Why and How Leaders Must Engage in Social Media

When I did a presentation on social media for C-level women executives last year I argued that leaders must engage with stakeholders in order to lead engaged organizations. I believed that then; I believe it now. People just can’t do “social media appreciation,” they have to participate at some level in order to understand how it really works. If they don’t understand how it really works, how can they assess how well their organization is doing?

In the interim, I’m happy to note that there has been research on the issue. The BRANDfog CEO survey published in the spring has gotten considerable attention. It quotes Aman Singh of CSRwire and Forbes.com as saying:

Transparency, vision and open communication are key to great leadership and corporate social responsibility strategy today. . .customers expect to hear from the executive leadership team on social media channels, as a direct way to connect and engage with the brands they love and the causes they support.

The data I find most compelling is that 82% of respondents are much more likely/more likely to trust a company whose executive team communicates openly. That is the gist of my argument.

When I sat down to write this post I looked for other recent studies. I was only mildly surprised to find that IBM’s Executive Exchange has a larger, personal interview survey fielded about the same time; IBM is good at social media, externally and especially internally. Again, one quote seemed to nail the situation: 

Though CEOs frequently mentioned dipping their toes into social media waters, few claim to be personally immersed. This arms-length involvement puts CEOs in a precarious position. They are making critical judgments about a disruptive technology without much firsthand knowledge. And they’re uncomfortably reliant on the counsel of less experienced Generation Y advisors. “For the first time in my career, I feel old. People in their 20s work and think about this social stuff in a different way,” a U.K. insurance industry CEO shared. “We’re using it as a way of connecting with friends and socializing; the kids coming up are using it as a way of life.”

These CEOs see social media use increasing by over 250% during the next five years to become the second most important way of engaging with customers. They still see face-to-face as number one. Over the same time frame, they see the importance of traditional media decreasing by over 60%.

The IBM argument is that connectedness through social media is not just a customer issue. Open communications also build and strengthen ties with employees and partners. There is no implication that it is three separate streams of communication. At the CEO level it’s about vision and values with detail on activities mostly left to the functional specialists. There is no implied platform recommendation either. The advice is “Be where your customers expect you to be.” They emphasize the importance of mobile to expectations about timely information. However, in this context mobile is not a platform. It’s a way of delivering social networks to customers according to their expectations.

The picture is one of a media world in the process of revolutionary change and the IBM study making the clearest statement I’ve yet seen of CEOs knowing they need to be part of that change but not knowing exactly how.

So I go back to my original argument; leaders need some personal exposure. Writing in WSJ, Dr. Alexandra Samuel has interesting recommendations leaders and would-be leaders should read for themselves. She sees interesting time-saving value in effective use of Twitter and mentions pressure for CEO blogs. She also suggests having some fun (“Build a Golf Course”) while learning.

If social media is essential to corporate communications and if executives can engage in ways that use time effectively, what reason is left not to engage in a personal and meaningful fashion?

SoLoMo - Implications for Marketers

SoLoMo is a term that has gained great currency since John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers coined it a year or so ago. The importance of the phenomenon was confirmed during the holiday season of 2011 by soaring m-commerce sales. In the U.S. alone, sales from mobile devices were expected to be over $10 billion in 2011, and the U.S. has been a laggard in the space.

The most startling statistic of all, however, is the fact that sales of smartphones exceeded those of pcs for the first time in the 4th quarter of 2010. The prediction has been around for awhile, but now it has been matched by the reality, and marketers must adjust their strategies accordingly. Much has been written about mobile strategies, but I think a lot of it misses a key issue.

First, the players, all of whom are well known, even if some are mere corporate infants. This infographic from Social Commerce Today positions them in the space.

Here’s my take, with the often-overlooked issue and implications for marketers. Devices are the facilitators but search, especially local search, is the fundamental driver. Whether people are looking for a present for Mom, finding where their friends are or locating a place to have Indian for lunch search dominates, and a lot of it is local these days. The fact that search ties it all together is a strategic marketing issue of great importance.

The other key marketing issue is the emergence of small local retailers as equal participants. Looking at the infographic above you see that all the players offer affordable marketing opportunities to small local businesses. Some of them are designed to cater to that market. Small businesses have to learn to take advantage of the opportunities and large enterprises will increasingly find ways to incorporate them into brand strategies. In this space the “level playing field” of the Internet has finally arrived, and its importance cannot be overstated.

How are marketers dealing with the challenges? A survey by Silverpop suggests that many marketers have a long way to go before they successfully integrate communications channels, including email. For additional data about which channels marketers are using and how, download the study here.

Marketers have a lot to learn as they deal with these strategic issues. How do we do this without harassing customers each and every time they are close to one of our stores? How do we do it with a level of privacy that is known and acceptable to our customers? And what about “deal fatigue?” It comes back to the fundamental SMM question: How do we play nicely in the social space and still accomplish our brand goals?

All questions that need serious thought, but the outlines of the space in which we are playing are becoming clearer. It’s called SoLoMo!

Article first published as SoLoMo--Implications for Marketers on Technorati.

Mobile is the Choice of Multitaskers

Are you seeing more QR codes on your TV screen and wondering who scans a code while watching TV? It could be up to 80% of the mobile Internet users who responded to a recent study by Razorfish!

