The other day, I was reading an article on my iPad about a cool new gadget that allows your iPad to hang from your treadmill or exercise bike, a fit rail for the iPad. In the article, they had a link to the Scosche Fit Rail for the iPad on Amazon, so I clicked through. Cool enough, I added it to my wish list.

As soon as I added it, I wanted to share it with Jeffrey but I realized there was no easy way to send this item to him. I could click the back button twice to send him the article but what an opportunity for Amazon (in all that empty space) to offer an ability to share the item you added to your wish list to FaceBook, Twitter or even just to email it to someone to notify them.

Would you have expected some sort of share ability on this wish list confirmation page or have I gotten share happy?

Update: Did you know they have a great share widget on their order confirmation page?

By the time this column is published, Google’s shiny, new social network Google+ should have approximately 20 million users. It’s one of the fastest growing services of all time. Have you joined yet? Still waiting for an invite? You can find my Google+ profile here.

I’m asking myself and you this: Is this growth due to the sentiment that Google+ is basically an improved version of Facebook? Or maybe it’s something else?

Google can learn a lot from Facebook, including how it captured more than 700 million users. Let’s hope it doesn’t learn the wrong things. In particular, Google+ doesn’t need brand pages. Let the brands tie in to the core functionality of Google+ with apps and website plug-ins. Businesses are hard-pressed enough to keep their website presence optimized let alone manage another outpost page.

Let’s explore some more Google+ success factors:

1. Open vs. closed networks. Facebook is a closed network. Everything that is shared is held within the sacred “walls” of Facebook. The data it collects – your information – is Facebook’s. This is one main reason many industry pundits have been frustrated by Facebook’s attempts to shut down every effort to export their friends to their own computers. Facebook wants to own the social graph. This is also why brands needed to have fan pages so that they could have a presence in this closed system.

Google wants that data too. Google wants to understand how to bring you more relevant search results and ads. The intersection of search, social, and mobile are a powerful force and Google was handicapped by not having full access to the data. Google makes it very easy for you to liberate your data from Google+. History shows that people get comfortable initially as they explore new experiences in closed systems, but eventually they want the freedom they get from open systems. Just remember the AOL of the 1990s, which brought so many people online in the first place and how eventually they wanted to enjoy the openness of the World Wide Web. Facebook could be the new AOL if it’s not paying attention. Google will now be able to leverage its social data and interest graph to offer new levels of ad targeting across its mighty search and display ad networks and not need to if it chooses to offer any ads so it can make revenue within Google+.

2. Social networking is the fastest growing mobile content category. Google’s Android (its mobile OS) has a huge install base and is growing by 500,000 activations daily. The Google+ Android app is well-polished; it already feels like an integral part of the Android experience for me. All of these activations include access to Google+. What happens to search and social when they are fully integrated in the mobile experience? What happens when I look for a restaurant on Google Maps and see my networks’ +1 reviews on the maps? Or what if I want to go to a movie? Will a search display reviews from my network? Facebook hasn’t even released an iPad app, and has no way to target ads to mobile users currently; Facebook is not ready for mobile.

3. Social networking 3.0. As Google starts to integrate Google+ across its products, the social layer becomes integral to everything we do. Google+’s architecture is based on a better understanding of how people’s networks really work and how information is shared and of interest to different circles. Check out this presentation by former Googler and now current Facebooker Paul Adams.

Will Google eventually even be able to suggest what circles certain friends should fall into so that people don’t have to do all the work manually? Probably.

There are many other things that make Google+ a phenomenal product. The experience from an improved photo viewer (and editor) is one of them. Sparks, is another; it helps you find content based on your interest and even mutes conversations.

There will be many factors that will determine the success of Google+. Nevertheless, let’s end off with a quick visual analysis.

I ran a Feng-Gui visual attention analysis on several screen shots from both Facebook and Google+ and the areas of attention in each are quite different. Yes, they both have streams of updates from your social network (so does Twitter), but the similarities end there.

Facebook stream: All the initial attention focuses on seeing the ad on the right-hand side, followed by which of your friends profile picture changed or who was added by your current friends and which of your friends are available to chat on the left-hand side.

