Technology is taking the holidays by storm, and it’s not just because today is Cyber Monday.  You need proof? Well look no further than your friendly neighborhood sidewalk Santa cheerfully jingling his bells to drum up collections for the Salvation Army.

The Salvation Army announced about a week ago that its sidewalk Santas in San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, and New York will be armed with smartphones equipped with credit card readers to accept donations on the plastic. The  credit card readers, which plug into the headphone jacks of iPhones, iPads, or Android phones, are being provided by San Francisco-based Square. Sprint is providing the phones and wireless service.

The goal of the initiative is to make it even easier to donate to the Salvation Army, which annually sends out a force of about 25,000 bellringers to raise money from holiday shoppers. In 2010, the Salvation Army collected more than $142 million to help people in need with toys, food, and clothing.

And though it’s not stated in the release, an added benefit of accepting credit card donations is that it will give the Salvation Army a way to track the donors. Traditionally, donations have been in the form of pocket change and small bills placed in the signature red kettles.

Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, is still a day away but as far as retailers are concerned, the battle for consumer dollars started weeks ago. That’s no surprise since more customers are expected to shop during this holiday season but many say they will be looking for bargains.

The number of people who said they are “definitely shopping” on Black Friday weekend rose from 27 percent in 2010 to 33 percent this year, according to a survey from the National Retail Federation. Half of the respondents say they’ll learn about retailers’ promos from circulars, while 17 percent are monitoring deals through Facebook.

Here’s a look at some of the shopping trends that are fueling this holiday season.

1. Free shipping is the new standard
More retailers are jumping on the free shipping bandwagon and some are offering free return shipping as well. About nine in 10 retailers plan to offer free shipping for online orders at some time this season, according to the Retail Federation. And more than one-third say they’re offering free shipping earlier this year than last year. In an attempt to compete with one another and Amazon.com’s Prime shipping program, even high end retailers Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue have joined the free shipping fray.

2. Online retailers hope to lure shoppers through their smartphones
At least of one third of American adults own a smartphone, reported the Pew Research Center and online retailers plan to take full advantage of consumers who are scanning their smartphones this holiday weekend. Some online retailers will start offering mobile deals as early as Thanksgiving. HSN, formerly known as the Home Shopping Network, will start its mobile sales at midday on Thanksgiving and offer them throughout high-traffic store-shopping times on Thursday and Friday, reported the New York Times.

3.    More open stores are creeping into Thanksgiving
Not to be outdone by online retailers, more stores are keeping their stores open on Thanksgiving as well, leading to a backlash from some employees and even customers. For the first time, Wal-Mart will launch its holiday sale kickoff at 10 p.m. Thanksgiving Day, joining Target, Toys R Us and other chains.

4. Retailers are boosting their social media and email campaigns
Eighty-four percent or retailers will send an email to their customers about Black Friday deals, up from 80 percent last year, according to the Shop.org eHoliday Survey, conducted by BIGresearch.  In contrast, social media campaigns are catching up. Nearly 75 percent of retailers will use their Facebook page to reach out to shoppers, up from 57.1 percent last year. Additionally, many retailers will use their website’s home page (50 percent) and Twitter (57.9 percent) to promote Black Friday deals.

Despite the growth in social media campaigns, email will still hold a prominent place in marketing strategies, argues Chad White, research director of digital marketing firm Responsys. “Marketers are trying to be smart about how they allocate their dollars and email is extremely cost effective,” he says . “Social media is still more about conversations whereas email is known as a deals channel in a way that social is not.”

I stumbled across an interesting study in the Journal on Consumer Research that suggests consumers are more willing to take orders from companies selling fun products or services than from utilitarian companies such as banks and insurance agencies.

The reasoning is that people who are in a good mood tend to use more direct language, explain authors Ann Kronrod (MIT), Amir Grinstein (Ben-Gurion University), and Luc Wathieu (Georgetown University), so messages that induce a positive mood can be more assertive.

“When thinking of the pleasure of hedonic goods, such as chocolate, a spa, or vacation, the consumer is usually in a positive mood and therefore she may expect to be addressed with more assertive language,” the authors write. Therefore, “love yourself a little” would persuade more people than “you could love yourself a little.”

In contrast, consumers do not have positive feelings about utilitarian consumption, such as banking and insurance, and don’t respond as well to assertive messages from such companies.

