Ask not what your customer can do for you, but what you can do for your customer.

Ah, the elusive “what do my customers want?” question. These days, it doesn’t have to be a guessing game. In fact, there are ways in which you can listen to your customers, trend their conversation volume + sentiment, and enact changes in your business from month-to-month or year-to-year to better serve their needs. Serving the customer is what will lead to an uptick in sales and conversions, so it’s important that you find out what they want. How do we propose you do this? Through social research.

Social research is a process in which you collect data about your target customers. You aggregate conversation on social networking sites, forums, blogs, blog comments, and more with an online tool. But now what? Here are a few quick tips when implementing social research + making it work for your business:

1. Remember: the tools are not perfect

Let’s face it, tools are not perfect. Though they’re a big help, they can only do so much. It’s important that when mining social conversation for actionable insights, you have the right sentiment for each comment. A tool simply may not be able to code it all correctly. For example, if a tool sees this comment: “Don’t you just love how ice cream melts so quickly? #theworst,” it might code it as a positive comment about ice cream. It may not be able to ascertain sarcasm. Therefore, it might be important for you to comb through the conversation and have a human assign sentiment.

2. Look for trends

Keep a running tally of trends from the past few months or over the past couple of years. What might you be looking out for in the coming months in terms of conversation volume? This can help you make better business decisions throughout your initiatives. You don’t have to wait until the end of a campaign to assess how it’s going. For example, if it’s fall, maybe you should watch for conversation surrounding your winter product line. Are people planning to purchase ahead of time? How might this affect your promotional deals or marketing messaging? You can suss out trends in conversation about things other than your products or services, too. What are people most excited about regarding your industry? If you’re an eCommerce business, maybe it’s free shipping or a “ship to store” option. If you’re B2B, maybe it’s new software or a platform that makes their day-to-day easier. Either way, use this data to capitalize on these trends.

3. Enact change throughout your business

It’s not just about marketing. Insights gleaned from social conversation can help you make fundamental business decisions that impact staffing, finances or pricing. Say, for example, that conversation surrounding your brand is low April-June of each year. How does this match up to sales? Could your business operate more efficiently with fewer people during these months? When you look into competitors’ conversation volume, you see that it is high. Perhaps running a promotion during this time, or tailoring marketing efforts, could take business away from your competitors.

4. Find out what else your customers care about

Perhaps you have higher operating costs than your competitors and cannot edge them out with just price. In what other ways can you provide value to your customers? In recent years, customers have placed more of an emphasis on things they care about. Does your brand give back to the community? Does your company recycle or aid ecological initiatives in some way? Can you provide excellent customer service? It’s things like these that communicate added value to consumers, and that can create brand advocates. With social research, you can find out what your customers care about and who they’re sharing it with.

5. Anticipate their needs

One really great thing about social research is that if you log trends each month, you can see more and more what is important to the customer. And this means that you are able to anticipate what they will want next (and in real-time, depending on how often you pull reports). Gone are the days when you have to be reactive; you can now be proactive. If you see a new trend of people responding to a certain marketing campaign or hating a new product line, it can inform your future business decisions.

It’s important that you find out what your customers want, so that you can be prepared to meet–and exceed–their needs and expectations. This is just the beginning of what insights social research can provide with the right tools and the right team.

1. Modify

Modification is key, especially in the digital age where consumers are constantly bombarded with marketing messages (and therefore become fatigued much quicker). For your next campaign, you need to switch up not only your creative, but your copy. Look for the best performing messages and try to figure out why they did so well. Was it a specific time these ads or updates ran? Was there a clearer call to action? Was the creative more vibrant and eye-catching? Did it simply educate the reader? Whatever the criteria, categorizing your messages makes it easy to assess which categories did the best. Highlight the various creative attributes that performed the best (say the call to action button was green rather than yellow or the tagline was bigger in this banner ad versus another) and tuck these insights away for when you begin your next campaign.

This is not just about marketing messages, either. You can also use your site-side analytics to assess where the stumbling blocks are on your website and modify those as well. Utilize the best performing search ads or most visited pages on your site to modify underperforming pages to have similar copy and creative. This will not only help refresh your site (which is great for SEO initiatives), but also give your consumer the most relevant and cohesive experience possible.

2. Refine

Don’t confuse modifying and refining. Modifying is changing the ad, the update or the posting schedule. Refining is essentially making your campaigns smaller by optimizing targeting and placements. Once you have assessed which messages and creative performed the best, you are able to make the pool of creative smaller and more effective. Similarly, look into what landing pages and content resonated most with consumers (hint: look at “time spent on page” and “return visits”) and direct your next campaign to these pages and/or new ones like them. It’s best to cast a large net in the first few campaigns and then refine to capture a more relevant and lower-funnel user.

3. Remarket

When planning your next journey, remember tactics that will connect you with customers that have already shown interest in your brand. This helps refine your targeting and can be a large display initiative. Remarketing is great especially for eCommerce sites, as it is targeting consumers who have already shown interest in your site by visiting. It can be used for several different reasons. If a consumer did not purchase your service or item when visiting your site, you can remarket them with an ad that displays the item at which they were looking very quickly (even during the same search session) to keep your brand top of mind. If a consumer did make a purchase, you can remarket them during their next feasible sales cycle or with corresponding items. So, for example, if I buy new tires, a company could remarket me to remind me to schedule an appointment for a tire rotation 80 days later. If I bought a pair of jeans from an online retailer, they might remarket to me with ads of suggested tops the same or next day. The possibilities are virtually endless as long as you have cookie data. This ensures that the consumer journey will align with yours.

With all of these tactics, you have the opportunity to optimize your next campaigns before they even start. Historical data can be a huge source of knowledge in planning + predicting future trends in your business and marketing initiatives. In the digital age, performance is never optimized enough. There are never enough tests conducted. In short, there is always something you can be doing to maximize your dollars. Therefore, it’s important to assess where you’ve been to see more clearly where you’re going. Once you’ve done this, it’s time for another Re:Adventure!

Build-Up Those Around You

Some employees thrive under pressure and in a reign of fear or terror. But most don’t. And the fact is, that happy employees are more productive employees. So build-up your employees and encourage your C-level executives to do the same. Fostering a sense of respect and professionalism can pay off a great deal–especially when your employees aren’t in the break room planning a mutiny. Building-up does not mean ignoring weaknesses or poor performance. But it does mean inciting an atmosphere where people can take chances and innovate new ideas without fear of failure.

