eMarketer is expanding our ecommerce coverage. Here’s a brief review of our latest reports:

Teen Girls: Always on a Social Shopping Mission
Teen girls are intrepid social shoppers who eagerly embrace digital and mobile tools. They engage with friends on social networks on a regular basis, sharing gossip and trivia, soliciting advice and chronicling the details of their lives.

Canada Retail Ecommerce Forecast: Measured Growth Ahead
In 2010, consumers in Canada spent $16 billion online for products and services (including travel). By 2015, Canadian online spending will nearly double. For ecommerce to hit full stride, more Canadian retailers must sell online and help consumers overcome concerns about the safety of online shopping.

Mobile Web: Best Practices for Retailers
Forward-thinking retailers are devising mobile strategies to address each stage in the consumer purchase funnel–awareness, engagement, consideration, conversion and loyalty. Many retailers have turned to fully enabled mobile sites in order to best exploit the channel.

After the Crunch: How Credit Card Issuers Market to Consumers Online
As the economy recovers, credit card issuers are seeking new ways to market products and engage consumers. Traditional offline media and web venues remain marketers’ channels of choice, but social media and ecommerce are also becoming an increasingly vital and effective part of the online marketing mix.

Shopper Marketing Insight: Embracing Digital Touchpoints
Traditionally, retailers and consumer products brands have relied mostly on offline media and promotion to deploy shopper marketing programs that help drive sales, secure customer loyalty and encourage trial of new products. However, as digital media and technology have grown more pervasive in consumers’ lives, they play an increasingly significant role in decision-making at each phase of the shopping process.

Social Commerce: Personalized and Collaborative Shopping Experiences
A new frontier in social commerce is being explored as retailers leverage customers’ Facebook profile data to deliver personalized shopping experiences on their sites. Fueling this trend is web retailers’ quick adoption of social sign-on, which allows consumers to log in to their Facebook account instead of registering on an ecommerce site.

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To listen and watch playback of the webinar, Social Media Outlook for 2011, click here. You can view the PowerPoint deck below.

You will take away:

• The numbers to know—how businesses are budgeting for social media and what they are spending
• How important Facebook is becoming to the online marketplace
• Why “liking” a brand is only the beginning of a consumer’s dialog with a company
• Which demographic groups are the heaviest users of social media and how to effectively reach them

About Debra Aho Williamson

Debra is eMarketer’s lead analyst focusing on social media marketing and the demographics of social media users. She produces eMarketer’s forecasts for social network advertising spending in the US and worldwide and has written more than two dozen reports delivering key insights covering how marketers, media and consumers are engaging with social media. A founding executive editor of pioneering internet business publication The Industry Standard, Debra is quoted for her analysis in the business press and invited to speak at major digital marketing internet events.

Sponsored by Demand Media.

Companies will spend more than ever on social media marketing in 2011, but some businesses are boosting budgets for entirely the wrong reasons.

In my new report “Social Media in the Marketing Mix: Budgeting for 2011,” I demonstrate that companies are planning budget increases next year, as they move from cautious experimentation to full implementation.

That sounds great, and shows that social media is winning over skeptical marketing executives. But many companies are expanding budgets for social media marketing not because they have been successful at it, but because they are relying on gut instinct—the feeling that “this is something important so I’m going to do it even if I don’t know why.” Or worse, they have watched their competitors earn accolades in the press for their work in social media, and they are afraid of losing any more ground.

These are exactly the wrong reasons to increase spending on social media. A few years ago, you could run a few tests and gain some valuable learning without spending much. You could go on your gut and hope for the best. Or you could let your competition make all the mistakes, and learn from them.

But things have changed. Social media sites have matured, and you can’t do much for free anymore. A Promoted Trend ad on Twitter can cost $100,000 per day. Top social media agencies are in demand, and they charge premiums for their work. Social media is too expensive—both in actual dollars and in the cost to your company if you do it wrong—for businesses to spend for the wrong reasons.

Now, more than ever, marketers need a clear plan and strategy for social media.

Takeaways:

Focus on integration. Integrating social media with other corporate activities is a key challenge for marketers, but incorporating it is the only way to be successful, long term. While respondents to a September 2010 Econsultancy survey were likely to have at least some unity between social media and marketing or PR, that was not the case for other core business functions such as customer service, sales, CRM or product development.

Instead of adding social media, start with it. I’m not saying every marketing effort needs to have a social component, or that social needs to be at the forefront. But it must be assessed at the earliest planning stages, rather than tacked on at the end.

