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The personality inventory known as the "Myers-Briggs Type Indicator" is premised on the idea that different people process information in different ways. Some people are verbal processors. Others are visual processors. Some people respond more strongly to images -- others to text. ...

Surprisingly, many customer service organizations have yet to put their toes in the water when it comes to social media engagement. In fact, fewer than half of them actively respond to consumer complaints via Twitter and other social media channels, according to Gleanster research ...

Personalization sits at the very heart of marketing performance improvement in B2B as well as in B2C companies. The latter camp has made enormous strides in recent years in being able to present customers and prospects with relevant content, offers, recommendations, and other types of messages via online channels, including the company website, in an automated and systematic fashion.

The proliferation of customer service channels can be both a blessing and a curse. It can be a blessing in that companies now have more ways than ever to address customer needs and resolve customer issues, potentially leading to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. It can also open the door to increased customer profitability through improved cross-sell and up-sell effectiveness.

When it comes to technologies that provide the foundation for customer experience management, there is no shortage of options. The marketplace today is deluged with platforms, including self-service solutions that offer multimodal and open response survey vehicles for soliciting customer feedback across multiple channels, including in-store, email, website and call center...

This story was originally published on Dec. 22, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

Following on the heels of the explosive growth of social media phenomena like Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter, companies are exploring whether they can leverage the "wisdom of the crowds" to solve the problem of connecting the bits of information that can lead to innovative products and improved service. ...

In November, as the crowds of caffeinated holiday shoppers began to swell, Starbucks baristas received a corporate edict: slow down. Going forward, they were to make only one drink at a time, no matter how many customers were waiting in line. According to sources, Starbucks customers were complaining that the company had "reduced the fine art of coffee making to a mechanized process with all the romance of an assembly line." ...

Understanding the social media conversation can help researchers select topics and phrase questions that result in more effective quantitative studies. Social media may provide an explanation of consumer motivations that quantitative questions can only hint at. . He can be reached at [email protected]. Jeff Zabin, research director at Gleanster, formerly was a research fellow at Aberdeen Group. He can be reached at [email protected].

In the rush to Facebook, marketers are discovering that different kinds of content drive different kinds of results -- and different social networks respond in different ways. It was not that long ago that the experts warned that brands could not "sell" in social media, that the audience would rebel, and that social media efforts would fail. We have learned, however, that when done correctly, it absolutely is possible to promote goods and services to online fans and friends.

Social media monitoring is a new business endeavor, with relatively few companies able to boast a significant track record of achievement. In fact, according to the new Aberdeen benchmark report, "The ROI on Social Media Monitoring," only 27 percent of Best-in-Class companies have engaged in social media monitoring activities for more than two years, while 44 percent have put their toes in the water only within the past 12 months.

Mobile marketing has at last emerged as an important part of the marketing mix. Through a confluence of technologies and standards related to mobile devices, including 3G networks and data packages, the mobile channel can now enable large-scale marketing activities capable of engaging consumers in unprecedented ways. ...

Despite the enormous popularity of peer-to-peer social networking, the adoption cycle for branded online communities has been relatively slow. That a growing number of consumer brands are transforming their existing static Web sites into interactive online communities is a trend that is not only recent, but also rapidly accelerating. ...

The most valuable asset of a company is its good name. Yet the rapid growth of the Internet and the explosion of social media, in particular, have made it infinitely more challenging for a company to protect its good name. Recent examples abound of how, owing to the viral effect of social media, ordinary people now wield the power to do untold harm to a brand...

The dismal state of the economy is causing companies everywhere to reassess their marketing budgets to ensure that they're allocating their limited marketing funds in the most productive ways possible. In many cases, this means curtailing, postponing or even eliminating previously planned marketing expenditures. In other cases, companies are actually investing more aggressively in various types of marketing programs, sensing an opportunity to capitalize on the grim economic headlines.

A trigger is a device that automatically executes a response to a certain event. In marketing, triggers are used to automatically deliver targeted messages, offers, recommendations or other treatments to customers on an individual basis at the most optimal point in time, based on any number of factors. ...

"A status report of all the different marketing activities you were engaged in might have sufficed in the past," says Kevin Doohan, director of interactive marketing at ConAgra Foods. "But now we have to show what business results those activities are driving." ...

Never before has the voice of the customer been so loud. And never before have companies been so keen to not only pay close attention to the wants, likes, experiences, preferences, opinions, suggestions and complaints of customers, but to carefully analyze and act upon the information in a systematic fashion. ...

Forty-five percent of marketing executives view return on marketing investment (ROMI) as a top driver compelling their organizations to track and measure marketing performance, according to a recent Aberdeen Group survey of 728 companies. This begs the question: Can the implementation of a marketing dashboard help alleviate the pressure related to improving ROMI?...

Companies have long recognized the importance of customer data in the context of revenue growth and cost reduction. Today, more companies are also waking up to the value of customer data in the context of direct mail waste reduction, which is fast becoming not only an environmental imperative but also an economic imperative ...