Multitasking is hardly a new phenomenon, but laptops, smart phones and tablets have taken the activity to a whole new level. An earlier study by Yahoo!, which interviewed over 8 thousand Internet users and over 5 thousand mobile users, found a whopping 86% of mobile users (92% of mobile users aged 13-24) viewing mobile content related to the TV program they were watching. That is too many multitaskers to be ignored!
According to the ReadWriteWeb graphic, a fair amount of the multitasking activity is communication, specifically social networking or texting (about brands or TV programs, I wonder?). 70 percent is use of apps, many if not most of which connect to the web, and 37% is plain old web surfing. That’s a lot of people conducting a lot of potentially brand-related activity! Neither study breaks out search as a separate activity, but given the explosive growth of mobile search, I have to believe that there’s a lot of searching buried in the surfing data.

Specific types of content are also more likely to stimulate sharing. This graphic from the new Razorfish report shows what they are. I see a strong reflection of target audiences, many of them young. My hypothesis would be that young men are heavy sharers of sports news; moms are heavy sharers of food content. What about reality? Everyone, or is that sharing somewhat female also? These are questions the marketer needs to pursue for her own brand.

Marketers can direct the activity and conversation by creative promotions and learn from their results. For example:
• Pepsi gave a free bottle of Pepsi Max who shared an ad with their friends using a Yahoo! social tool called IntoNow.
• The “Old Navy Records” campaign offers incentives including free music to people who tag ads with Shazam.
• A Heinken app allows users to play along with soccer games, trying to predict who will score in the next 30 seconds.
Read more here. And while you do, notice that these campaigns use special tools/applications to create just the right context for social sharing.

There are two important take-aways:
• It’s more than just not ignoring mobile; it’s also creating content that can move seamlessly from one channel to the other, as the Timberline scan tag and mobile site I described in my previous post.
• Then it’s devising ways in which to get people to interact with programming content or with advertising.

Marketers need to follow the lead of their customers. They are sharing web content. How does the marketer make content worth sharing and participate in the brand-related conversations?

Article first published as Mobile is the Choice of Multitaskers on Technorati.

Mobile Will Rule for Holiday 2011

Advice to retailers on preparing for the holiday selling season has been around since late summer. I’ve been collecting it but was stimulated to write this post by an email from my friends at Unbound Commerce, announcing that there is still time (barely) to get a mobile site for the holiday season. Important dates are coming soon.

According to Media Post, in 2010, the top five days by conversion volume include Cyber Monday at 16% [Monday November 28 this year; the deals start promply at 12:01 am]; Black Friday at 23% [Friday November 25 this year]; Tuesday, Nov. 30, 17%; Sunday, No. 28, 17%; and Dec. 6, 17%. See their advice on integrating paid search and mobile.

Here ‘s a quick summary of some of the platform-specific advice I’ve found:

Email. Review your last year’s holiday email campaign reports to find out what went right and what went wrong. Here’s a set of tips with a link to a holiday email guide.

Paid Search. With Google far ahead as the leader in online advertising revenue, the importance of paid search can hardly be overstated. If you want to optimize your PPC holiday schedule consider developing a bid boosting plan as recommended by Search Engine Land.
Online Display Advertising. Facebook is coming up fast as a purveyor of highly targeted display advertising. Large, multi-location merchants can target by demographics, lifestyles and activities. Small local merchants can make good use of the geo-targeting available on Facebook. Like Google AdWords, Facebooks ads are self-service and available to all.

MOBILE. That’s one place where all the advice givers find consensus, no matter what their industry. Mobile is going to be huge this year; retailers miss out at their peril. Leapfrog gives good advice that makes two points that many of the experts stress:
1. The holiday season is time for selling, making customer acquisition jump out front of retention for a few short weeks.
2. The LOMO (local mobile) part of the equation is due for a break-out this season as more consumers use their smartphones to search for stores and merchandise nearby.
The website Entrepreneur has good mobile marketing advice; the more you can accomplish by the holiday shopping season, the better!

For small businesses specifically: Entrepreneur has good advice about integrating your email, social media and mobile efforts. Small Biz Trends has advice for preparing for the holidays—operations as well as marketing.

Happy Holidays!

Article first published as Retailers Still Have Time to Prepare for Holiday 2011 on Technorati.

Using QR Codes to Trigger Retail Sales

Wilson Kerr of Unbound Commerce is an expert in helping retailers mobilize their sites and develop Facebook commerce for excellent customer experience and incremental sales. He made an awesome presentation to my social media marketing class last week in which he argued that mobile commerce is exploding and all ecommerce retailers need to become mcommerce retailers also. The factoids in this Ad Age poster support his argument. If you’re interested in drilling down for details on any of them, visit the page and click on the Mobile Marketing tab.
Once a retailer has mobilized her site and is open for mcommerce, the trick becomes to attract people to the msite, at anytime from anywhere. I was struck by Wilson’s concept of “Trigger Point Marketing.” It’s sort of like POS promotions that we all learned about in Marketing 101, but now the point of sale is anywhere! The media channels for Trigger Point Marketing are all the usual suspects including Facebook, Twitter, email and SMS. Two that are getting a lot of attention at the moment are QR and NFC codes.

I wrote about the similarities and differences in February when Google dumped QR codes in Places listings for NFC codes. NFC codes are operationally more complex, requiring a Places decal to be delivered to the local retail establishment. The program has been on a steady roll-out since April of this year. NFC have a lot of potential advantages, including tap-and-go payments, but for now QR codes are more accessible to the individual marketer or business. All you need is a free reader and qrcode creator and there are many of those available on the web.