General Motors is transitioning social media management into its automobile brand teams, giving them budget and planning responsibility. That way, “you don’t all of a sudden have someone going off and doing something that doesn’t jibe with marketing, or where the brand wanted to go on something, ” GM’s social media chief, Christopher Barger, told me when I was researching the report. “You don’t have the marketers going off and doing a social activation that they think makes sense but in the end doesn’t really.”

Even if you don’t think you can measure ROI, at least try. The ROI question is a critical issue to resolve and I expect much solid work will be done in 2011. But in the meantime, there’s no excuse for not even trying to measure results.

A survey by Harvard Business Review and SAS found that even among companies that considered themselves effective users of social media, 31% were not even using any analytic tools to help guide their work.

Businesses can be forgiven for not fully understanding the impact of their social media marketing programs. Analytics tools still need a lot of work. But not using analytics at all—that’s inexcusable.

The bottom line: The expected growth in social media marketing spending next year is a positive thing—a sign that it has earned a place at the marketing dinner table. While there are still many challenges to using it effectively, increasing budgets without a solid strategy is a sure way to fail.

With 52 million members, InterContinental Hotels Group’s (IHG) loyalty program, Priority Club Rewards, enables guests to earn points when checking in at nearly all IHG’s 4,500 hotels worldwide. The Priority Club Select Visa, the credit card connected to the loyalty program issued by Chase, serves as an extension of the IHG brand and lets members enjoy greater rewards and loyalty status at establishments such as Holiday Inn, Candlewood Suites and Crowne Plaza Hotels & Resorts.

Background

In the spring of 2009, IHG and Chase planned to relaunch the Priority Club Select Visa and wanted more conversational feedback and insight into new card features than traditional market research could provide. They turned to Communispace, a provider of private online communities, to rally a pool of 300 current Priority Club Visa cardholders willing to share their opinions on what card benefits and services are important.

Challenge

IHG and Chase kicked off the Priority Club Rewards community in June 2009. The goal was to align the new loyalty product with what core customers revealed as valuable traits in a “top-of-the-wallet” credit card. They wanted to explore rewards benefits such as free hotel stays and needed to find out how much of an annual fee customers were willing to pay on the card. In terms of card usage, “We weren’t seeing as high engagement as we would have liked to have seen,” said Sari Bernardo, alliances marketing manager at InterContinental Hotels Group.

Over the course of a year, IHG and Chase set out to talk to customers about their experiences with credit cards—what drives their usage and what specifically Priority Club Rewards and Chase could provide to capture more of their customer’s current spending. The team set an objective to double card penetration among its loyalty members and focus on the elite tier of its customer base—frequent travelers who hold Gold and Platinum reward status in the loyalty program.

Strategy

With help from Communispace, IHG and Chase walked community members through various scenarios and asked their thoughts about annual fees, rewards and loyalty-point redemption. The Priority Club team sought to engage cardholders with a variety of card usage, but it especially wanted to hear from customers who have a card but don’t use it on a regular basis.

“Our primary objective was, how do we get this new product right?” said Andrew Light, director of the IHG partnership at Chase Card Services. The discussions included design, marketing materials and “how we talk about features and benefits,” Light said.

Seeking to boost customer spending on the card and acquire new qualified cardholders, IHG and Chase focused on implementing new features that community members expressed were of value to them. For instance, community members suggested a new reward: an annual free-night certificate that could be used worldwide with no black-out dates. They also encouraged the Priority Club team to offer no foreign transaction fees when using the card abroad.

In addition to IHG-related benefits, it became clear to Chase and IHG that in order to drive engagement and regular spending with the Priority Club Select Visa, they needed to give consumers something back for everyday purchases. They introduced product rewards for cardholders that gave two points per dollar on gas, grocery and dining purchases. When cardholders spent with IHG, they earned five points per dollar. One community member, Bernardo recalled, did the math to see how many points he would earn by using his card, which he would redeem for a free night at Holiday Inn. “Free nights are actually obtainable in a reasonable amount of time,” the member concluded.

From the new-benefits discussion came the question as to whether community members would be willing to pay a higher annual fee in exchange for greater value. IHG and Chase proposed a $49 annual fee—up from $29 on the legacy credit card—to balance the program’s new benefits. “The annual free-night certificate justified that cost for them,” Bernardo said.

