The daily-deals company announced that revenue and active customers were way up on a year-over-year basis. The company said it was in the black for the first time, swinging from a $336.1 million loss to an operating income of $15 million. Reuters points out, however, that Groupon reported a quarterly net loss of $42.7 million, in large part due to high overseas taxes.

Again, there is a disparity between what Groupon is saying (hey look, we’ve gone from a loss to some operating income) and the reality of the situation (they reported a net loss while Wall Street was hoping for a small profit).

Marketing is a hot button for the company. Marketing expenses are down $28.7 million, with active users up 33 percent. Mason says the company is investing more in “transactional marketing,” which focuses on purchases, rather than just customer acquisition. He believes this has the ability to bring down the company’s marketing costs even more. Mason also explained that he sees “Groupon Now” customers becoming more loyal, and are more likely to become repeat customers. And, for the merchants, nine out of 10 customers spend more than the value of the Groupon itself.

Groupon is also particularly interested in continuing to make advances in its technology. The company has an “initiative” it has yet to announce, which will deal with expanding its technology. Recently, Groupon acquired Adku, an e-commerce promotional vehicle, which provides “suggested items” to customers. This technology alone is a boost to Groupon’s existing portfolio.

Check out their numbers below:

• Revenue of $506.5 million, up 194% year-over-year
• Free Cash Flow of $155.1 million, up 258% year-over-year
• Operating Income of $15.0 million, up from $336.1 million loss
• Non-GAAP EPS of negative $0.02, including $0.07 of tax from international operations, up from negative $0.53
• Active customers increase to over 33 million, up over 275% year-over-year

Additional reporting by Meghan Kelly

The service seeks to find and tend to customer advocates, people who rally around and talk up their favorite brands and get rewards for doing so. Extole not only provides tools for clients to market themselves, it also advises its clients on how to use its services, achieve certain goals, and gain brand ambassadors.

“Our platform helps our customers find their advocates and have those advocates create and share social content,” said Extole chief executive Brad Klaus in an interview with VentureBeat, “We have two types of content we aim to generate: testimonials and social actions.”

Testimonials are what you’d expect; written recommendations and reviews of the business or product. And social actions include a Facebook “Like”, a tweet, or an email opt-in. Businesses can use this customer-generated content however they like and can reward customers for producing content with points, gift cards, or charitable donations.

One prime example of how Extole works comes from its client Roku, the small set-top device that streams movies and TV. Roku realized about a quarter of its sales resulted from customer referrals and it enlisted the help of Extole to create a “social referral program” to boost that number. Customers were asked to talk up the device to their friends and family and for every referral that resulted in a Roku purchase, the original customer would receive a free month of Netflix.

The company just announced that it’s closed a third round of funding led by Shasta Ventures, which will be used to grow the company and create more tools to spur customer referrals.

Extole was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in San Francisco, Calif. The company employs a team of 70, and its clients include Redbox, AAA, and Kate Spade. Extole has raised $22 million from Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Trident Capital, and Shasta Ventures.

SocialFlow, which helps brands and publishers optimize their performance across Facebook and Twitter, is launching its self-service platform today. The company has had a banner year, growing from just two employees to more than 30 and graduating from the Betaworks building to its own office on the east side of Manhattan.

To get a sense of how the company works, let’s take the example from one of their clients, The Economist. With SocialFlow, which guides which messages The Economist puts out to its followers and when, the venerable publisher has grown its social media fan base five times faster than average and increased engagement with its audience at a rate eight times greater than before it used Social Flow.

“The best performing tweet The Economist sent out last year was between three and four in the morning on a weekday,” SocialFlow co-founder Frank Speiser told VentureBeat. “It was an article questioning the value of a PhD. No human would ever have predicated that was the best approach and the most significant article for their audience. Only an algorithm can key into an opportunity like that.”

SocialFlow’s new product allows anyone to tap into its platform for an affordable entry price of $99 a month. “We think this is something that could benefit a lot of individuals, not just big brands,” Speiser said. “If you have tens of thousands of followers, you don’t want to pollute their stream with errant noise.”

The company’s new office’s on 45th and Lexington will put it in close proximity to Facebook and Twitter’s New York outposts, allowing for increased collaboration. With 2,000 paying accounts, SocialFlow has a sizable revenue stream for an early stage startup. But Speiser says the company is likely to raise another round of funding this year. “We have so much demand for the product, it just makes sense to hire sales people to capture all that potential.”

Over the next couple of years, the company’s revenue is forecast to reach $399.5 million in 2013 and $540 million by 2014.

Year-over-year revenue growth for 2011 to 2012 is estimated to be at 83 percent; that growth rate is expected to slow to 36 percent by 2014.

For a company that (rather famously) didn’t have a business model just three years ago, it’s been a dramatic climb.

Still these ad dollars pale in comparison to what Facebook will rake in this year, a figure in the multibillion dollar range.

It’s difficult to imagine Twitter playing at the same scale. According to previous forecasts, Twitter won’t pass $1 billion in revenue until at least 2016.

These estimates come from online intel firm eMarketer.

In an email conversation with VentureBeat, an eMarketer spokesperson said, “We forecast in early 2011 that Twitter would earn $150 in revenue that year, and that number was subsequently cut in September — a result of Twitter’s slower-than-expected rollout of several ad offerings including ad sales offices in markets outside the U.S. and a platform enabling advertisers to buy ads on a self-serve basis.”

Twitter’s money comes almost entirely from ad products, with some coming from deals to access Twitter’s Firehose API.

Late last year, Twitter introduced a new ad product that would serve promotional tweets even to users who didn’t follow the Twitter account of the brand or person in question.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said at a meeting three weeks ago that the ad products are selling well and that brands are happy with the results.

“We continue to see great engagement rates,” he stated. “The health of the business is great.”

One thing Twitter hasn’t done is publish a breakdown of which Promoted products are performing best or how much revenue comes from which ad products — a set of statistics we’re sure brands would love to get their hands on.

As far as valuation is concerned, other sources peg Twitter’s 2011 enterprise value around $3 billion and its market capitalization around $3.6 billion.

I knew what I wanted to say in these posts but I struggled to find the right words to express my thoughts. I knew my blog needed an objective — a common thread between my posts that would drive home the bigger message. But finding the right chemistry between that objective, the words on the screen, and the tone and attitude that would define my voice was no easy task. Increasingly, it took more time and effort than my schedule allowed.

So I hired a journalist.

Actually, he’s a former journalist; a longtime beat reporter and editor who has worked for some high profile publications and is pretty well-respected for his expertise. Unlike many of his newspaper colleagues, he was not handed a pink slip. Instead, he walked away from a journalism gig that was both high-profile and frenzied, and launched a business that offers “content strategy” services to companies looking to enhance their online voices. I was one of his first clients.

Now, he and I collaborate regularly on my blog posts and other writing projects. We’ve developed a objective that centers around positioning me as an expert on safe online marketplaces. He reigns me in when it comes to tooting my own horn. He helps me practice some restraint and diplomacy when I feel compelled to blast my competitors. He makes sure that I’m not just repeating headlines but focusing my thoughts around particular news events.

He’s making me relevant.

More importantly, he’s charging me a fraction of what a PR firm might charge me for a bunch of other services that I might not really need. Because he’s juggling a number of other clients, he’s not devoting 40 hours a week to my blog strategy and content, and that’s OK with me. My blog is an important part of my business but it’s not a full-time element.

We’ve agreed that payment by-the-hour or by-the-word isn’t a good approach for us. Neither of us is interested in watching the clock or counting words. Instead, we have agreed upon a flat-rate price for a set number of posts, an approach that ends up costing me hundreds of dollars of per blog post instead of tens of thousands of dollars per month to retain a PR firm — not that a PR firm could even offer such expertise without former journalists on its staff.

Granted, I could have hired some random freelance writer to help me blog, but I’m getting so much more with a traditional journalist on my team. Our conversations are filled with insight into the news business. He knows how newsroom editors think. He knows how to lure readers into online discussions. He knows which topics will spark some buzz and which ones will generate yawns. And yes, he says, headlines matter.

From what he and I have been able to find, relationships like ours are pretty unique. We’ve heard of only a few instances of companies turning to former journalists to help them develop content for their sites, and most of that is project-based, instead of ongoing. We’ve also found — anecdotally, mind you — that journalists aren’t necessarily out there hawking their skills and going after business relationships with companies.

Truth be told, many of them don’t recognize how much they bring to the table when it comes to meeting business needs. Journalists have made careers out of gathering information and then using words to clearly explain, inform and educate other. They become experts in their beats. And yet they aren’t big on selling themselves or their expertise.

A working journalist who covers the same field isn’t usually available to be hired by a company like mine, due to ethics and and the need to avoid anything that might compromise those values. However, media is a tough industry, and some writers are looking for a career shift into new fields where they can get paid to apply their journalism skills.

The good news for these people is that companies outside of the news business are starting to recognize what they bring to the table. In the long run, as they put their hands on more content outside of traditional news outlets, the core values of journalism — along with some quality writing — could seep into this new, expanded blogosphere, raising its credibility and eventually changing the perceptions around blog posts as forms of journalism.

Greg Collier is the founder and CEO of Geebo, an online classifieds site. He is a California native who now lives in McLean, VA with his family.

Typewriter image via ShutterStock

The comic book is titled “Steve Jobs: Founder of Apple and is scheduled to hit Amazon as well as physical newsstands and comic books stores on Wednesday. Soon after Jobs’ death in October, people became hungry for more on his life story. Walter Isaacson’s biography was hugely anticipated, but despite its completeness, people still wanted more. Talks about unpublished interviews and plans Jobs may have left behind are still circling among the Apple fan crowd. What’s the next natural step? Make the story a cartoon.

Publisher Bluewater decided to create the book based on its previous success with another hot name in Silicon Valley: Mark Zuckerberg. The Jobs comic book is 32 pages long and chronicles his experience with Apple from the beginning. It does not, however, mention Jobs’ passing as the book was put in production prior to the event.

“Admire him or dislike him, Jobs’ vision and business acumen revolutionized the world,” said comic book author in a statement, “Between he and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, you would be hard pressed to find someone with greater influence over how we communicate, interact and do business over the last 30 years.”

This is not the first product to bear Jobs’ likeness since his death. Recently two companies, In Icons and Dragon in Dream Corporation, created an extremely realistic (scarily so) action figure of Steve Jobs. The doll was being offered at $100 with an estimated shipping date of February. That is, until Apple stepped in threatening to sue for unauthorized use of Jobs’ likeness and the Apple logo. The mini Jobs, complete with black turtleneck, was to be packaged with two apples and a “One More Thing” backdrop.

Bluewater, which also works with celebrities such as William Shatner, isn’t stopping with Jobs. A graphic biography of Bill Gates will be released in March, completing the trilogy of cartoonified powerful tech icons, who Bluewater says have a lot in common.

“There are definitely some similarities between Zuckerberg, Jobs and Gates. It takes a certain kind of drive and a certain kind of genius to move society the way they have,” said Cooke.

The Steve Jobs comic book will be sold for $4. The comic book was written by CW Cooke and illustrated by Chris Schmidt. You can also pre-order Bill Gates’ comic book here.

The rule of thumb is that a few crucial conferences are a must, and that it’s better to go all-in for the best events, like CES, then to spread yourself thin at a lot of lackluster ones. And CES, which begins this week in Las Vegas, is definitely one of the events for tech startups to attend.

It’s hard enough to make a splash with a six-figure budget, so how do you make an impression as a startup at an event like CES? What can you do with a small budget and limited human resources? Luckily, you don’t need a booth to make an impact, you need a plan.

What’s most important about CES is that it’s the one place where everyone in the industry gathers for a few days each year. That means a wealth of opportunities for new business meet-and-greets, a forum to connect with people you’ve only communicated with via email, and a chance to pitch your story to the media.

If you’re spending the majority of your time looking at other people’s products at CES, then you’re not pushing your own. The name of the game is booking 50 meetings in one day instead of 50 days of meetings. If your goal is business development then your focus is building relationships, and there’s nothing quite like meeting face-to-face to do that. When you meet someone the second or third time, and feel like you know each other, that’s when the big integrations happen.

