The Creative Workshop

Where No Search Has Gone Before (Or Ever Can Go)

2011-08-05T16:16:00.001-07:00

I've had the recent opportunity to tell the story that Mobile Email Does Matter as a guest columnist to Mobile Marketer Daily and also in an interview by Internet Retailer. I'm pleased to see that many others share my excitement regarding the unique opportunities of mobile email -- and we've only just started to tap its potential.

My only hope is that marketers don't get distracted by obsessing over how an email should look in a mobile device and actually spend their time thinking of mobile email strategy: unique experiences that take advantage of the mobile context which cannot be duplicated on the desktop.

And Speaking of Unique Experiences
I'd like to introduce you to a start up company that it's been my good pleasure to speak with their founder, Vivek Sharma. His company, MovableInk, specializes in what they call "real-time content for email." They have a number of offerings in their portfolio, and the one that I like the most - from a mobile marketer's perspective - is their real-time Local Maps.

Local Maps shows points of interest on a Google Maps mashup in real-time based on where the email recipient is at the time he opens his email. Since the map is rendered in real time, the POIs that the email recipient sees within the very same email will vary depending upon where he is at the time he opens his email.

The desktop experience of Local Maps doesn't exactly excite me especially when one's desktop connection to the Internet is managed via a proxy server as many business and as some commercial ISPs do. For example, I work in Oregon and my office connection to the Internet is managed by my employer who is in Minnesota. Therefore Amazon.com, Google, and others (including Local Maps) show me information relevant to The Land of a Thousand Lakes which is no where close to where I am.

The real Match Made in Heaven is between Local Maps and Mobile Email. Mobile HTML uses the IP address of the cell tower that is handling the communication with the mobile handset. This means that regardless of who your ISP is, you'll always get a true local map on your mobile handset when you read your email whereas you may or may not on your desktop.

To be specific, look below at two screen shots of the same email. The email is from a brand that I follow, showing the places within a few miles of me that serve a particular ... ahem ... beverage that I like (more on that later).

Here's what I see when I read my email at work:

Here's what I see when I read that same email on my mobile device:

Local Search vs. MovableInk Local Maps
So let's talk mobile email strategy now. Any brand having local outlets should consider Local Maps in their mobile email programs. Local search is one of the most widely used features on mobile handsets. MovableInk's Local Maps takes the experience to a level that local search can never go. The web search experience is restricted because it cannot provide the same personalized experience that only email can. Only Local Maps can provide personalized "insider information" on points of interest that local search has no way of knowing.

Local Maps is the perfect tool to capitalize on instant gratification which is the unique advantage of the mobile opportunity. Brands having retail outlets, restaurants, and fast food outlets are the ones that typically come to mind. Being denizens of an industrialized society, we don't plan our meals ahead of time any more. We eat when we're hungry no matter where we happen to be at the moment. Most food service brands have customer loyalty programs. Marketers should send mobile emails out sometime just before the time of day our stomachs start growling. The emails should contain loyalty reward offers that can be immediately redeemed. To top it off, the mobile email should include a Local Map that shows all the nearby places the person can go to immediately redeem his loyalty reward.

CPG Brands Can Benefit Too ...
Consumer Packaged Goods brands can benefit from Local Maps by displaying local outlets that carry a particular product. For example, I'm a fan of a particular brand of vodka (NOTE: this is *not* an endorsement for the consumption of alcoholic beverages) and I like it enough to subscribe to their email newsletters. It's a hard-to-find brand of vodka so it's important enough to me that all other things being equal, the establishments serving this brand have priority of those that don't. This is where mobile email and Local Maps are the perfect solution. Local search just doesn't work - believe me, I've tried it; neither Google, Bing, nor Yahoo! can show me which local dining establishment carries this particular brand. The mobile email from this brand should contain two keys items: a two-for-one drink offer (since martinis always seem to come in pairs) and a Local Maps showing all the dining establishments near me - no matter where I happen to be at that moment - where I can redeem this offer.

... As Can Consumer Electronics ...
Consumer electronics brands have some of the most rabid group of fans, rivaling those of rock stars. Who else can get people to stand outside a store in the freezing rain just so that they can be among the first to own a game, game console, or tablet computer? Product exclusivity implies product scarcity. So here's an idea to consider. Do a special new product rollout exclusively for your most loyal customers. If your product is sold all across the nation, limit availability of the new product to fewer locations than your normal distribution places. Finally, don't automatically assume that 100% of these customers are all at home or that they all know where the exclusive distribution locations are. Do the product announcement using a mobile email and include a MovableInk Local Maps showing the "secret places" where the exclusive product is available. This will drive your rabid fans even wilder!

So there you have it. The mobile opportunity is so much beyond getting an email to look nice in a mobile device. MovableInk's Local Maps is another great way to offer instant gratification for your mobile email program.

