The Disruption Tour - Run To Survive A Social Media Revolution

Sustaining Social CRM...ideas from ShoppeSimple Network

Dictionary.com lists the following definitions for the words:

"Sustaining"

1. to support, hold, or bear up from below; bear the weight of, as a structure.
2. to bear (a burden, charge, etc.).
3. to undergo, experience, endure without giving way or yielding.

"Social"

1. pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relations: a social club.
2. seeking or enjoying the companionship of others; friendly; sociable: gregarious

"Customer Relationship Management (CRM)"

1. The practice of building a strong relationship between a business and its customers and potential customers.

Dear Erin,

I hope this question has a resounding positive answer: What if your business could get higher average orders values, higher frequency of ordering, higher conversion percentages, more new customers, reactivate of older buyers and have multiple brand impressions that are permissioned every day?

Would you test a program that could deliver to your business any one of these metrics or any combination of them? Of course you would under two conditions:

First, the program would generate an ROI your business could afford; and second, you are not just moving dollars from one channel marketing program to another.

So if it can be proven to you that both case 1 and 2 occurred. Should you test this program? Of course you should. This is what the exact nature of market testing is all about. I sense your business does this all the time. If you could get these returns would you make this market testing a priority?

Well, this is exactly what The ShoppeSimple Network program is providing our clients and what we would like to test with your business.

In fact, we are so convinced that this program will work for your business (like it has worked for every other client) we have a special and guaranteed offer for your business.

I will tell you about this guaranteed offer in a minute please read on...

Have you done a Groupon/LivingSocial offer?  Have you sent out a catalog or a direct mailing with a planned 60-70% list rental and 30-40% buyers?  How many of your do a PPC program?

In any of these cases, what do you do once you land a new customer? What do you do to capture another order from this first or repeat buyer? How much money are you willing to invest to get another order?

So let's look at the Social Coupon business model which is essentially a revenue share, new customer acquisition business and let's run some simple math

Let's say you have a product and you gave 50% off on this offer and you had a 50% product margin. So a product which sells at  $50 retail is now being sold to the consumer for $25. Now these Social Coupon businesses take another 50% so you are left with $12.50 to cover your new customer acquisition. Let's say you were very successful with your offer and landed 1,000 customers. That would mean you paid 12.50 times 1,000 customers or $12,500 for this offer. A revenue share deal.  But when you planned this offer did you consider you would be out $12,500?

But you are now also under water by $12,500 and what do these Social Coupon sites do to help you recoup your new customer investment. NOTHING...NADA... ZILCH!   The only thing that could make this scenario worse, is if your existing customers are also the ones redeeming the deal.

What do you do to maintain a Sustaining Social CRM program with these consumers?

For those in the catalog space or pure ecom space...I can hear you thinking, "I would never do a deal like that."

Well, let's take a look at a pure ecom company who uses Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. You manage 100 keywords and you pay .75 per click on average.  You spend $12,500 a month on PPC instead of social couponing and you get a 1% conversion. So what does this look like from an initial customer acquisition cost perspective?

Let's keep the same margins and spending level. $12,500 dollars is 16,666 clicks and the number of orders at 1% conversion is 166 orders.  At 166 orders you brought gross profit to the business at $25 per sale which is $4,125. So your out of pocket loss to do PPC per customer is $8,375 ($4125-$12,500)/166 orders = $50.45 (LOSS) Gulp. If your conversion is 2% just half this number.

Would you have guessed that PPC cost per order was $50.45/12.50 or 4X more expensive than Social Couponing for your business?

It's no wonder that in two years Social Couponing has exploded to a 3 Billion industry and is projected to be 6 billion in 2 years.

Pareto's Principle from Wikipedia...(also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. You can restate the 80/20 as it applies to CRM where your customers drive 80% of your revenue so why is there such a missing focus on retention marketing (CRM). Now, adding the Social layer, why are you not focusing energy, resources and budget on building lifetime value of your business?  They would argue that they are, just maybe not in the coupon space yet

Proof in point

The ShoppeSimple Network's Sustaining Social CRM

Now, for the first time you can manage  your consumers' Lifetime Value efficiently and effectively. We simply plug into your business and in less than 10 days you are driving Sustaining Social CRM eCommerce sales. We don't replace what you are doing in social and mobile commerce we enhance it.

