Pop-culture was front-and-center this week as much of our chatter revolved around some clever and not-so-clever uses of our childhood icons as marketing devices.

First, Ferris Bueller teased us with the hope of a sequel but in the end we learned that it was nothing more than a car company desecrating the Mona Lisa of pop-culture movies. We discovered precisely which day Ice Cube believed was his most agreeable, residents of Mos Eisley revealed their fondness for sensible, 4-door sedans, and we’re reminded, once again, why it’s always a terrible idea to provide an employee from Archrival | Dachis Group with a motorized scooter.

Happy Friday everyone.

• Honda takes a righteous dude and relegates him to a soulless, shameless sell-out.

• The one and only instance of melodica music kicking-ass.

• Thanks to some relentless detective work, it has been determined that Ice Cube’s Good Day was Jan. 20^th, 1992. Word!

• You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and cranky Sith Lords.

• Motorized mayhem in Las Vegas – Dachis style!

• Is that what I think it is?

• This guy takes some pretty nice pictures.

• An unusual inclusion of a vending machine.

This week, news has been circulating that FMCG company Procter & Gamble will eliminate 1,600 jobs and shift more budget into digital media. The headline over at Business Insider is a bit more incendiary: “P&G To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It’s Free To Advertise On Facebook.”

The statement that “it’s free to advertise on Facebook” is wrong at minimum and leads executives to a potentially dangerous point of view regarding social business.

Let’s start with Facebook and free. From one perspective, this is true – anyone can start a brand page at no cost. However, building a successful page requires investment in media, social graph activation, and integration with large-scale marketing campaigns to offer custom experiences for fans and prospects. The world will learn more this week about the amount being spent on the Facebook advertising ecosystem – over $3 billion annually. That’s far from free – in fact, P&G’s remarks justify these investments.

What about brands that aren’t pouring money into the ecosystem? At minimum, companies need individuals to manage and moderate conversations. Although communities operating at scale may have members who engage each other with little company involvement, they aren’t free. Consider Wikipedia, a community that serves hundreds of millions of visitors every month – it takes technology and people to keep the site going – supported by donations. A company like Red Bull doesn’t get to over 26 million fans without engaging – which requires FTE/personnel expense.

P&G certainly didn’t pay for every one of the “1.8 billion in free impressions generated by the Old Spice campaign”…at least not directly. This is absolutely a success story and Dion Hinchcliffe and I talk about it in our forthcoming book, Social Business by Design. It’s important to keep in mind that this is an example of successful “big seed” marketing – plenty of money was poured into the initial mass media campaign and even more was spent to keep The Man Your Man Could Smell Like relevant with real-time videos. Free? No way – W+K grew 22% in 2011.

Not too long ago, I had a client who had a problem. He was the head of digital and emerging media for a consumer products brand. Recently, the CEO’s college-age children had come home for Thanksgiving break and showed the CEO this new thing called YouTube, where companies like Coca-Cola were having great success with reposting their TV commercials. As a result, the CEO decided to slash the digital and social media budgets; my client was laid off soon thereafter. Today, they are lagging far behind their industry competition and I have never seen anyone mention their brands or campaigns in social media.

Social media marketing success comes at a cost. Executives must take a social business perspective instead, considering external and internal factors as well as designing for intended and emergent outcomes. Without a holistic perspective, businesses end up operating like blind men around an elephant and a lineup of digital tombstones in online brand graveyards. 

Disclosure: my company Dachis Group operates one of the world’s largest Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant groups. P&G is a client and our recent work includes the People’s Choice Awards and Thank You, Mom. Red Bull is also a client and we launched their Facebook presence.

Why does being found matter? It’s simple; we are in business to drive results, predictable results. Having serendipity on your side is always welcome but is not the driver of managing your social brand presence. Being found is best understood when thinking through the customer experience. Here are a few practical examples:

• It would be a disaster if your store could not be found. Your potential new customers would consider alternative brands if you cannot be found in a map or location service.
• It would be a mistake to miss +30% of your customers or advocates. You invest heavily in Facebook Apps with Flash graphics yet many of your customers engage your Facebook Page and apps via tablets or mobile phones that are not Flash enabled.
• It would be a disappointment to not notice your engaged customers and their friends. You choose not to follow customers that engage you on Twitter because your feed will get too cluttered; as result the Twitter “Who to Follow” referral engine does not recommend your brand as often as your competitor who does follow their engaging customers.

