It seems like every weekend this time of year there’s a sale for something. Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, now Father’s Day. But how are you supposed to know when your favorite stores have sales?

High-touch service is an absolute must in today’s marketplace. There are far too many distractions to get between you and your customers. Commercials, online ads, the works.

For industries like healthcare, outbound interactive voice response (IVR) provides a necessary service. With outbound IVR, doctor’s offices can remind patients of upcoming appointments or even remind them to take daily medications.

The retail industry is beginning to pick up where healthcare began. In the same way a doctor’s office can notify a patient about an upcoming appointment, a retailer can now remind loyal customers of upcoming deals and sale events.

If an organization isn’t taking a proactive approach to this, they may be losing out to competitors. Bottom line: whichever retailer gets to the customer first has a big leg up and may win the deal on that alone.

Retailers can’t leave it up to customers to do the footwork anymore. Customers don’t want to do a lot of footwork anymore. Some online searching is about it, really.

Take the Father’s Day sales going on at bike shops this weekend. A buddy sent me a link to an online site having a sale—it was the first time I realized there might be sales this weekend.

Very briefly, I looked around online to see if any local bike shops were having sales. Basically, I looked at the home page of the site, and if it didn’t say “Father’s Day Sale” in bold letters, I assumed there wasn’t one and went on to the next site.

I spent maybe three minutes scanning local shop websites and called it a day—knowing where I’m going this weekend. The only thing that can sway me now is a text or email from another local or online bike shop.

So, three minutes looking and done. This is why high-touch service is key for retailers these days.

During the May 2013 British Columbia (BC) Provincial Election, Canadian firm Campaign Research compared the efficacy and accuracy of online polls versus those done through IVR.

According to the firm, polls conducted during the week before the May 14 election showed the New Democratic Party (NDP) ahead of the incumbent Liberal Party by as little as 2% and as much as 10%. By election day, things had shifted to a 5% win by the Liberal Party.

From Campaign Research’s report—

An IVR poll properly designed, executed and analyzed produced more accurate results than an on-line poll of identical timing, questions and weighting. A side by side on-line poll and an IVR poll conducted by Campaign Research over the weekend prior to the May 14 election showed a margin of 2.4% points in favour of the NDP compared with a 5.4% NDP margin for the on-line poll.

Campaign Research reported that IVR polling became more and more accurate the closer it got to election day.

Naturally, the closer the IVR poll is to Election Day the more accurate the result. The Campaign Research IVR poll conducted on the day prior to Election Day showed the Liberals would win by a margin of 3.6% points, just 1.3% points behind the preliminary Election Day result.

In a nutshell, campaigns move too fast for online polls to keep up with the real-time data. However, IVR polls that reach more people through mobile phones, can keep up.

Campaign Research also reported that IVR polls are less expensive than online polls. The firm concluded that IVR polling is a “speedy, lower cost and highly accurate method to measure voting intentions.”

For this internet thing to work, it needs rules like everything else. For there to be civility among the internet’s users, the morals and laws of the real world have to apply to the digital world.

So how do we apply those morals and laws? Or, more accurately, how do we compel internet users to follow them? Through protest, evidently.

This week Facebook has acknowledged that the company hasn’t adequately governed hate speech on its site. The admission comes after women’s groups put pressure on Facebook’s advertisers to withdraw their ads from the site.

According to the New York Times, activists “sent more than 5,000 emails to Facebook’s advertisers and elicited more than 60,000 posts on Twitter” in their protest against “pages that glorify violence against women.”

The internet has become a less-than-civil environment, what with all the haters and trolls on every forum and comment section. Anonymity emboldens, it seems.

This isn’t the first attempt by women’s groups to clean up Facebook pages, reports the Times. But they were more effective this time with a different approach—they targeted the money.

“We thought that advertisers would be the most effective way of getting Facebook’s attention,” Jaclyn Friedman of Women, Action and the Media told the Times. “I think people have been frustrated with this issue for so long and feeling like they had no way for Facebook to pay attention to them. [But] as consumers we do have a lot of power.”