Let me show you how...Let's follow what we are doing for Signals.com. Signals has loaded our "Push The Button" widget in their website header and in their email and Facebook Store. Because of this, they are also mobile enabled and their consumers can mobile order through The ShoppeSimple Network's digital properties directly to the Signals website shopping cart. It is important to note ShoppeSafe doesn't collect any personal identifiable consumer information/data.

Take a look at the top right of the Signals website. Consumers see this Push the Button everywhere they go on their website. By the way, you can manage the copy as you would like and you do not have to focus on deals. This is client dependent.

When Consumers Push the Button they are taken to a trusted 3rd party page we build for every client and it can match the look and feel of your branding. From Push The Button widget to your branded ShoppeHub page, consumers now can Pull-Place-Buy-N-Share relevant and targeted offers.  These offers can also be pulled by the consumer to appear on their ShoppeHub page which they bookmark or subscribe too.  Click here for an example.

On Facebook ShoppeFans Store.

The consumer can also place these offers on Shoppesafe.com, their personal home pages on iGoogle, MyYahoo and MyMSN. Plus from the merchants ShoppeHub page consumers can text, email, Like, Tweet offers to their "Trusted Referrals and print or enable digital coupons with barcodes.

You may be thinking, "why would I want to direct my valuable traffic away from my site and onto your ShoppeHub page?" The answer lies in our secret sauce. As I said at the beginning of this blog post, would you do this if you could increase average order values, conversions, order frequency, new customers, reactivations and brand exposures? Of course you would.So now is the time to provide your business with a "skin in the game" guarantee. You must be happy with the program results or you just don't pay us. Period End.

My hope is that you will contact me to start your Sustaining Social CRM program for your business. Please reach me by phone at 612-349-2740 or by email [email protected].

Best

Jeffery

PS. Please join me for our June Webinar "Is Your Social Toast Burning" on Wednesday June 22nd at 2 PM ET.

Feel free to forward this eNewsletter to colleagues who might find the topics covered here of interest or would be interested in learning more about working with The ShoppeSimple Network.

Google Places vs Facebook Places: It’s Search vs. Social : How can ShoppeSimple Help Merchants Get Orders...

What if you can find new customers and reactivation older ones with ShoppeSimple's suite e of 16 Social Commerce Digital Assets. What if you could deliver highly relevant and targeted offers to wherever your consumer are. What if you could finally monetize both your search and your social efforts in ways you have never thought about before. Why not consider a test with ShoppeSimple to prove to yourself how we can help your grow your business.  If any of the above interests you give ShoppeSimple a ping at [email protected] or phone 612-347-2700

The Next Web

On the surface, Google Places and Facebook Places

would seem to have a lot in common.

Both services are out to create a landing page for every local business in the world.

Both services allow local merchants to “claim” their pages, giving the merchant some editorial control over content on the page.

And both services no doubt expect to grab a chunk of what is projected to be a $32B digital, local advertising market by 2013 by claiming the middleman position between the merchant and the end user.

But where the two services break from each other – and in a non-trivial way – is in their respective distribution strategies.

Google relies on Search.  Facebook relies on Social.

And this is where things start to get interesting.

Search vs. Social

Whichever service is able to attract the most consumers will likely attract the most local merchant ad dollars.  The merchants will follow the users.

Let’s take a look at how consumers are exposed to merchant pages on Google Places and Facebook Places respectively.

On Google, it’s via the Google Search box.  If I search for something with a geographic component, say “San Francisco Taquerias,” Google shows me a massive seven pack of their own Google Places results, before showing any organic results.

As queries with local intent are estimated to make up roughly 20% of all queries, and almost everybody clicks on one of the top three results, this aggressive placement of their own Places pages on top of the search results is no doubt driving massive traffic to merchant pages.

Some back of the envelope analysis tells me this:

6,500,000,000 total queries per month * 20% (local intent) * 90% (to seven pack) = 1.17B local merchant referrals per month.

Massive.

Now, let’s look at Facebook Places.

Facebook users are exposed to Facebook Places pages via one of three ways; A) Search; B) When a friend’s checkin shows up in their newsfeed; or C) Via the Facebook Places feature on the Facebook iPhone app or touch.facebook.com.

Facebook Places is a brand new service (see our coverage here, here, and here) that allows people to “check in” to local businesses, and share those locations with their friends.