Where do customers find you? The question really is; how discoverable is your brand where your customer engages? Absence of brand signal inhibits your ability to be found by customer eyes or those of indexing algorithms. Consider a self-review in a few key areas to inventory how you are found – or not. Over the next few weeks I will dive deeper into the following four topics:

Brand Social Profile

• Search for your brand within Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn or Google+.
• Is your Brand Social Profile easily found?
• Does your brand bio concisely describe your brand? Contain brand keywords? Link to your brand hub?

Social Search

• Search for your brand within those same platforms above and general search engines of Google or Bing.
• What are the relationship results of your search? Is your network interested, engaged or advocates of your brand?
• What is the primary content shared about your brand? 

Referral Engines

• Search for your brand terms within Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn or Google+.
• Is your social profile present in the referral results?
• Twitter: Who to Follow
• YouTube: Featured Video
• Facebook: Recommended Pages
• LinkedIn: Signals

Location Services and Maps

• Search Google, Bing, Facebook Places and Foursquare
• Is your brand profile and location found?
• How will your customer know what is your official vs. unofficial location in the results?
• Do the above in a mobile app or browser and are your location address and phone number accurate?

How to plan for being found? Brands that plan for user experience, user interaction will have the greatest success.  Start with simple interaction flows to visualize the placement and the findability of your brand and valued social objects are the visual reference map. Review the insights from your analytics, your SEO and most simply the breadcrumbs of your digital architecture to inform your big picture planning for being found. Measurement of engagement with or from your destination are the insights you will monitor to benchmark the value of being found. Our Social Business Index captures these social exchanges with you and your customers then correlates this activity to brand outcomes. Your real world results are the serendipitous additional social engagement, phone calls and foot traffic and satisfaction of understanding how the magic happens.

The holiday craziness is well behind us, but before we get too far into 2012 I want to highlight some of last year’s best work from Dachis Group’s Information Design Team. The projects include apps, maps, videos, and more.

The truth is that we do a lot of amazing, internally-focused work that can’t be shown publicly — this is just a taste of the stuff that’s not super top secret. And you’ll notice that the work here might not always look like what you’d expect to see. That’s because we believe that it’s not just clarity and good design that helps people understand data and other complex information — you also need good old-fashioned storytelling. It pulls people in and helps them connect and care.

With that said I present to you a few highlights from 2011…

The Economist: World in Figures 2011 mobile app

The World in Figures iPhone app puts essential data and unexpected knowledge in your pocket, with statistics on more than 190 countries around the world. Based on The Economist‘s annual book, Pocket World in Figures,” the app lets you view and compare world statistics on topics from transport to tourism and commodities to cinema. You can access important socioeconomic data from anywhere or just let your mind wander with trivia about innovation, debt, and divorce rates.

IHG: OTA Profit calculator

We developed this highly visual, dynamic online calculator to help IHG hotel owners, general managers, and shareholders measure their reliance on Online Travel Agents (OTAs). The variable data is visualized on the right to show how much profit the hotel is giving to the OTAs, how much profit the hotel makes, and how many direct-booked rooms it would take to keep this same amount of money with the hotel.

Iowa, Did You Know?

This was our third collaboration (the others are here and here) with Dr. Scott McLeod, who wanted us to create a video that would get the 2,000 attendees talking at the 2011 School Administrators of Iowa conference. The purpose was to highlight the struggles that Iowa schools face keeping up in today’s global environment. The video emphasizes the magnitude of the challenge, the need for Iowans to support the changes that schools must make if their learners are to be career-, college-, and citizenship-ready, and the imperative to do this quickly.

Kronos: Women in the Workforce

Another in a series of powerful video collaborations with Kronos, the workforce management company. The video was created in honor of International Women’s Day (the 8th of March) and the purpose was to provide a look at some of the incredible contributions that women have made over the years, and to celebrate their impact on today’s workforce. This was the first time one of our videos was connected to specific day, which drove more immediate views.

