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Human behavior is very interesting to me. I have always loved anthropology, history, psychology and sociology. I think this is what has historically drawn me to marketing. Marketing is the science of human behavior as it relates to consumerism and recently the concentration has gotten very complex.

I have tried to build a evolutionary model of the changes businesses are facing today. My focus of this post is on consumer packaged goods (CPG) as it provides the greatest statistical evidence of change.

1900-1990 (The Good Old Days)

Oh the good old days of marketing. Media channels were limited and the pesky internet didn’t disrupt pricing like it does today. The purchase journey was simple because there were not very many options. Consumers typically learned about products through a handful of media channels or talking with friends and family. Marketing could be much more effective, but cost significantly more for the marketer. Marketers also received significant help from the media channels through turnkey solutions. Marketers didn’t need to know every aspect of advertising, because ultimately they didn’t have control of message distribution. Marketers could focus on their product and let the media companies handle the distribution. Marketing wasn’t simple, but it sure was easier for the marketer at times.

2000-2010 (The Internet)

Then there was the Internet. Now everyone is a media source. All you need is a computer, compelling content and internet access. I believe the internet is the single most disruptive medium to ever happen. Consumers now had options. With options came a longer purchase journey because consumers wanted to shop for the best deal. With the internet, they now had the ultimate shopping tool. Other rings to the journey were also added such as digital awareness advertising, online reviews and emerchants. This created a huge problem for both traditional media and marketers, because the message was being diluted and product pricing was becoming transparent. The strongest chance for conversion was still the physical store, but the journey to even reach the store was becoming longer. The only thing emerchants needed was trust from the consumer and a savvy shopper to capitalize on large conversions.

2011 (Social/Mobile)

Where getting consumers to your store was once the biggest challenge, now keeping them there is proving very difficult. Consumers now have smart phones for scanning products to receive price comparisons and reviews. Sometimes consumers will only come to the store to “demo” the product by physically investigating its merits, but then leave without buying and immediately purchase the product from a low-price emerchant. Social media also plays a heavy role in determining purchase decisions do to the easy of online feedback. Consumers are leveraging their friends and family through Facebook and Twitter to determine their next purchase. This is defining the way a new generation shops and buys products. Black Friday is the largest shopping day of the year, but many of the purchases are happening online and cyber Monday is making serious growth strides.

Conclusion

If I could make a few concluding points for marketers and merchants it would be this:

I recently had the pleasure of sitting on a very interesting panel regarding the Zero Moment of Truth or ZMOT. ZMOT is a concept developed by Google that attempts to identify exactly when consumers are making purchase decisions. It’s an extremely compelling topic and I would argue ZMOT is just the beginning in an overall shift in purchase decision paths. I could go on trying to explain ZMOT, but it’s easier to watch it in action. Below is the panel discussion and also a video from Google.

ZMOT Panel

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My house has a leaky roof. Kind of a bummer especially in Portland. Living in Portland, there are several roof companies to choose from. Many of them spend piles of money on traditional advertising such as Radio, TV, YellowPages and Newspaper. So when I went to search for a good, honest roofer, I first searched some of the companies I have heard on the radio. What I learned was shockingly clear. The advertising roof repair companies was outspending their reputation. The reviews for this company were absolutely dreadful. Considering they spend so much on advertising, I can only imagine their prices would be high as well. I have never seen an unanimous one star rating on Yelp, but these guys managed to really deserve it. Not only are the reviews bad, they are long and detailed.

I ultimately ended up calling a different roof company with much better reviews. The point I am trying to outline is the presence of amplified transparency. What the internet and social media can provide is complete transparency. Businesses cannot hide from shoddy service. Transparency will allow the “cream to rise to the top” much quicker than ever. If you are a company that is oblivious to a consumer’s new online voice and how it effects your business, you’re going to see continued diminishing returns from traditional marketing. Consumers are frequently researching products and services before they buy. If you have a bad online reputation, no amount of traditional marketing money is going to increase your business.

By the way, here are the Yelp reviews of the company I ultimately called. Also, on their website they pride themselves on their positive online reviews. I also attached a screenshot of their website layout. I’ll update this post after I receive service.