Here are a few other helpful hints to consider for CES, and for any other big conferences on your schedule this year. They aren’t earth-shattering revelations, but they’re often things that busy entrepreneurs forget time after time:

Early bird specials: Show up a places early because there’s a good chance others will too. Hotel lobbies and bars will be packed with people killing time before the show or events start — a perfect opportunity to meet them before things get too hectic.

Be visible: Be your product, your platform and your brand. Wear that company t-shirt, it’s a sure-fire way to strike up a conversation quickly and create a presence (so bring a few extras to give out!).

Be frugal: You have neither time nor money to waste. Book the low cost flight, share an Airbnb with other start-up folks. Don’t have a booth? Tap into your partners to see if you can also share their space.

It’s not a holiday: Focus. Stick to a schedule. Let people know what parties you’ll be attending and forward them invites. You need to go where the people you want to meet are. Ask around. Ask potential partners and journalists where they will be. Ask VCs. Read blog posts about conferences in your field. Organize.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas … but it shouldn’t: There’s no point in treating this as a one-off. Be sure to follow-up with the connections you’ve made and work those relationships for when you meet them again.

When the show’s over, you need to come away with more than a stack of business cards, you need to have built some solid relationships. Maybe there’s a deal or two in the bag. That’s when you’ll know that CES was a winner.

Henrik Lenberg is the Vice President of Platform at SoundCloud, the leading social sound platform that lets anyone create, record, promote and share their sounds on the Web. In this role, Henrik is responsible for SoundCloud’s partnership integrations and business development. Henrik joined SoundCloud in 2009. You can follow him on Twitter at: @lenberg.

For Rob Tarkoff, chief executive officer of Lithium, social is the next frontier for marketers. Lithium uses social media — beyond Facebook, as Tarkoff stresses — to connect with a brand’s customers and decipher who the bull horns are.

It’s well understood that people are more willing to buy a product if the recommendation comes from a friend, as opposed to coming from the company itself. We are taught the sellers are inherently untrustworthy. Company statements are easily written off because of this, but if a peer’s has something to say, we’re persuaded to listen.

“Marketers are starting to recognize peer-to-peer and there are going to be big changes over the next three years,” said Tarkoff in an interview with VentureBeat. “CMOs are saying they’re going to double or triple their spend on social.”

Social media is effectively free marketing for a company who knows its customer base. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and other users all drive huge amounts of content every day and deliver it straight to your customers’ inbox. In order to get your product into social mouths, however, Lithium must identify the big influencers and convince them to start talking about your product on the Internet. They accomplish this convincing process by appealing to the high schooler in all of us: feeling popular. Lithium calls this the, “underlying science of behavioral motivation.”

“In the online world reputation is everything, it’s the content you produce,” said Tarkoff.

Lithium’s “engagement” products make you feel like a “thought leader,” an industry expert on a certain subject. It makes you feel like people are listening. That sense of self righteousness is your ticket to social media buzz.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sees this sharing as the way people will ultimately engage with anything. That is, he believes when you share socially, you influence your peers to listen to a certain kind of music, read news articles, watch similar movies and more. At the company’s developer conference in September 2011, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook likes would evolve to have its own vocabulary. People sharing would then be able to do more than like, they could “play,” “buy,” or any other number of verbs.

“I absolutely think [what Zuckerberg says] is right and is at the core of our business,” said Tarkoff. “Facebook is totally aligned with us.”

Lithium plans to use the funding, led by new investors New Enterprise Associates and SAP Ventures, to acquire complementary technologies. Tarkoff, who joined the company in September, says Lithium has been on “cash flow positive” for the last few quarters and hopes the money will help it become a “consolidator” in 2012.

The Ace, which is expected to launch exclusively on AT&T in March, is being positioned as a “hero” device by the carrier and Microsoft, reports Betanews. That means AT&T will promote the phone through advertising, in stores, and via store associates.

It’s the sort of carrier push that no Windows Phone device has had before — and it comes just in time. Former Windows Phone general manager Charlie Kindel recently pointed to a lack of carrier cooperation as one of the biggest issues holding the platform back.

Windows Phone certainly has a number of other issues to deal with, in particular the lack of strong developer support (though that’s improving). But the major marketing campaign, plus the Ace’s killer specs (it’s said to be Nokia’s unannounced flagship device, the Lumia 900), should make for a good start to the year for the platform.

It’s unclear at this point how the marketing funds will be divided up between Microsoft, AT&T, and Nokia. But news of the marketing effort still demonstrates how much the phone matters to its partners. It’s reminiscent of how Verizon Wireless helped to back the original Motorola Droid years ago, via a massive marketing campaign that helped to spark the widespread popularity of Android.

Update: Microsoft and its partners may be pouring even more money into the platform than this report suggests, according to Paul Thurrott at Windows IT Pro, who says the total marketing efforts may weigh in closer to $200 million.

Image via Pocketnow

Darcy was one of many users of the smartphone-based on-demand car service to complain about the high New Year’s pricing. He called Uber around 1:45 a.m. after wrapping up New Year’s Eve celebrations at San Francisco’s Final Final. “There was a message that popped up about surge pricing from Uber, but I didn’t see how much it was going to be or how many times (4.25x) the charge was going to be,” he said. “Not to mention that we all had been drinking. I was calling an Uber for my wife and her friend who were wearing heels and didn’t want to walk.”

The 4.25x charge Darcy paid wasn’t even the worst of it. In an example on its Web site, Uber shows New York users faced a 6.25x surcharge.

Here is Uber’s definition of surge pricing:

We raise the price of our service when the supply of available cars gets tight. [Example: If there are 300 on the Uber system in a city and 290 of them are picking up a rider or in trip, then this would be considered an extremely tight supply situation.] We raise the price in increments over time based on supply health. When supply opens up, we then lower the price.

If Uber didn’t have surcharges, there likely would have been a crush of demand. This would have caused long wait times and a different form of negative experience. That’s what happens with cabs. Because their fares are regulated, they can’t legally raise fares for special events. (Although some cities do have special provisions for higher fares during periods of cab shortages or snowstorms.) The result is a de facto lottery, where only a few lucky people are able to take advantage of the below-market rates.

Technology allows us to finally do what we were taught in the abstract in economics class: match the supply and demand curves to set the optimal price.

Demand-based pricing is all around us: Airlines and hotels have used it for decades. In fact, a week before Darcy paid $86.30 per mile for a cab ride, I flew a Christmas night redeye from Oakland to Washington’s Dulles airport for $0.016 per mile — and that bottom of the barrel pricing still wasn’t enough to fill up a plane on Christmas. In more low-tech scenarios, many restaurants create “special” (i.e. more expensive) menus for New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day. Parking rates at baseball games often vary based on the opponent. San Francisco is experimenting with parking meters that set rates according to demand history. In my favorite experiment with demand-based pricing, Coca-Cola tested a vending machine that would adjust prices based on the outside temperature. That experiment was slightly less successful than New Coke.

So if demand-based pricing is all around us, why did Uber’s New Year’s surcharge cause such a stir?

Uber’s blog post does a reasonable job of explaining the economic theory behind its surge pricing, even providing an illustration of supply and demand curves. From the standpoint of economic theory, it makes perfect sense.

But when people feel ripped off, they don’t want to hear about economic theory or the team of Ph.Ds you have developing optimal supply and demand mechanisms.

Most people have a sense of what is “fair”. Study after study has shown that people will make suboptimal economic decisions in the name of fairness. Product and pricing decisions have to take that into account.

Too many in Silicon Valley think that we know better how the world works — that people should appreciate the brilliant implementation of economic theory, not make suboptimal choices. In a classic example of applying economic theory while ignoring the bigger picture, Google “solved” the problem of too much demand for its onsite daycare center by raising prices from about $33,000 to more than $57,000 annually for a family with two kids.

Pricing and product development isn’t just about theory and economics. It’s as much about understanding purchasing psychology, emotions and media.

On September 10, 2001, I took the last flight from New York to Los Angeles to speak at a conference on September 11. Because of the 9/11 attacks, my conference was canceled. I was stranded far away from home as the FAA grounded virtually all flights in the United States.

When the ban was lifted, the airlines could have implemented economically optimal pricing. They could have auctioned every seat on every flight. (At the time, people were doing things like buying brand new cars in California and driving them across country to get home.) They would have made a lot more money that way. But they held that inventory to help out passengers who had been stranded far from home.

Even in ordinary cases, airfares vary, but they don’t asymptote to infinity. There is generally a maximum fare for each city pair, and if they sell out, they’re sold out. (It’s actually much more complicated than that, but this is a reasonable simplification.) It’s possible that Uber also has a maximum multiplier, but the company doesn’t mention a cap on its web site and hasn’t responded to several requests for comment on this story. Someone identifying themselves as an Uber engineer did, however, leave the following response on Q&A site Quora:  ”Our hard limit for the auto adjusting was 50x (lol).”

There are social norms of what’s reasonable. Only someone who thinks a 10-pound bag of potatoes costs $400 would think $63 for a 0.73 mile ride is reasonable.

“There is no way I would have ever taken a $63 ride for 3 mins,” Darcy said. “It’s not that I am cheap, it’s just not logical to do something like that.”

What Uber could have done differently
The concept of demand-based pricing is perfectly reasonable. Uber did try to warn people in multiple ways about the increased fares. So it’s not entirely to blame here. Riders should take some responsibility.

But there are a number of ways Uber could have done better:

• Instead of showing users multipliers, they could have shown dollar amounts. For example, a chart that showed approximate current rates based on distance. e.g. “1 mile = $75,” “2 miles = $125,” etc. This is a lot easier than understanding multiples of a base you don’t know, especially for new riders.

• Set a minimum dollar amount per transaction. The screen would have shown a floor. e.g. “Any Uber ride right now will cost you a minimum of $60.” That would have dissipated demand.

• Set a reasonable maximum multiplier and reject any demand beyond that. This is essentially what airlines do when a flight sells out — they don’t take any more passengers. Perhaps this could also be accompanied by a button (“UberRich”) that will override any controls and tack on a known and very high surcharge.

• Offer fixed rates based on a destination. In most cases where demand-based pricing is in effect, the buyer knows exactly how much they will pay before they commit. I can see what a flight or hotel room is going to cost and weigh my options.

• Offer a prediction of future pricing. They could have shown that within an hour, rates were going to go down. This would have allowed the company to better serve all users. When I was flying back home from Washington, I could see that the peak demand day was January 2 and it would have cost me more than $400. So I chose to fly on New Year’s Day and paid $200. Darcy could have done something similar. “We could have grabbed a slice of pizza somewhere close and waited for the rates to come down!” he said.

Mostly, I’m disappointed that Uber didn’t turn New Year’s Eve into a positive marketing opportunity. I would have strongly advocated subsidizing rides with some of the company’s $32 million in new funding (from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Menlo Ventures and Goldman Sachs) to create a delightful customer experience. The company is young enough that it could benefit from positive customer feedback.

This was also a perfect time for a co-marketing opportunity. I bet that American Express would have kicked in $10-$20 for every ride on New Year’s Day charged to an American Express card.

I would have had drivers give out Uber-branded hangover kits with aspirin, earplugs and a voucher for 15% off a future trip to each passenger. This is especially valuable because Uber users were likely introducing their friends to the service on NYE.

Instead, some drivers rushed off because they didn’t want to be around to see the customer get the bill. According to a comment on Uber’s blog:

“When we arrived at our destination, we asked to see the rate. The driver did not show it to us and waited until he drove off to complete the ride so that we would receive the email. It was $170 for what is typically a $20 ride.”

Regulation and media
Uber is also still young enough that it has to worry about regulation and media coverage. The company was previously called UberCab, but changed its name in response to complaints from the City of San Francisco.

Transportation is a highly regulated industry. A state like New York is known for its activist attorney general. A few complaints and you might be on the receiving end of a lot of scrutiny you don’t want. As much as I despised Verizon’s proposed $2 fee for certain types of online and phone payments, I thought the FCC getting involved was over the top. But this is something to be aware of.

This is also a story that’s ready made for I-Team investigations and Action News segments. In case you’re not familiar with them, here’s how the story line goes: A consumer relates their tale of woe, there’s a slide with their excessive bill and your logo,  a comparison to what a “reasonable” rate is, a consumer advocate talking about how outrageous your move was and a 10-15 second soundbite of you explaining your decision.