Google+ stream: The first thing you want to focus on is starting a hangout. By the way, the consensus is that it is an “awesome” feature. Google wants you to connect and have a video chat with a group from your network while sharing content from text, to photos, to videos, etc. The next focus would be on adding more people to your network through suggestions.

Rafael Mizrahi, CEO of Feng-Gui commented: “Clearly, the left side of Google+ is cleaner than Facebook, but this is likely to change in the future as more features (and probably ads) are added to Google+ and more real estate will be required in the page to deliver the new features.”

There’s a lot more to be said about all the above. I’d love to know: What do you see as the future and impact of Google+?

P.S. Check out this slideshow on Google+.

Additional images: Heatmaps of FaceBook stream and Google Plus stream

If you are getting visitors to your FaceBook fan page and they aren’t converting into fans follow these 7 steps to get them to like you. Continue reading my post on the hubspot blog: 7 Steps to Increase Facebook Fans.

On October 15, 2000, A.G. Lafley, president and CEO of Procter & Gamble Co., delivered a prophetic speech entitled “The Consumer is Boss!” to the Association of National Advertisers. In his presentation he emphasized three main points:

• “We’re moving away from the current mass marketing model, away from push and toward pull.
• Consumers will only become more demanding.
• They want to have a conversation, to dialogue, to participate, to be more in control.”

These points may seem obvious to marketers and other business people today, but they still confound us. We only now begin to realize the implications. Recently, Rich Green, CTO at Nokia, said companies should stop trying to think of using social media for their own ends: “The big ‘a-ha’ moment is when enterprises finally realize that their digital existences are being defined by the consumer world, not the reverse. It is hubris to think that an enterprise can ‘use’ social media for its advantage.”

There is no question that marketing has been completely redefined, and understanding the impact of social and mobile technologies on customer behavior is still unclear for many. While we know people are engaged with our social and media efforts, the return on investment is still hard to define. In fact, according to the just released Forrester/Shop.org’s State of Retailing Online 2011 report (SORO 2011), 68 percent of retailers said if Facebook went away it wouldn’t impact sales at all in 2011. Also, 62 percent of retailers agree that returns on social marketing strategies are unclear. There is some good news: 72 percent of retailers will increase their spend in social. However, 36 percent of retailers are pursuing a social media strategy mostly because their competitors are.

In IBM’s State of Marketing 2011 study, we learned that 60 percent of marketers identified “turning data into action” as their top organizational issue. We suffer from data overload. It’s unclear what a lot of this social data is telling us, because we can’t directly correlate that data to sales in most cases. The true ROI of social media is unclear for many.

The study shows our frustration with social media:

“This year, social media is no longer the adorable baby everyone wants to hold, but the angst-filled adolescent – still immature yet no longer cute – who inspires mixed feelings. All things social continue to hold intense interest, with 53% of marketers currently applying it to their marketing efforts. But as tactics rise and fall, a more sophisticated approach is emerging.”

As quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, said: “The explosion of social networking with consumers has changed their (consumers) expectations about how they can and should connect with businesses. ‘Real-time’ is a new imperative, which is causing many businesses to rethink their customer relations strategies via digital marketing.”

We have had 10-plus years of warnings about these changes and so few are prepared. Companies have totally missed the point. They don’t really need to worry about keeping up with their competitors. Nevertheless, they must worry about how to keep up with their customers.

We have either entered or passed the year when mobile became a critical issue for business. The SORO 2011 reports that only 29 percent of retailers say they have a mobile strategy, are implementing it, and are already optimizing. Meanwhile, only 12 percent of the Internet Retailer Top 500 websites had mobile websites in a mid-2010 study, and only 7 percent had mobile apps.

I think every digital marketing executive should watch this video produced by Best Buy (be sure to replay the part from 1:20 to 1:30 many, many times):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Companies will continue to be slowed down by their slow corporate metabolisms. Their inability to collect the right data and act, analyze, react, and optimize based on the data continues to provide opportunity for those companies that have a faster metabolism. I no longer wonder how dinosaurs became extinct.

Where are your consumers headed? Where are they today? Will you truly serve them as they want to be served?

