Most online retailers collect a vast amount of information from their customers, but very few of them seem to know what to do with it beyond sending out coupons and newsletters. But ModCloth, which sells women’s clothes in retro vintage styles, has been able to harness the power of their customer data not just to increase sales but also to lowers costs.

The company uses customer feedback and data collected from its website visitors to make more informed purchasing and stocking decisions - thus lowering overhead, over-purchasing and lost revenue due to stock-outs.  It’s also used the information to develop smartphone and tablet apps that appeal more directly to its customers' tastes to drive more traffic and sales.  In fact, mobile devices account for 42% of visits to ModCloth.

ModCloth has also used its data intelligence to make its site more sticky. They have created interactive site features such as:

• The “Be the Buyer” program invites users to vote for their favorite styles and give det

If you're a small business with a Facebook presence, it pays to keep abreast of what Facebook is up to in the ad department. The social media behemoth  regularly updates its product offering for small businesses. Some recent additions include:

• Graph Search: lets you query Facebook members' opinions on favorite restaurants and local businesses. Facebook says the tool can make it easier for people to discover your Facebook page and learn about your business.

• Promoted posts: Profit from your "likes" by creating ads that appear in the News Feeds of people and friends who have liked them. The cost is based on how many people an advertiser wants to reach, and promoted posts can be targeted via location, age and interests.

• Mobile app install ads: If you have you own app, Facebook offers a paid way to get customers to download the app via an ad that redirects consumers to the iPhone App Store or Google Play.

Not on Facebook? Not sure if you should be? Yeoman helps manufacturers and publisher

For months, analysts and industry insiders have been griping that no one could monetize mobile. And in particular, that social media giant, Facebook, would HAVE TO monetize mobile in order to salvage its sinking stock price. Well the Q3 earning reports are out and - guess what? Facebook monetized mobile!

The Facebook mobile app serves up ads embedded into users' newsfeeds - and so far Facebookers have been biting. Will other retail companies be able to follow suit? That remains to be seen.

But for the moment, Facebook has managed to stop the deceleration of its revenue growth, thanks to mobile ads shoring up the company’s ad business, which is already accounting for 14 percent of total ad revenues.

Are mobile ads right for your business? What about Facebook mobile ads? For a nuanced answer to that million (or billion) dollar question, give Yeoman a shout, we'd be happy to discuss it with you.

This info graphic from Statista tells the story:

Do your customers and prospects actually “friend” “like” and “fan” business pages on Facebook? And if they do, how does that translate into sales?

Chadwick Martin Bailey recently conducted a survey to find out how consumers interact with brands on Facebook. Our top takeaways:

• A lot of people actually spend time on Facebook: 52% of Americans spend at least one hour per week on Facebook
• People don’t “like” brands indiscriminately: 78% of those who “like” a brand on Facebook like fewer than 10 brands. Also, 76% of people reported they have never “unliked” a brand, (and another 9% didn’t know if they had or not, so they probably hadn’t)
• You DO need to offer a carrot: 57% of those who “like” a brand reported that they did it to get a discount or take advantage of a promotion
• Facebook relationships make customers more loyal: 56% of “fans” are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend, and 51% say they are more likely to buy from a company again after becoming a fan

Read the whole gr

As predicted, we’re starting to see aggregation tools that centralize the vast number of social media channels.  Kathy Mandelstein of IBM recently spoke at BtoB’s Netmarketing Breakfast and shared several social media tidbits, physical and online interactive tools, and geo-location marketing ideas.  One example is an aggregation page that pipes in tweets, blogs, polls, videos, photos and a live stream into one centralized place.  You can find an example of this at www.ibm.com/social/lotusphere.  There are many options that help organizations manage multiple social sites without overhead—including Ping.fm and HootSuite.com.  (Let us know if you’d like to chat about these types of services.)

One other example of up-and-coming technology is the suggested use of QR codes almost anywhere including displays at events, keynote presentations and even event badges.  Use your smart phone to scan the image and you can store and then access product, event or even contact information with the use

One of the big myths is that Internet activity is dominated by younger people. All ages have increased their web usage and its more than just checking the weather. Case in point, mom’s blogging. More U.S. moms are taking to the blogosphere, actively posting their opinions on everything from politics to products. This has a major potential impact on Companies that sell consumer products to ‘boss of the house’. However, the growth rate of blogs is expected to slow as more women communicate via sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Since motherhood has typically taken women out of the workplace and limited their social interactions, what does it mean that mommies everywhere now actually have MORE time to interact with each other than their workplace counterparts? For starters, mommy bloggers now have a much greater influence on each other, most notably (for our purposes) on purchases the mommy set tend to make.

What does that mean for your manufacturing, software or publishing business? It