If you can’t come up with a way to defend your pricing or product decision in 10-15 seconds that doesn’t make you sound a) greedy b) evil or c) out of touch with reality, you might want to reconsider that decision. I can guarantee you won’t be able to explain economic theory in that time.

[Taxi image via Shutterstock]

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

It’s hard to believe that in 2009, Facebook was insignificant compared to the rest of social media.

Even harder to fathom is that one year later, Facebook asserted its dominance and became the undeniable leader of the social landscape, representing more than 50 percent of all time spent on social websites.

It wasn’t certain whether Facebook’s fame would be fleeting, especially in the wake of privacy concerns, but in 2011, this doubt was put to bed when Facebook became the only social platform that mattered.

Facebook now represents 95 percent of the time spent on social services and boasts nearly one in seven of the world’s population as users. Facebook’s dominance in social makes Google’s dominance in search look like child’s play.

The question for 2012 is whether or not any other company with skin in the social game can matter again. Both Twitter and Google+ have released new versions to compete with Facebook, even on the brand-focused Pages side. Perhaps they will generate enough activity to snag 20 or 30 percent of the time spent on social. Perhaps Google will figure out their only hope is to buy Twitter. But most likely not.

While 2011 was the year Facebook unquestionably dominated social media, 2012 will be the year Facebook takes over the world.

Facebook marketing is more than fluff.

In 2010, Facebook marketing was all about acquiring fans. In 2011, it has been all about engagement. In 2012, it is going to be all about performance and monetization. Enough of the social metrics and indicators: brands want true return on investment.

Brands are tired of assessing ROI using fuzzy metrics like trying to put a CPM value on earned media or determining a monetary value for fans and multiplying that number by their fan base. Facebook advertising is growing up and speaking in adult terms, like cost per acquisition and average order values.

In 2012, brands will be using the same language with Facebook as they do with email, search and the other lucrative forms of digital marketing. The campaign results will be competitive with these other channels, and Facebook advertising will offer a true, measurable, competitive marketing value.

In fact, these campaigns are already in the works, as we’ve seen with with several of our clients at Webtrends. Testing and validation are under way to establish best practices across verticals ranging from Fortune 500 CPG brands to specialty ecommerce retailers to B2B brands.

It’s an app world.

More than 7 million apps and websites are integrated with Facebook, and 500 million people use an app on Facebook every month.

During 2011, FBML (Facebook markup language) apps gave way to iFrame apps, making development on the platform more accessible. However, in 2012 the explosive new areas for Facebook apps are outside of Facebook.com.

At this past year’s f8 developer conference, Facebook announced custom Open Graph actions and objects. Apps like Spotify, Hulu, and Netflix now all share the activity that occurs in their apps to the ticker and timelines of their users.

The value of this integration is in its infancy. Look for a new breed of external apps to become massively successful by leveraging custom Open Graph connections and timeline apps.

Facebook is the dominant ad network.

Out of the top five display ad networks in the U.S., only Google and Facebook have grown their market share in the last three years. The other players (Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo) have now formed an alliance to sell their inventory together.

Facebook has been outpacing Google in its growth of market share, but it hasn’t even played its trump card yet.

While some of Google’s display inventory is from Google properties like YouTube, Google Maps, etc., most of it is from the million plus websites that are a part of Google’s AdSense program. Facebook in 2012 will likely launch its equivalent of Google’s AdSense, opening a ton of new opportunities for advertisers on Facebook.

Think about retargeting and IAB standard ad units. When this happens, Facebook’s ad dominance will reach ridiculous proportions. Google has no such trump card left to play, unless it wants to acquire one or more of the tumbling top-five display ad networks.

What about Google+?

A big technology company spends big money to try to get into a lucrative space that it knows it missed out on. Sound familiar?

While Google+ is arguably a better user experience in certain areas such as friend segmentation with circles, it came to the party too late. Like Bing, Google+ continues to slowly make progress, but it’s measured in single percentage growth year-over-year and may never be profitable.

But wait — since the tech gurus are all on tGoogle+ here and touting it as the next big thing, won’t it be? Didn’t the early adopter tech crowd make Twitter a big thing?

The Twitterati become less predictive.

Despite adoption rates to the contrary, the old vanguard of the Twitterati have migrated to Google+ and are touting the platform as the next place to be. Robert Scoble is included in 202K circles, and Jason Calacanis is in 243K circles. These follower numbers are huge for Google+ just like they were when they were on Twitter.

But these same early adopters and thought leaders also tried to go to FriendFeed and claimed it was the next party after Twitter. And let’s not forget, Calacanis thought Google’s now-defunct Buzz would be the next party and eat Facebook’s lunch.

The truth is, celebrities (real celebrities, not high-caliber tech geeks) are the taste makers now. They surpass our geek royalty follower numbers on the first day they sign up. Do you think Conan O’Brien wants to tell his audience of 4.6 million Twitter followers to move to Google+?

Be wary of geek leaders telling you that Google+ is the next big thing. Recall that geek culture went through collective vetting of “how things work” on Twitter developing the first rule set to dominate its feeds. But when Twitter became a mainstream consumer platform, the rules established by the tech elite were lost. The general public made its own rules about hashtags and following back. And the Twitterati set out to start their own LAN party elsewhere, but this time the mainstream didn’t follow.

These guys are still driving adoption on new platforms, but that doesn’t mean that these new networks will follow the same consumer trajectory that Twitter did. Mainstream doesn’t need the next big thing. Google+ today and in 2012 will remain a self-segmented group of tech insiders.

As a side note, Facebook in this story is the “popular” kid at school. She doesn’t want to be BFFs with the geeks. Facebook got its popularity in the halls of Ivy League schools, then high schools, then businesses and then the public. Its roots were with the cool kids, which is why it is dominant today over Twitter.

But if Twitter can leverage its celebrity and media connections with their more accessible user experience, it might be able to take a run at the blue mountain.

Which leads me to my next 2012 prediction…

Facebook’s IPO: Say hello to Silicon Valley’s newest billionaires.

With the Facebook IPO slated for early summer, we can expect a lot of wealthy techies. We can expect this to drive a ton of innovation outside of Facebook as vested Facebookers break off to start their own companies and venture capital firms.

Innovation will be driven further inside of Facebook as well, thanks to the cash infusion. They can start to pay family wages and not just fresh-out-of-Stanford wages, which means:

• Expensive talent acquisition
• Real technology acquisitions (not just acqu-hires)
• Maturation of Facebook ads for performance marketing

2012 is Facebook’s fairy tale year.

Facebook’s ad network is growing at a rate 125 percent greater than Google’s ad network did. Facebook also own more of the market share in social than Google did for search. Facebook is about to have the largest tech IPO in history. It is going to release the equivilant of AdSense and a mobile platform next year.

So is there really anything else of significance happening in social media next year? Probably not by comparison.

Justin Kistner is the director of social products at Webtrends, the global leader in unified mobile, social and web analytics. Kistner drives the development of social products and serves as a social media thought leader for the company. He led the development of Webtrends’ Facebook Analytics as well as the company’s end-to-end Facebook campaign solutions, a market first for the industry. He’s also a regular speaker on social media marketing at conferences like Web 2.0 Expo, OMMA Global, and Social Fresh. Kistner also founded Beer and Blog, a social marketing meet up in 20 cities from Portland to Tokyo. Follow Kistner on Twitter @justinkistner.

top image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell.

Christoforo (pictured) was apparently holding the e-mail and social media accounts for the N-Control game controller hostage, according to Moisés Chiullan, who took over PR for the company after Christoforo was ousted. Chiullan went on to detail the situation in a Reddit AMA discussion (where people answer questions submitted by Reddit readers), which eventually drove Christoforo to cooperate.

Chiullan wrote on Reddit:

I’ve been trying to get him to give up the access to these things he’s been holding hostage (email accounts, Twitter, etc) by asking nicely for a couple of days. The gloves are off now.

Paul told me on the phone two hours ago that “Eight months ago, I locked down all this stuff so they wouldn’t be able to fuck with me. If they don’t give me what I want, it’s war.” His demands include a contract written on his terms and substantial compensation, both immediate and for as long as the company continues to exist. He flaunted the PR debacle he created as proof that he “made the company a success”, citing all the media and public attention as the “best thing that ever happened to Avenger”.

He didn’t count on the fact that I anticipated all of this and have been a computer hardware and web tech since I was 14.

Several hours after the Reddit AMA began, Chiullan tweeted on the Avenger Controller’s Twitter account: “Happy to report that Mr. Christoforo has abruptly become very forthcoming regarding digital assets that he was previously withholding.”

I’m sure we’ll see more details about this latest drama soon, but for now I’m just flabbergasted by Christoforo’s complete lack of self-awareness.

Christoforo’s Ocean Marketing (he’s the only employee) rose to Internet stardom thanks to an over-the-top e-mail to an N-Control customer. VentureBeat’s Dylan Tweney bravely re-enacted the fiasco in our latest VB Weekly segment.

The free-to-play, five level promotional game — playable on a subsection of AngryBirds.com – features the now-ubiquitous, titular birds launching at both pigs and nuts hiding in half-separated pistachio shells. The game also has branded backgrounds including a pistachio orchard and a football game with nuts as snacks. A set of recent TV ads also feature the birds launching at nuts to crack them open.

The game serves as a sort of stealth marketing for Google’s Chrome web browser. Trying to load the game on other browsers and mobile phones brings up a prompt that tells players the game is “optimized” for Chrome, and then directs them to download the browser.

“The ubiquitous consumer adoption of Angry Birds and pistachios makes this partnership a natural fit,” Wonderful Pistachios North American senior director of marketing Marc Seguin said in a statement. “We’re excited to give consumers the snacks they crave with pistachios and feed the frenzy for new Angry Birds content with the launch of this game.”

To help draw attention to the promotion, players that share the game on social networks or find hidden “Golden Pistachios” hidden within the later levels can qualify for part of a $300,000 prize pool. Those prizes include cash, Angry Birds plush toys and a year’s supply of Wonderful Pistachios. Though the contest ends on December 31, the game will remain playable into 2012.

This isn’t the first time a popular mobile game maker has created a new version that’s dedicated to cross-promoting an existing product or brand. Doodle Jump maker Lima Sky promoted the Easter-themed movie Hop with a branded version of the game, while Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja series just recently saw a Puss In Boots-flavored release alongside that feature film. And, let’s not forget that Angry Birds Rio was a promotion for the bird-themed children’s film Rio, which drew 10 million downloads in ten days after its March release.

Major social games have also played host to major cross-promotional deals. Zynga’s FarmVille has featured exclusive in-game content promoting everything from McDonald’s to Lady Gaga. In fact, Zynga just today announced a deal with Discover card to allow card users early access to its upcoming Winter Wonderland expansion.

Visual presentations of data are everywhere, popping up on every type of online publication (even VentureBeat). There are so many infographics on the Internet that some bloggers are lashing out against the trend, and there’s even a subset of infographics mocking the uselessness of infographics.

“I think you’re going to see infographics on the side of milk cartons, if you haven’t already,” said Visual.ly co-founder Lee Sherman. Visual.ly is a 500 Startups company that recently raised $2 million to build data visualization tools for the masses. It is creating a library of tools for journalists, publications and everyday people to easily tell beautiful, engaging stories through data. Visual.ly and its investors Crosslink Capital, SoftTech VC and Anthemis Group are banking on infographics completely changing the way we communicate.

Infographics are incredibly useful for cutting through today’s data overload, but their proliferation puts them at risk of being overused, and their impact diluted.

Why we need infographics

The infographic is a picture painted with data. Take a quick look and a story emerges from numbers. Look more closely, and a complex narrative emerges from dense clusters of information. At least, that’s the ideal.

We live in an era of big data, where our every action spins off gigabits of information, both meaningful and mundane. Our computers, phones, and browsing habits leave behind trails of data exhaust that can be sifted and recombined to give us better search results, improved movie recommendations, or ways for marketers to serve up more relevant advertisements. But at the end of the day, it’s still just data. For those of us who don’t actually enjoy gazing at columns of digits, we need someone to make sense of it all, preferably in soothing colors and with non-threatening images. That’s why data visualization can be so comforting, and why it has become so popular of late.

