[Editor's Note: Good ways to interact with your customers.] Koa Beck - Destination CRM - 8/31/10 Longtime industry analyst Bruce Temkin recently released the first report under his own shingle. The report identifies eight customer experience megatrends, predicting how companies should interact with their customers in the next three to five years, on his blog, "Customer Experience Matters."

The megatrends are as follows: Read the full story.

[Editor's Note: How do you gain customer insight?] Justin Schuster - Destination CRM - 8/19/10 You've heard the mantra from customer service advocates: "Listen to your customers. Hear what they say." But do you do it? ...

[Editor's Note: Adults with kids discovering mobile coupons.] Kunur Patel - Advertising Age - 8/12/10 Once, coupons and offers delivered to mobile phones were used mostly by early-adopters of smartphones, predominantly young males. ...

[Editor's Note: E-mail hangs on.] Steve Rubel - Advertising Age - 8/9/10 Contrary to popular belief, video didn't kill the radio star, YouTube didn't knock off TV and Twitter didn't shut down bloggin ...

[Editor's Note: A look at special offers on location-based services.] Christopher Heine - ClickZ - 8/13/10 For the last several months, big brands have been consistently unveiling special offers on location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Booyah, and others. We’ve seen percentage-based discounts on purchases, dollars off, restaurant loss-leaders like appetizers and drinks, and sometimes even free meals. ...

[Editor's Note: Statistics show Social media is only getting bigger.] Amy Porterfield - Social Media Examiner - 7/16/10 Is social media taking over the web?

Just in the last year, the number of social media users has continued to climb at record speed and the audience demographics have widened. And marketers have noticed the trend. ...

[Editor's Note: People seem to like the Droid.] Stan Schroeder - Mashable - 7/9/10 According to comScore’s latest analysis of the U.S. mobile market, Android has grown significantly in the period from February to May 2010, while all other major operating systems experienced a drop in their market share. ...

[Editor's Note: Something new isn't always news.] Tom Denari - Advertising Age - 7/7/10 Let's face it. We've become addicted to making news.

It's not all that surprising. The digital age has created a hyper-awareness of anything new. We no longer have to wait for the morning newspaper to see what happened the night before. We don't have to wait for the six o'clock news to see what happened earlier that day. We don't even have to wait for the 24-hour news networks to arrive on a scene to see what happened 30 minutes ago. Mobile technology allows all of us to record and receive news instantly. Why does anyone need 24-hour news, evening news or even newspapers, when all of us are constantly making and receiving news all day long? ...

[Editor's Note: How is social media working for your business?] Nichole Kelly - Social Media Examiner - 6/15/10 Do you know how social media is helping your business? Want to find out how Twitter, Facebook and other sites are impacting your brand awareness? ...

[Editor's Note: Marketers aren't keeping pace with consumers and technology.] Oren Frank - Advertising Age - 6/17/10 Intuitively, it makes sense to believe that we all live in a post-digital age, and ...

[Editor's Note: Time spent on social media marketing pays off.] Amy Porterfield - Social Media Examiner - 5/21/10 Have you asked this question: Is the time I invest with social media really worth it? Whether you’re new or an old hat with social media, chances are you’ve wondered if the time commitment is really worth the return on investment (ROI). ...

[Editor's Note: Service delivery directly related to loyalty.] - CRM Daily - 5/18/10 New Accenture research has found that communications Relevant Products/Services and high-tech companies -- many o ...

[Editor's Note: Follow your customers to the web, don't lead them.] Jay Baer - Social Media Examiner - 5/14/10 For many companies, the conversation has shifted from “why” or “should” we do social media, to “where” and “how” social media should be done. ...

[Editor's Note: Trageted e-mails done right.] Dianna Dilworth - DM News - 5/11/10 I love to travel, and it feels like half of the e-mails I get are from travel companies, whether online travel agenci ...

[Editor's Note: A look at three challenges of customer management.] Larry Caretsky - Commence - 5/5/10 As the CEO of a technology company that provides Customer Management software to small and mid-s ...

[Editor's Note: Don't let your customers get bored with your loyalty program.] Chintan Bharwada - Loyalty and Customers - 4/28/10 Loyalty schemes are an established feature of the retail and services landscape. They have become widespread and arguably ubiquitous. There are a number of major groups of loyalty schemes, including: retailer loyalty schemes, financial service loyalty schemes, online reward schemes, frequent flyer and other travel reward programmes, geographically based loyalty schemes, and coalition loyalty schemes. Businesses have been keen to enhance customer retention, to find approaches to increasing customer spend and encourage customers to act as advocates. ...