Ask Smarter Questions

Obviously this is something that we live by, seeing as how we named the Levelwing blog after this principle. I believe that a fundamental key to becoming an effective leader is not only the ability to ask smarter questions, but the ability to teach your team to do the same. So what is a smarter question? It goes beyond the facts: the who, what, where, when and why; and dives deeper into the actions associated with the answer. It’s not about what the next big thing is but how we can leverage that thing to improve our business. The actionable insight is the only one that matters.

Find your Core

There is a lot of great research happening out there about multiple intelligences, emotional intelligence, company culture, etc., which lead people to participate in “leadership fads.” I’m not saying you should ignore it all. But the fact is that it’s probably not designed directly around your company or even industry. Therefore, you and your colleagues must be the judges of what is core to your company. Chasing down the different fad paths can lead to confusion and inconsistency within your company, which complicates output and external communication. At the end of the day, fostering a culture in which you would want to work–whether as CEO, analyst or mail room clerk–is more important than what Apple, Facebook and Google are doing on their campuses. Your core is what matters most.

Listen More Than You Speak

This is perhaps one of the hardest things to accomplish. As a leader of a company, you likely have a lot of opinions. It’s probably safe to assume that you’re Type A. But the fact is that you have hired the people around you to teach you something. Their differing backgrounds are what brings new perspective to the table. You’ve likely been involved in doing one or two things for the last 10 years, so a little paradigm shift can do an organization good. Therefore, create an environment where good ideas are made better with smarter questions and focused conversations, then fostered. Oftentimes, actively listening can move your company forward faster than your speaking.

Be Data-Driven

Being data-driven goes hand-in-hand with all the other aforementioned leadership tips. It adds a level of sophistication to your leadership. Sure, you can learn to ask smarter questions or to build up others, but how do you assess what initiatives are a success and which are failures? In all instances, you and your employees should remain goal-oriented. You must communicate that data is the deciding factor for all decisions both small and big. If you communicate this well, your team will develop the ability to poke holes in their own ideas, your clients will receive better output and you will have a company that is representative of what is important to you.

1. Decide what you’re going to talk about.

Many of you may be rolling your eyes at that, but the truth is that many brands get into social without so much as a plan or a content calendar. Planning what subjects you are going to talk about will allow you to plan for those subjects you are not going to talk about. One school of thought is that any brand communication should stick to “dinner conversation,” i.e. no mention of politics, religion or money. But for some, these subjects may be inevitable. A good place to start is to look at competing brands. You don’t need to copy their strategy, but just take note of what they discuss and what they don’t.

2. Talk to your target demographic.

Let’s say you own a luxury fashion label and you’re 20. Should your social voice reflect your 20 year old life? Perhaps. If you’re selling to 20 year olds. But if your prices are high and 40 year old women love your clothing, you should be talking to them. If your company creates technology solutions, your social messaging should cater to IT professionals and CIOs. Your brand should have a voice that talks to consumers in a language they understand. If there is a disconnect (even if you have high engagement), you may not be communicating with your most valuable audience.

3. Stay authentic

#2 might sound a little contrived. That’s why I’m emphasizing authenticity. You know your brand’s message better than anyone; therefore, you need to design your messaging to communicate that message. For what does your brand stand for? With what kinds of lifestyles + people can it be aligned? Consider what your target demographic likes besides your product or service and explore how you can integrate these things into messaging. Summed up: Be true to your message, but be artful in your communication.

4. Keep it in the hands of someone you trust

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times. Plopping an intern in front of a computer with your brand’s Facebook page up is not the way to begin a social strategy. Even if you’re somewhat ignorant to how the social platforms work, you are fully capable of creating a messaging strategy that speaks to your audience. Start with the long-winded version, exploring who your customer is and what you want to communicate to them. Then you can rely on someone else to put it into soundbytes + photos fit for the various social networks.

5. Consumer response

Being from an agency background, I always tell brands to err on the side of caution in this arena. It’s easy for people on the Interwebs to take things out of context, blow things out of proportion, or to have a viral disaster. Avoid these by always responding to customer inquiries/insults/instigations with respect. Sometimes a comment may call for a bit of wit, but respond as though you would expect an employee to respond face-to-face. This will generally keep you on the right side of the line of appropriateness.

If you follow these tips and stick with your gut, you will be able to communicate on social with personality and candor and without the drama.

As the Harvard Business Review puts it, “Apart from the fact that those between the ages of 50 and 65 spend twice the amount of money on healthcare than the 18 to 25 year-old set and three times as much money on housing, 50 to 65 year-olds also spend an amazing 78% more money on shopping.” 78% more money. That’s quite a bit that your business could be missing out on.

Here are two ways to find out if you could benefit from a demographic targeting shift in your digital marketing initiatives:

1. Social research gives you the unique opportunity to listen to unsolicited conversation by your audience of followers and sharers. Profiling the people who are talking most about your brand is important, but it’s also important to explore who is actually purchasing and not just sharing. Who is your most valuable audience? It’s probably smart to strike a balance between influencer and converter. If someone talks positively about your brand, that’s great, but if they are purchasing and then sharing, that’s the most powerful. Think about bloggers who do not fit the “mommy blogging” archetype (30-something women with one or two small children), but are of the Boomer generation.

2. Data mining should already be a part of your marketing mix. Perhaps it just needs to be redirected to examine the basics. Using your website data capture enables you to find the demographics of the people who are converting on your website. By mining this data and searching for trends, you can optimize your site to appeal to your most lucrative consumer group.

3. User experience testing can be a great route to optimization. User experience testing essentially does exactly what it says–tests user experience. Different audiences can be segmented in order to test who best interacts with your site and what actions they are most likely to complete. If your target audience is confused by your navigation or does not understand your messaging, it could cause drop off. The best way to optimize your conversion funnel is to conduct tests. Segmenting demographics in these tests could also help you ascertain if you are marketing to your most lucrative audience.

Whether you use these methods or others, it’s important to remember that your most valuable demographics online can change. It is a best practice to constantly test and refine your digital marketing efforts to be sure that you are meeting or exceeding your business goals and improving business intelligence.

“Sightseeing” might sound like ambling to you, but it can pay off. In our last series article we talked about assessing potential business opportunities quickly. But sightseeing is different. Essentially, you want to commit time to exploring new trends in your industry, making room for new goals and perspectives and new plans for achieving those goals. For example, if you asked anyone five years ago whether or not their brand should be on Facebook, you may have gotten mixed answers. Some would have probably said that Facebook is just for keeping in touch with friends and family or that no one was interested in shopping while social networking. Today we know that this isn’t the case. People like to connect and engage with brands on Facebook. Therefore, the plans of those businesses had to change their digital strategy accordingly. If a business did not take the time to explore brand pages and marketing options on Facebook, it’s likely they were left behind or striving to catch up with competitors who took the time to sight-see.