IHG: Business Reputation and Responsibility

BRR is the legal and risk management part of InterContinental Hotels Group. They asked us to create an entertaining intro video to help employees better understand who they are and how they champion IHG’s reputation, brands, guests, and employees. Despite the serious subject (and the department’s name), the playful spy theme and soundtrack helps present the team as fun and approachable way. This release followed a previous video that highlighted IHG’s efforts to be environmentally responsible.

Data Quality Campaign: Data is Power

This video was created for The Data Quality Campaign (DQC), a national, collaborative effort to encourage and support state policymakers to improve the availability and use of high-quality education data to improve student achievement.

Sophisticated marketers that want real, meaningful, and measurable engagement don’t want an assembly line, “any color, as long as its black” solution, rather, they seek engagement mechanics that are specifically crafted and designed to meet the value proposition of engaging with their audiences.

However, the problem with those experiences is that most of those have not been developed with the proper thinking. The performance of custom social experiences over the past several years is more an observation on the maturity state of the industry, rather than the effectiveness of the type of solution. Carrying through the automobile industry analogy, the auto, itself, isn’t the failure, simply the lack of proper method.

Most custom social experiences to date have been designed without a rigorous process that marries business objectives with consumer desires and the appropriate deployment channels with the appropriate mechanics and functionality. In an effort to help marketers design better custom social experiences, we’ve codified our learnings from the design and development of over 500+ custom social experiences since 2007 into a holistic framework that provides validation and a roadmap for the execution of social programs.

A social page management and publishing tool, on its own, is fine for beginners who are just learning to understand social on Facebook, and it is needed to drive streamlined publishing and ongoing page management across markets; however, meaningful engagement comes across the engagement spectrum and needs to be customized to have any tangible benefit. Custom social experiences, one example being those that provide utility, do, and will, always have a place in the toolbox of marketers, so long as they are designed and executed to deliver business results.

We can all agree that success in marketing is set up by a well crafted and articulated social strategy and that social programs are more effective when supported by media. Furthermore, there is no silver activation bullet. Rather, there are various ways to successfully activate consumers through social channels. But, let’s move away from the discussion of activation tactics and put the focus on business results because this is the conversation that industry leaders need to converge on in 2012.

To move forward as an industry we all need to face the music and substantiate to executive teams the value of online social engagement spend beyond the superficial metrics of likes and followers. Whether a marketer is activating in social via a custom social experience, rich video content, or a crafty message that is deployed through a platform such as Buddy, Vitrue, Spreadfast et al, there is a need for a standardized way to measure social performance. Just as there are standards in the field of performance marketing, we need holistic measures and answers to questions such as:

• What does success in Social mean to the CMO and what does her measurement dashboard look like?
• How can an executive team correlate business outcomes to a brand’s activities in social channels?
• And the holy grail: what is the ROI on the company’s overall spend in Social?

These are the challenges facing all of us in 2012. As with the automobile industry, there are numerous companies with different hypotheses and approaches, each building out separate models and platforms. It is the companies that deliver solutions to answer the above questions that will stand the test of time and win in the long run. However, this is not a zero sum game. This year will see more leading companies working together to set standards and bring best-of-breed solutions to market. As this New Year kicks into high gear, let’s challenge ourselves to, as an industry, elevate the discussion in 2012 to focus more on the metrics that matter.

Facebook, we are frequently told, is a disruptive technology. Twitter is a disruptive technology. Tunisia and Tahrir Square could never have happened without the disruptive influence of flashmobs and mobile technology. Blogs utterly disrupted the daily business of journalism and newspapers, and traditional media are finally mainstreaming the meme: February’s Forbes “30 Under 30” cover is subbed “Meet the Disruptors”—as if it’s a game show! And February’s Technology Review, that stalwart bastion of scientific bastardization from MIT, touts “Disruptive Technology” on its cover, anchoring an entire section of the magazine with an excerpt from a new anthology of the very book that inaugurated the term “disruptive innovation”: HBS professor Clayton Christensen’s 1995 The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Disruption is in the air, but it’s not always clear what it means. Even Christensen had his doubts. When I interviewed him nearly a decade ago, he was ambivalent about the word, if not the idea. Intel’s Andy Grove once gave a speech lauding him, but Christensen told me that even Grove was critical of the word, noting that there were too many “prior connotations to disruption,” and declining to use it internally. “People do misunderstand it,” Christensen told me, “but it said what we wanted it to say.”

