He came to find the owner of the phone was a man whose look of frustration was not due to an unsuccessful shopping trip, long lines or a packed parking lot, but rather his experience with trying to make a purchase on a mobile site. Unfortunately, and as research shows, this man is not alone.

So how do consumers respond to a bad mobile experience?

A study by Harris Interactive reveals:

• 43% say they would abandon the transaction and try again later on a computer
• 16% would be more likely to buy from a competitor
• 12% would abandon the transaction and try a competitors mobile site
• 63% would be less likely to buy from the same company via other purchase channels

The statics above should sound an alarm for brands that are looking to make sales from their mobile site. Is your brand guilty of creating a frustrating mobile experience? Read GMS Local’s latest blog post – Does Your Site Make A Mobile Phone Fly? – for three key recommendations that can help save your brand from a mobile mistake.  

To chat more about local digital advertising, keep in touch with the team from GMS Local on Twitter at @GMSLocal

Marketing executives and managers of national brands, with a minimum of 500 brick and mortar locations, were surveyed and provided with the local digital marketing averages and best practices from national data in order to access their reactions and to have them create comparative “self-assessments” against the national averages. According to the study, one of three national brands has yet to invest in the basic local digital effort of online business directory listings, and thirty-two percent of these marketers attribute their insufficient engagement to a lack of awareness.

“The research shows a clear disconnect between what brands believe they are doing with those investments and what is actually being done. We speak to advertisers daily that have enormous blind spots in local digital coverage, and who welcome the education and strategy needed to resolve their willingness to spend and target which is hindered by the inability to determine what to do first and next,” said Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search.

According to Borrell Associates, local digital advertising is expected to grow 18 percent in 2012, with local online spend projected to surpass all other channels by 2015. This growth, compared with the gap in what marketing executives perceive their brands are doing at the local level and the reality of their execution, shows national advertisers are missing the opportunity for sizeable gains.

As detailed in GMS Local’s whitepaper,“Perception vs. Execution: Examination of Brands’ Local Business Strategies Reveals Gaps to Act On,” national advertisers can overcome these challenges with deeper education around opportunity in the local digital space and self-assessment of the reality of their allocation and programs. Also helpful within the document is  a blueprint to help brands assess their local digital strategy and the three key areas for immediate action.

To chat more about local digital advertising, keep in touch with the team from GMS Local on Twitter at @GMSLocal

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page; 
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and, 
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community. 

The changes show a continued and clear commitment to the Google+ social network as noted by Stephen Hall, Sr. Partner, Director, Global Search for Catalyst online, a GroupM company. “This is a move to help push adoption of G+ on brands.  Growing your community/circles from a brand perspective, as well as increased sharing, should dramatically increase brand usage, given the vast potential increases in traffic from improved rankings.  This gets interesting for many brands as it forces them into the ‘content creator’ category. So for those that are not historically creating content, there is going to need to be a shift in the way that they are marketing their products and services.”

While many expected Google to move in this direction, there was clear unrest in some corners of the worldwide web over this move to a definition of a consumers’ world that is from Google and by Google. Twitter’s general counsel Alex Macgilivray, tweeted, in part, “Bad day for the Internet” and later the company, which once had a relationship with Google, expanded to say “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone,” Twitter continued. “We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Google’s response put all responsibility for any wider reach from Google back on the rest of the companies dedicated to cultivating the social graph. As reported in AdWeek and Search Engine Land, Google Fellow Amit Singhal said, “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service. Singhal added that “if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

For now, Google will begin rolling out these new features to all users and brands are likely to have little choice but to further engage with Google+ and the continued content creation required to distinguish. Dan Cristo, Director of SEO Innovation for Catalyst, advised, “One major thing I would expect brands to look out for is increased competition in the organic space. Previously, your organic search competitors were primarily websites. This is changing to now include anyone in a searchers social graph. Not only will preferences of ‘friends’ emerge in results as an answer to a question before a brand, those friends will be prompted to respond in real-time in this new world. Brands want to be the ones answering consumers’ questions. In order to earn that right, brands need to attain the same intimacy level friends have in the social graph, and act more like a friend as opposed to a brand.”

