As Motorola’s Droid smartphone readies for launch, the mobile industry is rife with geeky-yet-endearing Star Wars references. Most seem to fall into the camp that this is the droid we’re looking for (check out PC World for a good round-up), but it begs the question of which droid? Will Motorola’s smartest smartphone be the multilingual (and often long-winded) C-3PO, the chirpy R2-D2 or perhaps a battle droid from the less-than-endearing second series of Star Wars prequels?

In some ways, the latter reference might be the most appropriate, now that we know Droid is not just a model but a brand. It is, in short, the first in a veritable army of devices designed to fight for domination in the increasingly contentious smartphone space.

Of course, that battle is also about individual soldiers. As with Palm’s Pre, the Droid is Motorola’s comeback device – Motorola’s first real opportunity in years to recapture some of the luster it once had in the Razr’s heyday. Droid also marks a big line in the sand for the Android platform. As I alluded in a previous post, the alliance of Verizon and Android (with the right devices – check) should provide a big boost to carrier and OS alike (and increase distribution for apps in Android Market).

The larger question is: who’s fighting whom in this battle? Naturally, sitting as it does at the top of the smartphone heap, the iPhone is always the point of comparison for any new smartphone that comes to market, but it isn’t always the target (TechCrunch very ably covers this issue here).

I tend to subscribe to the notion that Apple and Google are more frenemies than enemies, with the recent skirmish over the Google Voice app and the ensuing board of directors drama more of a distraction than anything else, at least for the time being. For now, the two will be loosely allied in a “the-enemy-of-my-friend-is-my-enemy” sort of way against Microsoft. In other words, think of mobile as an important front, but in a much larger (and longer) war for computing supremacy.

Along the way, a rebel alliance is bound to emerge, and we know how that story goes….

Founded in 1999, GSI Commerce works with over 80 pure-play and multichannel retailers, including Toys “R” Us and RadioShack, as well as brands, including Ralph Lauren and Timberland. Clients look to GSI to implement strategies for customer acquisition to Web stores. We spoke with Jeff McCall, who leads the strategy services group at GSI, about how retailers are approaching the 2009 holiday season. A taste:

eMarketer: Where have retailers invested in their Websites, and where have they cut costs in preparation for the holiday season?

Mr. McCall: Retailers have spent time this year over the past few months making the shopping experience easier and better. Some have invested in usability studies, so they can remove some of the roadblocks that are keeping people from buying. It makes it a better customer experience, and it also raises the ROI on the marketing dollars that drove that traffic there, so we could argue that’s a cost savings.

The other place people invest that always seems to pay off is online gift centers. Retailers are anticipating what customers’ needs are and make some great suggestions, adding in customer reviews. It builds a community. Finally, we’ll see a push for gift cards and gift certificates for when customers can’t find the perfect gift or it’s late in the buying season.

eMarketer: Do you see differences in Website priorities for Web-only retailers versus the multichannel retailers?

Mr. McCall: Web-only retailers will do a lot of things we just talked about. Brick-and-mortar retailers have finally embraced the idea of tools such as associate ordering systems, where an associate can order an item not in the physical store from the online channel and ship it directly to the consumer. We’ve seen clients have great results with doing that. The same goes with in-store pickup. This has been around for a decade, but retailers have been slow to really embrace it, because there are challenges.

While we’ve seen divisions before between online and offline channels, I think a lot of those silos are breaking down. Customers are signing up for e-mail marketing in stores. Multichannel retailers are finally realizing that’s a good thing for both sides of the business.

eMarketer: How can small online retailers compete against large retailers such as Wal-Mart and Amazon during the holiday season?

Mr. McCall: The couple things I’d recommend to the smaller retailers would be first, make sure the site experience is everything it can possibly be, really fine-tune it to make it as compelling as possible.

No. 2 is to make sure that when you do get someone to come to your site and either sign up for e-mail or make a purchase, do everything you can to create that cycle of re-engagement with that consumer and bring them back again. Three or four years ago, retailers would throw lots of money into bringing consumers to their sites, but they didn’t worry about them after that. Now there’s a big shift, especially over the last year. Retailers know how much of their sales come from repeat customers. Make sure you’re locking those customers in and becoming their go-to source for whatever it is they’re shopping for.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access subscribers only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

Three recent developments in the online sports world bear out our long-held view that more and more live game content would migrate online.