Wilson’s slide shows some applications and there are many more. Home Depot has partnered with Martha Stewart’s lines to post QR codes in their stores—the POS concept again. When a shopper uses a smart device to scan the code he is taken you to the appropriate web page on one of the MSLO sites for detailed product information. That’s pretty cool for the US, but the really visionary application is Tesco’s virtual stores in Japanese subway stations. Here’s a video that you really should see. The US isn’t there yet in several ways, but if busy Japanese commuters love the concept can Europe and the US be far behind?

Your basic QR code has also gone social. Here’s one (yes, I made it myself and it wasn’t hard). I thought about putting it on my blog, but I remembered Wilson’s advice that it’s silly to expect people who are sitting at a computer to grab their mobile phone and scan a QR code on the screen. I settled for a simple “Follow Me on Twitter” icon for this blog, but try this tag for yourself to see how it works.

I was interested in an article on iMedia Connection this morning opining that the QR code might be dead. My experience parallels Sean X Cummings' informal survey; few people understand them and that's a problem. It would be resolved over time with wise use that adds customer value. One of his points is that agencies are using them stupidly, on moving buses for example. That certainly doesn't help the cause.

For my own part, I’m off to order new business cards with a QR code on them! What other applications can you think of that provide genuine value?

Article first published as Using QR Codes to Trigger Retail Sales on Technorati.

Barcode Marketing I - Promotional Opportunities

In this week’s Internet marketing class I played a Tesco ad that plugged both barcode marketing and Tesco’s new app, which has social shopping potential. The ad is fun, but it doesn’t emphasize the social aspect.



Consider this quote from Tesco’s agency:

Let’s say that three of your friends had bought tickets to [a concert] and advertised the fact on Facebook. Wouldn’t it be beneficial to receive an alert letting you know that they would be going to the concert and offering you the chance to buy your own ticket? This is a simple extension of current functionality but already the end user is having their possible needs preempted.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? You might want to read the post for some other ideas including the possibility that your friend Susan might be getting a cold. That one sort of creeps me out.

It will be interesting to see where Tesco goes with the social shopping aspect. They’ve experienced privacy push-back before, so they may proceed with caution. What most interested me about the video, though, was the happy consumers shopping with their smart phones in various settings.

A recent chart from eMarketer shows shoppers using their smart phones for a variety of purposes. Looking for deals is high on the list. Here’s a Reuters video that talks about the marketing implications of Tesco’s barcode app. So barcode marketing, which is essentially promotional, is clearly a growing marketing activity. Who are the enablers?

There are numerous agencies out there that develop mobile promotions (search ‘mobile shopping agency,’ for example). I was interested in DIY barcode promotions, so I kept looking. I found this really interesting case study. A mobile agency headquartered in Portland, Oregon hosted an art exhibit in their own space to test aspects of barcode promotions. They attached a barcode to each piece of art and encouraged viewers to scan them for information about the artist.

By now I had several barcode scanners on my iPhone, so I tried them all. None worked, so I made the correct assumption that I had to download the app from StickyBits in order to read them. That was only the beginning of my annoyance.

It’s a free app on iTunes. No problem there. It wanted me to sign in with Facebook Connect, which I don’t do. I don’t know whether my friends are interested in this stuff, and I don’t want to bug them. That proves I’m old, I know, but I just don’t use it. So I set up an account with StickyBits, no unusual information requested, but annoying on a smart phone. Then after a couple of other now-typical screens—Can I send you push info? No. Can I use your current location? Yes, although that could be a mistake from a privacy perspective.

Having satisfied those screens my scanner was operational and I scanned one of the artworks. The amount of information was disappointingly small. Yes, I know this was a test, but they could have made it more useful to the artists. The test performed as expected, though. Relatively few of the attendees used the barcodes and the ones who did were relatively young and computer-savvy. Read the post for yourself: it’s quite interesting and you can just click on the works of art featured to see the information provided (and consider the possibilities) and to see how few people scanned them.

I see another important lesson from the TenFour case study. Using a bar code format that isn’t recognized by the best-known barcode readers is going to present a problem. The user can prominently post the download link, but it still will probably inhibit use. My phone is already cluttered with apps—how about yours?

My investigation took me down many other paths looking for an answer to a basic DIY question, “Can businesses/non-profits do this for themselves without an agency?” The answer is “yes,” and I’ll follow up on that in a forthcoming post.

A Must Read--Mobile Internet Trends

I missed this when it came out last month. I appreciate Dave Morin's blog for bringing it to my attention!

Mary Meeker was well known for her insight, especially into the impact of technology on business and lifestyles, as an analyst at Morgan Stanley. She recently joined the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the sponsors of this report.

Top 10 Mobile Internet Trends (Feb 2011)

View more presentations from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

The entire report is good and highly relevant. The speed with which new technologies are being adopted in the marketplace is absolutely scary! The ten or so slides toward the end are of most interest to me. The integration slide that shows the impact of technologies other than computers on computing itself is though-provoking. So are the summaries of trends for 2011 and beyond.

Indeed a must read!

The Mobile Future--QR or NFC?

One of my students recently attended the mobile unconference in Boston and sent back dispatches from the field—thanks, Mike! One talked about QR codes and NFC tags. I wasn’t sure what the difference what the difference was, so I thought I should find out.

I’ve seen QR codes around for awhile. This is a shot from a Google Places page I maintain that invites me to “Share Your Place Page with Customers.” When you print out the QR code poster, this is what you get—a simple poster to place in the window. When a mobile phone with the appropriate reader (free here and, of course, on the iTunes store) is trained on the code, it links to the Place Page and the business information it contains. The QR code is a bar code that is read by the mobile reader--technology we’re all familiar with.

