Google riled up the online community again when the search behemoth announced on Tuesday that it plans to lump more than 60 of its privacy policies into one simple rule, starting March 1.

“Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience,” wrote Alma Whitten, director of privacy, product and engineering at Google in a company blog post introducing the policy changes.

Although Google’s announcement prompted fresh claims that the company is evil, the idea that Google merges data across its various platforms is nothing new. Since at least October 2005, the company has stated in the “Information you provide” section: “We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services.”

From a marketing perspective, this could eventually lead to better ad targeting on YouTube, Gmail, Google search and other Google services, although no new targeting tools have been unveiled. Analysts and bloggers are also calling this move an attempt by Google to compete with Facebook, which already uses targeted recommendations on its sidebar advertisements.

Google already holds the top spot in U.S. mobile display ad spending, according to eMarketer. The company pulled in 51.7 percent of U.S. mobile ad revenues last year, translating to about $750 million, the research firm states.

I’m still trying to decide why I came back last night to blustery, wintery New York after three fine days in sunny Orlando, Fla., the site of the annual Call Center Summit.

Starkly different climates aside, I wished my trip in Orlando could have been longer because the Call Center Summit, organized by the International Quality and Productivity Center (IQPC), was just that valuable. The sessions provided great insight into day-to-day call center operations at such companies as ING Direct, Scotts MiracleGro, Hershey Entertainment and Resorts, Avon, AT&T, and iRobot. Topics covered everything from social media and multimodal interactions to staffing and personnel, outsourcing, customer retention, and changing the company culture.

And while I didn’t see Mickey during my stay, I got on the plane with a profound sense of accomplishment nonetheless. I found fulfillment in all the great information I collected.

Here are just a few of the random thoughts I take away from the show:

1). Contact center people are obsessed with the time when their work or waking hours end. If I had a dollar for every time someone at the podium used the phrase “at the end of the day,” I’d have left Florida with enough money to put in my own bid to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers.

2). If you want to avoid having your contact center operations outsourced to locations like the Philippines or India, use information gathered in the contact center to provide corporate leadership with alternative cost-cutting measures. With little more than speech analytics, Tracy Wright, the director of North American customer care at Avon, uncovered a large number of  issues with how sales reps place and receive orders; addressing those issues saved the company $5 million and kept an untold number of call center jobs in the United States.

3). To force corporate executives to adopt a customer-centric approach, tie their compensation into the company’s Net Promoter Score, something AT&T found to be far more compelling than sales targets or cost reductions.

4). Have your agents stick to the script or face the consequences in social media. When an agent at iRobot told a customer to throw away his broken Scooba (which goes against the company’s protocols for proper disposal of broken or damaged units), the person on the other end of the call was an avid—and very influential—environmentalist who immediately took to the social media airwaves to deride the company’s recycling policies.

5). A call center is only as good as the agents answering the phones, so proper hiring is the key.

6). Once the right people are in place, you need to bring in the right tools and technologies to make their jobs easier. That only comes from talking to agents on a regular basis.

7). Every customer interaction is an opportunity for agents to build the brand, be neutral about the brand, or destroy the brand. You, naturally, want them to do the first one.

8). A great metric to determine how well your agents are performing is by asking customers: “If you were starting a business today, would you hire the agent you just spoke to?”

9). Agents can perform better when they are allowed to manage their own scheduling, days off, flex time, etc.

10). Contact centers can become profitable if customers see a value in them, and the only way they’ll see value is if the experience lets them do things they couldn’t accomplish anywhere else.

Besides the obvious photogenic feat of John Stamos [I had to work in a throwback to Jesse Katsopolis in the Full House days] yogurt giant The Dannon Co. has partaken in a pretty cool creative process to prepare their Dannon Oikos ad installment for third-quarter Super Bowl XLVI.

The company and its ad agency, Young & Rubicam, sought the expertise of Poptent, a crowdsourced video production company, in selecting the talent that would take actor-musician-performer Stamos into the living rooms of all Americans – and continue his influence via Dannon YouTube and Facebook channels and even in-store.

“It’s a very branded spot and the takeaway is, ‘How far would you go for Dannon Oikos?’” says Michael Neuwirth, senior director of public relations for Dannon. “The idea is, ‘Sharing something that’s this good can be that hard.’ There is a lot of element of surprise… great Super Bowl advertising is entertaining and has that element of surprise.”

John Stamos to star in Dannon Oikos Super Bowl commercial

Poptent president Neil Perry says that the video production platform currently has 42,000 video creators in-system, a number that was a much lower 350 when the service was first launched in 2007. “We delivered 34 finished commercials [to Dannon] using a stand-in for John Stamos,” Perry says. “It’s a luxury for a marketing company to be able to look at 34 video executions from highly talented videographers, so it’s a great process from that standpoint.”

Dannon worked directly with Poptent to hand-pick candidates from a short-list of Poptent.net videographers because of the proprietary nature of the project. Young videographer Remy Neymarc and his brother, Andrew, were the lucky directors retained for the prime-time project.

According to Neuwirth, “we sought to expand the field of creative concepts we were looking for, and the member-only crowdsource that Poptent delivers was extremely effective for us to generate a multitude of concepts in a short period of time.” The creative process did not utilize what Perry calls “antiquated storyboards,” but placed more emphasis on focus groups and quantitative study.