When it comes to real time messaging, there are few better networks available than Twitter. Twitter is easy to understand, navigate and search for conversations. But some media outlets use Twitter as a crowd sentiment tool and here is where I think it may fall short. Twitter messaging can be very temporary. If a user is not paying attention, millions of pieces of information will pass them by in seconds. That is why it seems sometimes conversations with critical mass are poorly orchestrated visually with Twitter. Take the Occupy Wall Street (or #occupywallstreet) movement as an example. Growing press coverage would lead you to assume Twitter chatter has steadily increased over the past 30 days. But in reality there have been very distinct spikes, followed by times of low mentions.

In contrast Google Trends gives us a much better visual interpretation of online mentions because Google indexes everything online. You can see a much more sustained growth in mentions and activity that was absent in the Twitter graph.

My point to this very short post is to always cross reference your research. Twitter is only used by 13% of online U.S. users and many of those users are not active. Open up your scope and investigate the truth in numbers.

Recently I was honored to speak at a small CEMA Marketing group in Austin, TX. At the event, I presented some ideas for how event marketers could integrate social media with a higher participation at conferences. A lot my content was centered around keeping actions simple and having fun with available tools such as Twitter. Below are a few elements of my presentation. If I could sum up my ideas on the matter they would be this:

1. Make everything very, very easy.

2. Use available tools instead of building propriety apps.

3. Cater to online chatter through qualified community managers.

4. Educate users pre-during-post event

5. Make networking fun and easy.

There is a race happening you might not be aware of. The race is for how your business controls and manages your social media. With some major players getting involved and some serious money changing hands this could prove to be a sector to watch. In this post, I’ll try to quickly summarize the most relevant platforms and what kind of businesses they are best suited for. Most only focus on Facebook, but all platforms listed have aspirations to work with other platforms.

Involver was one of the first Facebook application developers and continues to push out compelling products for companies. Bonfire has worked with Involver in past and overall they create a good product. They have jumped into the platform management ring with their “Enterprise” and “Business” solutions. They are very similar with Enterprise giving users every feature and product they make. I’ll focus on the features from Enterprise. If you want to read more about the “Business” product, click here. Below are Enterprise’s capabilities:

• 24 available “pre-made” white label Facebook applications
• Publishing on a claimed 40 media outlets. Most notable: Facebook, Twitter, WordPress
• Post scheduling on Media outlets
• Bit.ly analytic integration
• Social monitoring for keyword alerts
• Message Sentiment Measurement
• Message workflow management
• Internal analytic dashboard
• Up to 10 users

Price: Starting at $2,749 per month.

Wildfire started as a small FBfund (Facebook’s investing arm) company “way back” in January 2010. They initially created apps for pages that were simple to deploy and required no long term contracts.

As of June 2011 they have 120 team members and thousands of customers (we have used several of their products in the past). They have big aspirations to become not just an app developer for Facebook, but a fully functional social management system. In June of this year, Wildfire launched their Suite product. Here are their Suite’s capabilities:

• Drag and drop Facebook Tab creator: This feature requires no coding knowledge and can be updated frequently.
• Content Manager: The Wildfire content manager will allow for social media workflow simplicity and allow community managers to schedule and assign content posting on Facebook. This feature is very useful for companies with large teams or publish content with a high frequency.
• Promotion Builder: This allows companies to construct giveaways using a straightforward interface — drag and drop the text fields you’d like to require during the sign up, tweak the banners, then enter the official rules and you’re good to go.
• Dashboard: Facebook analytics can be difficult, but Wildfire’s dashboard can simply success metrics. Their dashboard shows analytics that are more detailed than Facebook’s standard Insights and you can even chart your progress against a competitor’s.

Price: Custom pricing. In a statement they say “low hundreds” to “low thousands”

Buddy Media is the gold standard when it comes to social media management. I mean gold as in both expensive and the best. They have every feature you could ever want in a platform and are fluent in all major languages. This is very important if you are a multinational brand that wants to segment your social media community. They currently service some of the largest companies in the world such as Starwood Hotels, Sony, Southwest Airlines, American Express and Ford. In addition to their impressive client list, they also recently received an additional $54 million in funding to grow out their infrastructure. Buddy Media can do everything Involver and Wildfire can and more. I’ll focus on the “and more” for the sake of time.