Ok, that’s great—so what is a NFC tag. NFC stands for near field communications; cutting through the techno-speak that means wireless connectivity. It’s hard to find a non-technical definition of NFC tags. I’ll settle from for this phrase from the NFC forum: “short-range wireless interaction in consumer electronics, mobile devices and PCs.” That phrase on their home page links to a nice non-technical explanation. The graphic shows what the two types of tags look like, but it’s not helpful in understanding the differences. It comes from a video on this site which has nice music but no narration!

This video is useful; it uses a scenario to explain what NFC tags can do. It comes from the University of Munich (in 2005!). Sincere thanks to the professors there for posting it in layman’s English! You really need to take the 5 minutes to watch the video and understand the potential power of this technology!

Everything I read while researching this admits that NFC codes are way cooler and have the potential to do more than QR codes. QR codes are, however, easy to create and for the consumer to use as my Google Places example shows. NFC codes require devices (likely mobile phones) to have built in NFC chips. Not many have it at present, especially in the US. The ones that do appear to be pricey. For now it appears that we’ll need to keep an eye on the NFC trials taking place in Europe, so we need to once again thank our colleagues there for leading the way into the mobile future!

Things to Watch for in Social Media Marketing in 2011

I’ve been watching prognostications about social media in 2011 and, since 2010 is almost over, I’m going to weigh in now. One of the best things I’ve seen is this discussion of interactive from eMarketer. It’s broader than social and well worth paging through . I’ve adapted the first three of their trends and added a perspective of my own. So here goes—and your comments and opinions are welcome!

eMarketer Webinar: Key Digital Trends for 2011

View more presentations from eMarketer.

• 2011 will be about apps everywhere—and increasingly by everyone. This is not news to anyone, but the development in this space seems to continue unabated. Apple says there are over 300,000 iPhone apps in its store. The fastest growing apps spaces currently are iPad and Android.
If you need proof of the wisespread use of apps, consider these two recent eMarketer charts. Retail shoppers (Dec. 15) use them to find bargains. B2B purchasers (Dec. 29) are using them to find information, with only the oldest group being a real hold-out. The same report says that 27% of this sample feels comfortable making a business purchase on a mobile device.

Footnote: a lot of us talked about 2010 being “the year of mobile.” In a sense it was, but that’s not because of the devices themselves. It’s because apps made them so useful to so many people in so many places.
• 2011 will be about content, not advertising. We’re coming to call it “content marketing” and its aim is to engage and entertain as well as to inform. The writer adds that we need “curation” to help customers separate the signals from the noise. Lee Rainey of the Pew Foundation says that all this content has “created a Bermuda Triangle: Markets are fractured, the marketplace is roiled, metrics haven't kept pace, and there's too much noise, so it's easier for things to get lost in the shuffle.” He has more interesting things to say about the megaphone that is the Internet in this report of a recent speech. Content curation can provide powerful assistance to customers in an era in which we’re all inundated with information.
Writing in the eMarketer newsletter Geoff Ramsey ( December 2, 2010) has 5 useful questions for those of us who create content:
• Is the content unique?
• Is the content useful?
• Is the content well executed?
• Is the content fun?
• Does the content make good use of the channel in which it appears (e.g., social, mobile, video)?
I would add, “Can the content be repurposed for other brand channels?” There’s never enough good content! The eMarketer webinar points out that “Consumers engage seamlessly with content across multiple platforms.” That’s a huge challenge for marketers—the right content in all the places the target audience would like to find it.
• 2011 will also be about location, which I’ve recently written about (1, 2). Venture capitalist Summet Jain belives that location and social commerce will be the driving forces in the year to come and Foresquare will be the driving platform. Take a minute to understand this quote:
Part of the new evolution of mobile commerce will be new developments in near field communications, which involves the use of proximity sensors to guide mobile users through stores and malls. These proximity sensors, said Jain, will be deployed more widely among small businesses in the coming year to allow users to locate specific items down to the very aisle and shelf.
That sounds good, but I wonder if small businesses will be that quick to mimic deployment of this technology in large malls. Small businesses have a lot to cope with just keeping up with their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts!
My Perspective – Converging Trends
When two powerful trends converge, the impact changes the marketing landscape. Here are my two nominations for that powerful force.
• The Ubiquity of Mobile and Use of Social Media. That goes back to apps everywhere on all sorts of mobile devices. When marketers combine that with the growing—almost complete—reliance of younger adults on digital media it creates a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. This is a good presentation on upscale younger adults. Their use of digital, even for content like newspapers, is fascinating and predictive, I think.

L2 Gen Y Affluents: Media Survey

View more presentations from L2.

• Prominence of Younger Adults and Use of Social Media. Prof. Olivia Mitchell of UPenn is being widely quoted on the number of baby boomers turning 65 starting in 2011 (10,000 a day!). The fact that many boomers are ill-prepared for retirement may retard the rise of younger people in business and professional ranks, but they will continue to gain power there. They are the young B2B purchasers in the eMarketer chart using mobile devices to get information and even to make purchases. As the Gen Y study shows, they are the people who communicate on Facebook and get their news on the Internet. Marketers must be there to meet them.
This is only my selection of the issues I see as being most important in social media marketing in 2011. It's not comprehensive, but I hope it’s thought provoking!

Location-Based Marketing 2--Check-In Programs

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have both come and gone. Black Friday filled the stores—from midnight on!*!—with shoppers who often used Black Friday websites to locate deals before they braved the stores. Cyber Monday online sales were over $1 billion—the most ever for a single shopping day!