Here are a few tips on integrating flexibility into your business plan:

1. Have dedicated teammates

Whether you have a team or just one individual, it is important to stay abreast of current digital trends + how you can leverage them within your business. Sure, everyone knows about SoLoMo right now, but what is the next wave of execution to look out for? Your company should always be on the lookout for potential opportunities, but take the time to delve into new trends as well. It is easy to get swallowed into routine and only concern yourself with your industry, but there is opportunity in many other places.

2. Outside the box

In that vein, it is important that you monitor trends even outside your industry. Let’s say that you’re in healthcare or travel and you notice that retail companies are doing something innovative with their remarketing ads. Envisioning how these trends can be applied to your business can help ensure that you are among the first to test new waters.

3. Adjust your plan

Since digital is ever-changing, your plan should have room for change and improvement. Don’t be married to one idea of how to achieve your overarching business goals. If email marketing converts the best for your first two years, and then mobile begins to take over, switch up your focus + put more effort toward monetizing what is working. It does not always have to include new channels, either. If your paid search strategy needs to go hyper-local to be competitive, find a way to make it happen.

4. Maintain end goals

No matter what new paths you may venture down, always be sure that the end goals are the same. If a new initiative does not meet your long-term goals, then it’s not worth pursuing. There will always be new ways to engage with and convert customers, but always be sure that each initiative has a measurement plan firmly in place.

With these tips, you will be able to stay abreast of all that’s new in digital and what can potentially help your business. When creating your roadmap to digital success, it’s important that you plan ahead but also plan to be adaptable. Change is inevitable in the digital space and those with a more flexible business + marketing plan are bound to have fewer hiccups.

How does this help me achieve my business goals?

This is the primary focus and question you should ask yourself before changing directions on your road to success. We have worked so hard to create a strategic roadmap that will align with your business goals and get you to the place you want to be. Although some opportunities might be flashy or exciting, it doesn’t mean they are right for you.

What strategy can I implement to ensure success?

Ok, ok. We can’t “ensure success,” but you can help your new initiatives by always implementing a strategy. Since you have already figured out which business goals this new initiative will help you achieve, you can implement a strategy for each goal. Remember: You don’t need to be a part of something for the sake of being a part of something. A perfect example of this is Pinterest. Sure, it’s a great platform and fun to be a part of, but that does not mean it’s right for your business. And if you do think it a good move for your business, don’t get into it without a strategy in place.

How will I measure the success of this?

Even though this is also a part of strategy, it’s important to think of measurement as its own initiative. How are you going to deem the use of this tool/trend/initiative a success without a measurement plan in place? Two words: you’re not. Also consider at what point you will determine if the opportunity is successful and implement a timeline for when you have to decide this. This will help keep you honest. Example: if this does not prove to be successful within six to eight months, we’re going another route.

What am I risking?

Risk is usually associated with big financial investments, but this isn’t always the case. There are small risks associated with simply shifting your or your employees’ time and focus. If you decide to switch directions, think proactively about what other areas will be impacted in your business.

What’s my plan if it doesn’t work?

This sounds a little paranoid, but the fact is that many, many business ventures and ideas fail within the first five years. If a new opportunity for a partnership or tool bites the dust, what is Plan B? Will it be easy to bounce back? Preparing for failure will help give you foresight, which can make you proactive.

If you can answer all of these questions, you can assess the opportunity without investing a lot of time and effort. If you cannot answer all of these questions before moving forward, I simply wouldn’t. You want to make calculated decisions based on what is best for your brand and bottom line. This does not always include a flashy new tool or investing time into a new social video platform even though you might wish it did. Keeping these questions and answers in mind will keep you on the road to success and avoid pitstops becoming pitfalls.

The Grandparent Factor

As the economy tries to rebound and unemployment drops, people are spending more money on consumer goods like toys. In fact, the average amount of money that a grandparent spent on a grandchild’s new baby gift was 24% higher than the average amount of money spent in 2007. This is a promising figure, but it is interesting how grandparents decide what to buy. Unlike younger generations, many aren’t consulting online reviews. On the contrary, 44% of grandparents buy what the baby’s parents tell them to, or what is listed on the registry. 13% say that they like to purchase a big-ticket item, while 18% admit that they have a hard time deciding what to buy their new grandchild.

A Vintage Vibe

With the recycle/upcycle trends comes the back to our roots toy trends. Vintage finds from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s are finding their way back onto the shelves. Typically, parents of these eras will feel nostalgic and buy these toys for their kids, hoping to bring them the same joy they felt.

Holiday Spending

In a recent study, consumer spending this Easter was projected to be about $17 billion. Though a big portion of this spending is apparel and candy, people are flocking to stores to purchase, which means more eyes on new toys. Toy companies need to invent new ways to reach consumers lower in the funnel during these special holiday times to maximize their impact.

Going Mobile

-4 in 10 smartphone owners will research toys and search store locations on a mobile device

-51% of tablet owners use the device to look up products

-22% of tablet owners use the device to purchase products

(all stats from Toy Info)

This essentially means that if you want to have positive impact on your sales, you need to be present across all screens. Converting users on their tablets, smartphones and desktops can be done easily, but the strategy has to be somewhat different for each.

Recently, I came upon this graph on Forrester and the thing that struck me the most important was the light grey portion marked “outside forces.” Big Data is so big that we thought it was the only thing we had to worry about. This introduction of outside forces is just as important, however. There are three big factors in how we will manage Big Data in the future, and I believe them to be: sustainability, policies and security. Though globalization, society and demographics might play a role, they are, in my mind, less significant. If you can protect your data in the face of change from the first three componenets I mentioned, you will likely be prepared for the last three.

Sustainability: The energy crisis has been exploding for years now. We are simply using up too much of our resources. Many companies are trying to make changes that impact our earth in a positive way. And Big Data requires storage room, and sometimes a big storage warehouse. Therefore, we have to expect innovation in this area. The housing of data requires a large source of used energy and there will have to be a way to recycle this energy, or we will fail in sustaining Big Data’s capabilities.

Policies: Data means a lot of things, but it has a serious potential impact on our government and policies. There is a lot of information to be obtained about citizens and the protection of privacy will undoubtedly be in the forefront of people’s minds as they explore ways to make Big Data work for them. Therefore, a lot of lobbying will be required for those companies that wish to house Big Data and what information is proprietary and what belongs to the individual consumer.