• Drag and Drop Facebook page development
• Multiple language support
• Real time analytics
• Scheduling and posting on multiple social platforms
• Large team workflow management

Price: Customized pricing. Most plans start at $5,000 per month.

I hope you have found this information helpful with any decision making in the future. If you have any you would add that I missed, please comment below.

I think Google is really missing a chance for success. Instead of launching Google + aggressively with apps and invites, they once again built a social product with a moat. They needed to build bridges to already established networks and call Facebook out on it’s proprietary operations. Google+ could be a better functioning Facebook without tackling the problem of user migration. And if Facebook tries to cut them off from using their data through their open API, Google could sue them on grounds of unfair business practices.

But I digress.

My point is, Google’s apparent hubris to create networks when they should be integrating them could ultimately destroy even their best products. People are settling on their networks so prying them away from Facebook or Twitter will be enormously difficult. Even the employee who created the concept behind circles has even left and moved to Facebook. The move raises eyebrows that Facebook will easily combat Google’s threat by creating their own form of circles using their friend’s list function.

If Google was serious about Google+ and does not want the technology behind it to ultimately folded into a separate product (I’m looking at you Wave), then they should have launched it in an entirely different fashion. Here are 3 ways I think they could have launched with greater success.

1. Launch with apps: influencers are not using browser based apps to decide if something is cool any longer. Influencers are using apps on their iOS or Android mobile devices. Facebook does not even have an iPad app yet! In addition, Facebook lost their best app developer because of Apple’s tough policies. Talk about a huge opportunity.

2. Enough with this slow invite nonsence: This tactic might work when you are still a small cool company, but reeks of elitism for a product that only succeeds when everyone is using it. Google already has enough computing power to manage the massive load, so why not take a chance. Make it cool by having everyone there.

3. Pull in all networks: Stop having an exclusive network and start building an inclusive network. Use Twitter oAuth, Facebook Connect and every other network login API available to pull in as many people to a central network. Think FriendFeed with much more capabilities. My wife loves Gmail, but when I mentioned Google+ (side note, really tired of searching for the + button on my iPad), she said she just got used to Facebook and would probably not switch for any reason. My point is this: the groundswell event is over, Facebook and to a much lessor extent Twitter won. The future of social media is integration and simplification.

I want Google to succeed. I really do. I just want them to know that this “toe dipping” launch game is tiresome and damaging. To me, this launch seems too safe. To be “cool” they need to break some rules or at the very least hurt some Facebook feelings. The risk for Google is great. One more failed social experiment and the community might stop taking them seriously.

HubSpot and Marketing Charts have released their Marketing Data Box, a quarterly collection of practical marketing tools ready for professional use. At Bonfire we are data junkies so we sorted through the stats with a fine tooth comb and summarized the key takeaways from the slide deck. We have also embedded the full slide deck for your reference.

Traditional Media Stats

• TV and Radio Ad buys are up
• Newspaper is down
• Online news consumption is up 17% and marks the first time more people got their news from the web.

Digital Stats

• Top areas of marketing growth: Website, Email, Social Media – in that order
• Trigger emails are on the rise (automated emails for certain calendar events)
• Inbound marketing leads (Blogs, email, social media, PPC) are 61% cheaper than outbound marketing leads (TV, Radio, Print)
• Cheapest lead sources (in order from cheapest): Blogs, Social Media, SEO, PPC
• Facebook ads have a 72.3% reach in the U.S.
• Facebook interactive ads (home page ads) have the highest recall of any social media ads

Smart Phones

• 1/3 of mobile users have Smartphones
• Time spent on Smartphones in order of use: Email, Social Networking, News

Online Spending

• Online spending is up 11%
• Youth online spending is up 9%

In terms of digital communication, anonymity is awful. If social media (some would argue the internet in general) is expected to be taken seriously, anonymity is a brands biggest threat. Facebook recognizes this and is constantly evolving to provide access to tools and applications that can help brands grow their businesses online. It is also one of the reasons that Facebook is 1,000x bigger and better than Twitter. continue