I want to focus in on just the check-in programs as a new and powerful shopper stimulant. There are the “old-fashioned” apps that let you compare prices in the retail store. Apps like TGI Black Friday (DealCatcher the other 364 days of the year!) aggregate coupons and deals from all over. Shoppers find them valuable, but the real action is in check-in campaigns run by individual retailers. Analytics by Mashable show Target far in the lead in terms of number of check-ins. I got there too late to check out the Black Friday tab, but the Weekly Ad page shows the variety of channels for accessing weekly specials and the opportunities for check-in promotions that include contests, give-aways and special deals.

One of the big winners this holiday season has been Sports Authority, mentioned in my earlier post as having a $500 gift card give-away on Black Friday. As this quote suggests, the company considered it a great success—and it didn’t even make the Mashable list of the top 10!

"We saw a lift anywhere from 5X to 20X for the number of check-ins," said Clay Cowan, VP of e-commerce for the Denver-based retail chain. "Every metric of engagement that we tracked went through the roof. Whether it was Twitter posting, Foursquare check-ins, Facebook friend adds and comments...we saw increases."
On Foursquare, the brand had around 400 followers before the campaign and now has almost 4,500. . .”

Three important points. First, Sports Authority has been testing Foursquare promotions since early this year. They had a process in place. Second, they’re not resting on their laurels. They now have a 21 Days of Deals promotion in place. The box from their home page shows strong integration with Facebook. It’s easy to guess that they may have other Foursquare promotions that will be promoted on their Facebook page. That’s the third issue; marketers need to use something timely like Facebook or Twitter (or both) to publicize these short-term deals beyond their mobile app subscribers. This material is too transient for web site promotion unless you’re running a big campaign announced far in advance.

That’s one strategic was of looking at location-based promotions—the specific campaign. There is another—the integration with long-term loyalty programs. According to Fast Company Safeway is testing a partnership program with Pepsi in its California Vons stores. It’s built on the existing loyalty card, the important difference from most of the campaign-type programs we are seeing. When the shopper checks in with her Vons card, she can receive instant rewards (coupons at check-out) on PepsiCo products. It’s possible to set the program up so swiping the card checks the shopper in and rewards are “shouted out” on Foursquare. It’s a bit hard to find the Foursquare page on the Vons site, suggesting local promotion of this test program.

Does this predict that the future of the loyalty card is on our cell phones as suggested by the New York Times? It’s worth considering!

Before you get too excited, though, keep the recent Pew research in mind. A report published in early November says that only 4% of Americans use location-based services at this point. Ok, the target audience is relatively small at this point. The good news is that this market is in its early days and thoughtful marketers have time to test and refine strategies. This space is exploding, though; I’d recommend starting right away.

And as you do it consider an even more far-reaching possibility: The future of convergence may be the cell phone. That will stand conventional marketing on its head once again!

Location-Based Marketing 1--Basics

It seems to me that location-based marketing happened during the summer while I was taking time off from blogging. That’s not quite true, but it suggests how fast this phenomenon has taken hold.

When I first heard about Foursquare (from my students of course!) my first reaction was, “Why do I want anyone to know where I am at a given moment??” My second was that I’m not a twenty- or thirty-something out on the town on Friday evening! I got that. It took me awhile to realize that this was potentially a better option than the mobile couponing campaigns I had been writing about (for example, Ford local campaign; mobile trends). Foursquare and the others provide platforms that provide functionality and reach users.

Foursquare and Gowalla are the two largest location platforms. At the risk of oversimplifying, Foursquare looks to be very attractive to retailers who want to run a specific promotion. Gowalla seems to be attracting venues that want something long-term as suggested by Disney’s recent deal with Gowalla. There are many other smaller and/or more specialized platforms. This short slideshow identifies them and does a good job of explaining their similarities and differences. This space got a big boost in August when Facebook introduced its Places application, making it easy for marketers to tap into the huge Facebook population.

10 Lesser Known Social Platforms and How Businesses Can Use Them

View more presentations from Erica Swallow.

The importance of location-based marketing is emphasized by Chief Marketer:

• 37% of customers who searched for a local business in ’09 ended up visiting the store in person (TMP & comScore, October 2009) • Local search currently represents half of all mobile search ad revenue (Kelsey Group, September 2009) • Younger generations embrace mobile in staggering numbers; 97 million 5-29 year-olds in the U.S., 281 million in India and 255 million in China currently have mobile accounts (The Mobile Youth Report, 2010)

They emphasize the ties between search and location-based marketing: “Search teams should be sure to capitalize on these online-to-offline strategies to capture local visibility and in-store traffic.”

Leading-edge marketers are already onboard. Sports Authority has conducted several promotions on Foursquare, including one on Black Friday, and says, "We like the ROI on the things we've been doing on Foursquare." CNN describes some of the other Black Friday action.

My favorite for sheer marketing creativity is KLM’s recent foray, which is “spreading happiness.” When a passenger checks in on Foursquare, the KLM marketing team uses other social networks to find out about the passenger’s “likes” and about her trip. They use that data to provide a surprise to the passenger and take a photo of the surprised traveler.

The KLM team has surprised travellers with champage, notebooks, a watch, and traditional Dutch foods. One passenger, Willem van Hommel, was going to miss one of his soccer team’s most important matches of the year due to his trip to New York. KLM surprised him with a Lonely Planet guide to New York with all the best soccer bars in the city marked out for him. Another traveller, Tobias Hootsen, was surprised with a package to remind him of home during his long stay abroad.