According to CNN, Woman, Action and the Media claims that 15 companies said they would pull their advertising. Nissan UK and Nationwide tweeted that they would.

Facebook responded on the site’s blog Tuesday, saying the company would take steps to provide a free-speech-friendly yet non-offensive environment.

“To facilitate this goal, we also work hard to make our platform a safe and respectful place for sharing and connection,” Facebook VP Marne Levine wrote on the company’s blog. “This requires us to make difficult decisions and balance concerns about free expression and community respect.”

Needless to say, there have been a few comments about this whole thing on the internet.

Social Media and Disaster Response

Social media has the unique power to disseminate a message in record-breaking time. What may have taken hours, days or weeks previously can now be communicated in a matter of minutes or seconds. This is a double-edged sword in many respects (see the Vine story above), but in some cases the rapidity and speed of communication is life-saving.

Per an article on Mashable, “social media is now a go-to tool for those effected by disasters. One in five Americans has used an emergency app.  Of those Americans effected by natural disasters, 76% used social media to contact friends and family, 37% used social media to help find shelter and supplies; and 24% used social media to let loved ones know they’re safe.”

Social media is used on a mass scale, meaning that the likelihood of reaching someone you are trying to get in touch with immediately or almost immediately is very high.  Most services are free to sign up for and use, so there is no barrier to entry based on cost.

Additionally, most social media sites (e.g., Facebook or Twitter) have access to massive bandwidth and server capacity all over the world. This means that it is more likely that at least one of these sites will be functioning with minimal delays, unlike phone lines that get tied up and congested.

Mashable has a great infographic detailing how social networks have become the primary source for news and information during disasters and have occupied a growing role in disaster response.

Some interesting tidbits:

• During disasters, social networks often replace 911 as the go-to source for help.

• One in five survivors contact emergency responders via social media, websites or email.

• FEMA asked followers during Hurricane Sandy to utilize Twitter to send texts or update social network statuses to let loved ones know they were okay.

The graphic details social media’s response to a variety of disasters including the Japanese tsunami, Hurricane Sandy, the Haitian earthquake and tornado season in Alabama. Engagement and usage is up when you compare the events chronologically, but it is stunning to see how effective social media was even several years ago when it didn’t enjoy the type of user base it does now.

Employers & Social Media

Most employers are checking out potential hires’ social media profiles on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. Some companies even monitor their current employees’ online presence. The legality of this is for debate in several states, with legislation being proposed that would restrict or prohibit employers from requesting access to current or potential employees’ social media accounts.

But according to the Wall Street Journal’s blog, employers have a whole new set of possible concerns to address when it comes to social media and networking sites. A new mobile app called Vine, which was developed and released at the beginning of the year by Twitter, enables users to create and post 6-second video clips that can then be shared or embedded on a variety of social media sites.

Sounds pretty tame, right? It’s only six seconds, barely more than a blink. Not so, says Jacob Gerhman of the Law Blog on the Wall Street Journal: “A new video sharing app is emerging as the latest source of anxiety for employers worried about social-media risks at the office.”

A quick search performed on the site for terms like hate work, bored or work produces results documenting employees doing some very non-work-approved things. Some of the tamer ones? Users leafing through confidential business documents on camera, an unauthorized worker driving heavy machinery at an airport, and many videos of employees “venting about how much they hate their jobs.”

Ultimately, employers who are curious about their current and future employees’ behavior on social media sites need to cast a much wider net, looking at a variety of social media sites beyond the networks they typically visit. And while it should go without saying, employees should understand that their actions leave a digital footprint catalogued permanently for anyone and everyone to see.

Continued in The Helpful Side of Social Media…

Many of us spend our days thinking about, writing about, discussing and using social media in its various permutations. The technology has undeniably become a critical element of both our personal and professional lives. But how do you keep up with the rapid and ever-changing landscape? What are Facebook’s most current privacy offering? What social network is growing most rapidly in the U.S.? Below are some of the most interesting current events and tidbits from the world of social media.