Security: This relates to policies and can impact everyone involved–the consumer, the company and those trying to obtain information about individuals. There are hackers and identity thieves, but also the threat of competitors stealing proprietary information about your customers.

Consider and prepare for these outside forces to impact your data management solution as much as you can, as it is probably inevitable that all of them will. I look forward to seeing how our industry funds projects to help manage the impact of sustainability, policies and security as well.

So what is the takeaway here? Essentially, brands and businesses need to respond to the customer’s desire for digital promotions. Here are the three main areas of focus (you may already be familiar with them): social, local and mobile–or SoLoMo to industry nerds. Here are a few tips for promoting deals on these channels:

Social media is a great way to expand your brand’s reach online. Promotions on Facebook Offers, or just on your blog (by enabling share buttons), can go viral within hours and expose a lot of people to your brand–organically or through paid media. It just depends on how great the promotion is, how highly sought-after your product is, and the “shareability” of your product. Note: most women will share a great deal they find on an apparel or beauty item, but may be less inclined to share a great deal on a tire rotation. Keep your audience in mind when predicting how “viral” your promotion will go on social media.

Local marketing is also a great way to capture a smaller, engaged audience with promotions and deal messaging. Consider implementing a deal on location-based apps like Yelp! or Foursquare, or running geotargeted paid search ads.

Mobile marketing is similar to local because when most people search for businesses on their mobile devices, they are looking for places nearby. Restaurants and retail can especially benefit from a great mobile marketing campaign. Creating paid search ads with the promotion or deal messaging and then driving to a mobile-friendly site can increase conversion rates.

With this forecast, the outlook for promotions and deal messaging within your digital marketing mix is very, very good. Remember: to create brand loyalty, you must first create repeat customers. A great way to entice them to your brand is through a promotion. The rest is up to you.

Paid search: Google AdWords, MSN AdCenter

Site-side analytics: Google Analytics, Adobe Marketing Suite (formerly Omniture), Marin + Kenshoo

CRM/New Business: Salesforce, PipelineDeals, Netsuite, Oracle

Social: Hootsuite, Sprout, TweetDeck

This is nowhere near an exhaustive list of tools used for these buckets, but all of these tools do similar things. Essentially, they organize all of your campaigns and content so that it is easily accessible to your team and your clients (if necessary). So what do all of these tools help you do? Though they are all different in look and feel, they essentially help you do three main things:

1. Aggregate + organize data

The aforementioned tools are meant to house lots and lots of data so it is easier to measure and act upon. Paid search and social can teach you about messaging that works well, site-side analytics can help you understand user behavior and experience, whereas CRM tools can help you optimize your communication strategy with potential and current customers.

2. Measure success

Success measurement is the most important thing that digital tools help you do. Oftentimes it takes a little ingenuity (with tracking code and setting up reports), but tracking your customers’ online actions is imperative for measuring your digital initiatives’ success. Paid search is simpler to see a return on investment. After all, you are given the precise number of clicks and conversions per user or investment.

With social and CRM, it may be slightly more difficult. Rely on your business goals to dictate what your most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are and work to create a system that will measure the increase or decrease in these completed KPIs. If your business’s goal is to generate leads, and you implement an email marketing campaign, your main KPI is probably a user performing a “Request More Info” form. However, it can be beneficial to measure things like email open rate and transfers to website to assess whether or not your email messaging and images are effectively communicating with the user. In short, to measure success, you must first define your terms of a successful campaign. As a more concrete example with email marketing, let’s say that 5% of those who fill out a lead form result in a new client acquisition with $X average profit. Therefore, you can monetize how valuable a completed lead form from email marketing is. Sometimes it’s just as efficient to work backwards.

3. Optimize campaigns + messaging

Once you are able to measure success, you are able to optimize your campaigns. It doesn’t matter if your digital initiative is an email communication, a paid search ad or an organic social update. All of these messages can be optimized toward a better return on investment. Historical data as well as current trends can help digital analysts predict when and where messaging will be most effective. If you are able to make predictions about marketing trends, this can aid in predicting business trends as well, which will help improve efficiencies in your business. Optimization is ongoing for those that want to constantly improve their return, but like success measurement, you must be optimizing toward an end goal.

With these tools and goals in mind, you will be well-prepared when planning your road to digital success. Next week, we’ll be talking about what to pack to prepare for speed bumps in your journey, so stay tuned!

As you may have (or may not have) noticed, Facebook has been trying to experiment with separate feeds for different forms of content sharing. Right now, it’s just your regular feed and then your “pages feed,” which features content only from the pages you have liked. However, now they’re going to take that idea and multiply it. You will now be able to sort by all friends, photos, groups, following, games and more. This will give you more content that you want:

As expected when Facebook purchased Instagram, the platform is becoming more involved in photo sharing and bringing your pictures to life. So what does this mean for brands’ social communication? Essentially, visual sharing will become even more pertinent–and you now have the capacity to share even more vibrant photos with your fans. You can join the waiting list to try out the new news feed before your less in-the-know friends.

Just in case you’re unaware of how hashtags work, here’s a quick rundown:

–Twitter started the phenomenon and Instagram and Pinterest have picked up on the tactic to aggregate conversation by subject

–They begin with the pound sign (#)

–Hashtagged words do not have any punctuation or spaces (examples: #MTVawards #Eredcarpet #MadMen)

–They’re mostly used as a frame of reference, but in different ways

(examples: The #Grammys live performances are awesome; Justin Timberlake killed it on stage! #Grammys)

Now that you’re up to speed on how hashtags work, let’s go over a few tips for using them to aggregate conversation about online + offline events.

1. Use the most popular and obvious hashtag for events

You want the information you post to be easily found by others. This means you need to use the hashtag everyone else is using. To find out which hashtags are the most popular, do a quick Twitter search, check hashtags.org and check Twitter’s Trending Topics. If you’re trying to establish an offline event on Twitter, create a hashtag that is easy to remember and branded. For example, The South by Southwest festival simply uses #SXSW because that is how they’re known. Adding locations or numbers can often be confusing, so when in doubt, keep it simple. Lots of people are tweeting from their mobile devices and don’t want to type a long phrase.

