In my recent paper titled Privacy Laws Force Rich Dialogue with Customers I outlined some of the looming legal directives that will change the targeting dialogue between brands and consumers and how the industry should respond. 

The ad network ecosystem will ultimately be forced the pull back the curtain of Oz to reveal to customers the machines and levers behind targeting technology. As illustrated in my paper, the predominant approaches are full targeting vesus opt out, but this is not enough choice. Segmentation strategies and targeting techniques used by ad tools are hidden within engines and will need to be surfaced to customers so that they may verify, modify, and importantly play with them.

This isn’t easy, however, as the mathematical vernacular of targeting technology with confusing terms such as graphs, nodes, and vectors are unintelligible to most. Metaphors will be needed to distill the complexity for customers. One of the approaches to take will be similar to how optometrists work by showing the customer different "lenses" (perceptions) held about them and subsequently allowing them to choose. These "lenses" may not just be rich segmentation concepts but will include social and individual assumptions too.

Where does this transparency and explanation rationale take us?

I don’t know about you, but my head is spinning from all of the articles and editorials about Google’s incorporation of Google+ content and other personalized search results.  While there’s lots of conversation about whether the changes are good or bad for Google and the future of search, whether Google is opening themselves up to more anti-trust investigation, and whether Google was simply too late to the social media game to make a difference,  I’m going to leave those arguments to others.   I’m more interested in the potential opportunities and challenges for marketers that this integration of search and social presents.

Opportunities

• It may give marketers an additional metric to track for social media.  Google will be surfacing your brand’s Google+ social content directly into personalized results, for consumers who’ve added you to their circles.  These search results may also include content that a consumer’s friends posted about you.  That means qualified clicks on your social content—and that means possibly tracking how much search traffic you generate to your own sites through social marketing. 

I've never made New Year's resolutions. Well, that's not exactly true. Last week, I promised my dentist I would floss my teeth more in 2012, but that's about the extent of it. But this shouldn't be interpreted as a lack of optimism; I'm absolutely certain that 2012 will be another great year. I fully expect that this will be the year we bring gamification to big mobile data in the cloud or some other delightful confluence of buzzwords.*

Although I haven't traditionally written an annual retrospective, 2011 was a particularly interesting year for the analytics community. So I couldn't resist taking the opportunity to recap the most significant events and trends that I saw over the course of the year. I've selected a few choice items that were both meaningful in 2011 and are likely to have an ongoing impact in 2012:

1. Google Analytics Premium launches. In September, Google entered the paid web analytics market with Google Analytics Premium. The new offering takes Google Analytics' (GA) capabilities quite a bit further than the free version and introduced a new option for enterprise web analytics buyers with upgraded processing power, support, and product features. As we move into 2012, it will be really interesting to see how Google continues to develop GA Premium to close the gap with competitors and to what degree they fine-tune the commercial and support models.

Digital messaging convergence is here – at least for consumers.  Consumers receive messages through multiple channels like email, text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, and mobile app push notifications.  And thanks to the smartphones and tablets they carry during their waking hours, they increasingly access these channels through a single device.  To consumers, the lines between distinct messaging channels are blurring.

Too bad marketers have been so slow to catch up.  Most marketers still manage messaging in channel-specific silos and don’t meet consumers’ expectations for integrated, synchronized messaging.  For example, many email marketing managers blast away at customers’ inboxes in an attempt to goose returns for their own channel instead of collaborating to execute a better mix of multi-channel messaging that will maximize overall customer value.

We just posted new research that explores what’s keeping marketers stuck in the siloed messaging rut and how they can better serve their customers (and themselves) by shifting to a new approach: Customer-Focused Integrated Messaging (CFIM).  Unlike siloed messaging, CFIM organizes data, resources, and processes to revolve around customers instead of channels.  In the report, we discuss why this desired state is more realistic and achievable now than ever before.  We also detail how marketers can make their digital messaging more integrated across channels and responsive to customers’ needs and behaviors.  These recommendations concentrate on changes marketers must make in three areas: