Social Media Week hit New York City with a vengeance last week and at one of the more spirited events–SUXORZ–a panel and a Greek chorus-style crowd identified the worst social media campaigns of 2009. In case you’re flummoxed by the word “suxorz” (I was too), it’s a word derived from the “sucks”. Campaigns by Pepsi, Charmin, Pampers, General Motors, Mars, Time Warner Cable, PETA, Pizza Hut and Ryanair were among the contenders for suckage honors.

Among the “winners”–a campaign by Old Spice that showed an animated video of a hairy, crusty armpit and Ryanair’s offensive attitude toward customer feedback.

So how can you use social media to fix campaigns that don’t click with your targets? Reacting correctly to negative feedback is crucial. According to a survey by Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia, direct engagement is the number one method of rectifying issues and addressing not-so-positive response.

In the newly published eMarketer Insight Brief: “Social Media Misfires: How to Head Off Trouble Before it Hits,” we highlight how marketers can avoid four kinds of social media meltdowns–employee abuse of social media; complaint response; how to avoid getting caught offguard; and how to avoid breaking the rules of engagement. From the brief:

Negative comments and false statements about brands can spread fast. Because consumers have the ability to create, publish and distribute their own content—as well as comment, debate, recommend and share their opinions—marketers and their brands are more vulnerable than ever. For instance, brands can be damaged by people who use Twitter to post false information. And they can just as easily be affected for the worse by employees who post prank videos on YouTube.

Listen up: Failing to appropriately research a social media strategy and establish relevant best practices can cost your company dearly.

“Social Media Misfires: How to Head Off Trouble Before It Hits” is a part of a series of eMarketer Insight Briefs focused on social media marketing. Available exclusively to Total Access subscribers, the seven briefs, along with a PowerPoint slideshow, answer the most common and most pressing questions that businesses have about social media marketing.

Total Access subscribers, log in and view the Insight Briefs now. Learn more about an eMarketer Total Access subscription today.

It’s always nice to find new research that supports so much that has gone before. In this instance, I refer to a press release from the Continuum Crew announcing that baby boomers are “emerging as New Social Media Mavens.” The survey covered 700 respondents from the Greenfield Online Panel, ages 35 and older.

My upcoming report, Boomers and Social Media, shows that boomers are flocking to Facebook. The main reason is the same as every other generation has adopted social networking: They want to be connected to family and friends. In fact, boomers are more open to meeting new people through social networks than any other generation, according to a survey by EuroRSCG Worldwide.

With all the boomers crowding on to Facebook, some media outlets wondered if they weren’t chasing away younger networkers. That does not seem to be the case, especially since the Continuum Crew survey found that its empty-nester respondents reported an “unprecedented” number of adult children were moving back home, thanks to the recession. If kids can swallow their pride and move back in with Mom and Dad, they can’t get too picky about sharing a social network.

When was the last time you cancelled your Super Bowl party because your favorite team wasn’t playing in the game? That was the question posed by Michael DiLorenzo, the National Hockey League’s social media and digital communications manager, at the Business Development Institute’s Social Integration breakfast Wednesday.

DiLorenzo explained that one the challenges faced by the NHL is convincing fans to “activate nationally” during the Stanley Cup playoffs — that is, getting people to care and watch playoff games even if their local or favorite team isn’t playing. So when a couple innovative fans came up with the idea to have a “Tweet Up” for the 2009 playoffs, the NHL ran with the idea. Since then, #NHLtweetup has become a great example of how marketers can use Twitter not only as an engagement tool, but as a loyalty and community building tool as well.

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In my just published Online Holiday Shopping Preview report (available to eMarketer Total Access subscribers), I forecast that e-commerce holiday season sales will grow 5.4% over last year, reaching $30 billion. Although this is tepid growth compared with the double-digit rates seen for most of this decade, it is a strong improvement over last season’s 5.7% decline. It also compares favorably with retail experts’ predictions of flat holiday store sales.

My online holiday sales forecast incorporates last week’s US Census Bureau report showing that after three consecutive quarters of sales declines retail e-commerce sales turned a corner in Q3 2009 by growing 2.1%. I expect that the recovery will gain momentum in Q4, spurred by holiday spending in November and December.

E-commerce is ideally suited for holiday shopping. The convenience of 24-hour shopping, the ability to compare prices, the opportunity to avoid crowded malls and the ease of finding items that run out of stock in nearby stores are all reasons why holiday shoppers will buy online in greater numbers and shift a bigger share of their total gift spending to the Internet this holiday season.