Put another way, Facebook Places is a delivery engine for person to person local merchant recommendations.  Every check in represents an opportunity for a local business to go rocketing through Facebook’s interconnected social graphs via comments and likes.

If this service takes off, it could result in an awful lot of exposure – via trusted sources – for local businesses.

While Facebook hasn’t yet shared specific numbers around adoption of the Facebook Features, we do know this: social networking is overtaking search in terms of usage in some markets.

The Value of a Click

From a local merchant’s perspective, not all referrals are created equal.  In order from most valuable to least is:

- A first time customer who discovers your business and becomes a repeat customer
- A long time customer who is reminded of your business, and re-engages
- A person who is exposed to your business but never comes
- A freeloading customer who comes only for a loss leader deal, with no intention of coming back

Search traffic has proven to be highly actionable and highly valuable.  If I am searching on Google for a “San Francisco Taquerias,” I am likely quite ready to go eat some tacos.

Social’s correlation with intention is less clear.  If I am browsing my Facebook feed and see that my friend just want to El Farolito Taqueria, it is less likely that I am actively looking for a Taqueria recommendation.  However, depending on the friend, it is possible that I might make a mental note to check the place out at some point.

Let’s take a deeper dive into some of the use cases around consumer behavior and local search.

The Use Cases

Here are some sample local search use cases from the consumer’s perspective along with our thoughts as to who has the edge as of today.

Any way you measure it, Google is pretty far ahead at the moment.  Their venue pages are robust.  Merchants can add coupons on a self serve basis, and users can read and write reviews.  In terms of structured data lookup, it’s hard to imagine anyone will ever choose Facebook over Google.  Google’s mobile apps do a nice job of providing “near me now” categories, whereas Facebook place just shows you a list of nearby venue titles.

But the wild card here is the lucrative discovery / recommendation use case.  At the end of the day, this is what matters most to local merchants – finding first time customers, and turning them into lifetime repeat customers.  And if Facebook can prove that local merchant recommendations delivered friend to friend via social check-in can beat search based research, they have a fighting chance to win the dominant share of local merchant ad dollars.

Social and Mobile are Rising Tides

When two companies are competing head to head with similar products and similar strategies – e.g. Foursquare vs Gowalla – whoever executes better will likely win.

But when two companies are betting on entirely different distribution channels… well, this would seem to portend larger industry ramifications.

Facebook has plenty of question marks ahead of it as it enters the local search market.  Are people going to check in at all given privacy and social graph issues?  Do friend to friend recommendations beat expert recommendations?  Are check-ins worthy of showing up in the newsfeed or will they be considered just noise?

But we do know this.  Traffic to social networking sites is growing more quickly than traffic to search engines.  And mobile is emerging as a significant point of control.

Facebook owns social, and is doing a strong job with mobile.  Google exerts influence over the fastest growing mobile operating system (Android), and also has one of the largest mobile app (Maps).

And what about Yelp?  My personal opinion is that the Google / Yelp showdown that we’ve all been following recently may soon become a Google / Facebook showdown.  And that whoever snags Yelp might have a big leg up (those new Facebook venue pages would look awfully strong with some Yelp reviews on them and would help them rank nicely in Google).

There are lots of moving parts at play in the face off between Google Places and Facebook Places.  Some are feature specific, some are company specific, and some are occurring at a macro, industry level.

It will be fascinating to see how things play out.

Original title and link for this post: Google Places vs Facebook Places: It’s Search vs. Social

Google CEO Schmidt Fuels Critics With Controversial Privacy Remarks

Who knows you online and pretty much all your whereabouts? Shouldn't there be another way to protect your Digital Rights? Shouldn't you be able to grant permission instead of companies just assuming they have your permission or worse just taking your permission to market to you? At ShoppeSimple privacy and Digital Right are at the forefront of everything we do. Check out our shopping experience at Internet Retailers who display the Powered by ShoppeSimple shopping button on their website.

For more information contact [email protected] or call 612-349-2740

Searchengineland.ocm

Aug 5, 2010 at 10:17am ET by Greg Sterling

Yesterday at the “Techonomy” conference in Lake Tahoe, California Google CEO Eric Schmidt made a number of remarks about user-generated content and data-mining that were somewhat controversial:

“If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence,” Schmidt said, “we can predict where you are going to go.”

“Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You’ve got Facebook photos! People will find it’s very useful to have devices that remember what you want to do, because you forgot…But society isn’t ready for questions that will be raised as result of user-generated content.”