I checked out the KLM Facebook page. The wall page had the usual flight complaints with speedy responses from KLM. One “surprised” passenger wanted to get a copy of the picture taken in the airport. Actually, it’s right there. There’s a link to the photo album on the wall page and it’s what you get when you click through on “what happened” on the promo announcement. As you might guess, the promo is also big on the I Love KLM page with another link to the photo album. Good follow up and I suspect they are integrating it with other media like Twitter. The downside is suggested by an article that uses the word “spies” in the headline, which is actually quite favorable when you read it. I didn’t see any privacy complaints on the KLM site. Wonder if that’s partially due to the fact that KLM already had an app that allows passengers to make a luggage tag with their picture on it? In any event, it’s a cool app and taken together, it signifies a company that’s deeply involved in location-based marketing.

Mashable has a good post with 9 steps for the marketer who is new to location-based marketing. A lot of the steps are not new to regular readers of this blog. Setting clear marketing objectives and monitoring are critical, for example. One that is especially important is 4 Customize. Each of the platforms offers different opportunities to engage visitors like the badges that can be earned on Foursquare. The marketer must understand the options.

There are other examples and strategy approaches. I’ll write about those in a few days when Cyber Monday calms down and we see what’s happened during these hectic shopping days!

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!

The White House Joins the App Craze

It’s been a political week, so I might as well end the week on a political note. The White House must have been reading eMarketer also; it announced its own app on Tuesday.

The eMarketer newsletter (January 21, 2010) quoted a study by DM@PRO and Quattro Wireless that has a lot more good data on building and promoting apps. If you’re the White House, promotion isn’t that much of a problem, but the reasons for the app certainly apply. Think about it; they pretty much boil down to ‘it’s where our customers are’ and ‘it’s gotten a lot easier.’

I downloaded The White House app and it works as promised. Plenty of photos and videos; access to the White House blog, which is pretty informative. Apparently I can watch the State of the Union speech streamed live next week. After just a few days the reviews on the App Store are pretty good. It’s clean and quick and those who have used the streaming say the speed is good. Only real complaint I saw is that it’s not compatible with the first generation iPod, but to be fair, it says that on the store page. I’m a huge fan of the first dog, so I choose a screen capture that included him. The White House furnished several screen captures—they know quite a bit about promotion—and you can see more on Huffington Post.

The study says that Facebook is still the most popular venue for apps with 45% of the marketers surveyed having developed Facebook apps. iPhone comes in second with 42%. Our own site or community comes in third at only 36%. How do you choose? According to eMarketer:

Engagement was the top reason to choose either mobile or social as an app platform, but social sites were perceived as better for many top goals, including engagement, audience targeting, sharing and branding potential, and reach. Mobile scored higher on creative control and persistence.

Interesting! I recently ran across a Facebook app that lets you send a newsletter from your page—sort of. According to Nutshell Mail, you can “Automatically send the latest feeds from your page to your fans' email inboxes.” Not for me, thank you. It’s worth looking at, though, just to see what’s possible.

There are at least two take-aways here:

1. Apps are still in their early days and marketers are finding more creative, and even useful, ways to use them. Think branding, think pushing your message out to people who have indicated willingness to receive it.
2. Mobile is finally here, although it still has a lot of room for development and growth. Think about the moms described yesterday who are using smart phones to manage their lives, shopping included. Retailers were urged to take heed. Brand markets are also.

What’s next for The White House? mobile.WhiteHouse.gov, according to the blog.

What’s next for this app user? While I was looking for this one, I found a camcorder app that is getting pretty good reviews for 3G users who don’t want to spend the money for a 3GS. At $.99, the app is a much better buy. What else does that say about today’s mobilized world?

Ghost of Christmas Future?

It’s no secret that I think apps are the future, and we can see it emerging now. However, I’m not a big mall shopper, so I haven’t experimented with shopping apps for my iPhone except for a grocery list, which I quickly became unable to live without. My students are on the same wave length. In fact, last night one tried to convince the class that we wanted to listen to sports events on our smart phones! No sale there, Laura! but I was thinking about apps when I saw this article in the NYT today. The idea of mobile phones as an essential tool for shopping intrigues me, although it may strike fear into the hearts of some retailers.

The video is fascinating, so I decided to experiment. I downloaded the free ShopSavvy app with no trouble. However, it didn’t work. Ok, go read some more. I found out that it only works on the iPhone 3Gs. Reason: older iPhones lack the autofocus function that makes a bar code readable.

Is there a bar code scanner app for the 3G? Yes, I found RedLaser and it looked pretty good. I downloaded that, although along the way I had to update my iPhone software; that took longer than the two app downloads together. After that, $1.99 and a few seconds later, I had a bar code scanner.

First thing I tried was a Diet Coke can. The UPC is on the side, so the can kept rolling around and getting glare from the metal; never did get it to work. However, I pointed the scanner at the bar code on the RedLaser site, and moments later I had lift off! The code is for a snuggles blanket and it sells for as little as $11.99 online and shows $14.99 at both Best Buy and Sears, which are near me. And I didn’t need to try to integrate it with the ShopSavvy app; it gave me results from Google search and from the Find. Fascinating!

Thank goodness I’ve finished my Christmas shopping, but I decided to check how well I did on one item. The hard drive I bought sells for as little as $109.95 online and as much as $179.99 at retail outlets and some online merchants. So I did just fine—thanks to a sale and loyal customer discount at Staples! Are you surprised at the price range? I was! Of course, customers will think about shipping when they see the online prices. Does this kind of shopping confirm the wisdom of all the free shipping offers we are seeing this holiday season?