The seed of that ambivalence is still growing 20 years later. To some ears, the disruption vogue smacks of the same revolutionary zeal embodied in another coinage prevalent at the birth of the web some 19 years ago: disintermediation. Consumers could break out the bubbly because the web was about to remove the middle man! Of course, it soon became clear that disintermediation was just another form of mediation, albeit one with cheaper advertising and new channels and digital gatekeepers, portals and the digital agencies that popped up to support them. We may have been removing the middle man, but we were far from sticking it to the man. Instead, like most revolutions, we’d just done a 360, replacing one regime for another.

Fortunately, the current vogue for disruption holds a different promise, one that creates tremendous opportunity, for brands or governments. Despite its fierce-sounding nomenclature, disruption is not ultimately a harbinger of revolution but rather the basis of a competitive reset founded on the fundamentals of good customer—or citizen—engagement.

To understand why, it’s necessary to go back to the Innovator’s Dilemma. As Christensen saw it, the innovator’s dilemma is that incumbent companies are caught in a web of their own success. Incumbents are terrific at staying one step ahead of threats to their business through what Christensen called “sustaining innovations”—the rational investments companies make each day to create more useful products: airplanes that fly farther, computers that work faster, mobile phones with longer-lasting batteries… whatever they think the market and its customers are telling them to do.

Disruptive innovators see the incrementalism in these innovations as a bloody red target. Disruptors see the telltale signs of historical change behind the incumbents’ incrementalism. To a disruptor, a hybrid car is a costly and inaccurate response to the need for low-cost, energy efficient automotion. To a disruptor, a newspaper blog is at best a  misguided response to the realities of instantaneous 24/7 networked reporting. Disruptors take aim at these targets with innovation based on the job that the incumbents are incapable or unwilling to fulfill through their value networks, and they do it for much lower cost: think Zipcar or Flipboard. Disruptors solve a job that would put the incumbents out of business if they were to try the same strategy. (Zip and Flip aren’t “advanced technologies” but  clever, cheap, off-the-shelf combinations of technology that work well in a fledgling market, and if Hertz or the New York Times bet their businesses on them, they’d fail miserably.) The incumbents see the virtues of disruption quite well, thanks much, they just can’t execute on them or they’d go bust. Hence, the innovator’s dilemma.

Historically, it seems we’ve arrived at a moment where disruption has succeeded revolution as a meme of historical change, providing us with better results and a fresher understanding of who our customers are and what they need.

Are there people who historically haven’t been able to do this thing for themselves and so have gone without it or let others do it for them? What products do your customers really want—and what are the best products for those customers? How do we structure our organization and whose money will we take to fund our business? Which parts of the value chain shall we outsource, and which need to be integrated?

Not coincidentally, this is one reason why advanced metrics for analyzing customer engagement—based on direct observation of literally hundreds of social signals swimming in the sea of unstructured consumer data that arises through social networks—are now emerging. (In future posts, I’ll be talking about some of those.) Dachis Group’s Social Business Index and Social Performance Monitor are designed precisely to help companies get out of the expensive incremental experimentation business and jump directly into the hearts and minds of their customers to figure out what jobs they really need to be done. With real, direct, actionable customer intelligence in hand—the Social Performance Monitor actually dives into the actual components that make up relative brand performance, specifically, Brand Awareness, Brand Love, Brand Mindshare, and Brand Advocacy—companies can practice innovation in ways that allow them to build good theories, find patterns and anomalies that will guide them to predictable success, avoid the bogeyman of commoditization, and teach them to migrate from vertical organizations and proprietary technologies to interdependencies and modular architectures.

When you put it like that, of course, disruption sounds a lot less radical and a lot more like hard-assed social business intelligence. As Occupy Wall Street discovered, it’s easy to make a big noise, but something altogether different when you need to make real change actionable. To disrupt, and not just to shake things up. Without deep insight into the job your customers (or citizens) need you to do, disruption either can be a cover for impotent viral expression or an expression of  needs the status quo can’t even imagine. The question is, what kind of disruption will you choose in 2012? Tell me here in comments or @craigbromberg on Twitter.