No question FaceBook advertising bears little resemblance to Search Advertising.  However, we are starting to see some great success stories of companies success with FaceBook advertising.  Nevertheless, FaceBook’s advertising model may be seriously flawed.

If you ever accessed Facebook using one of their mobile applications; perhaps you noticed something missing. There are no ads.

Most 30-40 year old women (one of the most coveted and powerful consumer groups) access their Facebook accounts usinge their mobile device.

While I agree that FaceBook needs a native iPad app, for the sake of their business, I think they first need to find a way to make sure all those current mobile users interact with ads.

As my good friend, Avinash pointed out in his 11 Digital Marketing “Crimes Against Humanity”, there are 6.9 billion homo sapiens on the planet and 3.7 billion of them actively use 4.3 billion mobile phones.

You hardly ever have to worry about keeping up with your competition if you keep up with your audience. Facebook is not keeping up with their audience and all companies do this at their own peril.

So do you agree that there might be a problem here?

It is the best of times and the worst of times for some businesses. Many look at the world and see the opportunities of being data rich, customer centric, and nimble while others imagine they can bring their old school thinking to the new media, always-on connected customer. They sit cross-fingered hoping that putting lipstick on their pig will improve their results. Let’s explore two publishers making news recently and learn how one is failing while the other has become quite successful.

We will learn from this comparison no matter what type of business we are in.

I love to consume and share content on my iPad. Ask any of the nearly 20-plus million people who have one and I am pretty sure they’ll respond the same way. So you figure when a publishing powerhouse invests an initial $30 million dollars and another $500,000 an issue into an iPad-only publication, how could it go wrong? Well, not all the numbers for The Daily have been revealed (for that you would have to speak to Rupert Murdoch or his Daily staff), but based on recent data and calculations, the results are not very promising. It has been estimated that the app had been downloaded 500,000 times and that 75,000 people have become “regular users” of the app, at least during the extended free trial period. Nevertheless, the tweets per day from the app are on the decline.

If I had to explain to Mr. Murdoch and his team why their paid subscriber to application download conversion rate is so low, I would tell them that while their content is beautiful, the experience of consuming it was painful and slow. People want speed, freshness, and variety. It’s painful to watch all these little boxes on screen while my issue was being delivered and to watch my beard grow as thumbnails of pages loaded. Mr. Murdoch, your publication is obese and crippled.

What has been your experience with The Daily? How would you fix it at this point?

By now I am sure you have heard about the acquisition of The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million and all the change that has followed that acquisition. The Huffington Post’s news, analysis, and lifestyle website was founded in 2005, which now counts nearly 25 million unique monthly visitors and boasts an affluent, influential audience that is growing at a rate of 22 percent.

You may have heard how The Huffington Post uses  real-time testing to write better headlines. Or maybe you heard The Huffington Post’s CTO Paul Berry speak about its Google Analytics deployment and how it uses it:

When the HuffPost publishes a front-page Quick Read or other feature story, Berry and his team can use Analytics to quickly gauge traffic spikes and update the content in minutes to drive the publication’s editorial direction. The editorial calendar stored on Google Calendar is then updated accordingly, giving staff easy access to any changes even if they are on the road. “Overnight, we can shape our feature stories or Quick Read columns and share any changes with everyone on staff to create more targeted, relevant content and attract more viewers.” says Berry.

As important as these data-driven pieces are to the formula, it was only recently when I heard The Huffington Post’s CFO Eric Ashman deliver the Web Analytics Association Gala Awards dinner keynote that I realized how hard-core, data-centric, real-time-enabling, and customer-focused their business was as he spoke about the primary drivers of The Huffington Post business model.

He spoke about the critical importance of having the right reporting structure in place with web analytics data including real-time stats as they relate to the “product” and marketing stats as they impact sales and marketing flowing directly to the office of the CFO and the board of directors. My brother and I have been advocating that for a reporting system to be meaningful, every piece of data must flow into the financial statements since 2001. Eric, as I do, believes “traffic analytics are as core to strategic planning, decision making and building shareholder value as financial statements.”

Several other critical success factors he shared included:

• Getting the technology team support and the importance of being nimble.
• Getting real-time data in the hands of people who can react quickly.
• Starting simple and building from there.

