In this week’s What’s Happening In Marketing, Stowe Boyd discusses marketing and public relations in the age of social media. Find out why Stowe believes public relations as we’ve known it is dead, and what companies can do to connect with customer communities. It’s easier than you think.

As always, these videos are unpaid content, produced by MarketingRev and our friends at Miner Productions.

In this week’s What’s Happening In Marketing, Baynote’s Jack Jia discusses the concepts behind his company’s Product Recommendation software, which analyzes customer shopping behavior online to make dynamic and accurate recommendations to other customers. As Jia notes in his interview, Baynote doesn’t rely on what consumers say they like, but on what they actually shop for and buy online. Find out why Baynote thinks this approach to applied analytics is so important.

As always, these videos are unpaid content, produced by MarketingRev and our friends at Miner Productions. I found Baynote at the Web 2.0 conference last year–not in some flashy booth, but in a vendor mosh pit of small demo tables. Their value proposition was so intriguing, I sought Jack out for an interview. But don’t take my word for it, judge for yourself.

It’s already week two with What’s Happening In Marketing, and this week we’re visiting Matt Roche, CEO of Offermatica. Offermatica is one of the world’s leading optimization companies, offering technologies that help businesses dynamically test and deliver content that resonates most with customers online. As you’ll hear from Matt there are different types of optimization strategies, from multi-variate testing to behavioral targeting and beyond,  but the goal is always the same–to listen to your customers and deliver content that’s most relevant to their interests.

This is a critical area of technology that marketers must understand, and Matt is as incisive and insightful in explaining the technology as any expert in the field. Offermatica also has a great set of resources on its site to explain optimization in more detail.

Once again, hats off to Miner Productions for a great job on video.

A few months back, I started interviewing a series of thought-leaders in marketing technology to gain their insights on the trends that are reshaping the practice of marketing. Over the next few weeks, we’ll roll out the videos, beginning first with John Girard, the CEO of the Web Content Management company Clickability. 

By way of full disclosure I should say that John is a good friend of MarketingRev. However, this video is not paid content. John simply agreed to be the first subject of this series to help get it off the ground, and he’s been an enthusiastic supporter of the concept.

These videos were produced with the help of the talented video team at Miner Productions. Thanks everyone–great work!

It’s a little ironic that many of the hottest social media applications in town are based on a user experience from last century. IM and texting are, well, text. Myspace and Facebook are basic web site communities with no multimedia experience. YouTube is good for video, but the interaction with other people has little no immediacy.  SecondLife is certainly the most interesting, but having some furry fox fish thing show up to your business meedting can be little, um, awkward.

A number of companies are pushing the communications over IP medium in a way that may see more interactive features working their way into social media applications. Oovoo is a new player in this space, currently offering a live Video chat social application that is getting some traction, and for good reason. Oovoo offers live video sessions with up to five simultaneous users, along with chat and file sharing, and also video email. It’s got a slick and user-friendly interface–sort of an IM of the future look–and it’s blindingly simple to use, which is really saying something for a video application these days.  

Unlike other video chat applications, like Userplane, Oovoo is a standalone application that you use in the same way you use an IM client. But with such a slick interface, it’s hard to imagine this won’t be popping up as an application in Facebook or–I wouldn’t hold my breath–LinkedIn.

Oovoo is turning heads, with some Skype users calling it a potential Skype killer. After downloading and installing the beta–completely installed and running in under 5 minutes–I can imagine replacing Skype if they move toward interconnectivity with land line and mobile connectivity. I’m not sure that’s where they want to go, but it’s not a fantasy. You can download the beta at www.oovoo.com, and check out some of the dialog at www.oovooworld.com.

Loomia is one of a number of fast-moving companies in the ultra-hot marketing technology sector known variously as Optimization and/or Personalization. The companies in this complex sector have differing approaches and technologies, but the concept is to analyze traffic and user behavior on your Web site and to use the data as a real-time input for dynamically tuning the content on your site to better serve and retain users. There are a number of tangents and angles off this central concept that different companies specialize in. Loomia’s specialty is providing product and content recommendations based on both explicit user preferences like ratings and implicit preferences based on where users go on your site, what they spend time on, and what they buy.

Loomia has a great graphic on their site that demonstrates their process, which they’ve given permission for me to post here to better explain what they do.

This space is continuing to heat up due to the effectiveness of optimization technology for tuning content to help user find things they want. It relies on the “wisdom of the crowds” to understand what people are interested in and to constantly tune content accoringly, rather than relying on the subjective opinion of an expert or editor which can only be updated in time-consuming content management cycles. Many companies are claiming substantial increases in time-on-site, conversions and close rates for online sales by using optimization, personalization and recommendations technology. Loomia claims an algorithm advantage over competitors like Aggregate Knowledge and Baynote by being able to drive personalization and optimization on a much smaller sampling of data, meaning faster time to relevant recommendations for users.