But in the end, numbers just haven’t been enough.  Especially when it comes to unstructured data like social media, where the most important information isn’t going to be neatly bucketable into categories like clicks or bounce rates. The vagaries of human conversation are messy, hard-to-process, and seemingly worst of all, unpredictable.  Just as challenging, the flood of data from these sources is vast.  However, though sensors (such as those in our smart devices such as phones or tablets, or in our Internet-connected home/office) create a formidable and a rapidly growing surface area for big data, this data generally falls into the large, yet well-understood category.  In contrast, the most difficult to operationalize listening and analytics processes are ones that 1) which the information is uniquely formatted on a normal basis and 2) requires excessive human intervention to process or respond to effectively.  To succeed, both of these must be ameliorated, and if possible, dramatically improved by understanding the implications of the unanticipated and then correctly formulating a useful business response. Anything short of this makes the scale problem untenable for businesses: Mountains of data requiring mountains of people in order to service defeats the very purpose of using technology in the first place.

I used the word “operationalize” in the previous paragraph, because that’s what many companies set out to do in 2011: Begin building business processes that were supported by new types of listening and analytics tools in an effort to make sense of their enterprise data, social data, and other data sources. In the process they gave rise to the term ‘big data’, a whole host of existing and new technologies and processes integrated into a “stack” that can start cracking both the data volume problem as well as the messy data problem (and opportunity) inherent in data pools such as social media.  One of the root causes: Traditional analytics and business intelligence largely fell behind the needs of businesses to start seeing all of the data relevant to them, whatever the form, and being able to understand what it really meant quickly and easily enough to actually do something about it.

The now-famous McKinsey report on big data last year had much to say on the topic and it’s required reading these days, including some extremely compelling case studies and examples.  But while the domains of healthcare, government, retail, manufacturing, and telecommunications have much of the industry-specific focus on big data, the one general domain where most businesses of any kind will be impacted is in social media.  This is where tools, platforms, vendors, techniques, skills, training, and much more will have to be developed and brought to bear. To be sure, a good amount of what has already been developed for the fields of analytics, data warehousing, business intelligence, databases, visualization, natural language processing, and more will be usable. But much of it won’t or has become obsolete because of the vast pools of deep data accumulating around our organizations and its unique structure.

Therefore, a new discipline is being synthesized out of the existing pieces that are providing important foundational elements for big data. In many cases entirely new elements will have to be introduced as well.  These include: 1) Radical solutions to address scale and performance issues, 2) edge-of-the-envelope machine learning capabilities ala IBM’s Watson that can remove human decision making when it’s unnecessary, 3) unsupervised identification of strategic business concerns and opportunities, and 4) an operational construct that directly affects the course of the business (as opposed to generating automated reports that sit unread inside an e-mail attachment.) Big data has the promise to deliver on all of these and in ways that will drive better innovation, competition, and bottom-line results. It will take time, but hopefully not hard work, except for those that produce the tools, although that may yet be too much to ask.

For now, 2012 will be an experimental year, a year spent preparing the fundamentals and figuring out the ways in which the pieces of the many disciplines that big data draws from will fit together. Many organizations will be trying out new ways to integrate big data ideas into their business while others will be putting the tools through their paces. But the smart organizations will be doing both, since big data is as much about process as it is about technology.  All will be learning what works and what doesn’t (for them), and seeing where the holes in their organization are for enabling the outcomes.  There’s little question that big data will be one of the biggest IT and business stories of the year, but exactly how and why is unwritten so far.

10 Big Data Predictions for 2012

Here is what I think are likely the most significant big data happenings this year:

1. Data scientists will be in short supply, while data warehouse and BI folks will try to migrate over. Yet lack of experienced big data architects will represent the real hold-up for now.  As Tom Groenfeldt of Forbes says, it’s really a matter of degrees when it comes to labeling someone a big data scientist. It’s also clear that practitioners of precursor fields of big data will be lining up to get involved, yet often lack the new thinking required to master the field. But the biggest shortage in my opinion will be in the enterprise-scale strategists capable of crafting and realizing a big data vision, one step-at-a-time.
2. Analytics vendors (social and otherwise) will start down the big data path. Many won’t get far, but a few will make the transition. When venerable old-guard analytics companies like SAS start releasing big data reports, you know it’s the buzz word du jour. Yet this is inevitable with any important new technology trend. What’s more significant is that very few vendors will have a comprehensive blueprint or framework for big data, most will be providing point solutions, and that’s fine. In this early wave, big data suites as such really don’t exist and it’s up to companies to curate a set of capabilities.
3. Everyone will label everything big data in 2012, making it hard to see what makes the approach or technology stand apart and provide a unique solution. The issue of signal-to-noise with big data marketing and hype will threaten to obscure its real meaning for some, yet others will take what big data represents — a set of innovative new approaches to solving new and long-standing business problems in a much more agile, integral, and high impact manner — as a call to significant action.  The Register recently published an effective cross-check of what big data really means to those on the ground. Regardless of the term itself, from their surveys it’s clear there’s a broad perception that big data will let organizations tackle problems that were previously ‘too hard or too expensive’.
4. Companies looking for instant nirvana with one-click setup and zero-configuration of big data solutions will increasingly have their needs met, but slowly at first. The problem with effective big data is that it’s not just about predetermined buckets or templates for business intelligence; it’s about meaningful analysis and processing of information in a way that’s highly relevant to the business.  .
5. Codifying the domain of a business in order to ‘teach’ an organization’s big data platforms will turn out to be one of the outstanding challenges, but some initial solutions will emerge. Most of the better big data stories, such as the health care company that’s collecting ubiquitous fertility data, instead of just from those having fertility problems (and skewing it for everyone), are specific to a domain or industry. In other words, they’re custom-built and designed.  Big data is often more about the democratization of data as Bradford Cross once put it, to be liberated for use inside and across the business, instead of limited to data scientists in white lab coats, tackling a small number of well-defined problems. To do this, we need better ways to adapt big data appliances to the details of our business. Important initial headway is being made here (example: Appistry‘s industry-specific big data solutions) and I think we’ll see much more of it this year, especially in social business fields such social marketing, Social CRM, social product development, and crisis management as well as specific domains such as life sciences, defense, and especially financial services.
6. Consumerization of big data will be one of the primary vectors into the organization for tactical needs, making ‘shadow’ big data a nascent but important new trend. I’ve made the argument that Google search is a great example of a simple big data appliance anyone can use. It analyzes the contents of most of the world’s Web sites in near real-time, allows all of it to be quickly searched using a simple interface, provides recommendations when it thinks you’re asking the wrong question, and so on. It’s in use at virtually every company in the world.  It will be followed up by numerous SaaS big data services over the next few years that will bring consumer-like simplicity and power to the field. They will be so easy to start using that many workers will prefer them to any home grown solution. While this won’t always be the case (partially because the internal data is typically quite difficult to load into external services by the average worker), companies will see plenty of unsanctioned big data solutions. Not that I think this is a real problem.
7. The more bureaucratic the company, the more it will struggle to embody its strategy and policy in an operational big data life cycle, despite this being the best way to obtain value. It’s hard for rigid processes and hierarchies to change, and companies either poor at using technology to solve problems or those that aren’t very agile will have more of an uphill challenge to activating on big data.  I don’t expect big data to appear in these organizations in 2012, but early adopters will appear in technology, finance, healthcare, insurance, government, media, and retail businesses if they have either stiff competition or are already rapidly growing (and hence already changing) more than other businesses. Correspondingly, big data vendors that supply these industries will experience the most lift.
8. Rich data, such as audio, images, and video, will remain opaque to most organizations this year, despite advances in machine analysis of both and their growing prevalence. I’m basing this on looking at most big data offerings today, which don’t emphasize these types of data very much if at al, despite the explosion of images, audio, and high-definition video in recent years. For now, the lion’s share of big data will focus on textual processing.
9. On the other hand, social media and big data — because it will usually not be opaque — will have significant lift this year, though semantic processing will remain in its early stages. I recently identified nine top uses cases for social business intelligence, for which big data will be a leading solution.  Social media, because it requires linguistic and natural language processing, is an ideal candidate for big data analytics yet it will be in areas requiring sophisticated link analysis like automated reputation/ influencer tracking and segmentation that will be of primary interest this year. Perhaps more importantly, big data will “complete” social business as a capability that allows the company to listen and intelligently analyze their constituents contextually and in scale (see figure above.)
10. Despite all of this, companies will do surprisingly well integrating early big data capabilities in their social business efforts in particular. That the big software vendors are moving into the big data fray (such as with Oracle’s new big data appliance) speaks volumes. And offerings are focusing on the ease-of-use factor, both in installation and maintenance as well as operation, clearly understanding the immense competition and pressure they’ll be experiencing from online providers.  I’ll be publishing a breakdown of the consumer big data app soon, but I’m virtually certain it will show a list of well-known and up-and-coming household names that you’ll be seeing in the enterprise this year as companies throw big data solutions at their issues to see what sticks.