The image above is arguably the most famous data visualization of  all time, representing French Emperor Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia with 400,000 soldiers of the Grand Armeé. The graphic shows the size of the combined French forces, the distance they traveled, what rivers they crossed, the temperatures through which they marched and, ultimately, the wisp of defeated and traumatized soldiers who returned at the end of the campaign.

What designer Charles Minard depicts in this 1869 infographic is still remarkable and influential in an era when powerful tools such as Adobe Illustrator, R and ArcGIS can digitally turn millions of data points into something digestible.

Google’s Susan Wojcicki recently revealed a new interface for Google Analytics at the Web 2.0 Summit in October, which she said was based explicitly on Minard’s work. The new Google Analytics visualization tool follows a similar design philosophy, and lets the webmaster track all site visitors from the time they arrive on the page until they reach a conversion point. The result is a funnel, which is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, so you can see how your army of visitors dwindles as it marches through your site.

More important than its reference to a famous French historian, Google’s new interface masks the sheer volume of information under the surface and makes it accessible.

Good visual stories don’t necessarily need to dive as deep as Minard did. For example, here’s a visualization of demographic information about Occupy Wall Street participants from Fast Company, which was created by firm JESS3.

An infographic can breathe life into something that would otherwise be boring on its own, as Column Five co-founder and creative director Josh Ritchie points out. “Good design seeks to solve problems,” he said. “This is often achieved by making things more intuitive and appealing, both of which can be aided by design and visualization.”

The need to tell stories has been with us since the beginning of time, so it’s only fitting that as our technology changes, so too do the ways we tell stories.

Telling the good from the bad

The Internet is a visual environment, and because infographics are visual before all else, even bad ones, they fit perfectly with the way we use the Internet. The human eye can take in much greater volume of information, more quickly than can our other senses. But this has also made infographics prime targets for overuse or abuse. Where do they go wrong?

“[Of] all methods for analyzing and communicating statistical information, well-designed data graphics are usually the simplest and at the same time most powerful,” says Edward Tufte in the introduction to his classic work The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Tufte, who is widely held as the foremost thinker in information design, says excellence in statistical graphics consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision and efficiency. Successful graphics should do the following:

• Show the data.
• Induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the technology of graphic production, or something else.
• Present many numbers in a small space.
• Make large data sets coherent.
• Encourage the eye to compare different pieces of data.
• Reveal the data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview to the fine structure.
• Serve a reasonably clear purpose: description, exploration, tabulation or decoration.
• Be closely integrated with the statistical and verbal descriptions of a data set.

Many online infographics don’t accomplish the above, usually because they are based on flawed or incomplete datasets.

A dataset could be as simple as the tally of houses on a street that end in odd numbers, or as complex as the daily electrical consumption of a ZIP code over a 10-year period. The true art of the infographic isn’t to make a beautiful design, but in the words of Washington Post graphics director Hannah Fairfield-Wallander, to “Let the data speak.”

And too many infographics seem to be gagging the data.

The most egregious examples of bad infographics are simply pictures with a few numbers attached, or a chronology of events peppered with commentary. They’re disappointing, contain minimal insight, and offer little that you couldn’t get from a simple text timeline. They are also hard to avoid. And this is why many feel the Internet infographics trend has run amok.

The infographics bubble

“A trend feeds on itself; people copy what they see without thinking,” says Nigel Holmes, a British graphic artist and illustrator who has been producing explanation graphics and, data-focused print work for magazines since 1966. “Folks have latched onto what they see as an easy way to make a splash, and they call it infographics. Most of it has no information in it.”

Just how popular have infographics become? Job search site Indeed.com lists 229 jobs for infographics designers nationwide, with everyone from startup Runkeeper to L.A.’s Good Samaritan Hospital seeking out a talented data scientist who can communicate numbers visually.

One Elance posting for a freelance infographic design gig, entitled, “Research and create a viral infographic for website” reads:

I publish a U.S.-focused website about fly fishing.

I want someone to research and create an infographic about trends within a certain fly fishing niche. You should be skilled at finding compelling data, conceiving an organization for it, and presenting it attractively as a graphic.

The work pays less than $500. An insurance company seeking an “out of the box designer” says on PeoplePerHour that its ideal candidate has “a passion for transforming data and research into compelling visual stories,” for which he or she will earn $20-$55 on a recurrent basis.

In other words, infographics are in danger of becoming just another item in the toolkit for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing.

Flowing Data creator Nathan Yau says that he lives and breathes data. He’s a Ph.D candidate at UCLA, and says his trash folder is full of egregious examples of bad infographics from SEO marketers, who will do anything they can to capture a few seconds of people’s precious attention, and perhaps a click through or two.

One way Yau says infographics have changed is that they now take a narrative that was once told in a text post, and arrange it visually, in a way that follows the layout of a blog post. “Infographics have gotten longer to fit into the blog format,” says Yau. “Posts that used to be long lists of favorite things and best methods have shifted to something more visual.”

Can the infographic be saved?

Sherman of Visual.ly counters out that the infographic is an ideal form of communication for a our busy times, where attention spans have diminished, and there is more content than ever for us to consume.

“It’s not like the old days where you read the New York Times all the way through, and threw the paper away when you were done,” says Sherman.  ”A lot of times people don’t even know where the story is coming from.”

“I think the world is a confusing place, especially online,” says John T. Meyer, the chief executive officer of Lemon.ly, a firm that has produced infographics for clients such as startups Zaarly, and IWearYourShirt. “We as a humans are creating so much content and so much noise online. That being said, people are doing amazing, incredible things and we know more data and information about our world then we ever did.”

The infographic has certainly enjoyed a recent swell of popularity thanks to social media and digital communications technology. But the same forces that have brought this communication tool to such a broad audience may be the ones that end up killing it off.

We’re floating in data. Our phones, computers and devices are spinning off more data than anyone knows what to do with. At the same time, however, we’re living in an attention economy where eyeballs are a currency, and enticing people to click on links or forward content through their social networks is the key to success. The result is an endless stream of half-baked infographics from marketers who could care less about the art and the science behind true data visualization.

Can these competing forces continue to coexist?

“What I think people are going to get bored of are infographics that don’t have a narrative, or don’t tell a story,” says Visual.ly’s Sherman.

Of course, he wants to help deliver tools to make that happen.

“This is a great climate from the tools perspective. It’s really, really, really early days,” says Sherman. “We’re out in front, and we’re making this market. It is going to happen, and it is going to be huge.”

[Image Credits: Napoleon's March: Wikimedia Commons, Who is Occupy Wall Street: JESS3, Infographic about Infographics: Think Brilliant, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: Lemon.ly]

Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of 

It was the most advanced consumer product of the century. The industry started with its innovators located in different cities over a wide region. But within 20 years it would be concentrated in a single entrepreneurial startup cluster. At first it was a craft business, then it was driven by relentless technology innovation, and then a price war as economies of scale drove efficiencies in production. When the market was finally saturated the industry reinvented itself again — one company discovered how to turn commodity products into “needs.”

They opened retail outlets across the country and figured out how to convince consumers to flock to buy the newest “gotta have it” version and abandon the perfectly functional last year’s model.

No, it’s not Apple and the iPhone.

It was General Motors and the auto industry.

In the beginning

At the beginning of the 20^th century the auto industry was still a small, hand-crafted manufacturing business. Cars were assembled from outsourced components by crews of skilled mechanics and unskilled helpers. They were sold at high prices and profits through nonexclusive distributors for cash on delivery. But by 1901, Ransom Olds invented the basic concept of the assembly line and in the next decade was quickly followed by other innovators who opened large scale manufacturing plants in Detroit – Henry Packard, Henry Leland’s Cadillac, and Henry Ford with the Model A.

The Detroit area quickly became the place to be if you were making cars, parts for cars, or were a skilled machinist. By 1913 Ford’s first conveyor belt-driven moving assembly line and standardized interchangeable parts forever cemented Detroit as the home of 20^th century auto manufacturing.

Feature wars

The automobile industry was founded and run by technologists: Henry Ford, James Packard, Charles Kettering, Henry Leland, the Dodge Brothers, Ransom Olds. The first twenty-five years of the century were a blur of technology innovation – moving assembly line, steel bodies, quick dry paint, electric starters, etc. These men built a product that solved a problem — private transportation first for the elite, and then (Ford’s inspiration) — transportation for the masses.

Market saturation

Ford tried to escape the never-ending technology feature wars by becoming the low cost manufacturer. Fords River Rouge manufacturing complex — 93 buildings in a 1 by 1.5 mile manufacturing complex, with 100,000 workers — vertically integrated and optimized mass production.

By 1923, through a series of continuous process improvements, Ford had used the cost advantages of economies of scale to drive down the price of the Model T automobile to $290.

When the 1920’s began there were close to a 100 car manufacturers, but the relentless drive for low cost production forced most of them out of business as they lacked capital to scale. For a brief moment, half the cars in the world were now Fords. To make matters worse, the long service life of Ford and GM cars (8 years for Fords Model T, 6 years for everyone else) retarded sales of new cars. In 20 years, U.S. car ownership had risen from 0 to 80 percent of American families — the market was approaching saturation.

Now cars would have to be sold almost entirely to people who already owned a car.

The crazy entrepreneur

After success as a leading manufacturer of horse-drawn carriages, Billy Durant was one of the few who saw the writing on the wall and got into the car business. Although he wasn’t a technologist, he was an entrepreneur with a great eye for acquiring car companies run by technologists. His keen insight was that several carmakers combined under one company umbrella would have more growth potential than one brand on its own.

Like most founders, he was great at searching for a business model but terrible at in large company execution. When his board fired him, Durant bought a competing company called Chevrolet, built it larger than his last company, and used Chevy stock to buy out his old company — General Motors — and threw out the board. Yet a few years later under his brilliant but reckless leadership GM was again on the brink of financial disaster and his new board fired him. (Durant would die penniless managing a bowling alley.)

Durant’s ultimate replacement — an accountant named Alfred P. Sloan — would turn GM into the leading and most admired company in the U.S.

Relentless

Over the next decade Sloan would implement a series of innovations which would last for over half a century. And catapult General Motors from the No. 2 car company (with a ¼ of Ford’s sales) into the market leader for the next 100 years. Here’s what he did:

Distributed Accounting: Unlike Ford, GM was originally a collection of separate companies. Distributed Accounting turned those fiefdoms into product divisions each of which, could be focused like Ford’s mass-produced lines. But Sloan went further. He figured out how to centralize financial oversight of decentralized product lines. His CFO created standardized division sales reports and flexible accounting, and allocated resources and bonuses to the GM divisions by a uniform set of rules. It allowed GM to be ruthlessly efficient internally as well with its dealers and suppliers. It got the division general managers to fall in line with corporate goals but allowed them to run their divisions freely. GM became the prototype of the modern multi-divisional company.

Car Financing: Realizing that Ford would only accept cash for car purchases, in 1919 GM formed GMAC to provide new car buyers a way to finance their purchases through debt.

Consumer Research: Every since his days at Hyatt Roller Bearing, Sloan, and by extension GM, was relentless about getting out of the building — they had an entire department that studied consumers, dealers, suppliers. More importantly, Sloan led by example. He visited dealers and suppliers, listened to customers and was tied tightly to his head of R&D Charles Kettering.

All this would have made General Motors a well-run and well-managed company.  But what they did next would make them the dominant company in the U.S. and eventually put tail-fins on the iPhone.

By the early 1920’s General Motors realized that Ford, which was now selling the Model T for $290, had an unbeatable monopoly on low-cost automobile manufacturing. Other manufacturers had experimented with selling cars based on an image and brand. (The most notable was an ad by the Jordan Car company.) But General Motors was about to take consumer marketing of cars to an entirely new level.

Market Segmentation: General Motors had turned the independent car companies acquired by its founder Billy Durant into product divisions. But in a stroke of genius GM transformed these divisions into a weapon that Ford couldn’t match. With the rallying cry “a car for every purse and purpose,” GM positioned its car divisions (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac) so they would cover five price segments — from low-price to luxury. It targeted each of its brands (and models inside those brands) to a distinct economic segment of the population. Chevy was directly aimed at Ford — the volume car for the working masses. Pontiac came next, then Oldsmobile, then Buick. The top-of- the-line Cadillac offered luxury and prestige announcing you had finally arrived at the top of the conspicuous consumption heap. Consumers could announce their status and lives had improved by upgrading their brands.