The big win announced by Loomia yesterday is a deal with the Wall Street Journal to provide content recommendations for WSJ readers based on preferences of other readers.

Recommendations provided by Loomia will appear in a module next to WSJ.com articles, under the header “People Who Read This…Also Read These Stories.” These recommended articles are based on a user’s current reading as well as their past behaviors around related content on WSJ.com, such as time spent or printing an article. These behaviors are matched against other users who share similar interests, generating article suggestions that are more relevant and personalized.   

The full release is available on Loomia’s press page.

Unica has just announced the planned acquisition of MarketingCentral, a Marketing Resource Management (MRM) tool that has been popular for it’s on-demand ease-of-use. MRM allows marketers to easily manage and share digital assets used in campaigns, such as images, logos, documents and other working files. MRM typically includes file sharing, work flow and review, and asset management functionality, and is an essential tool for agencies and marketing organizations.

Unica already has an MRM solution, called Affinium Plan as part of its Affinium Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) suite. But Affinium Plan was built as an enterprise-class solution, targetting complex marketing organizations. MarketingCentral was built as a much simpler on-demand solution for agencies and small businesses to get up and running with MRM quickly. The acquisition will broaden Unica’s appeal to agencies and small businesses, providing an entry-point into EMM with significant scalability.

For MarketingCentral customers, which currently include New Balance, Philips Medical and Saatchi & Saatchi, the acquisition will mean access to a more sophisticated suite of marketing management tools. As agencies continue to expand their technology capabilities, this will become an important opportunity to grow marketing management services.

Unica acquired MarketingCentral for “$12.5 in cash and transaction-related costs”, meaning the actual valuation of MarketingCentral was somewhere south of $12.5 million.

Maxymiser is a fast-moving company in a marketing technology sector that is rapidly becoming one of the most important fronts in Web marketing–a segment nominally defined as Optimization.  Optimization is basically the process of changing the contents of Web site or Web page to make it more accessible to users and search engines. That’s the short story.

The longer story is that Optimization includes a wide variety of functions and approaches. Optimization can be manual or automated. It can be based on multi-variate testing (the process of trying different things to see what works the best) or behavioral heuristics (watching what people do and changing to fit behavior). It can focus on search engine optimization, or user experience. It can deliver dynamic landing pages, or change site navigation and search results. The list goes on. Which is why this space is getting so hot. Many companies are seeing great opportunities to fine tune traffic flow and user experience by shaping their sites to better fit their users, and there are many ways to skin that cat.

Maxymiser is a European company, headquartered in London. (So we should probably call it Optimisation, right?) The focus on multi-variate testing routines to improve click-through and conversion. The concept will be familiar to marketers with DM experience–you never just ship out a campaign, you create control groups and test many different variables to narrow in on the campaign components that will deliver the best results. That process has been developing on the Web for years, with tools that help marketers create, test and compare web pages with different designs, different messaging and different offers. It’s finally hitting prime time with powerful tools that automate multi-variate testing, and in some cases leverage powerful algorithms to statistically narrow down the options to the most likely top performers. Other companies in this space include Offermatica,  Kefta, Memetrics, Sitespect and Optimost–and even Google Website Optimizer.

The news with Maxymiser is that they’ve acquired a Web development company based in Ukraine, which will become a services arm for the growing company. This follows a similar pattern with other companies in the space, and in fact, a broader trend in marketing technology at large. Vendors with promising technologies are finding significant bottlenecks in selling into marketing organizations, because most companies don’t have a strong marketing engineering group–they have an IT department that has a lot of priorities that don’t include serving their marketing team. By adding services capabilities, vendors can provide a more complete outsourced solution that doesn’t require heavy lifting by their customer’s IT group–especially when their technologies are Web-based. It’s an interesting hybrid between services agency and technology vendor that is emerging throughout the marketing technology industry.

The acquisition brings Maxymiser’s European team up to 80, including 15 analysts and online marketing specialists, and will allow Maxymiser to acclerate their Website testing and optimization (sorry, optimisation), specifically in the areas of personalization (darn, personalisation) and behavioural targetting.

Maxymiser’s CEO, Bill Dobbie, gave a canned comment in their press release, stating:

Our clients face increasing stress on their development resource. Maxymiser Services will soak up this pressure by providing clients with value added development and analytical capabilities allowing their businesses to benefit from optimisation and personalisation technologies.

Watch for more coverage on optimization and optimisation players in this space.