“The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity,” Schmidt said. “In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it.”

Last December Schmidt also made statements about privacy that were not well received in a CNBC interview:

He told CNBC Anchor Maria Bartiromo, on the cable network’s recent special “Inside the Mind of Google,” that people who have something to hide shouldn’t be doing things online that might potentially expose them if law enforcement seeks access to their search histories.

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” said Schmidt.

Google has apparently been holding off on employing facial recognition technology in products like Google Goggles. Schmidt’s comment above, “Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are,” is an apparent allusion to that capability.

Google has experienced various privacy related complaints and legal inquiries over the past several years, growing more numerous recently. The concerns have been raised by privacy advocacy groups and regulators in the US and Europe — though more persistently in Europe where they come from a broader number of fronts, including data retention and, more recently, the unintended collection of personal information by Google’s Street View cameras.

The danger in remarks such as those made yesterday by Eric Schmidt is that they serve to reinforce Google critics’ perceptions of the company as “big brother” or perhaps big brother’s enabling little brother.

5 Reasons Social Media Should be Search's BFF

For multichannel retailer Deb Shops, a seller of junior and plus-sized apparel and accessories for women aged 13 to 25, combining the power of two of online retail's most profitable channels — social media and search — has brought increased... They include the following:

1. Google likes social media;
2. social media produces quality inbound links;
3. social media is a proactive form of reputation management;
4. social media increases brand awareness; and
5. it increases consumers’ time spent on your website.

ROI Report

The Facebook Exodus

Fred Wilson sekingalpha.com

The NY Times Magazine has a short piece this weekend called The Facebook Exodus. In it the author, Virginia Heffernan, cites a number of anecdotes about people quitting Facebook. I am sure there are people quitting Facebook.

But the most recent comScore numbers tell another story (click to enlarge).

In the month of July 2009, almost 370 million people worldwide visited Facebook, up 155% from July 2008. Facebook is a global juggernaut. It is the fourth most popular website in the world after Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), and Yahoo! (YHOO).

This reminds me of all the Twitter Quitter stories I've read. People do quit Twitter. A lot of them. But here are the July comScore numbers for Twitter (click to enlarge).

In the month of July 2009, about 52mm people worldwide visited Twitter, up 1880% over July 2008 and Twitter is the 47th most popular website in the world according to comScore.

Here's the deal, churn is part of online media, particularly social media. People come and go. Some stick around, some don't. These stories about quitters are true of course, but they miss the big picture. More and more people are using these services every day.

Of course, Facebook and Twitter and every other web service out there should pay a lot of attention to why people are quitting their services and address those issues. The best services reduce churn over time. I don't know the exact numbers, but when we first invested in Twitter, it seemed like only 10% of first time users stuck around. Now that number is much higher and is one of the reasons why the service is growing faster.

So when you read these quitter stories, take them with a grain of salt. And make sure to look at the bigger picture at the same time. It may look very different.

Internet Explorer Loses 11.4 Percent Share to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome

From Seekingalph.com

by: Erick Schonfeld 

Erick Schonfeld

from techcruch.com

The new browser wars are on. More than a decade after Microsoft (MSFT) killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple (AAPL) released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google (GOOG) came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser.

Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers. That is the combined market share of IE8, IE7, and IE6. Certainly IE8 (the light blue line) has been growing strong since its release last March, capturing 16.7 percent of the market as of July 4. Those strong gains make up for most of the drop in IE7’s market share from 49.1 percent in March to 30.1 percent yesterday, indicating that Microsoft is doing a good job of getting existing IE7 users to upgrade at a steady pace. And in mid-June, IE8 finally surpassed IE6, which still stubbornly holds a 7.6 percent share. Add those three up, (IE6+IE7+IE8), however, and IE all together holds only a 54.4 percent market share versus the 65.8 percent combined share in March, 2009.

In just over three months, Internet Explorer has seen its overall market share erode by 11.4 percent. Where did that go? It went to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Nearly 5 percent of that, or about half, went to Firefox 3.0, which currently has 27.6 percent market share. That doesn’t count last week’s upgrade. See the dotted line just below the light blue IE8 line? That is a combined set of “other” browsers and appears to include Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome 2.0.