Fluctuating Demographics

Yesterday, Pew Research Center released the results of a study documenting how teenagers (ages 12-17) interact with and perceive various social media sites. Some of the key findings from the study point to the waning popularity of Facebook among teenagers. Per a Huffington Post article, “Facebook has become a ‘social burden’ for teens. While Facebook is still deeply integrated in teen’s everyday lives, it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new platform that teens can claim as their own.”

This is potentially bad news for Facebook. Social networks like Twitter and Instagram are seeing an influx of teenage users migrating to these sites because they “offer a parent-free place where they can better express themselves.”

Some of the issues cited by teens in Pew focus groups include the site “being overrun by parents, fueling unnecessary social drama, and giving a mouthpiece to annoying oversharers who drone on about inane events in their lives.”

Researchers say that social media usage among teenagers has reached a plateau, with those who sign up and use sites staying steady (at around 40%) since 2011. Investors and financial experts alike will be monitoring how this situation plays out, as teenagers are a key demographic advertisers are trying to reach. If usage remains stagnant or engagement drops off among users at a young age, renewed or increased future engagement does not seem likely.

Continued in The State of Social Media…

Even the world’s airports are not exempt from this type of visitor input. The annual World Airport Awards survey travelers from 160 countries about their levels of passenger satisfaction as it relates to airports. There are 12 categories including the best domestic airport, the airport of the year and the top 100 airports, to name a few.

A word about the survey’s methodology. Per the World Airport Award’s website, the distinctions are based on “12.1 million survey questionnaires completed by 108 different nationalities of airline customers during the nine month survey period in 2012 and 2013, covering more than 395 airports worldwide. This established, industry survey is totally independent and evaluates traveler experiences across 39 different airport service and product key performance indicators – from check-in, arrivals, transfers, shopping, security and immigration through to departure at the gate.”

There are thirty-nine product and service-related criterion included in the survey. The data is physically collected from a variety of input sources, which include online and email passenger questionnaires, research groups, corporate travel questionnaires as well as interviews, telephone interviews and selective passenger interviews.

The results are telling, as not a single U.S. airport was ranked in the top 25 in the World’s Top 100 category. The top airports were geographically concentrated, according to Washington Post and included “lots of Northeast Asian airports, a few in Northern Europe, and transit hubs like Abu Dhabi, Cape Town and Kuala Lumpur.” The first American airport to appear is Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International, which ranks 30.

Other results? Singapore’s Changi Airport was voted the world’s best airport, Tokyo International Airport was named the world’s best domestic airport, Frankfurt Airport was selected as the world’s most improved, Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport was awarded with the best airport in Europe title and Vancouver International received the honors for best airport in North America.

The results of this survey will be used in a numerous ways, from influencing funding to political pleas for infrastructure. The complete results can be found on the World Airport Awards website, which can be accessed here.

The restaurant was recently featured on the season finale of Kitchen Nightmares, a show helmed by Gordon Ramsey. Controversy erupted after Ramsey declared the restaurant’s situation unfixable. According to the Daily Beast: “the couple was so difficult that even the typically hardened Ramsay decided he couldn’t help them and shut the show down before beginning the rehab phase.”

The collective internet responded in kind, bombarding the restaurant’s social media pages like Facebook and social commenting forums like Reddit with scathing comments about the establishment and its owners.

This is where the story devolves into every customer satisfaction pro’s nightmare. Instead of laying low and letting the excitement subside, the owners instead decided to take to their Facebook page and respond to the barrage of comments they were receiving, doing so in a less than polite way.

A quick excerpt (and yes they were writing exclusively in all caps): “TO REDDIT.  I FORBID YOU FROM SPREADING YOUR HATE ON THAT SITE.  THIS IS MY FACEBOOK, AND I AM NOT ALLOWING YOU TO USE MY COMPANY ON YOUR HATE FILLED PAGE.” This impassioned response only further fueled internet commenters’ fire, and the whole incident continued to devolve from there.

At the core of this story is a lesson on what not to do on social media as a company and a brand. Kelly Clay of Forbes writes an excellent piece summarizing the seven lessons you can take from this cringe-inducing story. Her seven tips? Per Clay, “don’t reply to everyone, don’t respond to trolls, don’t react right away, Reddit is not for the weak, don’t insult people, learn to walk away and don’t lie.”

