A recent article by David Edelman, For Big Data to Work, You Need Intuition, mentioned how big data is becoming critical to making good business decisions, however, companies need to have the right people in place looking for the right information. It’s imperative for the data scientist or analyst to have a marketing experience and good intuition on how to make sense of the data and put it to use.

Edelman also mentioned how important  it is to look closely at the consumer decision journey as opposed to just looking at transaction data. With consumers using more online resources to research and evaluate products and service there can be a points in the consumer’s journey where they are falling off. If you’re not providing the information that they’re looking for at the right time and the right place, you are going to lose them.

This is where big data is going to help you evaluate where your “leakage is occurring.”

The New Consumer Decision Journey:

Is your call center staff on Twitter, Facebook and/or other social media channels?  If not, they should be. This department is best suited for addressing customer concerns and issue resolution yet many of these teams are not engaging on social media.  Your marketing department is probably seeing customer service conversations on social channels but are they engaging the customer as they should and are you measuring those engagements over time?

The chart below gives you a good indication of why you need to start training your customer service teams how to use social media:

I was just reading an interesting post on Socialmedia Today called The Engagement Marketing Disconnect Between Consumers and Brands Rages On and found an interesting nugget with regards to consumer engagement and brand’s lack of understanding of online consumer behavior.  The article’s author, Steve Olenski, made an interesting case based on findings from Forbes Insights and Turn called “The New Rules of  Engagement: Measuring the Power of Social Currency” but there was one graph that stood out for me:

A rather large 67% of consumers say that it’s the funny posts that get their attention but only 14% of marketers look to craft social posts that are humorous or irreverent.  There seems to be a very large disconnect here.

More brands are starting to do a better job of measuring consumer’s engagement with their brand however they’re still not able or willing to put out content that will best boost that consumer’s willingness to share content.  While humor is certainly subjective, there needs to be a willingness of brands to be bold and inject a little levity into their posts.  It’s this human element that companies have to address if they ever want to truly connect with their customers.

This past month I visited a few friends and colleagues I that haven’t seen for a while and who all work in the digital marketing arena. Through my conversations over coffee and lunch I’ve picked up on a common theme. Apparently they all seem to be suffering from Organizational Digital Stress Disorder (ODSD).

This isn’t to be confused with being overwhelmed by digital media (Simple Digital Stress Syndrome) or over reliance on your mobile device (Smartphone Psychosis), which are serious conditions but can be easily rectified by turning off your computers or smart phones and go for a walk.

ODSD is something more serious. It comes from working in a company or agency in a digital marketing capacity and being faced with the inability to convince the executives, colleagues, partners, stakeholders, janitors that a digital revolution is here and that their organizations must take a new approach to engaging their customers.

The pace of consumer adoption of mobile, social and digital technologies is greatly outrunning corporate america’s ability to keep up and as digital marketers we see it plain as day. Just read Mashable or even Adage and you you start to realize that this is something serious and if not acted upon quickly, the organization you’re working for will soon be irrelevant and possibly out of business.

Someone suffering from ODSD feels compelled to act on this information but unfortunately nobody believes them (or wants to) even when they’ve clearly layout the need for the organization to evolve from product/service promotion to content creators and social conversationalists.

To the “classically trained” marketer this sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo. They might say things like “this is how we’ve always done things” or “social media is just a fad.” Even worse, they might think they’re already on the cutting edge of technology because they just created a mobile app that condenses all their irrelevant marketing messages in one hard to read iPhone app.

This type of behavior and attitude towards change is the leading cause of ODSD and can manifest itself in many different ways such as hives, headaches, pulling of hair (yours and others), kicking things, wondering if its all worth it, and the need to go live in Tahiti in a thatched hut.

To be fair, change is not easy for many people and organizations (especially large companies) so it won’t come easy. Thus ODSD will be around for a while and I’m seriously thinking there’s a need here for a specialization in ODSD therapy. I’ve always felt a missed my calling at a psychologist so I may look into this but in the meantime I’ve found some other interesting disorder’s stemming from ODSD.

Do you or anyone you know suffer from any of these disorders:

Digital Schizophrenic Messaging Disorder (DSMD) – Severe form of psychopathology characterized by the breakdown of integrated marketing messaging throughout all channels (traditional & digital), withdrawal from the reality that your sending mixed messages through your marketing channels, emotional distortions of why you’re not getting a good ROI on your multiple Facebook posts, and disturbed thought processes (inability to trust that digital media can be measured).

Dissociative Web Development Identity Disorder (DWDID) – A dissociative mental disorder in which five or more distinct marketing messages exist within the same website (above the fold); formerly known as multiple message disorder.

Chronic Change Management Stress (CCMS) – A continuous state of arousal in which an individual perceives the need to change a company’s cultural attitudes towards digital marketing but not having the internal resources available to do with it.

Latent Liking (LL) – In Freudian dream analysis, the need to find hidden meaning of a Facebook like.