If you look at a 30-day version of that same chart, it shows Safari 4 with 4 percent market share and Chrome with 3 percent market share. It doesn’t yet break out Firefox 3.5, but if you assume that makes up the bulk of the remaining dotted line which jumped to nearly pass IE6 in the past week, you can figure out more or less which browsers are taking share from Microsoft. (I’ve used data from the most recent daily chart in this post, but embedded the monthly chart below which has data as of June 30).

As I said, this is early data from one source. Net Applications, another commonly cited source for browser market share, is currently reviewing its June numbers, but I have a feeling they will show similar trends. (This Wikipedia page shows other browser market share sources, most of them haven’t been updated since March). It is difficult to make any firm conclusions at this point, since market share is shifting so rapidly as every major (and minor) browser tries to convince users to upgrade.

But we are in the midst of a major upgrade cycle simultaneously across IE, FireFox, and Safari (with the Chrome wild card thrown in). When all is said and done, we might see a major shake-up in market share and almost definitely will see leadership pass from IE7 to another browser. The question is will that be IE8 or Firefox? Whichever one wins, the good news is that IE6 is finally dying.

50% Of Google's Self-Serve Advertisers Don't Come Back The Following Year

Siliconalleyinsider.com

Around 50% of all search advertisers that buy their ads directly from the search engine companies, including Google (GOOG), don't do it again the next year, according to a new study. Businesses like Yodel, ReachLocal and LookSmart lose 60% of their local advertisers each year.

The news could mean greatly diminished growth prospects for Google and its competitors.

In 2006, Google (GOOG) said local advertisers would spend $10 billion on Google search ads by 2010. But this new study, commissioned by Clickable and carried out by Borrell Associates, reports that local businesses won't spend more than $5.3 billion online until after 2013.

Until now, the explanation for such slow adoption from local advertisers -- the kind that made local newspapers cash cows for years -- has been that local businesses are slow to adopt new technologies.

In 2006, Google exec Sheryl Sandberg explained the challenge:

We think the [local] market is widely under penetrated. It sounds surprising to a lot of us, but even in the United States, arguably the most developed market in the world for ecommerce less than 50% of businesses even have a Web site, or let alone advertisers, so we think there is tremendous opportunity to bring those people online and bring them into our advertising product.

Clickable's study suggests a new -- and for Google, alarming -- possibility. When we learned the bit about how 50% of all self-serve search advertisers don't do it again the next year, we wondered: Maybe these local advertisers have tried to get on board -- advertising their businesses on search engines Google and Yahoo -- but decided their marketing money was better spent elsewhere.

Clickable, which paid for the study in hopes of turning up new new sales leads, sees the results differently and says the problem is that without a handy service like Clickable, local advertisers have a difficult time measuring the return on their search ad-buying investment. So they should become Clickable customers.

But Borrell CEO Gordon Borrell sees it more our way. He told the WSJ that the problem is that for local businesses, search advertising is more expensive than it should be. “Search advertising has been over-hyped and over-sold to local businesses,” he said. He also noted that over-charging middlemen, known as affiliate marketers, are part of the problem.

If it's true that the multi-billion dollar local advertising market is not "under-penetrated" as Google has always argued, and that local businesses are simply uninterested in search advertising because it doesn't generate enough return on investment, the growth prospects for search engines companies like Google must be considered greatly diminished.

op-google-advertisers-april-2009

http://seekingalpha.com/article/141369-top-google-advertisers-april-2009?source=email

10 things you didn't know about Google's (GOOG) search business:

businessinsider.com

We cover Google for a living, so we thought we'd read Steven Levy's feature about Google's search business in this month's Wired and learn nothing, absolutely nothing. We were wrong.

10 things you didn't know about Google's (GOOG) search business:

The people Larry Page and Sergey Brin tasked with figuring out how Google should make money in 1998 were a pair of know-nothings in their early 20s. Salar Kamanger, Google's ninth employee, had been a biology major at Stanford. His partner, Eric Veach studied computer science. Together they implemented Google's now $21 billion business, AdWords. Neat.

The first company to buy and run an ad through Google's automated auction business was a live mail-order lobster store.

The ads above the results on Google search results pages used to be sold by impression, not per click like they are now. Then, only the ads on the side were sold by cost-per-click (CPC) auctions

Many of the big advertising customers that bought these ads sold by impression were pissed when Google decided to switch and sell them based on CPC. Former Googler, now AOLer, Jeff Levick says one "threw us out of his office and told us to fuck ourselves." Yow!