The National Basketball Association is now offering a comprehensive broadband game package, priced at $150 per season, that offers live access to more than 40 games per week. This is the NBA’s first standalone broadband offering; previously, the league offered live online game streams only to subscribers of its cable TV package. This latest move puts the NBA in line with Major League Baseball, which has had a similar offering in place for years.

Speaking of MLB, the league posted some impressive online video and mobile video stats for the first round of the current playoff season.

And finally, CBS Interactive cited comScore data showing impressive month-over-month gains in unique viewers, video streams and minutes for its CBSSports.com Web property. (CBS College Sports, meanwhile, posted growth in viewers and streams.) The company attributed these increases to the start of the National Football League season, and the fantasy-league activity that accompanies it.

We’ve posted a few great interviews recently from our Total Access database — here’s a quick roundup of the action:

• Helping Wal-Mart Get Interactive: Kenny Tomlin of Rockfish Interactive chats with us about the company’s work with Wal-Mart and the social media forecast.
• Clorox: Rewiring The Brand Experience With Social Media: Mary O’Connell of Clorox talks about the company’s efforts to make digital and social media part of its brands’ success. O’Connell referred to creating a new vision of digital marketing that is “rewiring and re-imagining our entire brand experience.
• Integrated Marketing and Media at P&G: Clark Reinhard of Procter & Gamble describes the integrated marketing and media strategy for launching the Scope Outlast product line, which includes online video consumer testimonials and multimedia tie-ins with “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest.
• Best Buy Talks Social Commerce on Facebook: We chat with Tracy Benson, the Senior Director of Interactive Marketing & Emerging Media at Best Buy, about the company’s recent launch of social commerce campaigns on Facebook and Twitter.
• The Social Power of User-Generated Content: Sam Decker of Bazaarvoice explains how retailers use customer reviews and stories to drive measurable business results.
• Coke Weighs The Value of Social Media: Carol Kruse develops interactive marketing programs and experiences for Coca-Cola’s global brands around the world. Here, Ms. Kruse discusses Coke’s use of digital media and marketing and the evolution of social media.
• How Honest Tea Brews Buzz Online: Jesse Merrill, the director of marketing at Honest Tea, chats about the company’s word-of-mouth and grassroots approach to marketing.

Ever find yourself with the need to monitor social network and online buzz about your brand, your products or even yourself while on the go? Well, now there’s an app for that.

Actually, more than one. A number of Twitter tools have built-in monitoring features, but so far they’re limited to Twitter chatter. Larry Chase, publisher of “Web Digest for Marketers,” has a rundown of some of these (and other) business-oriented iPhone apps here.

Digital agency iCrossing recently introduced Say What?, an app that aggregates keyword-based search results from Twitter and Digg as well as blogs and forums into a single interface (full disclosure: I used to work at iCrossing). It also allows you to save your search history, which is handy for frequently searched terms like brand and company names.

Revolutionary? No. Efficient and easy to use? Yes. And that counts for a lot, especially as the quantity of conversations about brands and products (and people, for that matter) multiply. A side benefit for iCrossing, of course, is that it can use Say What? to monitor the buzz it generates by launching a tool like Say What?. Maybe not the raison d’etre for building it, but no doubt a highly useful side effect for an agency focused on the intersection of search, social media and mobile.

iPhone users can download the app from the App Store here (iTunes required).

Kenny Tomlin of Rockfish Interactive chats with us about the company’s work with Wal-Mart and the social media forecast:

eMarketer: Let’s talk about Wal-Mart and the Your Zone home furnishing site.

Mr. Tomlin: Your Zone is an example of taking a brand and creating an online brand experience for teens and tweens. Site users can select different room types and design the room to look like theirs, in terms of wall and floor coloring. We created all the 3D models of the Your Zone furniture options. When the room is built to the way users like it, they can actually order everything in that room. It gives them an opportunity to visualize what the furniture looks like and mix and match different options.

There are lots of applications for this type of functionality. There could be opportunities to do this with patio and outdoor furniture or furniture targeted at other age groups. Companies can gain a lot of insight in terms of most popular items and how rooms are being configured, so there really are many purposes beyond just selling the products.

eMarketer: You’ve also worked on the Elevenmoms program.