2. “Bonus” hashtags for live events

A fun way to measure engagement and impact of an offline event is to throw in what I like to call “bonus hashtags.” FOX sitcoms do a great job of this. If you’re watching Glee, for instance, you can always use the hashtag #Glee. But let’s say something particularly crazy happens on that episode. The show will prompt you to talk about it on Twitter by promoting a bonus hashtag on the screen–like #SingItRachel or #SueIsCrazy (these aren’t real examples, but you get the idea). Longer events like the Olympics, X Games, or even just award shows can also take advantage of the bonus hashtag strategy to measure at what times or during what specific events people were most engaged over the course of the evening, week or month.

3. Live tweet chats

Brands, celebrities and politicians have all jumped on board live Twitter chats. It’s a great way to create social momentum around your brand and aggregate conversation with people around the country and around the world. Live tweet chats just need a little extra promotion beforehand. A great example of this is in the 2012 Presidential Election when President Obama utilized Twitter as a Town Hall to answer policy questions. He only needed to promote the event time, date and hashtag in order to get lots of participation. Celebrities like Taylor Swift do live tweet chats as well as webcasts in order to connect with their fans, and all they need to use is a simple hashtag to get people involved.

4. Promoting your hashtag

You don’t have to limit yourself in ways to promote your branded and/or event hashtag. You can send out a promotional email to fans and followers, of course, but you can also put your hashtag into offline marketing materials. Especially if it is an event people will attend, put it in the brochures, pamphlets, on the presentation screens, or even billboards. People will be discussing your brand or event on Twitter, so it’s best to give them the “place” to do it so it’s easier for you to measure results.

5. Measuring results

Once your event or specific hashtag campaign has transpired, it’s important that you take a look through the event’s storyline. What actions or events prompted a lot of conversation? What elements were people tweeting negatively or positively about? What was the main behavior of people using your event’s hashtags? Were they simply checking in, tweeting quotes or facts from the event, sharing photos or videos? What percentage of attendees tweeted their experience? These are just a few questions you can ask and seek to answer using aggregated conversation from your hashtag. There is much insight to be gained from Twitter conversations surrounding your campaign or event and these insights can help you plan your next event or campaign for an even better response.

More than likely, your business is involved in social media to grow your business opportunities through leads or sales, create brand awareness, engage current customers, market to potential customers, implement better customer service tactics or various other similar reasons. Though convenience metrics are predominantly a social media problem, they also exist in other forms of digital marketing. For example, how many clicks did my paid search ad get? How many people viewed my webcast? These metrics are not painting the entire picture of a successful campaign and can cloud your judgement of digital success and further optimization.

So how do we combat getting lost in the vast ocean of convenience metrics? It’s simple, really. Align your business goals with your digital marketing goals. Let’s say for example that you sell B2B software. A tutorial video you uploaded to YouTube got 60,000 views in a week. Great, right? Well, not necessarily. How many of these views resulted in a visit to your website? Of these visits, how many performed an action, whether it was filling out a lead form or purchasing your software? Of the people who purchased, how many shared their purchase with friends or wrote a recommendation/review? These are all much more telling metrics than your 60,000 views. And chances are, the numbers that answer these questions are much, much smaller.

This all sounds quite negative, I’m sure. Can’t you just let me be happy that my business has over 80,000 likes on Facebook? But the truth is that as soon as you align your digital strategy with your overarching business goals, you will begin seeing growth in the metrics that matter and that will impact your business’s return on investment. In keeping with the proverb, anything worth having isn’t easily obtained. Therefore, I challenge you to go after the metrics that will move your business forward instead of languishing in a pool of clicks, likes and shares.

The Technology

The latest and greatest fridge has a new computer on the front that essentially acts as a brain. It will remind you of your shopping list and when your vegetables are about to be less-than-fresh. Heck, new refrigerators even have built-in TVs so you are never out of touch with your favorite sports team because you’re busy preparing dinner. But even more compelling than what your fridge can do is what your fridge can help you do. This brings us to the second focus.

The Consumer

We’ve all seen the Kelly Ripa doing-it-all mom commercials from Electrolux. While it does feature some of the new technology available (a stove top that boils water in a minute!), the commercial is really about how appliances make you, the consumer, more amazing and efficient. And this is at the heart of not only appliance marketing, but appliance development as a whole. After all, once women did not have to spend hours hand-washing everything, they were able to do other things–like make cookies or get a job. The dishwasher effectively gave people even more time to do the other things that matter more in their lives. Therefore, saving the consumer time and money drives a great appliance marketing campaign.

Even though this trend has been around for decades, it has not slowed down. In fact, as the world spins faster and grows smaller with the onslaught of technology and social media, we the people have an even deeper need for efficiency. We can’t be bothered to wait 30 minutes for clothes to dry; we have things to do and tweet! This explains why the idea of making the consumer more efficient is still at the heart of appliance marketing. Hiring a spokesperson like Kelly Ripa, a woman who seemingly bleeds Red Bull and sunshine, is the perfect way to synonymize your brand with multi-tasking, high energy and high efficiency. Let’s assume, however, you don’t have Kelly Ripa.

Consumers who buy appliances are essentially data-driven. They’re constantly looking for price match guarantees, iron clad warranties and lots of product reviews. Essentially, in the age of information, we know how to do our homework. Therefore, it is actually easier to align your appliance marketing with the consumer’s wants and needs. They need to be more efficient not only in using the appliance, but finding it. Make it easier for them. Here are some ideas on how to do so:

1. Provide product feedback on your product landing pages. Sally from Indiana has a family like mine and loves this dishwasher.

2. Create relevant landing pages that cater to the long-tail researcher. Take me to the right place.

3. Provide comparison scorecards among your products on-site. Explain (quickly) why X and Y dryers are different.

4. Offer video tutorials of cleaning tips or troubleshooting for the appliances. Don’t make me call a 1-800 number.

5. Make it all mobile-friendly. I’m on the go, your brand should be too.

Want to make the biggest impact on your customers? Stay focused on them. These are just some quick and easy ways you can help your consumer make the best purchasing decisions possible, and they’ll thank you for it. Streamlining the process of buying an appliance could be exactly what the consumer needs to buy your appliance instead of a competitors’. Apply what works with marketing to your business model: never underestimate the power of saving time.

Responsive design essentially creates the website’s functions and images as separate entities which grow and change as the screen size changes. If a user on a desktop makes the window smaller, the functionality of the website does not change. Similarly, the user who views the desktop version on the smartphone or tablet version can still perform the same actions. Gone are the days when the mobile version of a site is just a limited version with minimal actions you can take.

SEOMoz‘s visual account of how it works is helpful. Here is the standard view with 9 elements on the site:

Here’s what happens when you pull the screen wider:

And here’s what the elements do when you narrow the screen (or view the site on, say, an iPhone):

So what are other considerations before moving to responsive design?