In an experiment where participants read messages encouraging them to try chocolate or to open a bank account, respondents reported better moods when they were thinking of chocolate, and higher purchase intentions when the language was assertive (“you must try our chocolate!”).

However, participants who were thinking of a bank account did not report positive moods and had higher purchase intentions following a non-assertive message (“you could open a bank account with us.”).

“An important implication of this research for campaigners and for composers of public messages is that assertive messages can be effective and non-assertive messages can be counter-productive, depending on how they meet consumers’ communications expectations,” the authors conclude.

Apparently not every company should tell consumers to “Just Do It.”

In the year or so that I’ve been covering the CRM industry, I’ve often heard it said that it’s a jungle out there. But I never suspected that our animal instincts might just hold the key to unlocking customer information and feedback. That is, however, exactly what a university professor from Australia is suggesting.

Dr. Brent Coker from the University of Melbourne postulates that our instinctive survival response to detect predators is the key to understanding customer loyalty and word-of-mouth. And he’s teaming up with a neuroscience colleague to prove it.

“Our minds are programmed to detect movement out of the corner of our eye. As soon as we do, our attention gets refocused to the source of the movement. This was originally a survival mechanism to warn us against stalking predators. Most animals have it,” Coker said in a statement. “But we found a way to use it to manipulate customers thought patterns, and get the data we need to predict loyalty and word-of-mouth.”

And to test his theory, he recently launched Webreep, a system that he says can pull in between 80 percent and 100 percent more customer feedback than traditional pop-up type tools.

“We used what we knew about movement responses to design a customer feedback system that didn’t rely on popups and surveys.”

The secret to Webreep includes a bouncing Give Feedback tab, and a sliding feedback form that looks more like an app than a survey.

“It’s deceptively simple, but actually has a lot of science behind it. The challenge was to move the customer’s attention away from whatever they were doing, and make them want to give feedback. That’s the main reason why people hate popups: it intrudes on their mission to complete a task. The bouncing feedback tab creates a voluntary attention shift – the same principle we see when an animal sees movement in the corner of their eye. The feedback form slides out to avoid the negative disruption we see with popups.

For more details of the Webreep project, visit:
http://www.webreep.com/blog/post/2011/11/14/The-New-Webreep-Customer-Feedback-Form.aspx

The following is a guest blog post from Esteban Kolsky, principal and founder at ThinkJar LLC

There is a common misconception that you have to take all your business functions to where your customers are; as the saying goes, if they are there you must be present to help them. I am not a firm believer of “just doing it,” but I do believe that with proper analysis and understanding, you can certainly add channels to your customer service solution. This yields better customer satisfaction, builds loyalty, and increases revenue (this is neither the place or the time to have this discussion, but, trust me, it works).

The advent of social channels made everyone (well, almost everyone) run to support the new channels, because “that’s where everybody is.” This is certainly understandable as Facebook moves closer to 1 billion members and Twitter closes in on 250 million.  Not only are there lots of people, they are the vociferous, connected-and-social type—the ones you want to make happy.

The questions I very often get from my clients, though, are these: Should I do it? Should I open an outpost for my support organization in social X channel?

Would you like to know the answer?

I have a methodology I use to make that decision, but I also rely on usage data. I want to know who is doing what, why, and how, before I say a solid yes, even if the methodology says it is a good idea. After all, without knowing what others are doing, we cannot leverage their lessons learned (critical to success).  Until now, I have been using different sources of research to collect this data. Unfortunately, the available data is incomplete and sometimes outdated.

How can I get better data? This is where you come in.

I have partnered with Sword Ciboodle to produce research that will answer these questions. We are taking a very short survey with 16 easy questions and a not-too-complex matrix, which should take six to eight minutes to answer fully. The survey will focus on the use of customer service channels, including a few questions on social channels. We just opened the survey last week, and we will have it open through November 23rd.
Some of the early data shows that Facebook is a slight favorite over Twitter as social channels for customer service (62 percent over 58 percent), but the gap continues to grow. There is also a small group of people—roughly five out of the first 250-plus people we polled—who use Google+ as well.

There is more data I can give you; however, before I do that, I need your help.  Would you please let us know how and what you are doing with social customer service?

Take the survey, give us your experiences, and in the first quarter of 2012 you can compare your experiences with what everyone else is doing.

Thanks for the help!

Esteban Kolsky