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search , and was  published on MediaBizBloggers, Jan. 24, 2012.  Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

Recently SEOMoz published the results of an eye-tracking study done in partnership with Mirametrix.  This study focused on local search results and offers one of the first pieces of definitive data on consumer engagement with local search results across several variations of search engine results pages. The participants were shown a variety of Google landing pages that included universal search results. Of the five search types shown in the study, each one results in a SERP with local business listings that revealed that those local business listings garnered the most consumer focus, regardless of where the business listings were placed on the page—the top or the middle.

A compelling takeaway from the study was the participant’s fixation on the ”map pack” that Google displays in local-intent results. The map pack linked in a search received a lot of eye-tracking, as did the map image on the upper right side of the page.

To learn more about the results of Google’s eye-tracking study and the importance of maintaining your local presence on the SERPS visit GMS Local’s latest blog post: Eye Tracking Study Reveals Importance of Local Listings Management.

You can follow GMS Local on Twitter at: @GMSLOCAL

Research our organization, GroupM Search, published in Q4 found that less than 5 percent of all search visits from shoppers resulted in a visit to a brand website (click here for the full study). The majority of traffic was sent, instead, to third-party review sites, comparison sites, and social platforms. With the growing options for discovery and information gathering beyond a brand site, it is fair (and wise) for brands to question what role an owned website should play.

In fact, the question for 2012 is: “What role should my online brand destinations play in communicating with consumers about my business and when should I send people to each location?” For a business to be successful in 2012, they must have an answer and strategy to act upon the response to that two-part question.

Two studies we conducted in 2011 found that there is a growing number of opportunities for brands to influence the purchase path a consumer will take. We call those opportunities “signposting” moments; a moment in the journey when a consumer reaches a fork in the road and must decide which direction to go next. As recently as 12 to 18 months ago, these moments occurred most frequently on Google’s results page, but the options at hand were largely brand websites. Now, the choices are more extreme with everything from third-party category sites (Wikipedia and comparison shopping), brand sites, video sites (YouTube), and through social media (Facebook, Twitter, and Google+).

The death of 10 blue links has helped diminish the ease of navigation to a brand site. But, choices are good and the options at the disposal of a brand can be an advantage if brands can answer the role question posed at the onset of this column. That said, brands need to determine the following for each type of property:

1. What’s the point of the assets we own? Whether it is your brand website, your Facebook page, your Twitter stream, or YouTube – what is the primary goal of the destination and how do we continue to further develop the asset to satisfy that end goal?

2. What assets can we leverage on which we have an earned presence? With more users relying on third-party sites (category blogs, review sites, etc.) it is essential to be present in those locations. Though a concerted community activation effort or API feeds of data brands cannot afford to miss out on these locations.

3. Where are we placing signposts and are they clearly marked? For most consumers, the online journey starts with Google. Increasingly, Facebook plays a role as does Twitter and YouTube. Each of these “destinations” can be a gateway to another location. So, what directions are you offering to potential consumers to get them down the funnel toward a decision that includes you?

My perspective for brands, and what I told the individuals from the two Fortune 100s previously mentioned, is that in no way should Facebook be a replacement at the start of 2012 for a brand website. It should have a clearly defined role for the brand as should the brand site. If you cannot articulate both the role and the differentiation from other owned properties, then there is a real problem. The moment you have blurred the lines in your own organization to the point that you cannot distinguish roles and differentiation, you are not positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that lie ahead with your targeted consumers.

That’s why, in 2012, there will be nothing more important for brands than to know the roles of their digital assets and how differentiation of each will be communicated to their target consumers. The goal should be to make it easy for any consumer to get to the right destination (owned or otherwise) to experience your brand in the most optimum setting that will in turn progress their own journey to an ideal outcome for your business in this new year.

