macy's program, they also deserve credit for a great campaign.

OfficeMax "Secret Deals"

OfficeMax (in full disclosure a client of ours) did a great job of leveraging the Thanksgiving weekend for future benefit. Like every other retailer, they ran with specific offers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However, they also had an additional section of deals that required an e-mail address in order to see. While this is by no means a new idea, being this deliberate about acquiring new e-mail addresses is something more retailers should do, especially when many of the products they are selling during these days are at razor thin margins.

Cyber Monday becomes Cyber Week

Many retailers have tried to extend the Cyber Monday “holiday” beyond just a single day. Both Best Buy and Wal-Mart are running with Cyber Week and Amazon has been running some category specific promotions with the theme of 18 Days of Deals. While I applaud retailers for trying to drive additional sales, I hope these efforts don't dilute Cyber Monday.

Group Gifting

With the growth and proliferation of Facebook and other social media sites this year, I am surprised I haven't seen more social or “group” gifting. Best Buy does this with their “PitchIn Card”, which is essentially a reloadable gift card, but I haven't seen this anywhere else. My prediction is that both social media sites and gift cards will expand into this opportunity in the future.

Sears.com Navigation Toolbar

Leave it to Sears to bring something new to the world of site design and usability. If you didn't notice they added a “toolbar” along the left hand side of their site much like Facebook does along the bottom of theirs. While it's not holiday specific (they rolled it out in time for the holidays), it's interesting because a) it takes a lot of the basic site features (e.g. My Account) and pulls it off the page into a logical place, opening up site real estate for more merchandising/marketing opportunities; and b) it's continuing to push Web site experience down the path of acting more like software.

The American Eagle Ultimate Look Book

Here is another concept that isn't completely new or novel, but it provides a great user experience. American Eagle Outfitters launched the Ultimate Look Book which allows users to shop by outfit just by looking at a model. It's kind of like flipping through a magazine and is obviously perfect for the apparel category. Check it out if you haven't: http://www.ae.com/web/giftguide/index.jsp?icid=ggHP:GiftGuide#/2.

Where has all the advertising gone?

I don't have a lot of hard data on this but it seems to me that both eBay and Amazon have cut way back on their advertising this year (excluding the Kindle advertisements). It's possible they are waiting until later in the season but I just haven't seen that much compared to last year when they were on the TV a ton. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, has been running a variety of TV spots that are 100% focused on their site. It will be interesting to see if this changes as we finish the year.

The word of the season: Discounts!

Just about every retailer has gotten aggressive on discounting. This is not surprising as everyone is trying to overcome the poor economic conditions. What has surprised me is some of the “Luxury” brands that typically have not discounted for fear of diminishing their brand, have been…some even aggressively. Cole Haan, Tiffany, Bloomingdales and Niemen Marcus to name a few have run with “lower price” themes or been giving coupons with percent or dollars off. Just yesterday, I received a percent off coupon from Coach as a “preferred” customer. You can certainly expect this trend to continue through the end of the year.

As you can see, there are definitely some great ideas, as well as marketing tactics, that retailers are using to drive sales this year. But perhaps the best thing thus far has been the sale results. Online sales results through the holiday season have been very positive. Through the first 22 days of November, comScore reported online sales were up 2.2% compared to last year (and that's after being down for the first 10 months of the year). On Cyber Monday Coremetrics said that as of 1 p.m., sales for the day were up 19.6% over a year ago. Offline sales have been mixed. The NRF reported an increase in shoppers but a decrease in average spend causing a slight decrease over last year (which would be in line with their original holiday forecast of a 1% decline). ShopperTrak however, reported that their survey of sales results for Friday and Saturday showed an increase of 0.9%. Hopefully this news is a light at the end of a very long tunnel.

Pat Duncan is an Associate Partner in Rosetta's Consumer Products & Retail vertical

The economy is down. Unemployment is at a 26 year high. Analysts, politicians and shareholders are all on pins and needles, waiting to see how retail stores will perform during the critical holiday shopping season.   