Each year, the build-up to Super Bowl “is filled with more and more anticipation,” Neuwirth notes. “From a customer perspective, we look at this as a marathon and not a sprint. That reflects our approach to growing the yogurt category [and building on their share of Greek with names like Chobani out there.] It’s a campaign, not just an ad.”

This year’s Super Bowl commercial is not a debut for Stamos, who was featured in an Oikos ad last summer [Reference: above video.] The Greek category “continues to grow like wildfire” for the White Plains, N.Y.-based yogurt company; other hot sellers include its Activia and Danimals product lines. Dannon has another newbie, Dannon Pure, an “all family offering” at an “everyday price,” or 35 cents a cup within a six-pack, according to Neuwirth.

Photo credit: Joseph Pasaoa

Earlier this week, hundreds of vendors showcased their latest solutions at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show. One of the demonstrations that stands out is Cisco’s StyleMe, which gives customers a new way to “try on” clothing and accessories virtually.

Cisco StyleMe consists of a life-sized screen that overlays the customer’s image with pictures of clothing they select using gesture- and touch-based interfaces. It allows shoppers to quickly create outfits by mixing and matching a wide range of garments from the retailer’s in-store and online inventory. Cisco StyleMe also provides customers with fashion advice and allows them to receive feedback about their choices through social media and messaging.

Although the technology is still limited—the clothing can look pixelated and is not exactly fitted to the contours of your body for example—it’s easy to see the value behind this invention. Shoppers who want to quickly get a visual image of how several outfits would look on them will probably find using StyleMe easier than carrying a pile of clothes into the dressing room.

From a retailer’s perspective, the interactive mirror can boost sales by enabling shoppers to try on a wider array of items and allows them to share their experience with their online contacts.

And as another reporter pointed out to me, those who do use StyleMe in a dressing room will have more freedom in selecting outfits they might not otherwise wear. He described it as men having the freedom to try on women’s clothes.

By the way, men can also use Cisco’s creation to try on clothes made for them as well. StyleMe will first be launched in a handful of department stores in the United Kingdom before it makes its way to the United States.

The National Retail Federation packed the house today at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City, boasting an uptick in conference attendance this year at 24,000, up from the 22,500 who attended NRF 2012, Retail’s Big Show, last year.

President Bill Clinton served as keynote this year, and spoke of global solutions for a worldwide economic eyesore. Debt, and getting out of it. “This economic crisis has gone far beyond economics… it’s touched the [core sense] of who we are.” People have adjusted the way they work. The way they play. The way they relate to each other. What sorts of jobs they take.

Bill Clinton speaking at National Retail Federation's Big Show in New York City, Credit: NRF

And being that this is retail’s biggest day – the way they shop. [Clinton admits he still likes to support the small business and bought books at a local retailer for Christmas gifts this year.] Speaking of the ways consumers shop, I caught up with Jay Dettling of Chicago-based Acquity Group on the Expo floor, and had a quick Q&A with the executive vice president of the global multichannel commerce and digital marketing solutions company.

Acquity recently partnered with Adobe Systems Inc. [also live on location at NRF 2012] to introduce a set of enterprise solutions to support Customer Experience Management initiatives. Acquity was also instrumental in helping launch Digital Li-Ning, a Chinese sportswear giant’s e-commerce site. In Acquity’s case, they brought a global retailer’s presence to new markets. Here are excerpts of Dettling’s chat with CRM magazine.

CRM: Will tablets play a greater role not only on the consumer side, but on the enterprise side?
Dettling: “Tablets are very easy to deploy and the cost profile is lighter compared to point of sale and some of those hard-wired systems. The challenges [associated], I think, will [serve as] an opportunity for some companies. AirWatch, a company I saw here, has a really nice solution centered around asset management. All of a sudden if you have these tablets flying around, you have alot of your customer data, your transactional data, and you can walk right out of the store with it as opposed to the cash register or point of sale, which doesn’t just walk out. There are opportunities for companies to help with that asset-inventory management.”

Analytics…all abuzz. What’s your forecast for 2012?
Dettling: “We have more devices talking to the Internet, and collecting data [than ever before]. We don’t have enough people or processes making heads or tails of that. I don’t think the year 2012 will be too focused on it, but I think there’s an opportunity over the next 10 years as we get ‘smarter.’ Tablets and smartphones will really allows us [that] personalization when you start to add the social element to it. If you think about social commerce in the way of, ‘What if a retailer could adjust their catalog to me based on my social network and what my friends like?’ chances are they have a higher probablity of converting me to close a sale.”

What’s the greatest obstacle to really deploying a multichannel experience, from a global retail perspective?
Dettling: “Over the last 10 years, [companies] have been so focused around getting content on the desktop browser to look right so it had the right attributes, the right sizes, the right colors. Now they have to think about, ‘Well, if you’re on the tablet, the smartphone, now I can’t use that long description, I need a more form-function type of data’ and just managing that data. Companies that are able to manage their product catalog in a very optimal way will be able to position themselves to quickly deploy microsites on tablets or syndicate product catalogs to Amazon, and it adds flexibility.”