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and was  published in ClickZ, Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2012.  Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

As the local/social universe constantly expands with location-specific data, the likelihood that brands will miss essential pieces of the conversation is also in flux, in turn creating a social media blind-spot with each individual location. Surprisingly, this blind spot is created due to the very nature of many social listing tools. In fact, a study released by VenueLabs indicates most social monitoring platforms may be missing as much as 82 percent of online content about a brand, leaving many brands in the dark regarding their local sentiment. 

The advances in local marketing and social media make effective “social listening” more important today than ever before. As a result, and according to GMS Local, brands should be employing social listening tactics above and beyond monitoring keywords.

GMS Local’s latest blog post further discusses the existing blind spot in social monitoring and highlights the recent VenueLabs study. Check out GMS Local’s latest blog post here for more information: Looking Around the Social Media Blind Spot

When I consider what this means for digital advertising talent, it’s clear that before we can become greater than our parts, we must change the current culture. There’s little doubt that the present digital environment is challenged by a shortage of talent based on the demand the marketplace has created. Sitting on the agency side, this is further compromised by the opportunities for financial growth that are constantly presented at virtually every turn, which lead to job hopping and a reticence to invest in talent just to see it walk out the door for greater pay elsewhere. This growth, however, comes with a price.

I recently spent time with an individual who, during our conversation, lamented that he didn’t have the right mentor to help with his career growth. The tragedy of the moment was that the individual, who is immensely talented with great potential, doesn’t lack a mentor. He lacks a manager. Therein lies the real challenge with today’s talent crunch – the lack of individuals qualified to be actual managers of people.

In the digital space, we hire for talent, we develop skills to manage clients and execute strategies, but we rarely hire managers who truly understand how to cultivate and inspire those who work for them. Yes, we have team leaders, but that responsibility set and the rewards we place on them are rarely tied to developing our talent to the degree that they will become the next generation of leaders.

In sports, it’s suggested that a great coach is, above all, a leader of men and women. She is someone who can unify and align people behind a common vision. This person is someone who can motivate people to give more of themselves than what they might have otherwise believed possible. Are we doing the same in our digital environment? Are we hiring people because they can plan and execute a media buy alone? Is that enough? Are we not obligated to them and ourselves to expect more because the returns will have tangible value for us in the work product and business growth that can be delivered over time?

When was the last time you heard someone utter the phrase “They taught me everything I know” and it meant more than how to buy something? Digital advertising has the benefit and curse of being a very, very young industry. Yesterday’s planners are just now starting to evolve into strategists and even bleeding into traditional media roles in select cases. However, for the digital side to truly meet the challenges of tomorrow, we need more managers and stronger leaders who understand and prioritize the value of training and investing in employees. Without these managers and leaders, we’ll continue simply fishing for our supper day in and day out, and will miss the opportunities to teach team members to fish so they’re able to eat forever.

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and was  published in ClickZ, Monday, Dec 5, 2011.  Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

Foursquare is hot. Just ask anyone in New York or San Francisco. But if, one day, it shuffles off to the deadpool of once-hot-but-now-dead startups, I’ll tell you why. It became clear to me at about 10 pm on Thanksgiving night in the Central and Mountain time zones when Walmart , the reigning king of retail, gave no reason, nor incentive, for customers to check-in while waiting online to get inside their stores.

Foursquare is a 10 million-plus network of people looking for deals and earning faux badges that matter only to a small community of likeminded users. It is the bleeding edge of what will someday be a thriving mobile geo-location world that we will all inhabit. But for now, Foursquare is a regional play that masks what it is not – a middle America, mainstream tool.

For weeks I’ve suggested that this past weekend could (or should) be the biggest in Foursquare’s history. After eliminating would-be contenders such as Gowalla, and fending off Facebook, Google and a host of check-in apps, the holiday was theirs for the taking. No technology could better mess with the Black Friday, in-store experience between customers and brands, and the reason for the season (deep, deep discounts).