GM had one more trick to make this happen. Within each brand, the top of the line was just a bit less expensive than the lowest priced model of the next expensive brand. The goal was to convince the consumer to spend a little more to trade up to a more prestigious brand.

Market segmentation by price was something no other automotive manufacturer had ever done. While other car companies could compete with one of GM’s divisions, few had GM’s capital and resources to compete simultaneously with the onslaught of car models from all five divisions.

Planned Obsolescence: While market segmentation allowed GM to use its divisions to reach a wider market than Ford or Chrysler, this didn’t solve the problem of market saturation. By the late 1920’s, most everyone in the U.S. had a car. And cars lasted 6 to 8 years. Even worse, the market was now filled with used cars that provided even lower cost basic transportation. Sloan, the General Motors CEO, faced two seemingly unsolvable challenges:

1. How do you get consumers to abandon their perfectly fine cars and buy a new one?
2. How do you turn a product that competed on price and features into a need?

In another stroke of genius, GM invented the annual model change. Sloan borrowed this idea from fashion where styles changed every year and applied it to automobiles starting in the 1920s. General Motors would change the external appearance of cars every year. Sloan preferred to call it “dynamic obsolescence.”

Styling and design became an integral part of GM’s strategy. Sloan hired Harley Earl to set up GM’s in-house styling staff. Earl would run it from 1927 to 1958.

Before Earl, cars were designed by in-house body-engineers who focused on practical issues like function, costs, features, etc. Each exterior component was designed separately to be functional – radiator, bumpers, hood, passenger compartment, etc. Some companies used 3^rd party body-makers to set the style , but GM was the first to take car design away from the engineers and give it to the stylists.

The concept of yearly “improvements”, whether styling or incremental technology improvements, every model year gave GM an unbeatable edge in the market. (Henry Ford hated the idea. He had built Ford on economies of scale — the Ford Model T lasted for 19 years.) Smaller car makers could not afford the constant engineering and styling changes they had to make to keep competitive. GM would shut down all their manufacturing plants for a few months and literally rip out the tooling, jigs and dies in every plant and replace them with the equipment needed to make the next year’s model.

GM had figured out how to take a product which solved a problem — cheap transportation — and transform it into a need. It was marketing magic that wasn’t to be equaled until the next century.

By the mid-1950′s every other car company was struggling to keep up.

Mass Marketing: Starting in the 1920’s and continuing for the next half century, automobile advertising hit its stride. Ads emphasized brand identification and appealed to consumers’ hunger for prestige and status. Advertising agencies created catchy slogans and jingles, and celebrities endorsed their favorite brands. General Motors turned market segmentation and the annual model year changeovers into national events. As the press speculated about new features, the company’s added to the mystique by guarding the new designs with military secrecy. Consumers counted the days until the new models were “unveiled” at their dealers.

Results

For fifty years, until the Japanese imports of the 1970’s, Americans talked about the brand and model year of your car — was it a ’58 Chevy, ’65 Mustang, or 58 Eldorado?  Each had its particular cachet, status and admirers. People had heated arguments about who made the best brand.

The car had become part of your personal identity while it became a symbol of 20^th Century America.

After Sloan took over General Motors its share of U.S cars sold skyrocketed from 12 per cent in 1920, until it passed Ford in 1930, and when Sloan retired as GM’s CEO in 1956 half the cars sold in the U.S. were made by GM. It would keep that 50 percent share for another 10 years. (Today GM’s share of cars total sold in the U.S. has declined to 19 percent.)

How the iPhone got tail fins

Over the last five years Apple has adopted the GM playbook from the 1920′s: take a product, which originally solved a problem — cheap communication — and turn it into a need.

In doing so Apple did to Nokia and RIM what General Motors did to Ford. In both cases, innovation in marketing completely negated these firms’ strengths in reducing costs. The iPhone transformed the cell phone  from a device for cheap communication into a touchstone about the user’s image. Just like cars in the 20th century, the iPhone connected with its customers emotionally and viscerally as it became a symbol of who you are.

The desire to line up to buy the newest iPhone when your old one works just fine was just one more part of Steve Jobs’ genius — it’s how the iPhone got tail fins.

It’s one more reason why Steve Jobs will be remembered as the 21st century version of Alfred P. Sloan.

[Top car image via Shutterstock]

Marketo and competing providers like Eloqua, Genius, Pardot and Silverpop are part the emerging space of marketing automation. These companies are making it possible for businesses to improve sales lead generation and use a content management system to better connect businesses to their potential customers.

Marketo has had its eye mostly on enterprise-level customers since its launch in 2006. But with Spark, the company can better reach out to small and mid-size companies by delivering specific tools relevant to that audience.

Spark shares the same technology behind Marketo but gives small businesses more pricing options and services with rapid and sustainable customer growth in mind. Marketo said the biggest tools it will bring to small business owners will include email marketing, inbound marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and insights, social media and event marketing.

“Millions of small businesses don’t have the time or technology needed to truly spark rapid growth,” said Phil Fernandez, Marketo CEO and president, in a statement. “The things that really grow their business – like marketing efficiently and finding solid leads – never move off their to-do lists.”

A short video promo laying out the basics of Spark by Marketo can be viewed below:

A marketer’s dream, right? Yes and no.

Most marketers intuitively understand there is value in building mobile opt-in lists, but wonder “What do I do next?” There is a tremendous opportunity to create conversations with consumers, promote products and services in timely ways, and gain key insights like location and time of day preferences. But, more often than not, marketers are choosing not to do anything with their mobile lists because they are afraid about have messages be perceived as spam or they are too busy fueling the content machines of Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

We can do better than this. It’s time to for marketers to unleash the power of their mobile lists and data. Although mobile engagement is still an emerging discipline, savvy marketers are transforming the power of mobile opt-in lists into marketing gold. Here are a few tips marketers need to start paying attention to or risk losing customers to their competition.

Start with Smart Data

Right now, you probably have unsynchronized consumer data in your mobile marketing platform, your email marketing solution, and your CRM system, among other places. This is a problem. And, it will only get worse over time.

According to a recent Gartner report, enterprise data is expected to grow 650 percent in the next five years. Given the amount of time and energy it takes to acquire new customers, it’s ironic that little is being done to effectively manage–and capitalize on–current customers’ data. By embracing data in different places as an untapped asset, it’ll help you cultivate new relationships and strengthen existing ones.

Start with something as simple as matching mobile numbers with email addresses to create compelling promotional offers, for example. If a marketer isn’t comfortable reaching out to consumers on their cell phone, then they can always continue the conversation in email and realize higher response rates than normal–given these are the same consumers who have opted-in to receive mobile communications from you (a much higher bar than standard email communications).

How Ford Uses Mobile Engagement to Drive Leads

The last three years, Ford has sponsored the American Idols LIVE! Tour and successfully transformed mobile engagement at a concert into tens of thousands of leads. This year, the campaign began at the concert when American Idol fans were given the opportunity to use their mobile phones to enter to win a “Meet the Idols” backstage pass after the show. Everyone who entered the contest was then given the option to provide their email addresses and receive more information about the Ford Fusion. This simple activation not only helped Ford connect mobile numbers to email addresses that were later used in direct marketing promotions, but directly tied to lead matching for new car buyers.

Tap Mobile for its Best Purpose

Before you can start your journey, you need to know where you’re going. What channel should be used for what communication? Do you want to grow new relationships and/or build depth into your existing relationships? How might you extend your event or brand experience after it ends? How do you measure success? And, how do you tie your mobile promotions into other marketing campaigns to maximize impact? These are all questions that you need to answer before you can begin.

Mobile presents the most compelling channel for building the database. For example Clorox was able to drive a similar number of database opt-ins using the mobile channel at concerts as it did with its always-on online channel. Considering that interactive digital spending still accounts for less than 20% of overall media and promotions spending, according to Forrester, no brand should be leaving its media and event spending untouched with mobile calls to action and mobile list building.

Be Relevant and Respectful to Earn Trust

Consumer trust is most critical when you’re engaging with them on their most intimate communication device–their cell phone. Always gain proper permissions by requiring a clear opt-in process. By requiring the additional step to join your mobile list, you guarantee a higher percentage of qualified and loyal fans who will not mistake your text for spam. Know that consumers are still looking to be in touch with the right message at the right time. Pew Research recently reported that 31% consumers prefer to be reached by text messaging. A text message is perfect for timely and scarce content that can drive a “first to know” feel to info or merchandise.

As we head into 2012, you will see more examples of smart mobile engagement strategies that fuel clean and improved database building. Marketers are making the move to take mobile beyond a brand experience and leveraging it to build a long-term relationship with powerful and quantifiable results. It’s time to unleash the power of mobile.

Dorrian Porter is the founder and CEO of Mozes. He is an entrepreneur who co-founded HigherMarkets, an on-demand software company in March 2000. He later became CEO and led it to its acquisition by a Nasdaq listed company in 2002.

Death of a sales cycle

Most companies are very familiar with the concept of a sales cycle (the sales process and tunnel/funnel). Companies track prospective customers as leads through distinct stages and predict revenue based on potential sales as things currently stand. Up until recently, that was the best way for businesses to model revenue.

However, a sales cycle model on its own presents distinct problems and shortcomings when trying to drive sustained revenue growth in today’s increasingly social world for a couple of major reasons (and goes the heart of why corporations are literally leaving trillions of dollars on the revenue table).

• It’s insufficient: The sales cycle model remains stuck on near-term revenue opportunities, based what’s happening with current accounts.
• It’s inefficient: The sales cycle starts tracking revenue when a lead is accepted into sales, ignoring the time and expense spent on the lead by marketing before and during the sales cycle. As anyone who has planned an exotic vacation or purchased a new flat screen TV knows that in today’s market, the buyer explores dozens of online and social channels before they ever speak to a sales rep. That research, interest and outreach is not taken into consideration in a traditional sales cycle.

Birth of a revenue cycle

Contrary to the old sales cycle, the modern revenue cycle includes the parts of the business that feed and foster sales: marketing, branding, PR and social media. This bigger-picture process makes it possible to take this part of the business that has long been a cost center, and transform it into a true revenue driver.

Take marketing, for example. Incorporating marketing into a holistic revenue cycle means not just shooting in the dark and proving ROI later, but instead standardizing and tracking information with sales for the common goal of accelerated revenue generation. This new process, called revenue performance management (RPM), is a modern way of looking at marketing and sales together. The technologies that power RPM are rapidly gaining adoption among companies of all sizes and across every industry precisely because they deliver proven results.

In some respects, RPM is a no-brainer that’s time has finally come. In others, properly implementing RPM requires dedication and a degree of sophistication to get the best possible results. Still, it can’t be denied that there have been some major shifts between that make it both critically necessary and technically possible for companies of all shapes and sizes to take control of their revenue cycles by bringing marketing and sales together.

Today’s buyer demands RPM

Before the Internet, sales organizations actually had a chance to influence customers’ buying decisions. Now, buyers have a wealth of information at their fingertips and form their purchasing preferences well before they ever connect with a sales rep. We’ve gone from a limited number of powerful communication channels to a vast and fragmented Web-marketing world, bringing with it both opportunities and challenges.

Technological advances in cloud software — including marketing automation, business analytics, cloud-based CRM, sales intelligence and social media monitoring tools — have all been crucial to supporting the capture and flow of information from marketing to sales. They are equally as important to determining revenue impact.

For example, only recently has it been possible (or necessary) for a company to compare ROI across hundreds different marketing programs to base future marketing investment on the quality of resulting sales leads. Smart companies are now taking advantage of quickly proliferating marketing channels to reach, influence and track the interest of their prospective customers early in the revenue cycle. But with nearly infinite marketing options available, they must measure what works and what doesn’t to consistently accelerate their revenue engine. By optimizing interactions across every touch point, and aligning sales and marketing to operate at high velocity, RPM gives businesses the ideal roadmap to help leaders capitalize on the changes taking place in today’s social, mobile and web-driven marketplace to accelerate yearly growth by 40 percent.