I’m a customer of a little company called CountryWide Financial, a holding company of various financial and banking services, including insurance, mortgage, commercial loans and capital markets. Actually, they’re one of the largest financial companies in America, with many thousands of customers who trust them to safeguard personal data. Like many financial companies, CountryWide frequently changes and upgrades its security policy for handling online transactions. But the latest upgrade ensures that I will never use the CountryWide site again to handle transactions, and it’s an issue that has enormous impact for marketers who are charged with safeguarding customer relationships and brand image, if not directly responsible for customer data.

When I recently went to the CountryWide site to carry out a transaction, they stopped me at the door and introduced a new security policy. It started out in an intriguing new direction. To safeguard against phishing—situations in which an imposter hosts a lookalike site and lures customers to enter personal data which can be used to access and pillage the real account—CountryWide has instituted a personalized authentication image and statement. The idea is that the customer chooses a random image—say a tractor, or a telephone, or a leaf—and enters a random site ID phrase of their own choosing, such as “Holy Retinal Scanner, Batman!” Whenever the customer returns to the CountryWide site, they can authenticate that it is indeed CountryWide by the presence of their secret personal image and phrase. Very cool. I haven’t personally seen this concept before, and it’s kind of a cool idea. Great.

So I continue on to the next stage of the new security protocol, where I’m prompted to select a series of security questions, and to provide responses, which will be used to authenticate me in the future. Nothing really new here—how many times have I entered the name of my pet or my mother’s maiden name. But as I started to look through the security questions, it started feeling a little creepy. These weren’t the standard security questions, but an entirely new breed of questions that have some scary implications.

• What is your best friend’s first name?
• What was the name of the maid of honor at your wedding?
• What is the first name of your oldest nephew?
• What was the name of your first boyfriend/girlfriend?
• Where did you first meet your spouse?
• What is the nickname of your grandfather?

And on they go. Now I should point out that you can choose from these questions, and others a little less probing, like the name or city of your high school. But you must choose three questions, and these kinds of really personal and unique questions are prevalent. As I started to fill out one of these questions, thinking “gee, this is really specific”, I suddenly got a cold premonition. Wait a minute. I realize these are questions designed to safeguard my identity and personal data, but these companies have a really nasty habit of losing this kind of data, not to mention shifting privacy rules in ways that seem to make more and more data available for purposes I didn’t want. Not only are major breeches of customer data common, they include outrageous breeches by many of the most trusted financial institutions, including Bank of America, Citibank, Wachovia, FDIC, JP Morgan Chase—the list is literally too long to recite. And yes, CountryWide is not immune to its own security breaches.

I cannot imagine a more disturbing recipe for truly frightening levels of identity theft, than a database of information so personal and specific, that it could be used to impersonate you with a frightening level of authenticity. There are already plenty of instances of brazen identity theft, in which the perpetrators have gone as far as full-blown impersonation of their victim. Remember Frank Abagnale, the real life subject of Catch Me if You Can? What’s particularly disturbing is that the kinds of questions CountryWide is asking are not just specific and personal, many of them are permanent. Timeless. The name of your first girlfriend, where you met your spouse, will never change. Once that personal information is lost, you’ll never get a chance to recover it.

So while I applaud CountryWide for improving their security policy, and even taking creative steps to do so, I think these new measures of gathering personal information are disturbingly misguided for consumers. For many thousands of consumers, their first experience of security breach is when the institutions they trust lose their personal data through negligent loss or theft. In that regard, the first step in protecting your identity is safeguarding yourself from the probing questions of your service providers. And the marketers who manage the brands for companies like CountryWide should understand this fact better than their customers, since the backlash of losing such valuable data is far more costly than the value in collecting it.

I have to admit it took me a minute to figure out the relevance of this new mobile service and Web site for marketers. At first I thought the submission was yet another bit of spam. But a company profile and announcement came in for Concierge deLuxe–a global high-brow concierge service based in America that networks concierge providers in 80 countries. You can use the service to get a quick seat at a restaurant with a month-long waiting list, gain tickets to a sold out show or, if you’re in the mood, rent a luxury yacht for a weekend cruise on the Rhone.

Yeah, it’s a far cry from mobile advertising platforms and web analytics, but when I stopped to think about the times I’ve needed to entertain and impress an executive, or fix an impossible mess at an important event, I can definitely see the need to have a service like this in your back pocket. At $600 a year membership, plus expenses for any services you request, it’s a far cry cheaper than many alternatives.

Concierge deLuxe is launching with a private Intranet connecting 150 Concierges around the world to provide 24/7 support, connecting either by mobile device or standard telephone. Their mobile concierge service promises location-based information about local restaurants, shopping and entertainment, with access available through a personal assistant.

I have to say when I tried to call, the phone rang through to an answering service. Not the best start for a high-end concierge. But the concept is interesting, and if you’re in a business where you’ve got to support high-rolling customers or partners, it’s a well placed bet to have a concierge you can call on. Just do your due diligence before you buy a membership.