Yet, it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen in places like St. Louis (where I live) or any number of other cities outside the Top 20 because people either didn’t care or didn’t understand the power of check-ins. Allow me to give you two personal anecdotes that explain what could be the beginning of the end for Foursquare. At 9 p.m. Central on Thanksgiving night, Toys R Us opened its doors to thousands of would-be buyers. At my local store a Foursquare deal was offered to the first five shoppers on a given item, once five people were checked in. It took nearly one hour for five check-ins on the biggest shopping day of the year and for the deal to become available to those individuals. In a store with a capacity of 1,128 people and lines taking nearly two hours, not even two handfuls of people could be bothered to check-in for more of what they craved in the form of better deals.

But Foursquare’s bigger stumble wouldn’t happen for another hour. It finally arrived at 10 p.m. when Walmart opened its doors. Of the first crush of people, less than 50 total customers were checked-in at Walmarts across the St. Louis region. Again we have the kick off to the biggest shopping day paired with the biggest retailer – and nothing. Nothing to see, no deal to be had, move right along, folks.

If Foursquare gets its post-mortem, people will no doubt conclude it died from lack of mainstream adoption, but the truth is it died from lack of education. Lack of education from retailers about the value exchange taking place and a drive to connect. Brands like RadioShack, Macy’s and American Express have tried to educate people, but it has either been too little or too late for middle America. Generally speaking, consumers just have not learned fast enough how to utilize these tools to their benefit.

As Black Friday gives way to Cyber Monday and the rest of this holiday season, there will be more reports about the surge in online sales and the growth of mobile usage. All key trends for a shift in a highly-digital retail world, but it masks the reality of what took place last week. The check-in and geo-location industry aren’t going away, but Foursquare might if it can’t get middle America, and its preferred retailers, to pay attention.

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and published in AdAge, Thursday, December 1, 2011. Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.

That number may come as a surprise until you hear from those who are critical in driving the product’s success — advertisers. In a recent survey conducted by GMS Local of marketing managers of national brands with brick-and-mortar locations, marketers expressed little interest in online deal offers like the real-time deal concept that Groupon’s newest Now product represents.

While Groupon has placed significant bets on the product, only 4% of marketers polled in the study indicated a preference for this approach over other options, including the more common email-based daily deal. Groupon expects big things from Groupon Now, as evidenced by a March BusinessWeek article, stating that CEO Andrew Mason hoped for an incremental $1 billion in revenue from new products in 2011 — namely Groupon Now. The Now approach is designed to connect merchants (such as restaurants) that have extra supply with local consumers.

It is said to have the potential not only to transform lunchtime habits, but also to alter the topography of the multibillion-dollar market for local commerce. “However, according to our research findings that reflect the actual performance of the Now service, there is a striking disconnect between Groupon’s initial projections and reality.

Launching with much fanfare, Groupon Now has seen a gradual decline in growth since this past summer, and represents only 1% of the company’s revenue. These results are much more closely aligned with data reported by marketers that participated in the GMS Local study, but why does such a disparity exist?  

Why are brands not rushing to adopt Groupon Now? The reasons for this may be twofold:

1.) brands tend to make less money on Groupon Now versus traditional daily deals

2.) brands ideal for using the Now product often lack an inventory-tracking technology to truly make their Now play a “real-time” play. Much of Now’s allure is with the restaurant vertical, where empty tables on a Monday afternoon can be shopped similarly to empty hotel rooms on Hotwire. In order to achieve the success hoped for with the launch of Now and other real-time deal offerings, technological innovations from the deal provider or a third-party inventory manager, and corresponding deal specificity are needed. Should national brands consider the Groupon Now offering given its current limitations and lack of adoption? In short, yes, because Now has a key advantage over the traditional email daily deals model. For brands, it offers more targeted and authentic consumer engagement. For consumers, it allows them to drive the interaction and engage in ways that are more relevant and meaningful. But brands must do so with the following two caveats:

Localize, localize and localize your Now deals. Storefronts must be autonomous with their approach to and engagement with Groupon Now. Providing individual stores with control on how they deploy real-time deals will ensure greater relevance to the needs of the local consumer.