I am optimistic about the future of e-commerce. Over the next couple of years, unleashed pent-up demand should push e-commerce sales growth back to pre-recession double-digit levels. Mobile commerce, which is on the verge of taking off, will add new vigor to e-commerce. Further on the horizon is the intriguing potential of distributed e-commerce. Retailers will no longer wait for customers to come to their Websites. Instead they will bring their virtual stores to the sites where consumers congregate.

I just submitted a draft of new report on mobile social networking, which should be released in early November. It’s a fast-emerging space, and yet another example of consumers moving much faster than marketers. In other words, there are a lot more mobile users on social networks than there are marketers.

Part of the reason is the both mobile and social are emerging channels. Combine the two of them together, and well, you have an even less mature proposition. Not necessarily a lack of marketing opportunities, but more complications getting programs off the ground, as I learned from conversations with marketing executives. For example, here’s a snippet from my interview with Adam Broitman, co-founder of Cir.cus:

eMarketer: Where do you see responsibility for mobile social programs coming from?

Mr. Broitman: We still haven’t even fully defined who’s responsible for social, so when it comes to mobile-social, the process becomes even more complicated.

Adam’s sentiment was echoed by my friend and former eMarketer colleague, David Berkowitz, now senior director of emerging media & innovation at digital agency 360i, and steward of the excellent Inside the Marketers Studio blog. Here’s a short excerpt from that interview:

eMarketer: What kinds of challenges do marketers face, both internally in their own companies as well as externally facing the market, in getting mobile social networking programs going?

Mr. Berkowitz: Some of it, right off the bat, is just figuring out who owns mobile.

My questions to you:

• Who’s responsible for mobile, social and mobile-social marketing in your company?
• How have you successfully resolved internal ownership issues?

Businesses are flocking to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter so they can be where their customers are. What many of them don’t realize is that they have to adapt their messages to the medium’s culture.

Zappos is a widely cited example of a company that understands this. In an interview with social media blog Mashable, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh summed up his philosophy: “I think people worry too much about bringing their personal selves into business when I think the way to succeed in today’s world is to make your business more personal.” This approach allows customer to get to know a company and the people that work for it on a more personal basis. They can see how the retailer communicates and how it responds to the conversations on its Facebook page.

As Gordon Magee, Internet marketing and media manager at pet supplier Drs. Foster & Smith, told eMarketer, “At the end of the day, it’s the relationship that’s being developed so that you have a genuine desire as a company to provide customer satisfaction to the customer, and the customer trusts you enough to give you some money to have you send them a product through the mail.”

Since the advent of the recession, many banks haven’t thought of social media as a natural “fit” for their business or marketing aims. But that’s changing. Christophe Langlois monitors financial firms around the world that are using online communities and initiatives — as well Twitter, Facebook and other third-party channels — to engage consumers and employees, improve service and build advocacy.

In fact, Christophe’s Visible Banking site is potentially a useful resource for almost any brand; bankers shouldn’t be the only ones to take advantage of the examples and strategies listed here.

For a soon-to-be-published eMarketer report on social commerce, I recently spoke with Tracy Benson, the senior director of interactive marketing & emerging media at Best Buy about her company’s social media initiatives. She discussed some of the complexities around targeting influential customers—people who share their opinions with a large network of followers.

Ms. Benson said that Best Buy knows the profile of its best customers, understands their behavior and recognizes what these shoppers like because it keeps in constant touch with them. What Best Buy doesn’t know is the extent of their influence.

“What we’re trying to learn right now is whether the same person who purchases a lot from us is also one of our best influencers or is there a different path to the influencers. They may not be the best purchaser in terms of quantity or dollars, but they might be influencing 1,000 people in their network who then become the buyers.”

Where Best Buy needs help, according to Ms. Benson, is with data warehousing expertise. It is difficult to analyze the large number of customer comments collected from social media sites on a large scale. The alternative is to manually look at every customer who comments to see which ones post their comments to a large community of friends.

It’s no secret that smartphone users index higher for just about every key mobile activity than those with feature phones. But the growth in social networking usage among smartphone users has been truly eye-popping. According to a recent study from Nielsen, the number of smartphone users engaging in social networking activities shot up 187% from July 2008 to July 2009, nearly tripling from 6.4 to 18.3 million users in total.

What’s even more interesting is that mobile users have begun to display similar
frequency and time spent patterns as those accessing the leading social networks
from their PCs. As I discussed in my “Mobile Users and Usage: It’s Personal” report, marketers, publishers and advertisers alike can get a sense of what tomorrow’s mobile media consumption landscape will look like from today’s smartphone users, and mobile social networkers in particular are on the leading edge.