Manic Monitoring (MM) – A component of bipolar blogging disorder characterized by periods of extreme elation, unbounded euphoria about the number of retweets and Facebook comments your recent blog post generated followed by extreme depression in learning that it was all just spam.

Social Media Psychosis (SMP) – Loss of contact with reality that usually includes: false beliefs about Facebook going away soon, delusions that consumers want to share your 10 minute product informational video with friends; reading articles that claim that social media is dead (hallucinations).

High Tweeting Tolerance (HTT) – A situation that occurs with continued use of Twitter in which an individual requires more tweets to achieve the same effect.

If any of these afflictions apply to you, please call me and we can schedule an appointment. The Dr. is in!

P.S.

My treatment includes:

Cognitive Content Therapy – A type of psychotherapeutic treatment that attempts to change feelings and behaviors about helping an organization change the way it treats its customers and respecting the customer’s desire not to be hit over the head with marketing messages.

Recently I’ve started running again after a long hiatus from the sport and needed a mobile app that could help me keep track of my runs to in order to gage my progress.  Previously I was runner but stopped running after I did the Twin Cities Marathon in 2007; finishing in an excruciating 6 hours and 5 minutes. Apparently you have to train for one of these things. After that experience I thought 26 miles in 6 hours was enough exercise for 5 years but the time has come to get back on that horse

Unfortunately, the search for a good app has taken longer than I expected as quite a few of them have either not worked correctly or have been too unwieldy to navigate.  All I want is a simple app to track my runs and tell me how many calories I’ve burned after stumbling and wheezing my way to a 14 minute mile.

It shouldn’t be that difficult to find a simple yet effective app to do this yet many of the apps I found make the mistake of trying to load the user with too much information and functionality.  One has to keep in mind that the most successful apps are shockingly simple.  (I finally chose Endomondo)

Take for example Instagram. They started out with a very cumbersome app that tried to cram in too much functionality such as a clunky check-in function.  Fortunately for them they figured it out quickly and determined that people want it easy and fast. That realization netted then close to a billion dollars from Facebook’s buyout.

I was at a recent presentation at Apple’s headquarters in Silicon Valley this year in which they were describing their iAd platform, and they mentioned something that has stuck with me.  They spoke about how companies have started to design for mobile apps before they design for the web to ensure a simple clean design which improves usability.  What a great idea; so simple yet so hard to achieve.

We in the marketing and communications field do have a tendency to want to cram all of our strategies into each one of our channels from Facebook content to website links, but we need to step back and identify/align specific strategies and goals to individual channels.

So when thinking about your next mobile app, try to avoid these pitfalls:

Feature Overload
Using too many features:  One of the most common mistakes that a developer makes while creating an app is packing it with too many features and functionalities. This means they are actually “stuffing” the app with features and in the end, all that it does is confuse the end-users. The best thing to do is to use no more than 2-3 features while developing an app.

Complicated User Interface
Making the UI too complicated: The UI (User Interface) is an important part of any app. If the UI of an app is too complex, it will affect the usability for the end-users. This is bad news. Therefore, don’t over complicate the user-interface and stick to the ‘keep it simple’ principle, so that even a user, who is using your app for the very first time, finds it easy to use.

For more detailed tips on creating functional and clean mobile apps, here are some resources:

Designing a Mobile App? Don’t Make These 10 Mistakes
8 Tips for More Tapworthy Apps and Mobile-Friendly Sites
5 Simple Tips for Designing Better iPhone Apps

While many small and medium-sized businesses are planning to increase their digital spending budget within the next 12 months, only 2 in 10 are currently employing mobile marketing strategies.  Amazingly 29% of SMBs haven’t even heard of the term mobile marketing, which is mind blowing considering most SMB execs and owners probably use mobile devices in their daily lives.

In fact, a recent study found that 94 percent of the small-business users surveyed believe their mobile devices make them more efficient. So what gives?  They use these devices but they’re not seeing the value in marketing terms.

One reason I believe SMBs are so slow to pick up on this marketing avenue is that mobile technologies have moved so fast that marketing execs are too hesitant to try something they deem as untested.  SMBs aren’t alone in their trepidation as I’ve worked with a few Fortune 500 companies who still haven’t had the gumption to dip their toes into this medium.

It’s been my experience that while big business have the cash to try new mobile marketing strategies they tend to be more conservative in their willingness to try new things.  SMB’s obviously don’t have the endless funds the big boys possess but they do have the most to gain by trying this growing trend.  Especially if their competitors are already in this space.

In fact, 84% of U.S. small businesses using mobile marketing see increase in new business activity, according to a recent study by Web.com.  ComScore figures there are now 82.2 million Americans using smartphones and this figure is going to continue to grow quickly. When it comes down to it SMBs should take advantage of mobile marketing to gain advantage in three key areas:

• Provide better service to existing customers
• Attract more local customers
• Gain competitive advantage

It won’t be long before everyone will be carrying around computers in their pockets so the sooner SMBs can harness this trend the better competitive advantage they’ll have in the future.   And by future I mean tomorrow.