Encourage diversity in various markets to see what resonates with local consumers as there isn’t a one-size-fits-all way to success. A diversified approach will help you identify what works and what doesn’t, and allow you the opportunity to tweak your approach to make it work.
Our research and Groupon Now’s performance indicates that the real-time deal space remains in the early stages of adoption with both brands and consumers. Given its ability to ultimately deliver deals that are more relevant to the consumer, the real-time model will gain greater traction in the near term, particularly when technological advances enable more retailers to enter the space. 

In the interim, for brands that want to be ahead of the learning curve, it would benefit them to actively experiment with Groupon Now and like offerings as the market continues to evolve.

This article was writted by GMS Local and published in MediaPost’s Online Media Daily on Thursday, November 17, 2011. Follow GMS Local on Twitter – @GMSLocal

There, I said it. And I know I’m not alone. By nature, as an anti-social individual who will spear you with a cart while listening to “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” on my iPod as I shop, I am clearly in the minority. In fact, short of bridal parties in Vegas, there is likely no bigger celebration of sisterhood than Black Friday. Every year the teams of women wearing matching Black Friday t-shirts and saving spots in line for each other while doing their deal hunting grows; missioning the likes of which tribes have taught their young for centuries.

Black Friday Is the Original Social Shopping Experience

Retailers keep store hours based on consumer demand. Black Friday shoppers use basic survival instincts of herd mentality to secure the best deals, while fostering a sense of togetherness and community for the last decade plus. And now, Cyber Monday and mobile technologies further change the patterns of these shoppers.

This year, Black Friday comes early. Many more retailers including Macy’s and Old Navy have moved their store openings to midnight. Walmart will join the group of retailers that can’t wait and will open on Thursday. The shift to turn Thanksgiving into a commercial holiday (a redundant statement if ever one could be made in this country) has been met with ample backlash. Nearly 200,000 individuals have signed an online protest to pressure retailers into keeping the gluttony at the dinner table and not the checkout lane. And while it is certainly the right of the public to protest, and even boycott, it is probably done without an awareness of what Black Friday is for most people.

This move to more hours is reactive to consumer demand, yet is also preemptive to the challenges of control lost by in-store retail. Retailers are fighting a sluggish economy, new forms of distribution via the Internet, which makes it easier to get products from previously unknown sources, and the realities that in-store retail is growing annually at less than half the rate of online.

Unfortunately, for most retailers, the shift in store hours is not enough. Today’s digital-savvy shopper is aware that discounts can be had online, and rarely is the in-store deal alone enough. As a single shopper, I expect better mobile and social experiences. I see Black Friday as the single biggest day in the history of Foursquare. The viability and value to the masses will be set this Friday. For retailers, the ability to connect with individuals in the store with fresh, relevant deals is a differentiator worth watching.

Retailers must also cultivate a culture of social shopping that goes beyond a group with circulars in hand. Group-buying signals, such as in-store community trending of “What’s Hot” and flash discounts available via mobile devices will further transform and condition the buyers.

It’s unlikely that any petition of boycott will have enough impact to stem the tide of Black Friday’s move to Thursday. What may ultimately return Black Friday to Friday is the way retailers evolve online and bring social shopping 2.0 to bear. If retailers continue to rely on print circulars and downloadable store maps, they fail to recognize the ongoing evolution of the customer. Annually, groups of women in matching hot pink “I survived Black Friday” t-shirts go out to celebrate and shop. Retailers need to cater to this group and use the tools of today to move this old-school social shopping experience forward to social shopping 2.0.

This article was written by Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search – The Americas, and was  published in ClickZ, November 23, 2011.  Follow Chris on Twitter – @SearchBoss.