Get going on your new revenue cycle

How can you take advantage of this shift in your organization today? Here are a few actions I suggest:

• Establish an infrastructure where sales and marketing are fully integrated and equally responsible for revenue generation.
• Hire a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Many organizations are already doing this to bring together sales and marketing in an efficient way. That means one person responsible for the entire revenue cycle (money invested in marketing, capitalized on by sales, and then reinvested into marketing). The performance and continual improvement of that business process should be the responsibility of the CRO.
• Establish lead scoring thresholds to identify when leads should be passed on to sales and when they should be returned to marketing for further nurturing Identify. This removes defects and increases sales and marketing effectiveness and efficiency.
• Identify contribution to revenue for marketing campaigns and scrap those that are underperforming. In the same vein, determine which channels and campaigns are the most effective investments and increase investment accordingly.

What to Expect with RPM

A good revenue performance management process should result in high revenue growth out the gate. In our case, Marketo grew revenue by 315 percent in 2010 and we’re well on our way to making 2011 another record-breaking year — growing revenue 140 percent last quarter alone.

The numbers speak for themselves. Now it’s your turn. Seize the day and incite a revenue revolution at your company!

Phil is a 30-year Silicon Valley veteran and has the scars (and a couple of successful IPOs) to prove it. Prior to Marketo, he was President and COO of Epiphany, a public enterprise software company known for its visionary marketing products. Before that, Phil was COO and SVP of Products and Services at Red Brick Systems, a pioneering data warehouse vendor. Earlier, Phil held leadership positions at Metaphor Computer Systems, Stanford University Medical Center, and Masstor Systems. Phil holds a BA from Stanford University.

[Top image via Kirill Kurashov/Shutterstock]

Increasingly, businesses are actively promoting their brands and products, and sharing thought leadership content through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. When you interact with your company’s followers on these sites, it’s great to be bold, intelligent, fun and thought-provoking. But it’s more important to not cross the lines of propriety. Nobody wants to be known as a “social media stalker.”

Here’s an example: let’s say someone tweets favorably about one of your competitors. Would you track down the Tweeter, and send them an email (or even a public retweet) disparaging the competitor in favor of your superior brand? Of course not.

But what if that same person mentioned that she was looking for new high-end golf clubs for the serious amateur, and you happen to market some that fit the bill? By all means, reply through Twitter with a teaser and link to your product page. Could you pass the tweet along to your sales team? Sure, but until the prospect shares their personal contact information with marketing or sales, it’s less creepy to communicate with her through Twitter.

Every company has its own rules for social media marketing, but keep in mind that social networking is a person-to-person tool. Few people enjoy hard-sell marketing ploys on social networking sites — and they certainly don’t want to feel as if they are being stalked by your company. Here are a few tips on how to avoid being a social media creep, while still achieving sales and marketing goals.

1. Be helpful but not pushy

Twitter and LinkedIn can be excellent business marketing platforms. Keep up with relevant conversations, or in the case of LinkedIn, questions from groups or the Q&A tool, and then offer potential solutions to people’s requests. For example, if Joe tweets that he’s looking for an email marketing vendor, and this is a service that your company provides, you could respond to Joe’s tweet and ask if he’d be open to a conversation about the topic. This way, you can introduce yourself to Joe in a non-threatening manner and begin to establish a relationship. When you reply to someone, share educational information, such as a link to a recent blog post on the topic, and suggest alternative solutions if your product doesn’t meet Joe’s needs. That approach provides a lot of credibility and who knows, Joe might even refer you to someone else.

2. Be a thought leader, if you can

Social media is a place for learning, sharing and making relevant contacts. Instead of constantly promoting your own news, products, and website, share information and trends about the industry at large and even, what your competitors are doing. Link tweets back to a well-written blog to generate discussions and interactions. Be thought-provoking and engage on several social platforms if you can. If you toot your own horn only once in a while, people will start to listen. When and if you do decide to contact someone through one of these networks, they may take a look at your past activity. If you look too aggressive or self-serving in your approach, your hot prospect may not respond.

3. Be careful what you say, even if you know a lot

Researching potential prospects through social media can provide unique insight into the person’s interests, both personally and professionally, but take care in how you use that knowledge. Prospects probably know that you can find loads of information about them on the Web, but don’t ask how the in-laws’ dinner was last night, which they blabbed about on Twitter.  The best way for sales to use social media is to prepare for a sales call. New technologies can pull in information from an individual’s public profile and display the data within the CRM interface. This gives your company one-click access into a prospect’s recent social media interactions and can even reveal a picture of the prospect. Use what you’ve learned as background information and find one discrete moment during the meeting to mention something that you know about your prospect. It could be as simple as making a comment about a recent blog post that he wrote, or congratulating him on a recent promotion that you saw on LinkedIn.

4. Reach out if you see active interest in your brand

In cases where there is a social media mention of your own brand, or the brand of your key competitors, you may want to take a more aggressive approach to following up. If Joe had said he was looking for more information on your product, you might send his information to sales as a new lead and have a representative follow up with him directly. As mentioned previously, it’s always best to make the first contact with an individual at the same site where they initiated the discussion. Sites like Twitter and LinkedIn are invaluable marketing tools, because they can uncover prospects you may have not otherwise discovered. It’s easy to subscribe to relevant discussion boards for your target market and use tools like TweetDeck to monitor company and brand keywords so that you don’t miss a beat. Just keep in mind that social media is about interacting with others and expressing ideas, not about making a sales pitch.

5. Stay on top of social marketing best practices and trends

Social media is a fast-moving world. New sites, applications, methodologies and tools are appearing every week. Subscribing to blogs and news sites that cover Web and social media trends is helpful, as is sharing ideas with colleagues.  Here are a few common practices that apply to all businesses when engaging in social media marketing.

• Interact, interact, interact: Establish yourself as a thought leader and a social media pro.
• Listen: Set up alerts for your brand, your competitors’ brands and other related industry terms.
• Have a strategy: Be clear on who is responsible for follow-up so that multiple reps don’t swarm a single tweet
• Stay positive: Refrain from bashing competitors and never complain about clients.
• Be conservative: Avoid swear words, off-color jokes, and comments about religion, race, politics and other potentially inflammatory topics.

If you can be socially savvy set instead of socially creepy, social marketing can work to your company’s advantage. The new information social media provides can be used to build a deeper connection with your potential clients. When in doubt, try putting on their shoes.  Since you too are a social media user, the way you’d feel about an interaction can serve as a good barometer on whether you are on target, or a little off-base.

Laura Horton is a marketing manager for Pardot.

[Image via Arman Zhenikeyev/Shutterstock]

Needium, a “social media customer discovery platform,” could make that possible. The company announced an upgrade to its service today at Demo Fall 2011, a product showcase in Silicon Valley.

The company monitors and filters social media to look for tweets relevant to its customers’ businesses. Those customers are usually small businesses and merchants who are eager for real-time, local intelligence about potential customers. When Needium finds a matching tweet, its community managers respond on behalf of the matching merchant, creating a conversation and hopefully roping in a new customer.

Thanks to the geographic data embedded in many tweets, the company is already indexing a vast amount of local data: more than 400,000 tweets per day in Boston, over half a million in Toronto and upwards of 1 million tweets per day in the Los Angeles area.

Needium estimates that about 10 to 15% of local tweets are related to food, entertainment or travel needs. For example, every day:

• more than 500 people in Los Angeles tweet “I’m hungry”
• more than 300 people in Atlanta tweet that they have a headache
• 25 people in Washington, D.C. complain about their wisdom teeth
• dozens of people in Toronto tweet that they need to clean their their house, room or car
• more than 30 people in New York tweet about being locked out of their home, car or apartment

The company says that its Ruby-based platform can scale to handle the complete firehouse of Twitter updates, while its real-time indexing layer can process tens of thousands of messages per second in a distributed architecture. Activities streams are exposed in an internal, JSON-based API on a Ruby on Rails stack, which also handles the application logic. The company says it will soon make this API available to external developers.

Customers access Needium via an HTML5 and CSS3-powered browser-based dashboard, which will also form the basis of future desktop and mobile apps.

Needium was founded in 2007 and currently has 16 employees. It has raised $3 million in funding to date from St. Lawrence Capital. The company is based in Montreal.

Needium is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Froomerce is fairly simple to set up. The company has created a dashboard from which people can create a theme for their storefront, upload a logo, and choose a product topic as well as products to sell on their storefront. The products come from numerous affiliate networks Froomerce has partnered with. An affiliate network allows anyone to sell a product that isn’t theirs. For example, you can become an affiliate of Amazon and sell Kindles for a commission. When customers click a product in your Froomerce page to buy it, they are directed back to Amazon, with your affiliate code connected.

On the backend, Froomerce also provides widgets to help you place a storefront on your blog or social network, as well as widgets to place tag clouds on your page. Froomerce also provides an API so that developers can create new applications on top of its existing ones.

The product is not well suited to small retailers who don’t already have an online presence. Froomerce does not provide its own check out process, for example. Instead, it aims to help those with an e-commerce website to reach Facebook and mobile users as well as upsell.

“We went after the existing player that wanted to experiment with the new channels like Facebook,” Ali Naqi Shaheen, cheif executive of Froomerce parent company Coeus Solutions GmbH, told VentureBeat.

Existing online retailers often “want to know what their conversion rate is before we invest in something,” he said. Shaheen explained that Froomerce already has many affiliate networks signed up, so it can often provide a retailer with a numerical reason to engage and create a storefront.

Still Froomerce’s number one target isn’t retailers but publishers. Online publishers, such as the very blog you are reading, sell content directly from their site in addition to advertising. Many times in order to sell this content, you must manually discuss terms, prices, and expectations. Publications using Froomerce, however, can seek out a product they wish to promote, write a review and add a Froomerce link to the post. The publication then makes money off of the sales on that product.

Froomerce has partnered with affiliate program aggregators such as Linkshare, Commission Junction and others. Those using Froomerce are automatically approved to sell items from these networks and do not have to be approved by the individual affiliate networks. There are few cases where this isn’t true, such as eBay, which only allows you to sell through Froomerce if you’ve been pre-approved by them.

Froomerce is not alone, however. Companies such as Popshops allow those selling through affiliate networks to create online storefronts. Skimlinks allows you to link to products sold through affiliate networks as well.

Froomerce is owned by German parent company Coeus Solutions GmbH, headquartered in Berlin. Currently, Froomerce has been self funded and has raised $50,000.

Froomerce is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Cloud marketing startup BringShare launched the public beta of its data service on Tuesday at the DEMO Fall 2011 conference.

BringShare’s purpose is to make marketers’ lives easier when it comes to managing their data and making their workflow faster and more cost-effective when it comes to measuring online marketing efforts.

BringShare CEO and co-founder Justin Spring (pictured) claims that marketing professionals spend five to 10 hours a week aggregating and analyzing data related to online measurement. Instead of that hours-long process, BringShare supposedly produces custom reports in minutes, with data gathered from search engines, analytics software, social networks and e-mail tools.

“One of the biggest things we do is make it easier to identify ways to better spend your money,” Spring said. “We make it clear what your priorities should be.”

I asked Spring how this service differentiated from other marketing data aggregation services such as StatsMix. He said the difference could be described in the following scenario: Other data companies fill up buckets of paint and place all of the buckets next to each other in the same room, while BringShare puts the different paint colors together so you can see what they look like on the same canvas. Essentially, by seeing how the data interacts together, you get much more from it.

BringShare has three packages for marketers that want more from their online data tools:

• Starter ($49/month): two-dashboard view
• Complete ($99/month): six dashboards with “Custom Report Builder”
• Premium ($199/month): six dashboards with “Custom Report Builder,” premium support and tracking services

The three-employee company has thus far raised $1 million in a partial first round of funding, with backing from Ohio-based technology incubator TechColumbus and the Ohio TechAngels, one of the largest angel investment groups in the U.S. BringShare also boasts that it is the first Ohio-based company to present at DEMO in its history.

Take a look at the full dashboard below for a better idea of what BringShare is offering:

BringShare is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

It’s no secret: Times are tough and there’s economic uncertainty on the horizon. And when that happens, everyone – from consumers to businesses to lenders – tend to tighten the grip on their dollars. For small business owners looking to gain some traction in the market, these conditions can be disastrous. Still, it doesn’t have to be this way. Business owners can market their companies and spark some interest around it – but they’ll need to be willing to take some risks on out-of-the-box ideas.