First, SEO. Mobile sites used to have to compromise the amount of information that was on the page due to lack of space. With responsive design, the elements are all there on the page. When users want to find information on their smartphones, your site will have good usability, which is important to search engines. Also, people probably will not type a 7-word search query, so keeping your pages targeted to shorter keywords and keyword phrases is smart.

Second, user experience. While user experience may be enhanced for all the aforementioned reasons, it’s necessary to point out that with responsive design, your mobile site is confined to what is on your desktop site. For most businesses, this will be fine. However, for some, the mobile experience may need to be separate. Consider the reasons a user would search for your business on their mobile devices and why they would search for you on their desktops. If the reasons are quite different, having the same site content and functionality might not be the best answer for you.

An example of the useful findings from the report include:

• 50% of shoppers find it “extremely important” to find products that are both well-priced and effective
• 39% of shoppers consider obesity one of their primary health concerns
• 81% of Americans say they pay attention to nutrition labels
• More than 90% of shoppers have purchased a private label product in the last year
• While only four in 10 shoppers are willing to pay more for environmentally -friendly products, more than eight in 10 appreciate when the manufacturer bears the burden of production and offers an environmental benefit without increased cost
• 9 in 10 shoppers own a mobile phone, but 2 in 3 shoppers own a smartphone (up from 1 in 3 just last year)
• 30% of shoppers 18-34 indicated storing their shopping list on their phone regularly or occasionally, a number that is likely to increase with the promotion of organizational apps

So what does this data reveal to business owners? Price is still a main factor in driving purchasing decisions (no surprise there). Mobile marketing is a big opportunity to capture audiences, health concerns in America drive a lot of food purchasing decisions and most people want a more environmentally-friendly product without the added cost. Therefore, you are now able to market to consumers based on their most prevalent concerns. If your product does cost a bit more than your competitors, perhaps you can tout your eco-friendly product development process and target a smaller audience. If your product has a competitive price point, it’s time to focus on its proven effectiveness (ratings, recommendations, endorsements, etc.). Studies like these are great, but getting even more granular by region, age and gender can be even more telling. By leveraging consumer insights like these and more, you can find out what people want most and make data-driven business decisions about sales, marketing, inventory and more.

With the growth in the DIY trend, one might wonder, “How have ordinary homeowners suddenly become so resourceful?” Our answer – the wealth of resources available on the web!

Take Pinterest, for example. According to Pinterest directory, Repinly, outside of the food and drink category, “DIY & Crafts” accounts for the second largest share of popular pins at 9.6% of total share. Home décor follows closely in share at 8.4%.

And for those DIYers who learn best from a combination of audio & visual coaching, there’s YouTube. Search results for “DIY” return over 1.5 million video results, giving consumers guidance on everything from creating a solar water heater to replacing a dryer belt. Home store Lowe’s has certainly capitalized on this trend, creating a branded YouTube channel that features tips on painting, decorating and gardening, among other topics, to which over 36,000 consumers subscribe.

Blogs have also become a popular source for DIYers to showcase their projects and instruct followers on how they can do them as well. In fact, searching “DIY home blog” on Google returns over 344 million results! A popular favorite for home DIY project ideas among several Levelwing team members is the “Young House Love” blog. “Young House Love” is a true DIY love story, no pun intended. YHL was launched five years ago as hobby for husband and wife team, John and Sherry Petersik. As it grew in popularity among DIYers and home improvement enthusiasts, so did the time John and Sherry spent on the blog, which ultimately became a full-time job and recent book gig for them both.

Bottom line: digital presents a huge opportunity for home and garden brands. Specifically, social channels are great for positioning your brand as an educator and thought leader in the home industry, thus leading to increased brand awareness and helping push the consumer further down the purchase funnel. In addition to building brand awareness, going the “DIY” and “how-to” route allows a brand (like these tool companies) to showcase products in a not-so-pushy way.

– 42% of customers expect a response from brands within an hour of posting (Twitter users expect no more than two hours)

– 25% think it will probably be longer than an hour, but should be the same day

– 33% expect that it will be a few days before the brand responds

– 88% of customers said that if they visited a Facebook page with a lot of complaints and ignored posts from fans, they would be either “somewhat less likely” or “far less likely” to purchase with that brand.

– 89% of consumers say they have done business with a competitor due to a brand’s poor social response

Now compare those numbers to these:

– 60% of retail brand pages neglect complaints and questions on their Facebook pages

– Most big brands only respond to about 14% of tweets from customers, depending on urgency and content

To say that there is a big gap between what the customer expects and what brands are doing is putting it mildly. Therefore, let’s talk tips on how to make sure your customer service presence on social is impactful.

1. Don’t ignore anything

Don’t ignore questions, positive comments, negative comments, spam or profanity. All of these have an appropriate response. When ignored, it will make your brand look negligent of its page and fans. By the way, if you hide anything, always explain why. A simple message on the comment thread that says “All profanity will be removed for the sake of other community members” will do. Positive comments often get overlooked. That person still took the time to visit your social page and tell you how they felt, so be thankful. Say thanks, ask a relevant question to find out more about their positive experience or simply like/retweet/favorite the comment.

2. Prioritize

With Twitter especially, it can be difficult to find all of the comments people are saying about your brand. If you’re not ready to invest in a social monitoring tool, try using keywords in addition to your brand search. Some examples include “mad,” “sad,” “happy,” “angry,” “buying,” “quitting.” These will lead you to the tweets about your brand that are the most pertinent to respond to now.

3. Take it off social

When receiving negative feedback, respond quickly with a way for the user to contact someone who can help. Taking it off the Facebook page will prevent long strings of negative conversation. If the comment is not constructive (i.e.: someone wrote “Your brand sucks!”), try responding by asking questions: I’m sorry you feel that way, John. Is there anything we can do to change your mind?

4. Maintain a professional voice

There are times when you might want to say something snarky or even too casual back to the consumer. Don’t. Play by the rule that once you’ve hit send, the comment is out there forever. You can hide it from your timeline or remove it from your feed, but sometimes it has a way of coming back around. Instead, offer solutions and positivity to your customer. There are very few customers who are looking to fight; they’re mostly looking for resolution.

5. Communicate all responses to teammates

The last thing you want is a customer getting conflicting (or duplicate) responses. Therefore, it is important to discuss with your team who will be responsible for consumer response. If more than one party is involved, careful documentation must happen in order to ensure a unified brand presence across all channels.