Mr. Tomlin: Yes. Wal-Mart was one of the first large brands that really became active in building relationships with moms online. They reached out to eleven moms who were already blogging, Twittering and using social media platforms to talk about the things that were very much on board with what Wal-Mart is about—their “Save money. Live better.” brand message. It was very organic.

Elevenmoms wasn’t about having these bloggers help sell products—it’s really been more about the relationship and the opportunity to build a one-to-one conversation with customers who are passionate about the brand message. A lot of great ideas have come from the moms who are working with us. Now there are over 20 moms in the space.

eMarketer: Any thoughts on the FTC regulating blog content and enforcing that bloggers be more transparent about paid editorial placement?

Mr. Tomlin: If a brand contacts a blogger and says, “I want to send you my product to try,” the brand is thinking of it as an advertising opportunity.

The blogger needs to fully disclose that the product is provided to them for free and then the reader can decide how credible the review is. Because if I received a free car to drive for a month, am I going to write a negative review about it? Maybe I love the car, but a lot of people who read a positive review may be skeptical if the car was provided for free.

Some bloggers do product reviews on their own as a value and a service. What’s been disappointing, from my perspective, is many of these moms are interested in blogging simply because they think they can create a business out of it, but aren’t transparent. If that’s why you’re creating a blog, just disclose it.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access subscribers only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

I just completed a report on how consumer packaged goods companies can maximize social media for their business. It won’t be published for a few more weeks, but I wanted to preview a few datapoints gleaned from my research:

1. CPG brand loyalty is ebbing. The CMO Council and Catalina Marketing found that the average CPG brand lost one-third of its most loyal customers in 2007 and 2008—before the recession took hold.

2. Consumer goods marketers (a category that includes CPGs as well as a range of other product types) accounted for just 3.1% of social network display advertising spending in August 2009. If CPGs are on social networks (which they definitely are) they aren’t forking out paid media to support their presence there.

Is there a relationship between these two things? Could CPGs drive more brand loyalty by buying more advertising on social networks? Or does brand loyalty come from something deeper—perhaps a more organic presence in social media?

That’s what many people are asking on Twitter in response to today’s newsletter article, Does Social Media Work For Small Biz?. The story cites data from the Citibank Small Business Survey, which found that some 63% of small business owners think social media ‘is not helpful at all’ for generating leads. Reader CR responds, via Facebook:

My guess is that these small business owners heard the hype, gave it a go alone and saw little to no results. With the proper education, or by working with a specialist or agency, I think many of them would begin seeing the results they were hoping for. That’s been my experience.

What do you think? Is it the medium or the execution?

Update: To add another interesting angle to the debate, I just noticed this LA Times story today titled, Facebook Becoming Big Friend of Small Business.

I spoke recently with Mary O’Connell of Clorox about the company’s efforts to make digital and social media part of its brands’ success. O’Connell referred to creating a new vision of digital marketing that is “rewiring and re-imagining our entire brand experience. Read on:

eMarketer: What role does digital marketing—and media and social media, in particular—play for Clorox brands?

Mary O’Connell: We’ve been looking at social media intensely in the past 18 months or more. We’ve made great strides as a company in incorporating digital marketing and media into almost all of our marketing communications plans, so we made a conscious move into social media. My group is creating a new vision of digital marketing, which is we are rewiring and re-imagining our entire brand experience.

eMarketer: Green Works is a relatively new brand in the Clorox portfolio. How is it using social media and digital marketing to enhance brand awareness?

Ms. O’Connell: When we launched Green Works, we made certain that we went where our consumers are. This was a very conscious decision and the Green Works consumer is highly evolved in the digital space.

We have a blog site called the Shades of Green Journal and a program called 30 Days to Natural. With Green Works, we were very transparent about the ingredients in the products. At the beginning of this year, we began providing full ingredient disclosure about all of our cleaning products on our corporate Website and the Green Works site.