Of course, many other interesting things will happen in big data as well but this is a good start. I’m hoping we’ll see how the real strengths and weaknesses of big data fall out over the coming 12 months. Please leave your comments and own predictions below in comments.

A BBC report today quoting ONS figures for December 2011 highlights some of the losers:

“Christmas trading was a mixed bag for retailers, with Debenhams reporting flat sales. But High Street electronics and entertainment retailers, including Dixons, Comet, HMV and Game, reported sharp annual falls in sales, as did supermarket chain Tesco … Chains including fashion retailer Peacocks, lingerie firm La Senza and outdoor specialist Blacks Leisure fared worse and are now in administration.”

But who did well and why? Next brand sales were up 3.1%, with their direct catalogue and online business compensating for a fall in sales at retail stores. According to the BBC, discount fashion retailer Primark reported revenue growth of 16% in the 16 weeks to January 7, whilst online fashion retailer saw growth of 10% in UK sales and 93% elsewhere in the final quarter of 2011; meanwhile, luxury fashion brand Mulberry saw a rise of 25% in sales for the 16 weeks to January 14, whilst Burberry reported a 22% rise in final quarter sales for 2011. In general, despite a prevailing atmosphere of austerity, it seems luxury brands are doing well in the UK.

Did social engagement affect UK retailers this sale season?

So, what can we learn from the online social engagement of leading retailers and how much of an influence was this on their performance? Thanks to our Social Business Index platform, we were able to run some numbers on leading retailers over the holiday sales period in the United States, and I thought it might be interesting to do the same in the UK. We found a few supporting pieces of evidence to support what we now know about sales performance:

1. Next had an online conversation volume roughly 6 times greater than Marks & Spencer and almost 10 times greater than John Lewis in the run up to Christmas, thanks to a lot of campaign activity and conversation in their online channels, which performed very well.
2. Next’s and Marks and Spencers’ conversation volumes peaked before Christmas, whereas John Lewis peaked after Christmas during their traditional clearance sale period, as did Argos.
3. John Lewis enjoyed the most conversations about customer service topics, especially in the post-Christmas sales period, with Argos also having a relatively high proportion of conversations in this period focus on similar issues (although not necessarily for the same reasons – sentiment is still hard to measure with any certainty)
4. Marks & Spencer enjoyed a boost to its online conversations before Christmas due in part to a TV ad campaign and a relationship with a show called X-Factor.
5. Music and electrical goods retailers such as HMV and Comet, who in the past have  been popular during sale time, performed very poorly in terms of conversation volume, reinforcing the impression that their sectors are among the hardest hit by pure online retail models.

Whilst there was indeed a correlation between online social engagement and sales performance, causality is harder to identify within the marketing campaign mix used by the retailers. Clearly, the impact of pureplay online retailing continues to be felt on the high street, even in areas such as clothing that were previously seen as harder to sell online, but the picture is not as simple as it may seem, and retail is not dead yet.

It is interesting that John Lewis and Marks & Spencer are starting to find the right balance between e-commerce and in-store retail, and both appear to be investing heavily in online, with M&S reportedly expecting multi channel revenue to hit £300-500m by 2013/14. Both retailers have relatively active social media presences –  M&S has over 527k likes on Facebook, with an active community using their regular polls to comment on the page, whilst John Lewis have 693k likes on Facebook, with 4,874 people talking about them, and a very active twitter presence that enjoys 17k followers.

