Social media and smart phone adoption is driving the growth, says BCG. They are also predicting, perhaps with just a hint of hyperbole, that businesses will be “fundamentally transformed” over the next five years. Maybe.

However, their suggestion that companies create a digital balance sheet is a good one, in a time when one negative customer experience can lead to millions of negative tweets. For years, consultants have been called upon from time to time to put a dollar value on brand equity. Now, that will probably have to be broken out into digital brand equity, even if it begins as a simple summing of likes versus not-likes, or positive versus negative tweets.

BCG’s report, called “Digital Manifesto: How Companies and Countries Can Win in the Digital Economy,” speaks to the movement of passive consumer engagement to participatory engagement. As developing countries come online, the skip straight to social media services. 90 percent of users in Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico are using social media. BCG says that $1.3 trillion worth of goods was researched online before purchase, across the G-20.

“No company or country can afford to ignore this development. Every business needs to go digital,” said David Dean, a coauthor of the report and a senior partner at BCG. Indeed.

Written by David, Internet Marketing Strategist for Consultiq.

Now, ComScore conducted the study as part of its promotion of its Validated Campaign Essentials product, but the numbers bear examination, because the promise of digital advertising has always been better targeting and better measurement.

ComScore said they studied 12 national brands, 3,000 placements, 381,000 domains and 1.7 billion ad impressions, across advertisers such as Allstate, E*TRADE, Kellogg’s, Kraft, Sprint and others.

According to the results, an average of 4 percent of ad impressions were delivered outside of the target geography. At the high end, the mis-targeting ran as high as 15 percent on individual campaigns. In many cases, ComScore reports, ads were served in markets outside of those where the product is sold.

This calls for not only better auditing and measurement tools, but also better IP address geolocation services. If AT&T reports all their consumer DSL IP addresses as living in Richardson, Texas, it’s going to be hard to target their customers outside of Richardson.

ComScore said that 72 percent of the campaigns studied had some ads running beside “unsafe” content as determined by the advertiser, but they didn’t say how many impressions that represented out of the total. Still, better tools are needed to characterize and qualify sites for delivering ads. ComScore’s study highlights not just the need for auditing, but for better targeting tools as well.

Also interesting is the overabundance of of ad inventory, which is effectively limitless. “The display advertising market today is characterized by an overabundance of inventory, often residing on parts of a web page that are never viewed by the user. This dilutes the impact of campaigns for advertisers and represents a drag on prices to publishers,” said Dr. Magid Abraham, President and CEO of comScore. “Conversely, some ads below the fold are quite visible and deserve more credit.”

Aside from auditing, this tells me that advertisers need to think more, and investigate more, about their ad placements, almost on a site-per-site basis.

Market surveys are nothing new, of course, but online survey tools have proliferated in recent years, and their capability and power has grown too; one can now easily arrange telephone surveys through online survey services.

But who to survey, and what to survey them on? The annual best-practices benchmarking survey of your existing customer base is a good place to start. Offer participants a chance to see aggregate survey results to entice them to participate. The questions, obviously, will be particular to your product or industry, but try to keep it short enough that people will actually respond, and follow best-practices for surveys (no leading questions, no push-poll surveys, etc.) to produce results that are meaningful and useful, for yourself, and participants.

General market research surveys can produce useful content too. When designing surveys, give some thought to which questions can be used to generate public facing content in addition to guiding internal direction or strategy. Much of what you learn will be useful to customers and prospects, and it doesn’t mean you have to give away the jewels of your dataset. (And anyway, success is about strategy execution, not keeping your strategy secret.)

To build depth in the information you gather, think about how to screen participants in an initial, qualifying, survey, and identify those participants who self-identify or otherwise qualify for a longer in-depth survey. Look for criteria to identify willing participants in those longer surveys, and participants likely to have the answers to your questions.

Also look to how you can implement a cycle of surveys – plan for annual benchmarking surveys to actually take place annually. Create a calendar on which you can plot surveys on a quarterly basis. (Or some manageable periodicity.)

Content creation can be a slog, but with some planning and forethought, and the latest in online survey tools, it can be made a little easier.

Four days last week saw online spending top $1 billion; so far this holiday season, comScore says, consumers have spent $30.9 billion online, a 15% increase over the corresponding period in 2010.

comScore expects Cyber Monday spending to rank as heaviest online spending day this year, repeating that day’s performance last year.

“More than $1 billion in spending on Free Shipping Day put the exclamation point on what will almost certainly be the heaviest week of the online holiday shopping season,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Four individual days surpassed $1 billion in spending this week, with Green Monday leading the way at $1.13 billion. While next week may see another strong day or two at the beginning of the week, it’s clear that we have now reached the crescendo for this season and that spending will begin to slow as we get closer to Christmas, leaving Cyber Monday as the top ranked shopping day for the second year in a row.”

An analysis of e-commerce transactions by comScore shows the percentage of transactions last week with free shipping reached 56%, almost four percentage points higher than the same period last year.

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The week ending December 9th alone saw $5.9 billion in online spending.

“The most recent week of the online holiday shopping season saw growth rates remain in line with the season-to-date at 15 percent and three individual spending days eclipse the $1 billion threshold,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “These highlights represent another very positive sign for the holiday shopping season, as the week following ‘Cyber Week’ often experiences relative softness in spending momentum due to retailers pulling back on their promotional activity. As we enter what will be the heaviest week of the season for online retailers – beginning with ‘Green Monday’ on December 12 – all signs are now pointing to a strong finish to the season.”

Cyber Monday, “Green” Monday (today), traditionally a big spending day, and Free Shipping Day (this Friday, December 16th) will duke it out for the #1 spot in online spending for the 2011 season.

