But instead, I think this year is a better time for recognition, an affirmation if you will, that agility is not only important, but it’s becoming the primary digital business advantage.

(Digital) Business Advantage
We’re all pretty aware that the pace of business is moving faster. Companies have been talking about accelerating, optimizing and innovating for years. Agile software development has been around for over a decade, so what’s different now?

The difference is how disruptive agility is becoming to the core business and how unaware and ill-prepared most companies are for the coming change.

Top themes in our discussions with business leaders:

• Agility is the advantage: Companies can’t afford to be “done” with projects in a world where competitors can quickly copy (and nullify) whatever competitive advantage your new web site or mobile app was promised to provide. Agility itself is often the defining advantage in the marketplace.
• Change is the constant: Transformation, disruption and adaption are no longer single events to be managed. They are the new normal of business, and they are accelerating.
• Fast follower is a losing option: What value or advantage is created by examining what competitors have already done, particularly when it will likely change again before you can respond to their first effort?

If your primary focus and investment is in redesigning your web site or creating a new social media marketing campaign then it might be time to look a little further down the road.

The Paradox of Agility
Most initial efforts to increase agility will usually result in the company slowing…the paradox of agility. Not slowing in activity—that’s usually off the charts—but a slowing in the ability of the company to create new value, advantage or even fully complete one digital initiative before bouncing to the next in ever-increasing cycles (sales-driven companies, I’m looking at you).

Instead, the faster you want to go, the more strategic and dedicated to the long term you (and your leadership) need to be.

• Want the agility of Amazon?  CEO Jeff Bezos often talks about planning 4-5 years out for “new” digital game changers
• Innovate like Apple? Former CEO Steve Jobs described his vision for the iPhone and iPad in 2001, talking about the Digital Hub
• Change the game like Barnes & Noble? They invested in creating an entirely new (and separate) digital team dedicated to redefining their future

Digital Agility Requires Forgetting about Digital
Rather than focusing on how to do more digital initiatives faster, first put digital aside.  There are three foundations you’ll need before digital discussions will be helpful

1. Understand customer needs—the problems you solve, not the products or services you sell.
2. Understand how your company can consistently differentiate and win, given customer needs.
3. Define what business capabilities you need to deliver on points 1&2.

Get through these are you’re ready to start talking about how the design of your people, process and digital platforms can enable new capabilities, accelerate innovation and growth, and (of course) increase your company’s agility and advantage in the market.

It was the first in ExactTarget’s now 11-year history to combine sales, service and partners as it builds its trajectory to take the company public. The ExactTarget story continues largely due to well-executed and personable leaders who inspire their team of orange to live the dream by ExactTarget numbers: revenue, profitability, cash flow and CSAT numbers. Humble and straight-talking visionaries are cognizant of the fact that none is achievable in a vacuum and invested the audience’s time in the criteria of team, leadership, trust and communication.

With 2011 numbers are strong, their confidence made it feel predictable even. SEC filing managed and ticker-symbol set. Balancing the right degree of transparency was also established. It was a checklist of corporate good health and a viable good investment when their filing is complete.

ExactTarget’s Interactive Marketing Hub and the Hub Exchange provides some compelling differentiators leveraging ExactTarget’s power of execution, speed to innovation, multi-channel and total cost of ownership for their clients.

During the conference, ExactTarget’s research showed 48% of clients’ core issues revolve around managing interactive marketing cross-channels. Continuing the dialog, ExactTarget host Rob Brosnan, Forrester’s Senior Analyst of Customer Intelligence, previewed and explained the framework for the Wave report in both ExactTarget’s categories of Email Service Provider and Cross-Channel Campaign Management (CCCM). One of the highlights is the overwhelming factor of cost for retaining CCCM systems and the customer demand for a personalized customer experience. Eighty-two percent NPS from ExactTarget’s existing clients was a compelling statistic.

Acquity Group is a strategic alliance partner to ExactTarget, combining strategy, design and technology in one place for creating, building and maintaining cross-channel digital marketing campaigns that will help you acquire, engage and retain your customers and consumers for any enterprise globally.

What started as an effort to provide disabled individuals with ease of use in regard to technologies, has now evolved into its own science. With a heavy focus on human factors engineering, a new system has developed to evaluate how users interact best with tasks, systems, and environments. As digital customers become more sophisticated and begin demanding readily accessible interactions in real-time, the necessity of incorporating multimodal strategies within your business and marketing plans will become evident.