Following these simple tips will ensure that your social channels are well-maintained. You can give your consumers the chance to get their questions answered and their complaints rectified on social media, which is where most of them are anyway.

Social Research + Intelligence

Social intelligence is something that we really believe in. It entails social media monitoring (or listening) to public consumer updates on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, in blogs, forums and more. Whenever a consumer discusses your product, brand or competition, you can be privvy to what they say (as long as their comments are public). How does this help? Well, for starters, you can assess consumer sentiment about your brand and products or services. If there is an area that you need to improve, we can guarantee that a consumer is talking about it right now online. This feedback can be indispensable because it can lead you to make data-driven business decisions based on what consumers want. Instead of creating a focus group or interfering with their time on your site with surveys, you can obtain unsolicited (ie: unfiltered) and real-time opinions that can help you make better business choices. What kinds of better business choices can be based off of social intelligence? Here are just a few examples:

1. Improve marketing. Sure, you know that your red velvet cupcakes sell the best, but do you know why? Perhaps it’s the icing consistency, perhaps it’s the price, or perhaps it’s the one that is always available at 3pm when most people crave sugar. There are so many reasons out there for you to consider. If you tap into the minds of the consumer, it may help narrow down your reasons, thus improving your marketing. Let’s say it’s the icing. You can start a campaign that tells consumers that this particular icing is now available on every flavor of cake. Let’s say it’s the 3pm availability. You can create a campaign that is targeted at afternoon snackers and tailor messaging directly to them.

2. Improve customer service. Perhaps it’s not cupcakes. Instead, you are a dentist. As you glean insights from your social research, you notice that the waiting room comes up as a sticking point for most patients. In fact, it may keep them from returning to your business. You can then set out to improve upon this aspect of your business: you could implement scheduling changes to decrease the time customers spend in the waiting room, or work on making your waiting room nicer. Add magazines, a coffee maker, a TV, a vending machine–whatever! Now you’ve provided customers with an additional reason to come back to your business.

3. Find out what your competition is up to. Sure, there are plenty of ways to assess your competition, but none may be as detailed as what you will hear from your customers. Therefore, it is important to create a social research strategy that encompasses your competition. What are consumers comparing about your two businesses? How does each succeed and where can each improve? You can glean information about what customers think regarding your competitions’ promotions, warranty and/or policies, guarantees and their loyalty to the brand. This will help you determine ways in which you can gain a competitive edge.

Price Sensitivity Analysis

Many businesses set their prices and forget it for years, but this does not optimize your business, as your margins and overhead fluctuate far more often. Price sensitivity analysis essentially aims to find the optimal combination of your cost incurred, your price point and consumer demand. Creating a graph that manipulates these variables allows you to determine at what price point consumers will buy the product or service from you (and not your competitors) and at what price point allows you to maximize profit. To assess how much consumers are willing to pay, you can look at historical data like trended demand over time, or simply submit a survey.

User-Experience Testing

Our last idea for aligning your business with consumer needs is user-experience testing. This takes place online and is a way for you to tell how your website performs with consumers. Your website is usually the first impression a consumer has about your brand nowadays. If they have a bad experience the first time, they will find other places to visit the next time they’re in the purchase consideration phase. If they have trouble loading your site, navigating its pages, if they are subjected to ugly 404 pages or reach roadblocks in your conversion funnel, you can bet that they will not return. Therefore, it is important to marry your data and creative in order to create a website that is aesthetically pleasing, search engine-friendly and, most importantly, user friendly.

To do this, you must monitor users’ reactions and engagement with your website. Then collect and analyze user feedback in order to create the optimal user experience. This will give you insight into what consumers find most valuable about your site, which gives you the opportunity to expand that offering or component. You can gain insight about your website’s design, copy, navigability and more, which will allow you to make decisions that positively impact your business. Let’s say, for example, that you’re trying to sell a product, but most consumers are coming to your site just to get reviews and information. It’s time to discover ways in which you can enhance the profitability of the site and capture consumers who are lower in the purchase funnel. This can all be done with user-experience testing.

5. Big Data is more than just an industry buzz word.

So often we see new trends and they turn out to be basically nothing (remember Google Wave?). Big Data seems a little frightening (maybe because we’re capitalizing it as a proper noun all the time), but truly, it has the power to change your business. Don’t get caught up in the fact that it’s a hot topic and deem it a fad because leveraging insights from the information it provides can inform tons of business decisions.

4. Big Data combines disparate data sources.

Building a custom solution is simpler than it sounds. Essentially, you create a program that will aggregate all of your data into a database and then you are able to ask it questions. The right questions can yield amazing insights into your business. Perhaps you never knew that weather impacted your business, or traffic, or simply the day of the week. By combining disparate data sources, you save the time it takes to aggregate the information, which allows you to spend more time analyzing the fluctuations of your business.

3. Big Data can improve your marketing.

Remember when I said that it improves your business? Well, we can begin with how it can change your marketing initiatives. For one, Big Data can provide insight about consumer behavior–and not just in relation to your business. Leveraging Big Data is about more than your customer’s purchase cycle. It’s about all the things that influence that purchase. Knowing how and why your customer makes a decision can drastically improve your marketing because you understand where your brand needs to be and what messaging is appropriate for your target audience.

2. Big Data can improve operational efficiency.

It’s not only about marketing initiatives. Imagine knowing when your business will spike and what products (and at what margins) will cause the spike. Based on historical consumer trends and current demand, you can predict that. By utilizing Big Data to predict business trends, you can improve efficiency in practically every aspect of your business: staffing, pricing, inventory, etc.

And the number one thing we love about Big Data is…

1. Big Data = Opportunity

If you’ve been saying (and typing) the phrase “the problem with Big Data,” you’ve been looking at it all wrong. Instead, look at Big Data as an opportunity–for all the examples I have just listed and more. Essentially, Big Data is “big” because the uses for it are practically endless. For example: you can assess how well your business performs historically when it rains between 10am-2pm in June. Why you would want to know this, we’re not sure, but you could probably trend these exact variables over time. This kind of limitless knowledge is scary to some people, but we think it’s better to have more than less. In order to make sure you’re not getting lost in Big Data, create your goals for using it. How, specifically, do you want to improve your business and what questions can you “ask” of Big Data to assess historical performance in these areas. Stick to your goals and the opportunity for improvement will be limitless.

Though this tells us a lot about the tool industry and how willing they are to create video and visual assets to entice their customers to buy new products, it also tells us a lot about how social media is evolving to encompass industries that were not previously seen as the “right fit” for social. Many marketers used to say that everyday products–from tissues to drill bits to laundry detergent–do not belong on social media. And yet, here they are–making successful waves across all the platforms. So how have these tool brands gone social?

