Local is Going Mobile

I’ve been working on some local advertising issues lately, so the 5 Mobile Trends article in AdAge last week grabbed me. Here are their trends:

1. Mobile will completely revolutionize the way local advertisers can connect with potential customers. Ad Age’s subhead captures the issue perfectly: “How the Computer in Your Pocket Is Changing Your Business.” Smartphone and apps users of the world have united to change your business—attention must be paid!
2. Growth in adoption of mobile shopping applications will continue to alter in-store consumer behavior, increasing the significance of mobile in point of sale decisions making. I wrote about my UPC code scanner not long ago. It really works! What’s funny is that when I’m at a store I like and where I know the people, I’m embarrassed to use it (unless I can hide behind a shelf so people won’t see me!). If I’m at a store where I don’t know people or don’t care what they think, it’s fine.
3. Brands and agencies will continue to build branded apps, but will also have more attractive display media options, thanks to Google. Keep reading—more below.
4. Advertising's outdoor real estate is fast becoming another connected channel capable of delivering high-fidelity digital experiences as unique, varied and measurable as more well-established mediums. That’s worth further exploration—does anyone know of a good recent posting?
5. Consumers have new power to express their opinions through social technologies from anywhere, anytime. Smart marketers will do all they can to encourage and act on this feedback. A lot of marketer content ought to be focused on generating customer content. How to accomplish that is one essential element of social media strategy. More on consumer reviews soon.

One of the things I did recently was to update local listings for the local wildlife sanctuary (that’s grammatically redundant, but both are necessary to my meaning). A local business needs to look at all the local media. There are many that offer free links to your website. Requesting listings is not much effort and worth the $$ it costs, since that is $0. Also free are Yahoo! Local and Google Maps/Business Center listings. There are value-added services on Yahoo! but the basic listing is free; links to both are on this page. The Yahoo! listing is simpler, note that it includes opportunities to upload photos and write reviews—both good promotion for the local business.


The Google listing is typical Google with more options. Google Maps gives you a stripped-down listing and map location. Google Business Center allows you to add the bells and whistles like I’ve done here. Images and videos are great promotion tools. What I really love is the Coupon option. As you can see, I’ve added a printable coupon to this listing. What you can’t see is that if a person is searching from a mobile device, they get a savable mobile version of the coupon. So cool! Cool, but not perfect. There is an option to create a link so you can link the coupon to a website, a blog, a personal page. Great idea—unfortunately it doesn’t work at present. They also have a Google Maps button for your desktop toolbar and a Mobile app. Their Favorite Places program offers smart-phone readable badges for heavily-searched stores, and there’s more on the drawing board. Read a good review on ReadWriteWeb.

And so it goes—and will continue to go!

Google Wave--Killer App for Collaboration?

A student recently posted this link with an interesting application of Google Wave—thanks, Jeff! It reminded me that I needed to try to understand this new Google product. It’s still in preview, not yet in publicly-available beta, so if you want to try it, you have to request an invitation. As of mid-December Mashable said there were about a million users. The slow rollout limits the usefulness of a collaborative tool, but there’s quite a bit of buzz on the web about bugs and general difficulty of use. “Take it easy” seems to be a reasonable approach and Google makes it clear that they will get invitations out as they think the system is ready.

In Google-speak Wave is “equal parts conversation and document,” it is completely shared with all participants, and it takes place in real time. Google’s Dr. Wave explains and demonstrates. The video is better on the Google site, where it’s embedded in a use example (clever of them!), than on YouTube where you can’t see what “Dr. Wave” is pointing at.

Here’s a more fully populated example from Mashable. Mashable people have written extensively about Wave, although the link to their Complete Guide is broken at this writing.

Google says Wave can be used to arrange events, collaborate on projects, share photos, share meeting notes, brainstorm and play interactive games. Ok, but that’s not only generic, it’s more consumer than business oriented. Howard Greenstein has an excellent post on Mashable. It suggests potential business uses and gives a hypothetical example of a team preparing a client pitch from multiple locations. His conceptualization of modes of use is especially helpful, and there are other useful links at the bottom of the post.

Can Wave replace email and other collaborative tools like wikis? That’s not yet clear, but it’s clearly worth keeping an eye on—perhaps giving it a trial when it becomes more widely available!

Have You Created Your Google Profile?

Google announced the profile product earlier this week. I tried it, and was interested in how it worked.

What you do is type “me” in the Google search box and a profile page for you comes up. If that creeps you out, then when you see they know quite a bit about you, you may be doubly creeped. However, when I looked carefully I realized the things they knew came from other Google sites (Blogger and YouTube in my case). I added my website, not hosted by Google.

Once you set up a profile, the link shows at the bottom of the first search page when someone searches for your name.

The two things that happened to my profile were specific to my situation. I am cursed with two first names, and the only way to get that into most forms is to run them together. Consequently, I’m visible on the web under both versions of my name. Not good, if I were counting on the visibility. On that note, however, it looks to me as if Google is indexing a lot more profiles that I have scattered all over the web than they used to, but that may be just my imagination. I count on my Google Alert and haven’t Googled myself for a long time.

The second thing is also unique to my own situation, which I happily describe as “semi retired.” I do still teach, so I put that in. The way they put it together sort of made it look as if Harvard had set up a satellite campus on Cape Cod, which would be very convenient for me, but isn’t likely to happen!
So I changed where put Harvard, into previous employer, and the display works better, although it’s not the way I would prefer it.

I couldn’t find a way to link to my Twitter home page, so I just put that in the bio section. I didn’t bother with contacts but it looks as if you can send this to contacts from your Gmail account. I know all of mine would love that!

My assessment is that this works; it’s not clear that it adds much for someone who already has more visibility than she needs. If you’re working on online visibility, or if there’s something (or someone) that confusing about what is readily available for you online, it may be useful.

I wonder if you’re on your corporate network, if the “me” search will in effect create a corporate page; I rather doubt it. I can’t see any way to purposefully create a corporate page (a la Facebook), but if you’re more cleaver than I you might be able to game their system.

This isn’t the answer for people who want to effortlessly transfer their profile from one network to another. Does it have any potential to be linked with Open Social down the road? The two look very different to me, but—in time—who knows?