Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

And how smart was it to hold a contest in which the only way for customers to win was to make Microsoft’s products look inferior? Or to put the effective message another way: Winners don’t buy things from Microsoft.

That’s not a message you want your cross-channel gimmicks to send.

Consider casinos. They stack the odds in the house’s favor, and they hate having to make big payouts when a customer wins at the slot machines. But whenever a player wins a big jackpot, the casino makes a big celebration out of it. Why? They’re sending the message that people do get rich playing the slots. That’s what brings more players into the casino.

Or think about the old “Pepsi Challenge,” in which passers-by at shopping malls take blind taste tests comparing Pepsi and Coke. That was a low-stakes game for Pepsi; only the people who were surprised they picked Pepsi showed up on the TV commercials. (Pepsi also helped its odds by washing the ice used in the drinks, which improved the flavor of Pepsi but made Coke taste watery.) Even if some people chose Coke, Pepsi could still say the test showed people preferred Pepsi by a margin of 2-to-1.

That’s the way you want to work cross-channel promotions that intermix in-store, mobile and social—you want them to drive traffic by customers who actually buy things, and to align winning with being a customer.

For example, imagine an in-store trivia game in which loyalty customers can use their phones to find an answer on the retailer’s mobile site and get a 10 percent discount on that purchase if they answer the question correctly. They only get to play if they’re loyalty members; they only win by going to the M-Commerce site; they only cash in on the discount if they buy something.

Want to sweeten the promotion even more? Give a 5 percent discount to loyalty customers who try but fail at the trivia challenge. That way, they’re not really losers, at least as long as they buy something. And non-loyalty customers? They can sign up on the spot (or on the mobile site), and then play for the discount. Everybody wins, and the mobile site gets traffic from the store’s best customers.

Want to turn this type of promotion into a very bad idea? Make the answers hard to find on the mobile site, so customers will spend time searching while they could be shopping. Or encourage them to use Google, giving them the chance to drift away from your store and to the online store of a competitor. Or make the challenge one that invites customers to compare prices or products with other retailers on the Internet.

Humiliating potential customers or wasting their time, Microsoft-style, is a bad idea. Actually sending customers away to online competitors? That’s a true failure.

And if all this sounds like it’s in the realm of the marketing department, not M-Commerce or IT, consider this: IT people are good at spotting and fixing failure points. Marketing people are good at optimism. And cross-channel marketing campaigns that are intended to link mobile, social and in-store really need to be vetted from a failure-oriented point of view.