First, they have leveraged video. This medium is only growing in popularity and importance. Essentially, social media is not all about sharing your products, but instead, sharing your brand’s message and helpful information to your current and potential customers. These tool companies have taken the route of giving advice to their consumer about getting projects done.

Second, they have focused on educating consumers. Though the products appear in the video, the fact is that all of the projects could be done with the help of other tools. However, it is the video’s job to plant the idea that purchasing their tool would make it even easier to do. By educating consumers, these tools companies effectively make their videos consumer-focused and limit the self-serving rhetoric.

Third, they’ve appealed to more audiences. It’s the cardinal rule of sales: expand your market. Milwaukee, for example, has developed its brand on Pinterest, which has a predominantly female audience (though the number of male users is said to be growing). Therefore, someone might think it’s not a great fit for the brand. However, upon doing a quick search for power tools, it appears that many consumers are actively pinning power tools (by other brand names). With the recession, the DIY economy has grown, and a large portion of that community is women. The audience is there, so tool companies should be creating a branded presence here as well.

All in all, social media has become less of a popularity contest and more about reaching consumers with useful content. The platforms are not limited to “clearly social” industries like fashion anymore; visual platforms like YouTube and Pinterest have ushered in the new era of social, in which practically any industry or company can be successful.

1. Analytics Implementation: As I mentioned before, many decision-makers realize that this is an imperative part of their digital media strategy. Deciding on your analytics tools, from free Google Analytics to a more in-depth solution like Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite, is the first step. Choosing a tool based on your needs and team’s ability are among factors to take into consideration as well.

2. Aggregating Intelligence: So you’ve begun tracking and analyzing initiatives, but now what? Remember, all this data is only as good as the person interpreting it and gleaning actionable insights from it. Therefore, it’s important to have a dedicated team to look at trends and create plans for how to best capitalize on these trends. Whether it is changing digital media planning and buying, marketing messaging, or more business-related needs such as switching up inventory, it is imperative that you have the right people asking the right questions of the data in order to interpret how it can be utilized best.

3. Offline + Online Matching: This is a more in-depth process than most people are used to. This process entails several complex steps of data matching, which requires getting information from marketing initiatives, website transfers and user behavior, as well as offline purchases. For example, if your brick-and-mortar store runs a paid search ad about your winter sale on shoes, you want to be able to tell how many people saw this ad and purchased not only online, but in your store, because of it. It can be done, but it rarely is. Database development can help lighten the human power it takes to harness these sources of disjointed data and retrieve the right answers.

4. Predictive Modeling: This is by far the most in-depth analytics level, but probably the most beneficial to any business. Essentially, predictive modeling allows businesses to overlay historical data, current trends and external variables to create a process that enables businesses to make data-driven decisions about their marketing, sales, research and development, etc. This form of advanced analysis can impact business across the board, giving companies the ability to manipulate variables to choose the most profitable outcome.

No matter what your level of analytics implementation is now, there is always room for improvement. Whether it is your strategy, intelligence or technology itself, analytics is more than just tracking code and conversion numbers. At the heart of analytics lies the foundation of your business intelligence. The more you have, the more you know.

According to Google, people in the U.S. get 1 billion colds a year, which is about 3 per person throughout the year. Flu + cold searches begin in September and reach their peak from December to February. But for what are people searching?

They, of course, want cold + flu remedies, whether it be medicine or just things that might make them feel more comfortable. This can impact a number of different industries aside from healthcare and pharmaceutical companies. If you’re a tea or soup brand, you could add in keywords like these during the fall and winter months to capture audiences who may need to consume a comforting, hot fluid. Companies like Netflix could add in these keywords to capture people who might be sick in bed and wanting to stream movies. In short, staying abreast of search volume trends that seemingly have nothing to do with your business may actually pay off in the end. Your competitors might not be thinking of varying their keywords for search engine marketing and may be missing out on opportunities like these.

This infographic also affirms the mobile search growth. There was an 88% increase in the 2010-2011 year for healthcare-related searches. People may be searching from the couch or on the go, but the key is for your brand’s marketing initiatives to be mobile-friendly in order to capture these visits from potential customers. Now, isn’t that more than you expected to glean from a simple infographic about cold + flu searches?

The power of mobile for weight loss programs is obvious. First, they’re extremely user-friendly, since many people are spending tons of time a day in mobile apps anyway. Secondly, they set users up for success. They are easily accessible, which means users can get information while shopping at the grocery store, while ordering at a restaurant or while at the gym. Teaching is the primary approach for many of the weight loss mobile apps since education is the key to enacting lifestyle changes. The secondary approach of these apps are simply developing good habits. If users gets into the habit of using the app, they are likely to consult it when trying to make a decision about their health.

Automatic integration with the desktop version of the site is also a big component of these weight loss apps. Users do not want to have to enter in their information more than once, so this sync is important. It is also a great practice for the app developers and its marketers, as this gives them insight into their consumers’ behaviors away from the app.

In that vein, let’s discuss the best weight loss apps and their tactics for reaching their user every day:

1. Gym-Pact: This app is very unique in that it eliminates the “excuses” that people give for not going to the gym. You are able to link your bank account with the app and each time you miss a workout, it automatically withdraws the amount you agreed to. Additionally, those that do not break their gym pacts are paid with the funds withdrawn from those who did break it. Though it’s not a monumental amount of money, it can add up, and it gives users incentives–to lose money or gain money–beyond just losing weight or getting in shape.

2. Weight Watchers: This is probably the most popular weight loss program on the planet, and the app is a great tool. You can photograph your meal and it will give you the points total. This takes out the guessing game of entering food information, which gets tricky, especially at restaurants.

3. Fooducate: This app allows you to scan the barcode of products you’re purchasing and get up front information about them. This is important for those of us who are incredibly confused by the ingredients list on most foods.

4. Thin-Cam: Similar to the Weight Watchers photography ability, the Thin Cam will analyze the food you capture and upload by food nutritionists. It will also give you feedback on appropriate portions. It’s kind of like having tiny experts in your pocket.

The data collected by these apps is virtually endless and can be used to entice relevant advertisers as well as make the user experience better. Most apps also incorporate a community aspect, mostly through forums and “friends,” which can help drive motivation and encouragement throughout the process. These communities are all housed online, so it’s possible for this information to be mined through social intelligence research to glean insights about making the apps and services more comprehensive.