This is all pretty new, and not that many shoppers are yet using it. What about next Christmas? Fearless Roberts prediction; this is going to catch on fast. Corollary to that; if I can do it, anyone else with a smart phone can!

Retailers, both online and off, seem to have two choices. They can offer to meet the lowest price; notice that Wal-Mart’s price matching offer (current TV ad appears to simply restate the policy on their site) excludes online prices. That obviously can cut into a retailer’s margin—and what if it’s counter to the merchandising strategy?

I would describe the second option as, “you can’t beat them, so join them.” I’ve previously described apps intended to make it easier to shop at certain stores or buy certain brands. That is going to make sense, at least for first movers for awhile. Like everything else, however, there will be a limit to how many apps customers want.

Is this within range of small local retailers? I searched again and found this site; the costs are consistent with what I’ve seen before and on the low end are not excessive.

Should retailers—large and small—be thinking right now about next Christmas and how they can take advantage of the trend to mobile-assisted shopping?

Kicked-Up Marketing with Apps

Ad Age hosted an Apps for Brands conference last week that produced some interesting advice and case histories. There’s no doubt that apps for Apple’s iPhone represents market leadership with, according to last week’s email, 75,000 apps and 2 billion downloads as of today (the CNET article says 85,000 apps; I took Apple’s word for it). To marketers a more interesting issue is what other firms are doing in the space since few of us have a brand that can attract developers like the iPhone.

First, a couple of layperson’s definitions. An app (application) is software designed for end users. A widget is a graphical interface that allows users to interface (easily) with the application. In practice, the two are often indistinguishable from one another, since marketers are delivering a lot of apps, especially the mobile ones, as widgets. Examples from the conference include:





The Kraft iFood Assistant













Bank of America Mobile Banking















Benjamin Moore’s Catch-a-Color








Ad Age advises that apps must be real time and easy to use and to pay for if not free. They point out that people will pay for value if the apps are useful enough. They also point out that people are even more annoyed by intrusive advertising in the mobile environment than on the desktop as Major League Baseball found out. On mobile, click-through isn't the only metric that matters. Are people recommending your app? Or trashing it on Twitter? "We measure click-throughs, but we don't measure pissed off," said Mr. Bowman, referring to when MLB put an intrusive ad into its At Bat app.

They also point out that apps need to be part of an integrated marketing message, although people are most likely to learn about apps by WOM. Their recipe for success is utility, frequency and viral. Good advice.

Each of the apps above has a demo page; they are all worth looking at. The Benjamin Moore color app clearly wins the prize for most creative, but the other two offer genuinely useful services, and that’s really what it’s all about. The three firms above are all trying to sell a product or a service. Only Kraft charges; 99 cents. The MLB At Bat app (see it on their home page) is $4.99 at the Apple App Store; they are offering a value-added service. Make sense?

But is this another strategy that’s only for corporations with big advertising budgets? Not necessarily—more about that in a few days.

A Butterball Message for Thanksgiving?

What better to contemplate on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving than a perfectly-roasted turkey? Last week Ad Age pointed out that Butterball had joined Web 2.0. I considered that a charming thought and investigated further.
As I suggested on the webcast yesterday, I don’t understand all the angst about cooking a turkey. I think it’s one of the easier things to do in the kitchen and I’ve never quite understood the popularity of the help line. According to Ad Age, it started in 1981 with 11,000 calls. They now have a (seasonal, I presume) staff of 50 and field 100,000 calls. The Turkey Talk Line® is, indeed, a great marketing device but 1) it’s expensive and 2) it’s not entirely convenient for today’s on-the-go consumer. According to the senior v-p of marketing at Butterball:

"When the Turkey Talk-Line started 28 years ago, the phone was the best way to give people the important turkey-cooking information they needed," Mr. Klump said. "This year, Butterball continues to evolve and reach new cooks with initiatives like turkey text messages, a new mobile website and web chats, so that we can provide Butterball's expert holiday advice the way modern cooks want it, anytime and anywhere."

Indeed they can! The mobile alerts and website are a nice touch. They also have some other interesting social media initiatives. They are doing a live chat on their site today and another on the Gather.com site tomorrow.

I complained—rightly—yesterday about the lack of a live link to the informational page about the web chat from the home page. This morning a link to the information page has gone up. It’s about an hour until time for the chat to start, and the promised link at the bottom of the information page is not yet there. I’m used to B2B events where they ask you to sign up in advance. Looking around just a bit, I don’t see any other timed chats like this, so I don’t know whether this just-in-time provision of information is typical for B2C live chats. It seems to me to place a big burden on the person who wants to attend to remember it and to sign in during the chat. I checked the Gather site too and same thing. You have to remember to attend the live chat. Wouldn’t an autoreminder make sense for these?

They also mention blogging, so I looked. What they’ve done here is also interesting. They profile some of their “star talkers.” What you find on this page is that they’ve recruited three of what I call the “mommy bloggers.” All of them are active on multiple blogs and/or sites. That’s reaching out to bloggers in a very active way. I can’t find a Butterball blog, per se, so they seem to be counting on these established bloggers. A Technorati search shows considerable activity in recent days for “Butterball turkey.”

So gentle readers, it appears that Thanksgiving preparations are well underway. If you are traveling, do so safely! Wherever you are, do enjoy your Thanksgiving with family and friends, as I’ll be doing. See you next week!