Results

Before officially launching the card in June 2010, IHG and Chase ran its marketing materials by the community. Members advised the team on features to tout and even helped pinpoint the imagery for the credit card’s official landing page.

Chase and IHG promoted the card through multiple channels. Email offers delivered particularly strong results. The initial email campaign for the new product yielded an 80% increase in new accounts when compared to the previous 2010 email campaign for the legacy card product. Chase and IHG also saw a 53% lift in the response rates from existing customers opting to upgrade to the new card. Also, 50% of cardholders who upgraded to the new product switched from a previous no-fee version of the card.

Key Takeaways

The Priority Club Rewards online community demonstrated the power of crowdsourcing to give customers what they truly wanted. For IHG, the customer community also acted as a sounding board for ideas and topics related to the hotel chain. Customers voiced several customer service-related issues, for instance, and IHG and Chase helped work out a few bill-paying glitches. IHG said it has begun to notice residual benefits—lifts in both spending and activity with the card.

“We’re attracting a different type of customer than we did from our legacy product,” Bernardo said. “We’re attracting even more elite members, those Gold and Platinum very frequent, heavy business travelers.”

IHG and Chase have been able to optimize their communications and marketing efforts because of insights from the community. For example, the majority of community members argued against Priority Club Rewards marketing the product via social networks, citing it “too commercial” for that type of environment.

Next Steps

Six months later, the Priority Club Rewards community remains live and has no intended stop date. The community will continue to serve as a learning mechanism for Priority Club Rewards, helping with both ideation and customer service. “The community,” Light said, “will help us with innovation to keep the card ‘top of wallet,’ fresh and valuable, and keep us ahead of the marketplace.” Currently, the team is engaging the community on the reward-redemption experience and how it affects cardholder satisfaction.

With the Federal Trade Commission proposal for an online do-not-track mechanism and members of Congress putting out their own PR on the issue, I asked eMarketer’s principal analyst and social media expert Debra Aho Williamson for her take on the issue.

Question: What do you think of the proposal for a do-not-track list, which the FTC and lawmakers seem to think would work pretty much like the telemarketing do-not-call list?

Debra Aho Williamson: The reason do not call works is because everything is associated to a phone number but on the internet there are so many ad servers, networks and parties involved in delivering internet advertising, that it would be impossible to have a single do-not-track list.

Question: Consumers don’t like the idea of being followed online, so isn’t the demand for some kind of do-not-track mechanism a reaction to the genuine feeling among consumers that their privacy is being violated?

Debra: Any do-not-track mechanism would pretty much obliterate the way consumers use the internet. Consumers don’t realize how much of the basic functioning of the internet and the positive user experience revolve around tracking.

They don’t realize how do not track would negatively impact their experience. Things they don’t think about are how when they visit a news site the site tracks what they are interested in and then offers them stories they like. Or how an ecommerce site keeps their credit card information, so they don’t have to re-enter it every time they want to buy something. Or that a social site keeps track of their preferences.

People take all of this for granted, and I’m not sure that consumers or the FTC are completely aware of this.

Question: What about offering consumers an opt-in for being tracked?

Debra: Opt in always sounds great. But when it comes to advertising, there are so many parties and players involved, it is really hard to make opt in effective. When you think about all those different ads on a page, how could you opt in to all those suppliers?

It’s easy to opt in with email, you just say you would like a particular email newsletter. But with targeting it’s much more complicated. For instance, I was on a news site and there were ads on the page. I saw an ad for Seattle, which just happens to be where I live. There was also a banner ad for American Girl dolls. Oddly enough, I had been looking at American Girl dolls while holiday shopping for my kids. Is that creepy or helpful? I find it helpful.

Question: What about self-regulation?

Debra: It’s pretty clear that the landscape of targeted content and targeted advertising is getting very complicated. There are many companies using data on consumers in some way to deliver a customized experience, whether in advertising, customized content or in social media. But the number of players involved is enormous, and getting agreement across the industry is going to be impossible.

That said, any time that the government raises the specter of regulation, the industry always says it can regulate itself. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a lot more proposals about self-regulation as well as the industry spending more time lobbying lawmakers.

Question: How should advertisers deal with this pressure?

Debra: The best thing advertisers can do is remember to take the highroad. The consumers are their lifeblood and especially when it comes to social media, where consumers have so many opportunities to express themselves, the minute an advertiser oversteps their bounds, the consumer is going to talk about it all across the internet. That would be the worst-case scenario.