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Five Questions To Start The (Still) New Year

1. Does your target Digg your ads?

As if zapping wasn't bad enough, now readers on Digg can essentially vote ads off the island while promoting the ones they like to star status. For the un-dug, Digg is the highly popular, tech-focused news site where the stories are chosen by the users -- the more Diggs a story get, they higher its ranking on the site.

And now that ads can be Digged or Buried, marketers will get real-time feedback on the relative appeal of their ads to this highly influential target. If you're targeting techies, this could be the cheapest copy test you ever tried and the most eye opening.

2. Is your marketing worth retweeting?

While the joys of tweeting may still escape you personally, the phenomenal reach of Twitter is undeniable. In addition to the 20 million or so global users, tweets now appear as status updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and other social networks, extending the reach of tweets to just about everyone marketers might want to reach.

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This isn't kid stuff either. Professionals between 35 and 49 are the biggest tweeters of them all. So, if you create marketing worth tweeting about, the world will find out about it faster than you can say, "Wow, that's tweet."

3. Are interns handling your social media?

This is not a trick question. I've been asked this a lot in the last few months, and it is a reflection of the naive belief that it is okay to put a brand's social media campaign in the hands of novices. One senior marketer even told me that his company uses interns for all their social media and then shrugs off the lost intellectual capital when the interns move on.

As social media advances from experimental to the frontlines of customer relationship management, building and maintaining expertise is essential to optimizing results and avoiding PR nightmares. After all, would you ever put an intern on the phone with the press or your top customers?

4. How many customer "love letters" do you get each month?

It is a simple fact -- beloved brands do better. Becoming beloved requires achieving customer satisfaction on the basics (product quality) and somehow exceeding expectations via service. Zappos calls this delivering "wow" and does this wherever they can. The Apple Store does this with its amazingly knowledgeable squad of orange-shirted concierges.

Others use "Marketing as Service" to create brand love, like the HSBC BankCab whose riders send at least one love letter every week. So ask yourself, what could your marketing be doing (versus saying) to generate this kind of passion?

5. Do you have an app yet?

Two thousand nine was the year of the app rush for marketers. Everyone from Blockbuster to ZipCar, Betty Crocker to Starbucks, Fandango to The Food Network cooked up mobile apps for their prospects and customers. In fact, well more than 100 brands joined the fun, some as pragmatic extensions of their service offering (like FedEx mobile) and others as engaging entertainment that enhanced brand perceptions (like Scion's AV Radio).

Given the low development costs of mobile apps and the millions of smartphone users, there is still time to get app happy.

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