This way of thinking takes me back to the early days of my company. When Geebo was born back in 2000, it was pretty much limited to the Sacramento region, a place that I called home at the time. I operated out of my bedroom in a home that I shared with a roommate (which was also a good money saver) and had to come up with ways to get listings on the site, get people to visit the site and maintain a balance that would help it grow. And I had to do it all with a very small budget.

And so, I embarked on a series of “out-of-the-box” marketing techniques that would hopefully bring in more listings and more visitors – and eventually more opportunities that could lead to more revenue. Below are five examples of initiatives I launched that got my site rolling. They may not be ideal for your business, but if not they may spark some ideas on unusual ways to market yourself.

Barter system: As a classifieds site, one of the key segments that we needed to reach were car buyers and sellers. We needed the listings and we needed the shoppers, so I approached a local auto mall, which had a big electronic billboard along Interstate 80 in suburban Sacramento.

In exchange for advertising space on an electronic billboard that would be seen by tens of thousands of commuters on a daily basis, we created and served banner ads for those dealers in our Vehicles category. And since we were also providing auto dealers with free listings at the time, we were able to encourage those dealers to list their cars on our site, as well, for more exposure.

Colleges: Classifieds are often about finding discounted items for sale – and who knows better about bargain shopping than college students? Geebo hit the college campuses in two ways. The first was an obvious one – advertising in the college papers, a much cheaper ad that what the regional newspapers were charging. The second outreach was in the form of bookmarks and “Netcards,” or large postcards.

The bookmarks were freebies that we distributed on campuses around the bookstores and libraries. The netcards were posted on all of the open billboards across the campuses – and replenished regularly. The costs of the netcards and the bookmarks were minimal and the open billboards were free.

Virtual events: I needed a way to quickly boost the number of visitors to the site, as well as the number of listings – and so the Geebo Virtual Job Fair was born. This wasn’t an “event,” per se, like a real job fair. Instead, we convinced employers around the region – including state government agencies – to let us post their job listings on the site and then promote them as being part of a “job fair.”

At the same time, we advertised the job fair as the place to find all of the best jobs in the region in one convenient place. In this case, it was all about how the “event” was marketed, (Remember, this is before online classifieds had really gained any traction – so the idea of looking for jobs online was still pretty new.)

It was a great success in that the number of listings topped 500 (with many of those employers becoming Geebo regulars over the years), as well as a boost to our traffic numbers.

Partnerships: I always wanted a community component for my business, a way to give back. But I really didn’t know how to go about finding a worthy organization – until I came across the Keystone Club for teens at a local Boys and Girls Club. Geebo partnered with the group to help it meet its goals (which revolve around community service and career preparation) by sending the teens into the community to identify and recommend organizations worthy of a donation.

The buzz from the event caught the attention of local media outlets, which created some publicity for Geebo, as well.  In the end, I coughed up $3,000 – a $1,000 award for three of the teen-recommended organizations. We weren’t a profitable company at that point, but chalked up the $3,000 donation as money we didn’t have to spend in publicity and advertising.

In the end, the partnership was a win-win-win – a win for Geebo, the organizations that took home checks and for the teens at the Boys and Girls Club, too.

Pizza box stickers: Getting the word out about a new site is half the challenge – and so we started thinking about different ways to reach people in the community. With an investment of a few bucks for some Post-It Note types of stickers, we cut a deal with some locally owned pizza joints to place Geebo stickers on their pizza boxes.

Working with the big chains was not so easy. But the local guys were willing to place our stickers on their boxes in exchange for some free banner advertising on our site, which was reaching the same local audience they were hoping to attract. The investment was minimal – but the potential for return was great.

About the author: Greg Collier is founder and CEO of Geebo, an online classified ads site that serves cities and regions across the U.S.

Very often when we’re pitching a new piece of business, the prospect starts to wonder out loud about whether everything that could be done for them on the marketing front is being done. It’s not an unreasonable line of inquiry.

Far too often, however, that line of inquiry leads to a terribly silly question being asked: “What’s the one thing we could be doing that we’re not doing that’s going to turn everything around?”

Marketing professionals working inside companies tell me they regularly hear the same thing from their executives. In short, these people are wondering if there’s a marketing silver bullet.

While there may well be intelligent and high-value marketing options that are not being pursued, I have never found an instance where some single initiative would magically turn things around. Marketing simply doesn’t work that way.

Entire forests have been cleared and pulped into paper to print all the studies that establish that customers need to hear the same message several times and across several different channels before they are moved to take action on it. This means that effective marketing must be a strategically planned and coherently integrated campaign of multiple tactics designed to engage your prospects in as many different places as possible or affordable with mutually reinforcing messages whose impact accumulates over time.

When I hear the silver bullet question, I know what’s gone wrong, and it ain’t that some single high-impact initiative is being left undone. What’s gone wrong is the strategy. Specifically, there isn’t one, or it’s inadequate, or it’s not being adhered to.

Here’s what I mean.

A properly developed marketing strategy engenders high-level confidence that all appropriate marketing tactics and campaigns were thoroughly considered and that the proper mix is being implemented. A properly developed marketing strategy builds in evaluative mechanisms that reassure clients and corporate executives that they are on the right track, even if the end point is still far out of sight. A properly developed marketing strategy does not leave people wondering if there is something more they could be doing.

Your customers aren’t werewolves. Stop looking for a silver bullet and start planning your marketing strategically.

(About the author: For  30 years, Francis Moran has navigated the fault lines between journalism and public relations, between technology companies and their markets. Having worked as a consultant, reporter and editor, Francis is an insightful marketing and public relations strategist, an expert writer and a seasoned veteran of the specific challenges of helping B2B technology companies engage with their marketplace and those who influence it. You can reach him at Francis@Francis-Moran.com)

Marketing automation software -- software that lets you build content (landing pages, emails, deliverables, etc) and then present it at the right time to your potential buyers -- is growing up fast. It’s now in that awkward stage where it’s no longer the cool, new fad but enough people have heard the buzz to know (sort of) what it is and why their company needs it.

Many companies, large and small, were employing marketing automation in some capacity before the category had a name. But thanks to a growing number of new technologies, marketing automation is becoming a defined part of every marketing budget, and corporate marketers are testing for the best solutions just like they did for CRM technologies back in the 90s.

Reputable analyst firms exist have reported on the various tools available, but they often focus only on the technology aspect and don’t include the ancillary pieces that put some MA vendors ahead of others. The most important of those “intangibles” is a strong community where MA newcomers and pros, alike, can gain expertise and best practices.

Enterprise-level marketing automation solutions handle the heaviest-duty cross-platform marketing programs needed by about 20 percent of businesses. The other 80 percent of companies will turn to MA vendors that focus on the mid-market. Let’s take a look at those pros and cons of those mid-market players and what your company needs to know about them before making a choice.

Eloqua
Eloqua does a great job for companies blurring the line between the mid-market and the enterprise – those businesses that aren’t a traditional enterprise in size, but that want to operate like one. Eloqua offers savvy marketers the opportunity to bring different messaging points into their MA programs, provides deep integration into CRM platforms, including Salesforce.com, and can tie in more advanced programs like SMS marketing.

The company struggles, though, by not offering a turnkey solution. The advanced functionality that it offers means that to use it well, a business really needs a team of people, such as a designer and a campaign strategist, overseeing the process. Additionally, functionality from an Eloqua system is limited off the shelf, but the platform’s robust API solves that problem for businesses that have development capabilities in house.

Bottom Line: Businesses that have a savvy marketing staff, a development staff available, and a need for mobile programs should look at Eloqua. But the platform might require too much development work to the API and too much high-end marketing functionality for businesses that don’t have extra hands on deck in these areas.

Genius
For businesses that are on the small end of small and medium businesses, Genius makes marketing automation systems that focus on the most simple aspects of MA and that do a good job of educating the market. The company realized early on that sales departments are what drive change in an organization. So this technology does an excellent job of “playing nice” with sales. In addition to being specific about its focus – on the basics – Genius also makes it easy for small businesses to adopt a simple MA platform on a manageable budget.

Once these small businesses want to scale, however, Genius has a hard time keeping up. It’s seen massive customer attrition as customer needs have matured beyond the functionality a Genius system can offer. [Editor's note: Genius' customer retention appears to be much stronger than stated here. The company reports a monthly renewal rate of over 97%.]

Bottom Line: Genius is a good choice for business that are new to marketing automation, that want to educate the sales staff and need to quickly wrap their arms around MA. But businesses should be advised that transferring to a different MA platform when you scale is like trying to leave your banking institution – difficult, painful and not a great idea unless you have to.

Marketo
[Disclosure: My company, LeadMD, is a services company that works closely with Marketo clients and resells the platform.] Marketo doesn’t try to be everything to everyone. It knows its marketplace and has purposefully focused on integration with Salesforce.com. Like Genius, Marketo puts an emphasis on education, and its technology offers robust functionality, but is not so complex that you need a team of experts to run the platform. Marketo also has a strong user community, which customers can use for best practices and help.

The company’s most prominent weakness is actually by design – it does not have a footprint into other CRM platforms because it made the decision to focus only on Salesforce.com. Additionally, Marketo tends to be fairly reactive, making it later to market than other vendors with new advancements. There is a positive to this strategy, however; Marketo tends to get it right when it introduces something new, since it has learned from other vendors’ mistakes.

Business-to-business marketers tend to look past the platform because they want things like SMS, social or telephony integrations that Marketo currently doesn’t offer but has roadmap plans to. Additional emphasis should be put on Marketo’s ancillary products – such as Sales Insight – that are highly innovative and bring significant value.

Bottom Line: Marketo is a good match for businesses that are squarely in the mid-market, are using Salesforce.com, are already doing email marketing, and have a need for predictive marketing data in the future. A Marketo customer generally is an early technology adopter, is open to on-demand software purchases, is apt to have an ongoing relationship with a vendor, and will participate in a community.

Pardot
Pardot is known for its price positioning, which offers marketing automation functionality that is easy to use for about 40 percent less than other solutions. It is another vendor that is comfortable in its own skin.

For the cost, however, Pardot offers limited technical functionality. It does not extend as far into sales as some other vendors, so it’s not a great plug into platforms such as Salesforce.com. The company’s customer service will help you get going on the platform and helps customers resolve issues, but the lack of a community means that best practices are not available.

Bottom Line: If you are a US-based business looking for an affordable MA platform that offers basic functionality, keep your eye on Pardot. Like Genius, however, if you anticipate that you will need more sophisticated MA functionality in the future, Pardot doesn’t scale well for deeper functionality.

Silverpop
Silverpop did a great job of acquiring its way into the MA space by purchasing Vtrenz. The company does advanced batch and blast email very well, meaning that it can effectively serve an important and growing market segment. The platform has grown to include more sophisticated functionality such as landing page creation tracking, lead landing functionality for the sales team and even lead nurturing. Silverpop integrates well into different platforms, making its reach even broader.

After acquiring Vtrenz, Silverpop really disguised itself as a MA player when it is really a top of funnel email marketer. For businesses that need to identify better prospects, score them and deeply analyze which campaigns are doing well, Silverpop simply doesn’t support those functions.

Bottom Line: It’s not a true, comprehensive MA technology, but for customers that want superior, high-level email marketing functionality, Silverpop is hard to beat.

End Note
The MA space continues to grow, but vendors that can offer community and best practices are the ones that will help it thrive. People don’t feel lukewarm about MA the way they do about CRM. They either love it or hate it, and these vendors are shaping how the industry will play out.

Justin Gray is the CEO and chief marketing evangelist at LeadMD. The company helps businesses generate and manage leads better through marketing automation processes and technologies. He can be reached at jgray@leadmd.com.

Marketers are realizing that: 1) consumers are becoming increasingly social in new and existing environments (hello Google+); 2) therefore creating massive amounts of social activity data; and 3) the technology and science that processes this data is getting more sophisticated and precise. This innovation can be likened to another “environmentally conscious” revolution (in the literal sense): the hybrid car.

Social is Media’s Hybrid

Overnight we’ve moved from John Wanamaker’s statement, “I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half,” to an industry-wide targeting capability that enables billions of dollars of marketing to be managed at the impression level. With this power, the onus is clear. Do right by the consumers and employ the best technology possible to enable efficient, welcome, and effective advertising programs.

