I like ads.

I do — and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

(How much do I like ads? I briefly considered opening this post with “Hi. My name is Josh, and I’m an adaholic,” but then decided to avoid the stigma of addiction. Denial, right?)

Sure, during the Super Bowl, I prefer the ads to the game — who doesn’t? (Admittedly, live-blogging the Super Bowl ads did draw some odd stares from the folks I was “watching the game” with. It’s now become something of a running gag whenever I’m over at a friend’s place.)

But here’s the real measure: I own a TiVo, and sometimes I don’t hit the Easter-egged “Skip 30 Seconds” button when an ad comes on. In fact, every now and then I even rewind to watch one again.

And I’ve been perfectly OK with the agreement Google and I made long ago: Yes, Google Gods, you may scan the megabytes of information stored in my free Gmail account and target the adjacent ads accordingly. Sometimes, I even click on those — a few of them actually do match my interests — and no doubt I do so more often than I would if the ads were randomized.

But, in general, behavioral targeting and (especially) the mining of my social graph kinda skeeves me out. (Yes, Facebook, I mean you. I don’t care if we named you a Rising Star last year. Star or not, you’re going supernova all over my civil liberties, and I’m this close to canceling my account and leaving you and all your 450 million members behind.)

With all this in mind, you can imagine my reaction to a banner ad I spied on The New York Times’ Web site this morning. “Advertising Is Creepy,” indeed.

More after the jump.

Read on… »

Many people know that grocery is “1 percent business,” meaning that the typical profit margin is about 1 percent. And there are software vendors like MyWebGrocer who are trying to help the grocery stores of the world get on to the social web. And that’s a noble goal. Except when the engagement doesn’t work, and it fails the customer, and the retailer. Sometimes bad sCRM happens to good brands, and not for lack of effort.

And it just makes social customer relationship management look less viable for consumer brands. That sucks, because it’s not true.

Since I work with gourmet food brands, I read Gourmet Retailer every day, thanks to their cool blog feeds, via Google Reader. So, when I found out that MyWebGrocer, a software brand that devises coupon solutions for grocery brands like Food Lion, Raleys and A&P, I was ecstatic. Then I tried the product on ShopRite’s Facebook page. But we’ll start with the positive.

ShopRite is a highly engaged brand, at least on Facebook. They monitor their Facebook page and its nearly 10,000 fans. Their content is fairly good. They tastefully (and quickly) moderate their discussion forums. They even have an electronic labels for education program that’s an environmentally sustainable alternative to what my generation grew up with in the ‘90s (mail in labels for points).

OK, now for the problems with the MyWebGrocer widget:

Number One: Location, location, location. I know that sCRM best practices would dictate that a brand would want to direct users to the brand’s number one social object (The Facebook Wall), but this thing is hidden so deeply on their Specials tab that only a guy writing an article for a CRM publication could find it.

Number Two:  Where’s The Beef or the Social Object? If you’re trying to define the social object as the grocery product itself (i.e. Rotisserie Chicken – $4.99), don’t allow the grocery products to scroll across the widget so users can’t select them. If you can’t share the social object within the social graph (i.e. the newsfeed) then you’ve got a big cart of FAIL on your hands. They could have potentially even saved this by allowing social commerce here with something like Cartfly ^[1], Nimbit, Payvment or Flogd, allowing the user to purchase select non-perishable grocery items on Facebook. Nope.

Number Three: User interface (i.e. Merchandising). The load times are slow, the fonts are jaggy, and when the user picks their local store from the widget, it has no bearing on the final output to the newsfeed.

Number Four: The “Drop A Jean Size In 2 Weeks” Ad on the widget. Whoever on the advertising team that allowed this non-relevant ad content in should be personally flogged with a cat of nine tails by ShopRite’s EVP of marketing. It hurts the user’s trust in the brand.

I hope MyWebGrocer can really go back to the woodshed on this one, to drive some real value for the social customer in the grocery vertical. If they don’t, all grocery customers will have is the Whole Foods iPhone app. And I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been doing a ton of Whole Foods business since the economy went South.

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^[1] Disclosure: I’m on their board of advisors

Adam Metz is the principal of Metz Consulting, a social customer management consulting firm that specializes in food and beverage, travel & hospitality, apparel and regulated brands. He’s the author of There Is No Secret Sauce, and is currently writing Dance On A Volcano: How Sexy (and not-so-sexy) Brands Acquire, Monetize & Retain The Social Customer.