According to the study, which sampled users across 365,000 websites, as of the third quarter of this year, Facebook is leading social media site used for retail shopping login, with a 49% share, followed by Google and Yahoo!. Facebook’s share drops  to 43% on media websites.

And users are increasingly using Facebook and Twitter to share news of their purchases, comments and reviews, engaging their friends in their online shopping activities.

Retailers are learning how draw on users’ social network to enhance and customize the shopping experience. Social network sites offer information on users about everything from their birth date and gender, to their location, interests, photos, e-mail addresses and social sharing activities. The data offered by social network websites can vary from site to site, but it can nonetheless help marketers personalize the shopping experience, or better segment consumers.

It’s a reminder though, for users to check their privacy settings on Facebook and other social sites and consider just how much information they want to share about themselves. Using your Facebook account to sign-in for online shopping can be fast and easy, but if you’re uncomfortable sharing all your profile information, it may not be for you.

So far this holiday season, consumers have spent $15 billion online, a 15% increase compared to corresponding days from 2010.

The $1.25 billion spent on November 28th, 2011, represents an increase of 22% over the $1.03 billion spent on Cyber Monday last year.

“Cyber Monday was yet another historic day for e-commerce, with online spending reaching a record $1.25 billion,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “It was just the second billion dollar spending day on record, following on the heels of Cyber Monday 2010. While last year saw Cyber Monday rank as the heaviest online spending day of the year for the first time ever, it will be interesting to watch the next couple of weeks to see if any future individual days in 2011 manage to leapfrog this year’s highest day-to-date.”

Some 10 million consumers spent an average of $66.97 per transaction over 18.7 million transactions; The average spend was $124.82 per buyer.

comScore also reported that half of the total dollars spent on Cyber Monday were spent by people using their computers at work; Cyber Monday originated as an theme meant to lure shoppers returning to work and high-speed internet access after the Thanksgiving long weekend.

“Despite some analysts’ predictions that the flurry of brick-and-mortar retailers opening their doors early for Black Friday would pull dollars from online retail, we still saw a banner day for e-commerce with more than $800 million in spending,” said comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni. “With brick-and-mortar retail also reporting strong gains on Black Friday, it’s clear that the heavy promotional activity had a positive impact on both channels. We now turn our attention to Cyber Monday, a day that Shop.org says will see eight-in-ten retailers running special online promotions. Last year, Cyber Monday was the heaviest day of online spending ever, with sales exceeding $1 Billion, and we fully expect to see another record set this year.”

Consumers drive the Black Friday deal research site bfads.net to the number one slot in terms of unique visitors from November 21 to 25th; the site recorded a 51% jump in traffic compared to the equivalent period last year, reporting nearly 4 million unique visitors.

Amazon was the #1 ranked online retailer on Black Friday, followed by Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple, each of which reported double-digit gains in visitors over last year.

Indeed it has, but it’s getting harder to be that anonymous dog these days.

Earlier this year, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt famously said that “if you don’t want to use your real name, don’t use Google+” and Facebook’s terms of service require users to use their real name on their account, and create only one account per real person. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the age of privacy is over, and there is a growing trend to “real-name activity” on the Internet.

Closer to home, my local weekly entertainment news paper recently made a policy change for its online version, prohibiting anonymous commenting. Further, “those who continue to post comments using their existing fake names will have their comments removed and their memberships suspended. Also, if someone signs up with a new account under a fake name and posts a comment, we will delete the comment and the account will be suspended.” Further still, this publication is encouraging users to post their comment with…. wait for it…. Facebook connect.

The stated reason for this change is to inspire more thoughtful and civil debate, although having the website percolate through readers’ Facebook feeds will surely help boost traffic. Coincidentally, in a recent Saturday Night Live episode, Jason Sudekis appeared on Weekend Update in costume as The Devil, taking credit for inventing online video buffering and commenting.

It’s good for internet marketers, of course, because more data on more real people is better for advertising sales, and both Google and Facebook know who their true customers are.

But privacy advocates continue to fret, and full real-name transparency can chill participation; employers are increasingly scanning the social media profiles of potential candidates. Should a citizen be allowed to comment anonymously on a local hot-button issue without fear it may cost him or her a job offer?

And will the chill freeze online participation growth rates?

Nurturing leads from marketing-qualified to sales-qualified leads also requires a steady stream of content, in many different forms. Good SEO practices, including content generation, and solid PPC and social media programs can get prospects to your website, and maybe even get them to fill out a form, but nurturing with fresh content is what moves them down the line towards a purchase.

Check with your sales reps and learn how much time they are spending talking to truly qualified prospects that can convert, versus tire-kickers that get recycled. If it’s 80/20 tire-kickers to qualified leads, you, as a marketer, are not doing enough nurturing through e-mail, your website and social media. In fact, your sales team is doing the nurturing that marketing should be doing. You can turn this around, but you’re going to need more content.

Clearly, you’re going to want to produce webinars, case studies and whitepapers which you can e-mail out to nurture prospects, but there are other channels too, literally.

A branded channel on YouTube can not only host archives of your webinars, and your demo videos, but it can also tag visitors so that you can tie them back to your Google AdWords campaign – with Google’s re-marketing feature, you can hit those YouTube visitors up with an ad on the content network down the line, reminding them of your brand. That’s nurturing too.

Still pictures from events, like trade shows, updated product screen shots, all of this is fodder for your social media channels, website and press release. Getting an impression with a prospect via Google image search is nurturing as well.

And while case studies are great, look for opportunities to do mini-case studies – tap your content syndication partners and vendors for a chance to highlight willing customers. They don’t even need to be marquee names, you just need your brand highlighted someplace your nurture prospects might see it, reminding them to think of you, and click through that next e-mail, rather than just opening it.

Content creation opportunities abound – after a while, identifying them becomes second nurture…er, nature.