Mr. Murdoch, I truly wish you could have been there to learn.

Do you agree that we can learn from these two very different publishers?

Create relevant and delightful experiences people want to share. Speed up your site, speed up your corporate metabolism, enable everyone to make decisions based on data, and execute rapidly; that is going to be a winning formula for the next several years. Will you be able to keep up?

Big news today in the social analytics & CRM space as Salesforce.com has acquired social media monitoring company Radian6 for approximately $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock. This will definitely blur the line between social and CRM. I wonder who will be next to be acquired.

As I was reading the acquisition news, and seeing this article about how companies don’t understand why consumers use social media, it reminded me of an article I published in July of 2001.

Have you been bombarded, like I have been, with the latest buzz suggesting we should spend our time, resources, and money on online customer relationship management (CRM) software {and Social Media monitoring and measuring tools}? Talk about putting the cart before the horse! Oh, the idea is pointed in the right direction, all right — but don’t you think first you need a satisfied customer base to manage?

Your goal, of course, is lots of satisfied customers — happy ones who become loyal, repeat buyers as well as active referrers. But just because they bought from you once doesn’t mean you have a relationship with them — yet. In fact, for all you know, they’re not coming back, and maybe for a very good reason.

First, you have to create an online shopping experience that plants the seeds of a real relationship. Then, you have to nurture those seeds with outstanding fulfillment and customer service. Building a relationship takes time. Shoving some tech-heavy CRM application at your customers is more likely to push them away than draw them in. If you want to get it right, you need to follow not CRM, but MRC: Manage your e-business correctly so that you can establish a relationship based on which you can develop a delighted and loyal customer. Only then can all the other stuff you do have the impact you want.

Lots of e-businesses have the software to facilitate CRM, and lots of software vendors would love to sell you some if you don’t have it yet. Nevertheless, most businesses don’t have the in-depth customer knowledge they need to use the technology effectively. They wind up getting carried away with trying to manage what they don’t actually have.

According to smart and commonsense customer relations guy David Sims: Everybody who profits from CRM has their own definition of what it is, but they’re agreed as to what it is not: CRM isn’t about technology any more than hospitality is about throwing a welcome mat on your front porch.

Properly understood, CRM is “a philosophy that puts the customer at the design point, it’s getting intimate with the customer,” [in the words of Liz Shahnam, CRM analyst with the META Group]. Mike Littell, president of the CRM division of EDS, agrees: “We view CRM more as a strategy than a process. It’s designed to understand and anticipate the needs of the current and potential customer base a company has.” Once you nail that, Littell says, there’s “a plethora of technology out there that helps capture customer data and external sources, and consolidate it in a central warehouse to add intelligence to the overall CRM strategy.”

In short, first get the happy customer base, and then you’ve got something to manage. To put it more bluntly, poor customer service can lose you a customer and leave you with nothing to manage.

And every one of us here has had the following problem: You go to a site, run into a snag making a purchase, and decide to call customer service. But the lines at customer service are all busy. Do they put you on hold? No! They tell you to go to the Web site! Didn’t you just come from there?

So, before you go spending your money on CRM, spend a little time — no, a LOT of time — considering how effective you are at MRC. That’s where it all starts, and if you get it wrong, that’s also where it all ends.

Do you know any companies that have put the cart before the horse? They invest in social media campaigns, tools, etc but not on their core service. Be remarkable first and your social media & CRM strategy will stem from their.

In December, Amazon (AMZN) invested $175M in LivingSocial. Like Groupon, LivingSocial capitalizes on local advertising by having deals of the day that offer discounts to people who opt in to certain deals. But today, they are offering a $20 Amazon.com gift card for just $10 (get yours today). Brilliant!

It is rare to see 100% redemption for any offer for these companies, but this is a great way for them to add several hundred thousand to a million+ new names to their database as the word of mouth of this great offer gets out. Dozens of my friends have already promoted it on Twitter, Facebook, etc. And even if 100% redeemed it, there could be some breakage in terms of not all the money being spent and of course Amazon has a profit on those purchases as well. So total cost is less than $10 a customer. Can you come up with some creative way to acquire customers that benefit all three parties involved: benefit You, benefit the customer and benefit the company you are offering something from? Please let us know.