The increased desire for multimodal interactions has been felt across several industries, from the automobile industry to the gaming industry and beyond.  One cause is as consumers are subjected to constant onslaughts of information and sensory overload in almost every aspect of their lives, multimodality provides a light at the end of the tunnel. Multimodality is a resource that can help alleviate the tedious process of information absorption and prioritization.

One example is how automobile manufacturers are applying the concept of experience design to transfer more processing tasks away from drivers and onto the cars. By creating smarter cars that have the ability to detect and react to their environment, cars can now share in the act of making driving decisions. Nissan’s new radar solution does exactly that. Attached to the rear bumper, these radar sensors can detect when another car is in a driver’s blind spot. And rather than compete against a plethora of driving distractions from incoming phone calls to warning lights and fighting children, to communicate the car employs both audible and tactile channels. When a driver attempts to change lanes or merge and someone is in their blind spot this sets into motion the following: an audible alarm, an electronic yawing of the brakes, and a subtle righting of the wheel bringing the car back into the center of the lane. Infiniti provides a similar technology in their cars – both systems help their drivers avoid becoming one of the 830,000 blind spot accidents that occur yearly (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration).

However, this is not the only driver for multimodal strategies. Two main functions of multimodal interactions are to reach new levels of consumer engagement and lower consumer learning curves. In the gaming industry you need to look no further than the XBOX Kinect or its competitors Nintendo Wii and Playstation Move. These systems feature a natural user interface to enable the use of gestures and spoken commands as a method of interaction. This capability is supported by software technology equipped with motion capture, and voice and facial recognition. Now gamers can lose the controller and actively participate through a new input channel – be it dancing to DDR or battling aliens in Space Invaders Extreme. As for the reduction in the learning curve, this is evident by the rise of new consumer markets and the decline of the teenage gaming stereotype. Walk through a family living room these days and you might see a mom exercising to Wii Fit Zumba Fitness or a group of adolescent girls dancing to ‘TiK ToK’ on Just Dance.

It’s evident that multimodal interaction is exuding a strong influence in the experience design space. Examples of its application appear to be boundless – we can continue with how Siri and similar software technologies (Google’s Majel Project) are shaping the mobile phone market, or General Electric’s Kitchen of the Future. These technologies are revolutionizing the way our society interacts with products, systems, and in turn each other. A decade ago it would have been hard to imagine cars making decisions, or dictating instructions to your phone’s operating system. All in all, experience design and multimodal interaction is working to integrate technology seamlessly in all aspects or our lives. It will be exciting to witness what is to come next in this field.

The Facebook ad offering has matured since its inception and the advertiser has precision targeting options that essentially feed users more relevant ads. Some of those ads take on the shape of the Facebook news feed model and are shared across friend’s pages much like any other story in your feed. This allows the ads on Facebook to have viral potential (something paid search does not have) and this benefits advertisers by opening them up to the number one channel of consumer influence – the “peer” channel.

Beyond Facebook Ads 101 – what are some advanced tips for advertising on  Facebook that can help you catch some viral heat? Here is a list of seven advanced Facebook advertising tips:

1. Logos are not overly successful. If you feel that your brand is appealing enough to have your logo be the stand-alone incentive for a user to click, use your logo. Otherwise, tests have shown that users react more positively to an ad that doesn’t feature a company’s logo.
2. Refresh every 10-12 days. Refresh your images and/or your copy. If you monitor dynamic ad habits vs. static you will realize that having ever-changing ad creative makes a world of difference in performance primarily because the networks tend to reward active advertising participants with more impressions. The same stands true for Linkedin Ads.
3. Using questions in the title can increase your CTR. Experiment with questions in your title – not in the body copy. Users love to give their opinions in social environments and questions catalyze interest activity.
4. Spend most of your time on specific targeting. Unlike most other platforms, Facebook has plenty of rich user data that includes their interests based on factual profiles and not general categorizations found within some online display targeting. Take advantage of this by targeting geo-specific messaging to age groups and interests that can make use of your product. Do NOT mass advertise on this network. Target, target target.
5. Use a time prompt within your ads and couple it with exclusivity. Traditional marketing time statements like NOW and LIMITED TIME will work but try mixing in these terms with a value word/phrase that makes them seem exclusive so that the user won’t feel that everyone is getting the same add and same value prop… This is where targeting can make or break you.
6. Third Person Can Work. Some brands have claimed that using the third person in their ads has increased their CTRs. You can create ads that say “for him” or “she cares.”
7. Monitor ads that perform well in a CPC model and try them in a CPM model to compare costs. This is somewhat common sense but a lot of marketers don’t think about it. They see their ads performing well with high CTRs and don’t ever consider moving that ad to a CPM model. If you have an ad that is clicked often it may save you money to place that ad in a CPM model. Monitor and optimize based on the working model that costs less.

Of course, these are seven tips to experiment with. You should not expect every one of these tips to work in your favor 100% of the time but nonetheless, you should be testing them out and use them to optimize your campaign frequently.

By that time, they predict that having a gamified marketing service or customer retention program will be as important as having a marketing presence on Facebook. M2 Research claims that corporations spent over $100 million on gamification processes in 2010, and that number is expected to grow to as much as $2.8 billion by 2016.

Even for those who have never picked up a video game controller, it’s hard not to notice that the world around us is becoming increasingly gamified. Happy hours, frequent flyer miles, credit card rewards, and grocery/department store loyalty programs are all games at their most basic level. Such programs simply encourage and reward brand interaction through the use of milestones and incentives.

What are the Benefits?
Games themselves are inherently addictive because they appeal to some of our most basic human desires, namely competition, power, status, achievement, and self-expression. In addition, gaming principles tend to emphasize accelerated feedback cycles and short-term, achievable goals, which are effective in increasing and maintaining engagement. While the “real world” tends to be rather open-ended, games are effective because they establish simple goals and rules, where achievement can be quantified on something as simple as a progress bar.

Gamification translates remarkably well to the digital space, where most incentives need not even be tangible. Leaderboards, achievement levels, badges, and virtual currency come at almost no added per-unit cost to the business, but can be a big motivator to users. As a result, firms would be wise to consider using gamification concepts to help them deliver rich, memorable experiences to their customers.

What are the Risks?
However, gamification offers some significant risks. A firm needs to thoroughly understand what motivates its customers, or it runs the risk of rewarding the ineffective customers and punishing the valuable customers. If the rewards promised are excessive, the business will end up raising customer expectations and making promises that it can’t fulfill.

Gamification should only supplement an existing intelligence-driven strategy—otherwise, it will just add an extra layer of complexity to an already broken system.

Keys to a Successful Game

• Figure out what behavior you want to encourage. Since the point of gamification is to award specific actions, take a look at your organization’s business goals and figure out which related user tasks you want to focus on.
• Be devoted to the maintenance process. In order for the “game” to work, the process needs to be refreshed from time to time. Add new challenges and achievements to keep users engaged, taking into account the feedback you’re getting from analytics.
• Focus on the perceived value being delivered. If the user doesn’t believe they’re actually achieving anything by playing the game, they won’t play it. Thus, even for virtual rewards, consider whether the user’s perceived value earned is greater than the work they are putting in. On the flip side, if you promise your users too much, the gamification process either won’t be worth the effort or may yield negative value.
• Capture customer intelligence data. Aside from increased user engagement, one of the most important things about gamification is that you can learn more about your customers and their behavior. Not only can this information be used to improve the gamification process itself, but it can also drive process improvement in other facets of your business as well.

To check out more results from this study, check out Acquity Group’s latest issue of Results.

Acquity Group and Adobe recently hosted an executive dinner in New York City at the New York Public Library, featuring a presentation by Paul Hagen from Forrester.

During this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday, traditionally the start of the holiday shopping season, consumers showed no sign of slowing down – online spending maintained its upward swing despite the lackluster economy. Consider these two statistics released by IBM: Online spending increased by 24.3% on Black Friday and increased by 33% on Cyber Monday.

Additionally, comScore released an initial report of $6 billion spent online between Monday, November 28, to Sunday, December 4 alone, totaling a staggering $20 billion spent online during November 1st to early December. This marks an overall increase of 15% over last year. Mobile traffic to retailers’ websites, meanwhile, has grown more than 200%.

The increase in online shopping revenue – particularly during this Holiday shopping season can be attributed to mass-market proliferation of smart phones and mobile devices as well. Several notable online shopping trends evidenced during Black Friday and Cyber Monday were the prominent use of mobile devices – iPhones, iPads, and Andriod phones – to visit retailers sites to make actual purchase, and the use of mobile devices to research online deals and then purchase using their mobile devices. IBM Coremetrics reported mobile traffic increased to 14.3% from 5.6% for Black Friday and 6.6% from 2.3% for Cyber Monday.

These staggering trends not only reinforce the need for brands and retailers to continue increasing their investment in the eCommerce space, brands and businesses now must respond agilely to keep pace with consumers’ adoption of mobile devices and social media for research, product comparison, and shopping. Furthermore, brands and businesses can be better positioned to increase their online revenue by investing more in the cross-channel commerce and brand commerce space, and enabling consumers by guiding them through the purchase-decision process through various touch points and channels.