[Editor's Note: Do you know what your competitors are doing?] Neil Mason - ClickZ - 4/26/10 Life feels fine when there's positive growth in the right kind of metrics. Despite tough economic trading conditions over the past 18 months, the digital economy has generally been doing OK. Here in the U.K., spending on online advertising grew by just under 5 percent in 2009 compared to 2008, with spend on search up by just under 10 percent. While that isn't the kind of stellar growth seen in previous years, the indicators are positive. Business confidence among advertisers is higher than it's been previously, and we're continuing to see growth in the active online audience (up 10 percent vs. a year ago), some of that being driven by the growth in population of social networking sites such as Facebook. ...

[Editor's Note: Pay attention to wht your customers are saying and doing.] Kenneth Yeung - Network Solutions - 4/19/10 One of the premiere conferences focused on inbound marketing was held in San Fra ...

[Editor's Note: Research shows customers don't feel their loyalty is rewarded.] Jarrett Paschel, Ph.D. - Retail Customer Experience - 4/7/10 It really is quite enlightening to head to Wikipedia and look up the various definitions of loyalty. ...

[Editor's Note: Contact centers can have a big part in increasing customer retention and profit.] David Sims - TMCnet - 3/31/10 A recent article in the Harvard Business Review, cited by officials of Contactual (News - Alert), found that “increasing customer retention rates by 5 percent could increase profits from 25 to 95 percent.” ...

[Editor's Note: Study shows positive emotional response most important to loyalty.] - Real Estate Relativity - 3/10/10 This research paper focusing on the hotel industry indicates that although delig ...

[Editor's Note: Measuring and improving the online customer purchase lifecycle.] - CNN Money.com - 3/17/10 As online commerce sales grow and take additional market share away from traditional brick-a ...

[Editor's Note: Knowing the results can help your marketing decisions.] Amy Porterfield - Social Media Examiner - 3/15/10 When you hear that Facebook is yanking Yahoo from its ranks and inching up on Google’s traffic throne, you can’t help but pay attention. ...

[Editor's Note: Results of Facebook vs Twitter study for CRM.] - Online PR News - 3/14/10 Internet Marketing optimization firm compares the benefits of Twitter verse Facebook as a Social Media market ...

[Editor's Note: March is a good time to see if your marketing plan is working for your customers.] Jack G. Hardy - Miami Herald - 3/15/10 A soothsayer tells Julius Caesar, already on his way to the Senate (and hisdeath), ``Beware the Ides of March.'' Were it not for William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar (Act I, Scene II), this ominous warning would have been lost forever. ...

[Editor's Note: Missing a population market?] Kevin McKeefery -DM News - 3/5/10 Although 80% of US marketers say that the Hispanic market will impact their products and services in the next five year ...

[Editor's Note: Smart companies increasingly understand that their richest source of insight are their own employees.] Mat Fogarty - Mashable - 3/5/10 Collaboration and crowdsourcing are the realities of today’s public Internet, and the trend is now gaining real traction in the workplace. Smart companies increasingly understand that their richest source of insight, ideas, data, and information is within their own employees. They are the ones whose talent, work, and daily interactions with the product make the business what it is. ...

[Editor's Note: A model for aggregating data from e-commerce sites into a more automated system of targeting people.] Steve Smith - Behavioral Insider - 2/26/10 The identification of consumers who are in-market for broad categories of goods has always been a mainstay of behavioral targeting. Whether by visits to specific content areas or even abandoned shopping carts, BT is always hungry for intent-to-buy behaviors. ...

[Editor's Note: Good communication with loyalty program customers will keep them happy.] Glenn Haussman - Hotel Interactive - 2/19/2010 Everybody loves a reward. But as consumers become more sophisticated, just getting tossed what they perceive as generic offers, savings and incentives simply won’t cut it. Their demands and tastes are changing and hoteliers looking to create genuine loyalty need to rethink the way they approach their programs. ...

[Editor's Note: Coupons are back in.] - The Wise Marketer - 2/5/2010 Annual coupon use in the US is on the rise for the first time since 1992. Coupon distribution hit the highest level recorded since ...