The Shades of Green Journal is a blog where we share relevant news and developments at Green Works and the natural category. 30 Days to Natural is a very lightly branded way of engaging consumers and providing tips on the things they can do to lead a more natural lifestyle. We also have a ratings and review function on our Green Works site. Consumers post and tell us what they think about the products, which we think is hugely important.

eMarketer: Has Green Works sponsored any online content on green or natural products/living sites and blogs?

Ms. O’Connell: We were the platinum sponsor of the BlogHer conference this year. We also had a conference of aggregated Twitter and blog content with live feeds offering information based on Green Works microsites. We also have a relationship with the Sundance Channel for paid media. Brita had a program called “Show Us Your Green Room Contest” that targeted college students and was tied in with Facebook.

Fresh Step cat litter has a Facebook presence and a cause marketing relationship with the ASPCA. Clorox has its own Facebook page aimed at the issues mothers and families face with respect to the health and wellness of their family.

Just before the Labor Day holiday this year, Clorox offered free disinfecting wipes to teachers. So, in the midst of concerns about the H1N1 virus, we teamed with the National Education Association and offered wipes to every teacher in the country. Teachers went to CloroxClassrooms.com to register for and download a free coupon for Clorox Disinfecting Wipes. In a four-day period, more than 100,000 teachers redeemed coupons—that was a program launched through social media in real time.

eMarketer: How was the site promoted?

Ms. O’Connell: Teachers knew to go to the site through promotion by the NEA. We did some traditional media, but most of the promotion was done through bloggers who cover teachers, health, education and schools, and on Twitter. Even bloggers who just write about free things wrote to us and asked for the link to the program.
We’re also very active on Twitter. The Twitter homepage lists the top 10 trending topics and Labor Day weekend, CloroxClassrooms.com was among the top 10 topics of the day. We knew the word would be spread through teacher blogs and mom blogs. It really demonstrated the power of social media in a situation like this.

It’s critical for us to offer something of value to consumers. Earlier this year Clorox was recognized by the Marketing to Moms Coalition for excellence in how we outreach to bloggers. Bloggers gave us a high rating in terms of offering the mom bloggers valuable information that they could share with their readers. We want to offer useful information and have an ongoing dialogue with this audience.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access subscribers only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

Clark Reinhard of Procter & Gamble describes the integrated marketing and media strategy for launching the Scope Outlast product line, which includes online video consumer testimonials and multimedia tie-ins with “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest.

eMarketer: The brand is partnering with Ryan Seacrest on promotion. Why?

Mr. Reinhard: He has such a broad appeal and we’ve worked with him for a few years. We recently debuted our TV commercials on his Website, RyanSeacrest.com, and he tweeted to his fans to watch the commercials.

eMarketer: What role do digital media and marketing play in this launch?

Mr. Reinhard: We have homepage takeover banners, online video testimonials and a downloadable coupon offer. We’re continuing to increase our investments in digital and particularly on this initiative. We cannot disclose our media spend, but digital is an important part of our overall holistic program.

In addition to our Website, we’ve done outreach to bloggers and keyword search. We’ve also deployed online ad units. For example, the expandable unit offers consumers the opportunity not only to learn about the products, but the ability to see what people who have tried the product think of it. The ads bring a bit of the Website experience to them so they don’t need to go to our brand site to learn about the product.

Our Pour unit shows two horizontal and vertical units on the same page. Together, they deliver the full message as liquid from the horizontal unit pours into a bottle, which is the vertical unit. We’re innovating in how we use our ad units. You can then click through to see the videos and still see your e-mail. The ad units aren’t interrupting the consumer’s experience.

eMarketer: Are there any media buys so far on “American Idol” or Ryan Seacrest’s radio show?

Mr. Reinhard: We are featuring Ryan in our advertising, on our Website and his, in FSIs [freestanding inserts] and also for events and appearances. We are always looking for cross-promotional opportunities to support our brand and the Seacrest properties.

eMarketer: The ad campaign includes TV, print, online, sampling and point-of-sales media. What sorts of online destinations are you targeting?

Mr. Reinhard: We are launching with different spots for Scope Outlast mouthwash and Crest Extra White plus Scope Outlast Toothpaste on national network and cable TV spots. Online, we are focusing on social networks, blogs and the sites of womens’ fashion/beauty magazines such as Marie Claire and Redbook, as well as entertainment sites such as MTV, People and Bravo.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access subscribers only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.