How will the new cookies law affect your marketing efforts?

Extract: The Direct Marketing Association has told marketers to consider a range of steps to ensure they comply with the cookies law.

It is likely that you will have heard a great deal over recent weeks about the new cookies law, but how will it affect your company's efforts to increase lead generation?

Last month, the UK government implemented an EU directive requiring websites to obtain visitors' permission before using cookies to track them and to make clear what data is being tracked and how it is being used.

What steps should you take?

In light of this, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has published a ten-step guide to cookie management, which advocates that organisations engage all key stakeholders, including marketers, in debates about what cookies policy they implement.

Furthermore, it advises companies to check all the areas where cookies may be used and to assess their level of intrusiveness and their function, as well as to develop and test any solutions they do implement.

Firms also need to consider how they will obtain consent from web users to track cookies; there are many ways of doing this: pop-up boxes, homepage headers, providing terms and conditions and so on.

They will need to use these to provide access to content that tells users what cookies are being used, what they are doing and how users can provide or withdraw consent for their data to be tracked.

Non-compliance still rife

It is advice many firms should take on board, but to date it seems that very few are doing so as yet.

Earlier this month, a study of 55 major organisations' websites by KPMG revealed that just ten of them were compliant with the cookies law, despite potentially facing fines of up to £500,000 for breaching this regulation.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) last month expressed concern at the continuing high levels of non-compliance, but acknowledged that the heavy workload involved in meeting this new law would take time to complete.

Dave Evans, who has led the ICO's work on cookies, told BBC News that the regulator would instead expect companies not yet compliant to be able to demonstrate what steps they had undertaken over the past year to adhere to these new regulations.

Do your company's integrated marketing services obey the new rules on cookies? What policies should you adopt in response to this law change?

Do you use social media to improve your customer service?

Many brands haven't woken up the fact that social media sites are perfect for customer service.

A colleague of mine recently moved into new house and had problems getting her Internet connection up and running.  After a month of copious calls with India and other parts of the universe she had practically given up on her dreams of being a silver surfer.

Luckily for her she is a prolific Tweeter. After one fruitless conversation with Dave from Deli and at the end of her tether she ranted on Twitter about her disappointment with her provider.

To cut a short story shorter….it was fixed within 12 hours.

You would think that most companies are listening and monitoring their brand reputation within social networks but recent figures gathered by Econsultancy found that just 11 per cent of firms use social media sites as a way of offering customer service.

Whether responding to negative posts or thanking a happy customer for their comments

Spin that on its head and you'll find that 81 per cent of businesses with a Facebook page use it for marketing purposes.

However, you can't use social media sites to promote sales if your customer service is shoddy as visitors to your brand page could see negative comments that have not been dealt with - lowering your reputation.

Why isn't social media being used for customer service?

Luke Brynley-Jones, founder of Our Social Times, looked into this problem and detailed the results on the Econsultancy blog.

He found that the main obstacle in firms using social media sites as a platform for customer service is fear!

It seems the majority of you are afraid that by responding to negative comments you'll open a can of worms and a crisis will ensue.

However, this is generally not the case as potential and existing customers would prefer seeing how you respond to criticism and how you rectify the problem.

If you do this well, then your brand reputation will improve and your customers may start recommending you to other B2B buyers.

What's more, recent research from Ogilvy PR found that 60 per cent of B2B buyers are influenced by what their peers have to say about a brand on social media sites, reported the Financial Times.

So why not start responding to tweets that mention your firm on Twitter, whether it's good or bad, and to any comments posted on your Facebook page?