Guest Post - Ringtones for the Blind Part 2

Yesterday, Laura described the ringtone project for the Perkins School for the Blind. Today, she takes us through the often-difficult process to it successful conclusion.

Although our web administrators at Perkins are very talented, ringtones were not within their scope. Therefore, I began to investigate what other organizations were doing in terms of branding and marketing.

First, I emailed and telephoned the organization which had been reported in the press to have created Obama’s website. The company is called mStyle and, of all things, happens to be located in Boston! The emails I sent to the address posted on their site bounced back (not a good sign for a company in the technology space) and the telephone messages I left – three in all – were never returned.

Next, I Googled ‘ringtone downloads’ and ‘creating ringtones’ and other similar phrases and found a number of articles promoting this as a new way of reaching a younger audience.

What I discovered in my research was that some websites:
a) clearly had problems with the downloads (The National Zoo in Washington, DC has a message “Due to temporary technical problems, the ringtone samples and store are offline”)
b) worked through a consolidator of some kind (meaning that you are sent to a website which is not your website, and the consolidator makes money),
c) made the ringtones available, but not for free (in some cases as a donation to the cause as in the case of this Unicef campaign against violence in Kenya)
d) made the ringtone downloads so difficult to find that I never found them, although they had been cited in articles about ringtones (Ford Mustang, Porsche)

I ended up finding a new company called Myxer, which responded immediately to my email. The VP of Business Development called me back within an hour. When I explained to him what I was trying to do, he told me that although much of what they do is to enable people to make their own ringtones, or to download an artist’s ringtone, they also work behind the scenes with companies like Friendly’s Ice Cream to provide free downloads.

One of the ways Myxer makes its money is by showing ads on the text message you receive once you have requested a free download from a specific artist.

If your company or organization agrees to pay the equivalent of the cost of the ad placement, Myxer will not show ads and just provide your ringtone download without showing any other company’s advertising. This is the direction I chose to go in. Nonetheless, I had to give up the requirement that the delivery of the ringtone would be branded only with the Perkins brand and not with a third-party provider. When a visitor downloads the ringtone from the www.perkinsbrailler.org website (or from Friendly’s), you receive a text message from Myxer directing you to the Myxer website to finish the download.

Myxer was incredibly courteous to work with, turning their organization inside out to get us up and running in our very short timeframe. Moreover, they offered to provide the service for free until we reach a certain number of downloads, believing that our cause is worthwhile.

And we are up and running…

Still, this has not been easy. We have had feedback that people can’t seem to do the downloads – partly because they don’t understand how their cellphones work, and partly because the technology is complicated.

As was reported in a recent article in AdWeek, the technology is not really ready for primetime yet. Apparently this is due to a variety of reasons, including:

• A large number of carriers, all having their own restrictions

• A wide variety of equipment with varying capabilities

• The type of message being sent, with some phones unable to receive some types of messages

This was validated recently when I attended a luncheon at which the CEO of Nokia spoke. During the question and answer period, I briefly described my own foray into the world of mobile marketing and asked him whether there was any initiative among various manufacturers of equipment as well as providers to standardize the technology and make it more universally accessible. He indicated that this is a very important question and although there are explorations being made, there is no solution at this time.

Our initiative is intended to be international since the Perkins Brailler is sold all over the world. But, the problems only escalate when you are talking about ringtone downloads with carriers in India or Africa.

All in all, quite a learning experience! But until the technology matures, this is still going to be a difficult road to traverse.

Guest Post - Ringtones for the Blind -- Part 1

Today I'm delighted to have a guest post from Laura Matz who is Director of Sales and Marketing for Perkins Products at Perkins School for the Blind, a world-renowned organization located in Watertown, MA. Laura contacted me last summer in the early stages of this marketing program. I've followed the development of the program with interest, and am pleased that Laura has provided us with a detailed narrative of the issues she faced. Today is the introduction; watch for the steps to a successful conclusion tomorrow.


I work for Perkins School for the Blind, responsible for international marketing and sales for a small division within Perkins which sells the Perkins Brailler® – a low-tech device used all over the world which looks like a typewriter and creates printed Braille. After 57 years, we have just launched the Next Generation™ Perkins Brailler® - a ‘reimagination’ of the classic Perkins Brailler, incorporating a sleek design, contemporary colors, and cool, new features which users have asked for.


Since one of the target audiences is young people who are blind and visually impaired – ages 8 – 15 and older – we decided to create an audio campaign, for obvious reasons. We contracted with a brilliant musician, Raul Midon, to write an original song for us. Raul, aside from being an internationally known, gifted guitarist and singer, is also blind and uses Braille.

One of the goals of the campaign is to enable a young person in a mainstream school who is blind or visually impaired to be able to show the new Brailler to his or her sighted classmates, and feel proud that it is a cool device; not something that looks old-fashioned or obsolete. In addition, we wanted kids to be able to share the song with their friends, blind or sighted, using the modern, new media with which kids communicate these days.

Therefore, we decided to turn the song into ringtones and post them on the website for download. I began to look for a company that would guide me through the technology hurdles and allow me to:
a) Offer the downloads for free
b) ‘Private label’ the downloads, meaning that I didn’t want to go through another website in order to download
c) Ensure that there was no advertising associated with the download, which could compromise the ‘integrity’ of a non-profit organization such as ours.

The example which I wanted to emulate was Barack Obama’s website which makes the downloads available for free, makes the process simple and does not appear to go through a third-party. Also Bounce at Procter and Gamble makes it free and easy to download their jingle.

Stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow!