Cross-channel campaign management (CCCM) tools face mounting pressure to evolve in the face of continuous, interactive, customer-led dialogue. CCCM capabilities have matured dramatically, but marketers often ask, “Are the applications resilient enough to meet the massive challenges marketing organizations face today?”

Forrester clients can see how much progress vendors have made in “The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Campaign Management, Q1 2012”. We identified, researched, and scored 12 products from 11 providers: Alterian, Aprimo, ExactTarget, IBM, Infor, Neolane, Oracle, Pitney Bowes, Responsys, SAP, and SAS. Our approach consisted of an 81-criteria evaluation; reference calls and online surveys of 156 companies; executive briefings; and product demonstrations.

We found that marketers need CCCM applications to:

• Manage a complex array of marketing processes. The campaign design process alone is elaborate – and happily vendors provide strong, yet simple, design tools. Yet CCCM tools also aid marketers in planning (budgeting, spend management, and calendaring), analysis, tactical execution, and reporting.
• Develop more strengths in digital and emerging media. Although most vendors have extended their applications, many client references told us that vendors need to clarify their approaches to social, local, and mobile applications, and how real-time decisioning can be applied beyond offer management.

Yesterday, Google announced that, effective March 1, it would be creating a single view of users across the majority of its products and services and creating a single, simplified, global privacy policy to cover the new approach.

Now, as a customer intelligence analyst, I preach a “consolidated view of the customer” to clients nearly every day. I advise retailers, CPGs, and others that creating an optimal experience for customers is nearly impossible without having a clear understanding of their needs and preferences, across all channels and lines of business. But what Google’s doing extends well past traditional “single view” and into “personal data locker” territory.

On the face of it, Google claims that it’s making these changes for the same reason: to improve the user experience. But to remain profitable and keep providing free services to several hundred million users, Google will also use its vastly increased insight about users to sell better targeted (read: more expensive) ads to advertisers. 

Is Google’s new policy PIDM-friendly?

I wanted to look at how these changes map to the principles that companies must follow to be successful as personal identity management emerges. Here’s my take:

• Privacy: Google’s new privacy policy is a good one. It’s simply written, well constructed, and fairly concise. It’s almost global, excluding only a handful (Chrome, Wallet, Books, DoubleClick) of its businesses. However, while the policy allows broad-brush opt-outs, its failure to provide its granular controls over what’s shared between properties and devices is a major miss.
   

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.

Does your firm have an online testing program? If so, we want to hear from you!

Today we are launching the 2011 edition of Forrester's Online Testing User Survey. Our goal with this survey is to collect data that will help further our understanding of online testing trends and identify best practices. Last year we ran the survey alongside the Online Testing Wave report and published the findings in The State of Online Testing 2010.  This year we're fielding an expanded survey to address a wide array of factors involved in managing an online testing program, from benefits, goals, and challenges to budgeting, staffing, experiments, and suppliers. This is valuable information that will help firms benchmark themselves against the rest of the market and discover opportunities to enhance their online testing efforts. 

Click here to take the 2011 Online Testing User Survey now. As a "thank you" for your time and effort, we will send you a complimentary copy of the completed research, scheduled for publication in Q1 2012.

And please feel free to share this link - http://forr.com/ub7Mwx - with friends and colleagues who are involved in online testing.

Thanks in advance for your support, we are looking forward to sharing the results with you shortly!