Social targeting is the hybrid car of advertising–leveraging new technological innovations, dramatically reducing waste (emissions), and improving efficiency, and all the while employing responsible business practices. A marketer’s dream.

Marketers Want to “Off Road”

Like you, brands want to drive wherever they please. While they appreciate that you are committed enough to their products to become a ‘Fan’ on Facebook or ‘Like’ their content across the Web, what they really want is to turn you into an independent promotional engine. And that means going beyond Facebook. Brands are recognizing that much of our social activity actually takes place outside of the Facebook racetrack. For instance, think about how many times per week you view your friend’s Twitter photos. Or, for that matter, share or comment on a blog post?

Savvy advertisers are finding ways to tap into the connections we have with people in those contexts. If the holy grail of brand marketing is turning people into brand ambassadors, Facebook Fan Pages are merely one lane on a closed course. Whereas Brands want to drive their ad dollars responsibly and (so to speak) go off road and have the ability to choose from a variety of options, an SUV, 4×4, Crossover, etc.

Why Shift Gears from ‘Fans’ & ‘Likes’ to the Brand Graph™

With all this time online, we as consumers are generating billions of social interactions each day. Smart brands have taken notice of just how powerful and informative these interactions can be and are looking to their unique Brand Graphs to get the whole story. A Brand Graph reveals the social attributes of existing customers and can uncover large groups of high-potential prospects that are most likely to become brand favorable. Virtually every consumer is social online; required information brands need to navigate today’s social landscape.

Under the Hood, Access to Massive Data: It’s no secret that Google+, Amazon, Facebook and the like have heaping amounts of user data, but in reality, few brands are truly leveraging this data to expand audiences. Why? Most don’t realize what is possible and appropriate from both a technological and privacy standpoint. But privacy controls are solidly in place, and create “win wins” for everyone involved.

For example, marketers are proactively enforcing the highest levels of privacy and standing united alongside organizations such as the AAAAs, AAF, ANA, DMA, IAB, and NAI. Industry-wide, we understand that we’re at an incredible cross-road and if we don’t adopt and enforce strict protective measures, it will be done for us (without necessarily supporting the best interests of consumers and a growing industry).

Vast Social Population + Advanced Technology = a Marketers Road Map: Applying techniques like demo and interest targeting filters feels like we’re looking in the rear view mirror. Recent advancements have been significant; for instance, behavioral, look-alike, and retargeting have more narrowly honed in on how to find and reach a potentially receptive customer. But all of these lack a social element. Enter social targeting and a marketer’s Brand Graph.

This is the bridge between targeting advancements and an increasingly social population. Many marketers are realizing powerful results using their Brand Graph to identify new audiences, share insights that inform program-wide marketing and media decisions, and drive greater efficiencies.

What You Can Expect to See Down the Road

At a high-level, brands will (of course) still market to Fans, but they’ll increasingly look at opportunities to influence and grow audiences and engage with a much broader set of high-value prospects – i.e. users in their Brand Graph. It makes all the sense in the world–after all, if your friend just struck gold at Brooks Brothers, you’re not only likely to hear about it directly from her, but to also go shopping. Brands should drive the best vehicles for each individual journey.

Better, More Relevant Ads: The better the social targeting, the more relevant the ad. Let’s say for example you’re a loyal “America’s Got Talent” junkie, but don’t do much online to exhibit your dedication. You haven’t Liked the network or show on Facebook. You don’t Tweet about it. But, you do talk to your colleagues at work and your friends at dinner about the episode you just watched. Social targeting values these connections that are usually invisible to marketers. It identifies the people that the “America’s Got Talent” devotee shares and connects with most online and let brands put ads in front of those consumers who are most likely to have been influenced.

An Industry Awakens

As enamored as our industry is with social media, very few take advantage of it in a way that really delivers the goods. Unlike how long it’s taken the auto industry to roll out a large selection of hybrid automobiles, the advertising industry is quickly realizing there are new, better models that meet the needs of brands. Social targeting your unique Brand Graph presents relevant advertising to a new pool of socially connected consumers, not just a retargeting pool of predisposed Facebook fans and followers. For perspective, this new pool is typically 10 – 30 times the size of a brand’s original customer base or retargeting audience.

We are past the days when retargeting is “enough.” We have the tools and the insight to truly expand audiences rapidly and, at the same time, have consumers actually “Like” ads and online experiences that are more engaging and interesting to them. Perhaps this could signify a time when our industry wakes up to the realization that online budgets should more accurately reflect the vast amount of hours actually spent online and the medium’s unique power to target precisely. Today, over 350 major brands understand and use their Brand Graph with 33Across.

Let’s face it, the world is social. Every major brand is rushing to determine how they become more social and leverage the influence inherent in their brand – their Brand Graph. What we’ll continue to see is that Facebook Fans become less relevant to major brands as they recognize that there are other vehicles that enable them to activate their Brand Graph and “drive” on their own terms.

Eric Wheeler is the CEO and founder of 33Across, a social marketing company. Eric was previously the CEO of Neo@Ogilvy and Executive Director of Ogilvy Interactive North America.

Fusion Garage CEO Chandrasekar “Chandra” Rathakrishnan unveiled the company’s new operating system today, GridOS, in a live webcast, along with its Grid 10 tablet and Grid 4 smartphone. Rathakrishnan explained that the company decided to pursue a mock marketing campaign as TabCo because he didn’t think people would give its new devices a fair shake otherwise.

Speaking about the Joojoo tablet, he said, “Our initial hype didn’t meet the performance of the product.” The company obviously wants to be taken more seriously with its Grid devices, but I don’t really think the TabCo hype helped its case much. And of course, many still remember Fusion Garage as the company that co-developed, and ultimately betrayed, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s Crunchpad tablet.

The company said its GridOS and devices are an answer to countless Android devices that all look the same. The GridOS is based on the Android kernel, and it can run Android apps, but Fusion Garage has developed an entirely new grid layout that makes it look completely different than Android. I’ll admit that the interface looks cool, but it’s certainly not as groundbreaking as the company’s marketing would have you believe.

GridOS devices will be able to run apps from Amazon’s Android app store, and Fusion Garage will also launch its own Grid Shop for apps specific to the platform. Given how little the operating system resembles Android, don’t expect to see the official Android Market on GridOS.

The Grid 10 tablet sports a 10-inch screen, a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, and a (surprisingly high) 1366 by 769 resolution. It’ll cost $499 for the Wi-Fi only version, and $599 for built-in 3G. The company is taking pre-orders for the device now on its website and at Amazon. The tablet is expected to ship on September 15.

The company offered up fewer details on its Grid 4 smartphone, but Chandrasekar did show off how you can continue watching media on it from the Grid 10. The phone will featured a four-inch screen, dual-core Qualcomm processor and will sell for $399 unlocked. It’s expected to ship in the fourth quarter, and the company will announce carriers at that point as well.

Click here to download the VentureBeat Windows 7 desktop app. The Intel AppUp developer program is the official launch sponsor.

Buddy Media advertises its platform as “power tools for Facebook.” The platform allows brands to update content on various pages as well as monitor activity from fans. In addition to publishing and moderation tools, the platform gives clients a drag-and-drop editor for Facebook pages, real-time analytics and customizable tools.

Over the past year, Buddy Media has announced a slew of milestones, including 200 new customers so far in 2011, doubled revenue since the end of 2010, a huge growth spurt in total number of employees (40 to 200 since 2009) and a new London headquarters for European operations.

This is Buddy Media’s fourth institutional round. The funding was provided by new investor Insight Venture Partners and existing investors GGV Capital, Institutional Venture Partners and Bay Partners.

The New York City-based company plans to use the new funding to take operations global, opening new offices and making strategic acquisitions around the world. In addition, the startup plans to double its staff within the next year.

What won’t be happening is employees walking away with cash from the deal. A Buddy Media spokesperson told VentureBeat, “This is working capital. No current investors or employees are taking money off the table or cashing out.”

Along with the funding announcement, the company said it has added Kevin Colleran, Facebook’s first ad sales executive, and strategist Michael Kassan as advisors.

The recent round brings Buddy Media’s total funding to $90 million. All Things D says sources now put the company’s valuation at $500 million. Facebook’s valuation is between $50 billion and $100 billion.

We asked Buddy Media what kind of liquidity event the company might be looking for in the future. The company spokesperson told us that while the founders are “not ruling anything out,” they are very much focused on rapid growth and product development rather than a sale or IPO.

According to data in a comScore report released today, most QR code-scanning consumers are between the ages of 18 and 34, and around a third are in households making $100,000 or more per year.

And for all the flack the print industry gets for being behind the digital times, almost half of all QR code scans originated with printed magazines and newspapers.

What this means for marketers and other decision-makers today is that QR codes, while rapidly evolving and gaining in adoption, are still far from being a mainstream technology. As a tool for reaching a diverse audience for a range of goods and services, QR codes have not yet arrived. Nevertheless, their popularity is growing rapidly — one report from QR company Jumpscan estimates a 1200% increase in QR code scanning during the last six months of 2010.

For mobile marketing executives and managers, this data represent an interesting guidepost for how mobile QR code campaigns should be targeted and where codes should be placed.

“QR codes demonstrate just one of the ways in which mobile marketing can effectively be integrated into existing media and marketing campaigns to help reach desired consumer segments,” said comScore senior vice president of mobile Mark Donovan in a release.

“For marketers, understanding which consumer segments scan QR codes, the source and location of these scans and the resulting information delivered is crucial in developing and deploying campaigns that successfully utilize QR codes to further brand engagement.”

ComScore’s research showed that in June, more than 14 million U.S. mobile users scanned QR codes. Altogether, these mobile users make up 6.2 percent of the total mobile audience. Of these 14 million, 60.5 percent were male, 53.4 percent were between 18 and 34, and 36.1 percent made $100,000 or more annually.

Around 58 percent of scans occurred while users were at home, with an additional 40 percent of users saying they scanned codes while in retail stores. As previously mentioned, traditional magazines and newspapers led the pack of QR code sources, coming in at 49.4 percent of user responses. Around 35 percent of respondents said they scanned codes on product packaging.

All told, the vast majority of QR code scans came from physical or print sources such as business cards, flyers or brochures. Around 27 percent of respondents said they’d scanned a code found on a computer screen, and less than 12 percent said they’d scanned a QR code they saw on a television screen.

Other stats show that around 30 percent of QR code scans are conducted on Android phones, with 21 percent of scans coming from iOS devices and 17 percent from Windows phones.

Image courtesy of scott blake.

The company’s last indie game flash sale generated around $1.8 million during its two-week sales period. That means that the current flash sale is on track to exceed the sales of the company’s last flash sale, in large part thanks to increased visibility on news aggregator sites like Reddit and Hacker News.

Humble Bundle has added a new game to the bundle, as well as a 14-day pass to play indie darling sandbox game Minecraft, to further promote sales. Markus Persson, the developer of Minecraft also known by his Twitter handle “@notch,” is the top contributor for the bundle after paying more than $4,000 for his batch of indie games.

Humble Bundle gives independent developers a way to publicize their games and compete with the major publishers in an industry that regularly churns out triple-A titles. This bundle’s breakout hit is a 2-D 8-bit platformer called VVVVVV, a game where players navigate obstacles by changing the direction of gravity. This quarter’s bundle also features “Crayon Physics Deluxe,” “Cogs,” “Hammerflight” and “And Yet It Moves.”

Much like in the Apple App Store, independent game developers struggle for visibility on distribution systems like Steam and the Xbox Live Arcade. Humble Bundle brought visibility to games like World of Goo — which ended up porting its game to the iPad because it became so popular.

Humble Bundle went through startup incubator Y Combinator after 2009′s Humble Indie Bundle (put out by a group of indie game developers) ended up being a runaway success. The sales let gamers pick up a number of indie games that don’t have copyright protection software.

Gamers can pay whatever they want for a bundle — which could be anywhere from 1 cent to $6,000. Gamers also decide what percentage of the fund goes to charity or to the developers and whether to give Humble Bundle a “tip,” which is around 5 percent by default. If most gamers used the default payment schedule, that means Humble Bundle picked up more than $90,000 in its last indie game flash sale.

This is the third bundle the company has launched. It launched a “Frozenbyte” branded bundle that included games from one specific developer. The company’s first bundle included indie darlings like side-scrolling puzzle game Braid and survival horror game Penumbra.