Can social help create experience-led ‘bricks + clicks’ differentiation?

Having taken their time to embrace e-commerce, could these two iconic companies pave the way towards a more sophisticated bricks and clicks strategy for retailers? They are both known for experience, customer service and quality, and this gives them a good degree of customer loyalty.

In an age of abundant choices and competing pressures for our time and attention, the basic approach of choosing or curating product selection, letting people browse in a friendly and supportive environment and giving awesome customer service is still a winning formula, and one that pureplay online retailers cannot always match. Apple has already shown that physical retail stores can be re-imagined and rejuvenated by focusing on customer experience, resulting in it’s stores enjoying higher sales revenue per square foot than Best Buy on one hand and luxury jeweller Tiffany on the other, although revenues in 2011 were only 1% up year on year. Apple is now looking to make this experience available more widely than its flagship city stores by offering mini-stores within Target stores in the United States.

I think there are plenty of other categories of goods where the additional cost of physical retail locations can be offset by the gains of human service, great curation and conversation, and not just the quirky map sellers and antiques shops I enjoy browsing through in Greenwich market at the weekend.

There are three things I think any successful bricks and clicks strategy needs to focus on: experience, curation and service. These must apply across both online and physical interaction, and this is where social media can really come into play by spreading the word about the fabulous experience your stores offer (location based services, facebook, recommendations, twitpics, etc.) and enticing people into a commitment (wishlists, baskets, product selectors, click and collect) that they can fulfil when they arrive at the store. But how many stores can really say they manage the online/offline handoff so elegantly? That indicates an organisational design problem where retail operations are managed differently to online and customer service channels.

To provide truly amazing experience, of course, requires a lot more than snazzy social media campaigns and Facebook likes and fans. It requires the foundation of a connected company, where the best employee brand ambassadors can be scaled to provide support and advice on social channels; it probably also requires some thinking around Social CRM and how this can be used to really get to know customers and their needs. Finally, of course, it needs tight feedback loops between action and results to achieve the kind of closed loop ROI that traditional marketing spend has spent years creating. This is where our integrated approach to Performance Brand Marketing comes into its own: strategic social engagement backed up by solid, close-to-real-time metrics and measurement.

There are very few organisations that have the depth in social to develop not only an overarching social experience strategy for brands or retailers, plus design the connected company underpinnings to make it work, plus the kick-ass social engagement campaigns and content to bring it to life. I am very excited to be part of one that does, and we will be talking a lot more about this side of our work throughout 2012.

The third week of January traditionally represents a critical time for most of us – it’s the point where we find ourselves forgetting about and/or completely abandoning our list of over-valued New Year’s resolutions.

This fact isn’t lost on us, so we discriminated this week and selected some of the more epic internet offerings as a way to hopefully motivate you to stick to your goals. We think you’ll find inspiration from a zebra who flaunts some mad moves, get amped-up over footage from the bonus-round of Street Fighter 2, head-bang with Juliet, and get seduced by the Dark Bark Side.

Happy Friday, everyone.

• That’s one dope zebra.
• Proof that the super-secret Street Fighter 2 bonus round exists.
• Super cool.
• Stephen Colbert acts out a nuclear explosion. And it’s spot-on perfect.
• IMDABES….IMDABES
• First, watch the trailer. Now, go play the awesomest tribute game ever.
• The Bark Side.
• You’re beautiful. It’s true.
• Juliet’s super hardcore.
• Hopefully “Baby Girl” doesn’t get motion sickness.
• Hello. Is it me you’re looking for?
• So true it’s eerie.

As part of this integration, there are always questions as to whether brands can effectively direct the conversation in their social media communities and further their goals. Using our Social Business Intelligence tools, Dachis Group recently extracted data on ecosystem activity for major retail brands around the Black Friday 2011 holiday period. We worked to correlate that data with marketing tactics from these brands to understand how various tactics impacted the specific activity within respective brand ecosystems.

A summary of our findings is shared below. We believe this data is relevant to marketers trying to build valuable conversations around their brands during not only the holiday season, but for future events as well.

A special thanks to the Social Business Intelligence team overall and particularly Ray Renteria and Bill Keaggy for their efforts on this document.

Click here to access the full report.