Clay’s piece offers good lessons for even the most experienced marketers and highlights the importance of reading and responding to customer feedback in a levelheaded, calm and productive manner instead of following your social media whims wherever they happen to take you.

Potentially one of the most popular business mottos of all time, the idea that the ‘customer is always right’ was popularized by department store retailers like Harry Selfridge and Marshall Field around the turn of the 20^th century.  Since then, it has become a philosophy ingrained in our notion of customer service and satisfaction, but does this slogan hold true in any and all circumstances?

On his blog Value Creator Brian Vellmure considers this very question.  Often we categorize our interactions with clients as “customer relationships.”  Per Vellmure: “As in any relationship, sometimes there is a misalignment of expectations and a lack of compelling value proposition for both sides.”

Vellmure effectively points out that any relationship, even a business one, is not one-sided and it is very rare that any person or company is ALWAYS right. As with any relationship, customer interactions are give-and-take, and companies would do well to realize this.  For Vellmure, the old adage is inaccurate, and automatically adhering to it can have detrimental results.

Yes, a company’s first and foremost duty is to listen to and show empathy for their customer’s needs and requests, but this communication should be constructive and productive for both parties involved.

Vellmure puts this idea into context, stressing that companies have a goal to foster positive customer engagement and to emphasize “an endless and tireless pursuit to create value, to delight customers, and to create a community of engaged, happy and enthusiastic customers.”

The simple truth is that not every business will be a fit for every customer.  In Vellmure’s opinion, companies shouldn’t bend over backwards to please every customer 100% of the time, but rather cultivate mutually beneficial, profitable relationships that are a great fit for both client and service provider.

Ben Zifkin of Hubba stresses that employees understand their product and its potential in and out, in a different way than customers perceive it.  The end goal of any partnership is to effectively communicate the potential benefits partnership may offer in a way that customers understand, agree with and find appealing.

Zifkin offers a multi-level process for achieving this.  It starts with companies themselves drilling down to make sure they understand the fundamental problem at hand.  After they’ve accurately pinpointed the issue at the root of a customer’s complaint, they move on to identify and design a suitable solution that mitigates or fixes the problem.  Once both parties have agreed on the solution, execution commences.

What endears a consumer towards a product?  What repels them? An article featured in Fast Company explores the science behind how colors are used for the purposes of marketing.

Leo Widrich’s article sets out to investigate if and how the inclusion of certain colors in branding materials (logos, websites, company literature, et cetera) actually affects product or service buying decisions.  Widrich utilized research conducted by The Logo Company for his research, saying: “Scientists have been studying the way we react to colors for many years.  Certain colors make us feel a certain way about something.”

Based on this basic idea it is possible to break down colors, the corresponding emotional reactions they illicit and resulting consumer behavior.  The full infographic is available at KissMetrics, and it highlights just how powerful an influencer color can be.

Thinking of going red?  Do so with caution as it creates a sense of urgency and is often associated with extreme discounts.  Do you want a color that is easy on the eyes and relaxing?  Green should be your choice, as it is the easiest color for eyes to process.  Rolling out a high-end luxury product that will look distinguished to even the uninformed eye?  Use tons of black, as it is “powerful, sleek and used to market luxury products.”

Kiss goes on to offer a color spectrum of sorts and highlights what type of shopper a color is likely to attract and what type of venue the color performs best in.

Pink, sky blue and rose colors attract traditional buyers, most successfully in clothing stores.  Navy blue and teal catch the attention of shoppers on a budget and are often featured lucratively in banks and larger department stores.  Finally red, orange, royal blue and black are the traditional colors of the impulse shopper, performing well at fast food restaurants, outlet malls and clearance sales.

Marketers should be advised that although color selection figures prominently into customer choice, it is only one piece of the aesthetic puzzle.  Other elements like store layout and overall design factor into purchasing decisions.

One last interesting tidbit offered by Widrich…Hyperlinks are blue because the color “offers the highest contrast between the colors used on early websites.”   When the web was invented, there weren’t a lot of colorful options and blue was both the darkest color available and the color that offered the highest contrast against the black text