Few would argue about the impact of social media. The voice of the customer has never been so powerful, so connected, nor so frequently measured before. Customers are obviously engaged in conversations with brands. Customers choose to affiliate themselves with brands and businesses they “Like” while others consume the content (i.e., reviews, videos, etc.) produced by their fellow customers before and after they make purchase decisions. Social media has tremendous impact on brand perception.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One trend concerns me. So many marketers obsess about the return on investment of social media. I’m a big fan of ROI – always have been – always will be.

So what is the return on creating and strengthening a relationship and over what period do you measure it? Here is how it’s broken down:

• What is the investment (true cost) of listening and engaging in conversations?
• Can the returns (incremental revenue) really be measured using direct response metrics?
• Over what period do you measure the impact and how does that relate to lifetime value of a customer?

Measuring the short-term sales attributed to a tweet, YouTube campaign, or Facebook “Like”-athon might demonstrate “return,” but it is the wrong end of the telescope to be looking at measurement from.

Social Media Can Not be Measured in a Snapshot

Social media is about relationships. And anyone who has ever had one can tell you that you cannot judge a relationship from a snapshot; you need to observe a relationship over months or even years to get any sense of the quality and value of that relationship. Sadly, most of the social media analysis tools in the marketplace don’t provide this viewpoint.

When a brand chooses to participate in social media it is an investment in customer experience. Any investment in customer experience should be part of the cost of any marketing program today, but its costs should be amortized over the long term.

Irrational Hype Will Lead to Irrational Expectations

“If you torture the data long enough it will confess,” is what we learn from British economist Ronald Coase. The question to ask is what are the “social media pundits” trying to get it to confess to?

The McLie of Foursquare

McDonald’s first reported a 33 percent increase in overall foot traffic (and later clarified it was actually a 33 percent lift in check-ins) on a $1,000 Foursquare campaign. Have you seen this story? There has been quite a bit of analysis on this already by others, but here is the summary:

• This was a contest with gift cards. Long-term impact: zero.
• Measuring check-ins doesn’t measure increased foot traffic.
• To measure foot traffic, measure actual foot traffic. Metrics are not randomly interchangeable.
• If you cannot measure the financial impact of your campaign, all you know is its cost. You didn’t measure the outcome.
• Measure conversions: reach > response > visits > check-ins > transactions > revenue > repeat.
• McDonald’s has about 26 million customers per day, so a 33 percent increase equals 7.8 million Foursquare users. But, Foursquare only has a total of 3 million accounts and 1 million active users.

Even if this case study from McDonald’s was misunderstood, the point pundits are pushing is the same. Too many people are trying to look at these relationship building tools as a direct response vehicle. Can you get a direct response from a relationship medium? Sure you can. So why not put your customer relationship management (CRM) initiative on commission and then insist that any communication with customers that doesn’t directly contribute revenue be cancelled? No more smiles for you! Online, those virtual smiles are visible to everyone. Do you want to be that company who only smiles to those customers transacting right now?

Take it from someone who loves measurement, conversions, and improving responses, you ain’t going to get any satisfaction trying to measure the short-term impact. You will get a lot of noise, false signals, and opinions.

Measuring the long-term impact is what you need to look at and hopefully the tool vendors will catch up with this. However, it’s not probable. It is especially challenging considering the volume of data they would need to go through to do this properly, the false hopes they’ve spread, and the “experts” they’ve endorsed.

There is a ton of value in engaging with your customers in social media. No doubt about it! Please get realistic about what it takes to build real value. Only then might you deliver the type of happiness Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com, has acheived by leveraging great customer experiences and nurturing real brand evangelists. That is how you can experience the true ROI of social media!

Just last week, I had the pleasure of keynoting the fabulous eMetrics Conference in San Jose. While there I had a chance to sit down with my good friends Jim Sterne and Avinash Kaushik to discuss Jim’s latest book Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment. If you are doing anything in social media, planning on it (and if not why not) then you should get a copy right away. Take 8 minutes and watch the interview below, there are some juicy nuggets in there.

Click here to view the embedded video.