Last week, at its SuiteCloud10 partner conference in San Francisco, NetSuite hosted its first-ever “Hairball” awards, honoring businesses that, thanks to cloud computing, were able to improve productivity, cut costs, and cough up the “hairball” of legacy solutions it once used.  A typical hairball might involve an on-demand solution for salesforce automation, an installed ERP product, a data warehouse solution, and of course a number of Excel spreadsheets for reporting. The awards were presented in a light-hearted, playful manner, and were prefaced by these two videos. (Warning: The videos contain some impolite jabs at NetSuite’s competitors SAP and Great Plains. In no way am I saying I agree with the content and this kind of marketing; I am posting them for entertainment purposes.)

Here are the first-ever Hairball Award winners…

Most Applications Replaced: After implementing NetSuite, MYCOM, a provider of OSS Service Assurance software, eliminated a 9 applications including Sage, Microsoft, Peachtree, and a proprietary quote systems. The company also got rid of 250+ spreadsheets.

Most Improved Productivity: Acquiring ten software companies left e-business solution provider KANA with a host of application hairballs. After implementing NetSuite OneWorld across the enterprise, Kana was able to close its finances in one-third the amount of time that it once took and reduced order processing times by 20 percent.

Greatest Cost Reduction: Once Fresh Produce Group untangled its business applications by moving on-demand, it saw net profit margins improve by 100 percent (within 18 months of deploying NetSuite). It estimates it saves $1 million a year through identifying and eliminating unnecessary overheads.

Most Global Solution: Also winning the best-dressed award of the evening, Filipino-influenced fast-food restaurant chain Jollibee has 1,800+ restaurants worldwide and was able to roll out one instance of NetSuite OneWorld.

Best Enterprise Deployment: Student accommodation company Campus Living Villages with its 170 subsidiaries once had nearly 40 ERP instances. After deploying NetSuite, however, it was able to standardize on a single Chart of Accounts.

Best Ecommerce Solution: Online retailer Virtual Inventories ended front-end and back-end solutions including Monster Commerce, Zen Cart, Volusion, StoneEdge, Pinnacle Cart, QuickBooks, Navision, Magento, and DepotNet with a single NetSuite implementation.

Best Manufacturing Company Solution: Engineered wood products company RedBuilt left SAP for NetSuite over just 86 days. It had worked with SAP for six years and never fully got it implemented.Its total cost of ownership shrank by nearly $300,000 annually with NetSuite over SAP.

Best Services Company Solution: Point-of-sale solution provider POSitive Technology untangled a hairball of Goldmine, QuickBooks Pro, MS Project and others with cloud computing.

Best Software Company Solution: TradeCard, a finance, supply chain collaboration and vendor compliance platform provider, replaced combination of Oracle, QuickBooks, Salesforce.com, Lotus Notes, and Excel all with NetSuite

Best Wholesaler/Distributor Solution: Ira Wood & Sons, a home improvement and outdoor superstore, once was working with more than 12 solutions including Prophet21, Hypercomm Terminal,  Monster Commerce, Unishippers Ship Manager, Worldship, NetStamps, NEC Elite IPK, ACD Plus, TimeClock Plus, QuickBooks Pro, and ExactforWeb. Moving to NetSuite allowed the retailer to streamline processes and focus on customer service.

Harte-Hanks Inc. recently announced the launch of its Automated Marketing Platform (AMP), a direct marketing tool designed to offer “informed, relevant and measurable local or global campaigns,” according to the company’s press release. In order to leverage its own technology within its existing multichannel solutions, Harte-Hanks signed an agreement with VeraCentra, Inc. to brand and sell the VeraCentra Collaborate solution, an on-demand marketing intelligence tool and delivery platform. Citing the increasing complexity of delivering relevant communications as the reason for building AMP, Harte-Hanks bills the product as an easy-to-use solution that can span vertical industries.

Based out of San Antonio, Harte-Hanks is a worldwide direct and targeted marketing company that provides direct marketing services and shopper advertising opportunities to local, regional, national, and international consumer and business-to-business marketers.

Harte-Hanks’s new partner, VeraCentra operates from Napa, California. The twenty-two-year-old company provides on-demand marketing intelligence software and automated multi-channel communication systems.

“We as an agency offer a lot of marketing services, [such as] fulfillment and creative design, email marketing, execution email marketing design,” says Jeanine Falcone, managing director of The Agency Inside Harte-Hanks. “We have all these services that wrap around the different ways that brands would use and implement and execute a marketing plan.”

AMP allows a brand to have centralized control over its messaging and the different pieces that it wants to have out in the marketplace, but also the flexibility for localized marketers to select the pieces that fit how they target their market.

According to the press release, Harte-Hanks utilized “its vast experience and expertise in direct marketing to evaluate the on-demand landscape, [and after undergoing] a rigorous review of potential solutions, [the company assessed] that blending VeraCentra’s technology with its marketing services would bring additional value to its client base.”

When asked what this “review” entailed, Falcone says only that Harte-Hanks performed “an exhaustive search,” before settling on VeraCentra’s technology.

Falcone is also unclear about the reason behind Harte-Hanks’ decision, saying only that the platform “did everything we needed it to do…And it fit across many of the verticals we served without having to customize things.”

She says the company’s search included a technical and marketing evaluation.

Though Falcone would not reveal the actual number of companies Harte-Hanks considered, David Resnick, vice president of sales and marketing at VeraCentra says he presumes the number is somewhere between 20 and 30.

“For VeraCentra, as an emerging company in the technology space, to have an industry leader like Harte-Hanks, who has partnerships with other technology companies, go through an assessment of 20 or 30 other companies and choose our technology to meet their midmarket needs was a strong endorsement of what we’re doing,” says Resnick.

He speculates that Harte-Hanks chose to leverage VeraCentra’s technology rather than create its own because his company was able to put all of the data into one repository for customers to act upon. He says VeraCentra’s skills in building data marts and in understanding the key performance indicator development that’s required to make technology solutions vibrant is what most likely set his company apart from the rest.

The final product offers companies centralized control and the ability to customize and personalize content. Harte-Hanks claims AMP will simplify the process of providing local marketers with multichannel marketing programs that generate sales while maintaining brand and message consistency.

There’s no doubt that customers’ attitudes have changed drastically in only the past two years. The biggest recession of our lifetime has shaken many to the core. We’ve lost well-known financial services firms such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, as well as local banks and businesses. Consumers weren’t to blame for the economic collapse, yet they’re shouldering the burden of it, thanks to the taxpayers’ bailout of Wall Street.

What do cash-strapped, middle-class taxpayers have to show for it? While the economy is showing signs of improvement, nearly one in 10 are still out of work. Many of those who are working are enduring, salary freezes, salary cuts, and furlough days. Over the past two years, they’ve watched their home prices fall, retirement accounts fluctuate wildly, and healthcare costs rise.

As if the economic fallout isn’t bad enough, consumers are also realizing that corporate and legislative negligence of yesteryear left us with an environmental mess that can leave an indelible mark on our planet. If we want to preserve the health of our planet and its inhabitants, we must clean up our acts today. Years of neglect and abuse by big businesses and the government have left many confused, upset, and angry. As a result, they’ve become distrusting and disloyal.

Fortunately, social media has become a cathartic release for many, enabling them to vent to family, friends, colleagues, and peers. And thanks to smartphones, they’ve become far more connected and vocal. According to The Wall Street Journal, Research In Motion sold about 500,000 BlackBerry Storms in that device’s first month on the market—and about the same number in the second month. Apple sold a million 3G iPhones in just one weekend—to a marketplace that already had a sizeable number of first-generation iPhones.

These numbers are staggering and clearly show that consumers are not only comfortable using these smart phones and Web-enabled mobile devices, they’re eager to use them.

Many are using them in their professional lives as well, whether or not their organizations support them—which is what inspired our March 2009 feature story, “CRM and the iPhone.” These purchases, combined with a need to connect and commiserate with others, have accelerated a cultural shift toward a hypercritical, instant gratification society.

That they’re able to expand their networks makes them far more influential. Customers are watching businesses and critiquing them to anyone who will listen. It’s a new reality for businesses—one that must be addressed.

Lior Arrusy, president of Strativity Group, in the Webinar, “2010 Customer Relationships – Emerging Smarter, Building Stronger” (February 3, 2010), assumes the role of the average consumer to describe the general consumer sentiment toward big businesses: “I was betrayed by you or other vendors. You are the reason I’m in trouble. You will have to do heavy lifting to fix this relationship. I will be watching and commenting on everything you do,” he said.

This is a general trend. To find out exactly how customers are feeling, you’ll have to listen to them. But, how do you respond? What do these new consumer attitudes mean to organizations’ products, services, and customer relationships? How do organizations adapt in this new world? Who are their real customers? Which products are in real demand? Join Lior Arrussy, me, and others to find out the answers to these questions and more at our first Customer Executive Forum (April 19–20) at the Camelback Inn and Resort in Scottsdale, Ariz. This is a great opportunity to explore and define next-generation customer strategies by engaging with peers in an interactive environment.