In order to reassure bidders that they wouldn't be way over-bidding their competition for a keyword, Google used to guarantee the winning bidder it would charge them just a penny more than the next highest bidder. This immediately encouraged higher bids.

Now the price advertisers pay is determined by the formula P = (B2 X Q2)/Q1, with P = price paid by the advertiser, Q2 = Quality score of the next highest-placing ad, Q1 = Advertiser's quality score, and B2 = the next-higheset-placing ad's bid.

Obsessed with auctions, Google even makes its own divisions bid for servers by auction.

The order of ads on a Google search results page isn't determined by simply putting the highest bidder at the top.  Something called a "Quality Score" also comes into play.  Steve reports an ads Quality Score is composed of "relevance of the ad to the specific keyword or keywords, the quality of the landing page the ad is linked to, and, above all, the percentage of times users actually click on a given ad when it appears on a results page."

Google tries to forecast which ads will get clicked on based on the day's temperature. This makes sense when you start to think about queries like "ski boots" and "bikinis."

Berkeley professor Hal Varian, Google's "chief economist," keeps an apartment on campus -- the ranch house where Google got its start. Since Google HQ is called the Googleplex, Steven calls the apartment Hal's "pied-a-Plex." We hope Hal calls it that too.

Analog, Digital, Social

by Kevin Hilstom Minethedata.com

Folks seem to be self-selecting themselves into three camps.

The first camp is the classic direct marketing crowd, rebranded as the "multichannel marketing" audience. I call this audience the "Analog" audience. This camp knows more about strategic direct marketing than anybody else in direct marketing, having been introduced to direct marketing as the credit card, the 1-800 number, and the database took prominence. This crowd reads Catalog Success and DMNews. This crowd attends ACCM and Internet Retailer. Ask this crowd to launch a new product or service, and they'll have a business plan for you in a couple of hours, one that spans multiple channels.

The second camp is what I'd call the "Digital" crowd, online marketers who burst onto the scene during the late 1990s and early part of this decade. This crowd knows more about classic online marketing than anybody. They can tell you that shopping cart abandonment is 43.84830048% if various criteria are met. They're great at SEO and Paid Search and Banner Ads, they know that the open rate on the last e-mail campaign was 22.438%. They know and love tactics. They can be strategic direct marketers, but seem to adore their form of marketing, are are willing to forego bigger opportunities to stay loyal to their niche. This crowd attends Shop.org. Ask this crowd to launch a new product or service, and they'll have your Google marketing plan coupled with an e-mail campaign strategy ready to go in just a few hours.

The third camp is what I'd call the "Social" crowd. This crowd is motivated by technology, the "shiny new toy", if you will. The shiny new toy might be an iPhone app, it might be getting 11,000 followers on Twitter, or it might be creating a viral campaign using Facebook. This person might be 55 years old, this person might be 25 years old. Ask this crowd to launch a new product or service, and you'll have your new product or service in a few hours!

What seems to be missing from the marketing departments of 2009 is a balanced representation of Analog, Digital, and Social strategy.

The traditional catalog brand spends 50 minutes of a 60 minute meeting debating whether 124 pages is better than 116, wondering if an 8 page insert will boost demand, considering whether a Wed-Fri in-home window might work better than Mon-Wed. Analog topics dominate the meeting.

The online brand struggles with driving traffic ... we'll over-think an e-mail campaign that will cause only 1 in 700 recipients to purchase, or we'll dig into our pile of 74,000 keywords to come up with micro-copy that will stimulate clicks. Digital marketers often need analog tools to drive traffic, but there's a fierce independence among this audience.

And then we have the social crowd --- everything is viral! If the product is good enough, it will stand out on its own and will create its own audience ... so let's make it free and social and then things will work. The wisdom of the digital crowd is missing, the strategy of the analog audience seldom surfaces.

In the 2010s, the opportunity exists for a leader to straddle each frontier ... analog, digital, and social. The leader doesn't have to be an expert in each area, but the leader has to hire folks proficient in each realm.

In the 2010s, the best strategies will incorporate percentages of Analog, Digital, and Social strategy.

In 2009, I sit in too many meetings where a faction with Analog, Digital, or Social experience dominates the meeting. Knowledge of the target customer, coupled with a strong mixture of varied experience, will yield positive results.