With the biggest shopping days of the year upon us, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we will know soon enough.

To draw consumers in to stores, retailers will need innovative plans and great sales.  The tougher the economy gets, the more tightly consumers hold on to their wallets – and the more savvy they get in the hunt for deals. This holiday season, retailers need to expand the ways they engage customers in order to get a bigger piece of what will most likely be a smaller pie.

Direct interaction with customers via mobile means greater engagement. And mobile media activation means brand messages can be instantly and directly beamed into users' pockets via SMS – which in turn will lead to greater profitability.

Retailers such as Sears have already jumped into the mobile game and offer consumers the opportunity to sign up for sales and promotions. Even luxury brands like Dolce & Gabbana have started using mobile to engage with consumers and notify them of VIP sales.

This train is leaving the station…so it is time act now. To fully take advantage of mobile, here are five recommended initiatives for retailers this holiday season:

Subscriptions
Retailers can utilize mobile subscriber lists the same way they do email or direct mail. The bonus of mobile is it goes to the cell phone, which four out of five Americans “never leave home without,” according to a recent study by Synovate.

By incorporating location and demographics data and then targeting customers based on purchase preferences, retailers can use mobile messaging to drive notable spikes in sales.

Engaging Messaging
Create messaging relevant to the consumer and to their individual shopping habits. With mobile you can use area code or ZIP code verification when texting consumers to deliver a targeted message about promotions in stores nearest to the customer.

Retailers should also use messaging to engage with customers about the latest sales over holiday and vacation periods. If you've ever tried to contact a store the week before Black Friday to ask when the store opens, to only to pushed through an automated system – and then after 10 minutes reach an uninformed associate – you know how important painless access to relevant information can be to a customer.

“Premium” Mobile Coupons
Retailers can create a sign that is visible to 4 am Black Friday diehards standing in line – and that sign can be activated with a mobile call-to-action that rewards these hardy shoppers with special discounts, or the ability to sign up for in-store sweepstakes.  

Consumers love special offers, and bargain shopping seems to be the theme of this holiday season (again). Simply put, there is no better way to deliver a coupon than to an object the customer takes with them everywhere.

Interactive Two-way Messaging
Two-way messaging can help retailers extend their brands to engage consumers directly. This encourages shopper loyalty and activity between brands and customers.

For Black Friday and the holidays, retailers could invite customer feedback on their holiday shopping experiences, and determine what the consumer would like to see moving forward with the holiday season and next year.

Mobile Websites

Mobile sites are becoming a mainstream marketing tactic and an easy way to bring the brand to the phones of loyal consumers. Nielsen recently reported that there were 56.9 million mobile web users in July of this year.

Given the depth and breadth of mobile web usage, it seems prudent for most brands to have a mobile website to better and more directly reach customers. Just imagine if every print or TV ad for Best Buy had a mobile call to action that drove subscribers to the brand's optimized mobile site, where they could review products and shop for the best deals.

Here's a bonus tip: in building your mobile plan, don't forget that it's important to make your mobile efforts easy to find for consumers. Make sure to prominently include your keyword and short code on all marketing materials, advertising circulars and Web copy.

Oh, and if you're worried it's too late to start a mobile marketing program for this year: it's not. Mobile campaigns can be activated in less than a day.

Google doodles are Google's versions of the home page logo that celebrate events and anniversaries. Google today began featuring Sesame Street's beloved characters as a special doodle series in the run up to Sesame Street's 40th anniversary on November 10th.

Big Bird was featured today on the Google homepage. Conveying his height, we only see Big Bird from the waist down; his legs form the L in Google. Other favorite characters will be featured for the next seven days. I was weaned on public broadcasting shows like Sesame Street and The Electric Company and Zoom, so I had a visceral reaction to the big lunkhead. I can't wait to see who will be featured next.