Domino's Pizza. GoDaddy. Chrysler. Mattel. The Gap. Nestle. And the list goes on. Some of the biggest brands have suddenly found themselves entangled in social media crises that no one could have predicted... but that we all must now plan for.

True personalization is complex to achieve and requires a deep database of individual's opt-in preferences. However, the results are powerful.

As consumers find more ways to avoid unsolicited marketing communications, panicked businesses are responding by creating opt-out relationships wherever they can. This is the wrong approach.

To get customers to interact with your enterprise, websites today must provide a multi-dimensional experience.

Twitter can help your business get closer to its customers, create better word of mouth and greater brand advocacy and generate great ideas from engaged fans. How? Start by learning from the best practices used by companies that have been successful with Twitter.

THE SITUATION: Social media can impact the national and global agenda with astonishing speed ... and it can also put people and institutions on the sp...

The Challenge: How do you build a business case for potentially costly changes to improve the overall customer experience? The Reality: Marketers ca...

I am sharing this story because these types of cultural issues apply to all marketers, not just those in the hospitality industry.

Three Voice of Customer (VoC) innovators -- Pitney Bowes, JetBlue, and Intel -- implemented important best practices in 2011. Watch them closely in 20...

If an internal problem affects consumers, that's a marketing issue -- as both FedEx and UPS learned the hard way this year.

For some brands, this will be the year of multichannel breakthroughs. For other brands, the next twelve months will be another painful period of trial and error -- mostly error.

As the holiday season kicked off, online and offline marketers wasted millions of precious opportunities to engage with customers, capture preferences, and build the foundation for a year-long relationship.

Empowered, activist customers are getting better and better at making their displeasure known... and, as they proved this year, they are also getting better at winning battles against big companies.

Unfortunately, opt-out marketing policies are the norm. They allow marketers to send you information and offers they want to send and to use online an...

There's been some discussion recently that a broad and expanding "social media fatigue" has set in and that even users of established sites like LinkedIn are in danger of burning out.

As I stood outside the Apple store and looked at the letters, flowers and apples people had left there, I knew there had to be some important lessons we as business leaders should learn from the remarkable life of Steve Jobs.

You must meet the wants, needs, and/or desires of your shopper and her consumers if you want to cultivate loyalty.

After every major redesign of Facebook, privacy concerns tend to loom large, and then fade into obscurity. That may well happen this time around, but Facebook should do a better job of contributing to the debate and explaining how it plans to protect user privacy.

It is obvious that Netflix wasn't listening to its customers when it set up its new pricing. If they had been listening, then they wouldn't have been caught flatfooted by the intensity of the consumer anger.

Marketing Situation: Recently, a client for whom we were developing Customer Engagement strategies asked for help in identifying the reasons for low c...

Could coupons shared via Facebook add a powerful dimension to your marketing programs? An online loyalty program from the specialty ice cream producer and retailer Cold Stone Creamery suggests that the answer could be "yes."

There has been a lot of talk recently about "Twitter fatigue" and "social media fatigue." Actually, I think what we are looking at is isolated pockets of "irrelevance fatigue".

Conduct regular searches on the terms customers are most likely to use that relate to your company, your brands and your promotions. Then join the conversation.

When discussing customer centricity, I often hear questions like: "Why in this tough economy, should we invest time or resources chasing some elusive new customer centricity initiatives, when we have so many other priorities? What's the payoff?"

Each time Obama appealed to voters to tweet at the members of Congress who represented them, Congressional offices were swamped with constituent communications. Marketers should be curious about how the president pulled this off.