The State of Mobile Messaging 2011

2011-05-12T10:54:00.000-07:00

Each year the question always arises, "Is this the Year of Mobile Marketing?" The honest answer is "Yes" and "No". Each year the data about mobile marketing shows that it is maturing from an experimental medium into a mainstream medium for online marketers. And each year, the data shows that it still has a way to go before it reaches the level of mass adoption that other online channels including search, banner advertising, and email marketing enjoy.

First, let's consider the data showing the growth of mobile marketing - specifically commercial mobile messaging. Estimates put the number as high as 6.1 trillion text messages sent worldwide in 2010. Text messaging now is the preferred mode of mobile communication for many mobile subscribers. A study from Merkle showed that 18-29 year olds prefer to text rather than talk for their personal communications. With the widespread adoption of text messaging for communications, it would be a logical assumption that text messaging adoption for commercial messaging should follow. But more on that later.

Even though actual advertising dollars spent on the mobile medium still remain orders of magnitude less than the other advertising media, it remains the one having the highest growth rate. According to the DMA's Statistical Fact Book 2011 Edition, advertising dollars spent in the mobile medium grew at a whopping 63.4% over a four year period from 2006 to 2010. This was during the same time period when total advertising spend shrank by 2.5% due to dropping expenditures in the traditional media channels including direct mail (catalogs, newspaper, magazines, inserts, etc.), radio, and television. Even though social media marketing has been the darling of the press, reality is that advertising spent in this channel grew at less than a third the rate of that for mobile. The projected growth rates through 2014 for the two channels are expected to come closer together; but mobile is still expected to grow faster than social.

Now let's consider the data that indicates commercial mobile messaging still has a long way to go before it reaches the level of mass adoption. In the Merkle study I mentioned above, the same 18-29 year old age group that prefers to text rather than talk for their personal communications are absolutely loathe to accept it as the medium for commercial communications. Quite surprisingly, a definitive 74% of this age group surveyed use email as their preferred medium for receiving commercial messages.

Email is the preferred medium for commercial messages over SMS because of three important factors:

There still remains a sizable population of mobile subscribers who are still paying for each text message while email is free,

Unlike the ability to set up multiple email accounts, a person has only one mobile phone number.

Mobile devices are highly personal. People jealously guard their SMS inbox more than they guard their email inbox.

Let's consider this latter point. Mobile devices are highly personal. People jealously guard their phone numbers from the marketers' clutches for fear of receiving spam messages that they perceive to be highly personal intrusions. For this reason successful commercial mobile messaging places an extremely high premium on trust. Only when people start trusting the integrity of the brand will SMS marketing reach mass adoption on the scale of email marketing, search, display advertising, and mobile apps.

Marketers having successful email programs are in a perfect position to have successful SMS campaigns. The hard-won foundation of trust established by the email program can now be built upon with the SMS marketing program. For this reason, if you are a marketer looking to pilot your SMS marketing programs, start with your email subscribers. Best of all, start with your "mobile responders," those that tend to read your emails on their mobile devices. These are people that are already engaging with your commercial messaging campaigns in a mobile context. The barrier of adoption for your SMS marketing campaigns is lowest with this group.

Three Unique Benefits of Mobile Email

2011-02-21T21:58:00.000-08:00

The online marketer's message is delivered via the Internet. There is an evolutionary transformation taking place in how consumers are choosing to access the Internet. Analysts including Morgan Stanley, and Gartner Research are predicting that within the next four years, the mobile device will become the number one access point to the Internet world wide.

For the past 15 years since the commercialization of the Internet, it's all been about the Desktop Experience. But now consumers are starting to expect the Mobile Experience. If brands do not offer a mobile experience to their customers, there is the possibility that they will lose them to brands that do.

In 2009, smartphones comprised less than 18% of all cellular phones worldwide. Within just one year, smartphone sales worldwide jumped a whopping 80 percent and represented over 21% of all cellphones sold worldwide in 2010. In February of this year, ReadWriteWeb reported that more smartphones were sold worldwide than PCs for the first time ever in Q4 2010.

Research into consumers' mobile device usage patterns indicates that people are interacting with their mobile devices at all times during the day. Additional research indicates that reading email continues to be the most popular data usage across all mobile devices for both feature phones and smartphones. With the meteoric rise of smartphone adoption, email marketers who offer a mobile experience for their customers stand to reap enormous economic benefits.

Email marketers need to see beyond just mobile formatting and consider the mobile opportunity. It is a tragedy of missed opportunity to focus just on repurposing desktop content for the mobile screen all the while ignoring the uniqueness of the mobile context that the desktop cannot duplicate. Mobile devices are the enablers of instant gratification. From a single device, I can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, anytime I want to. I can also listen to music, watch a movie or TV show, purchase just about anything, play a game, find out where my friends are and tell them where I am, search for information on any topic, read my email, my magazine, my newspaper, or my book, program my DVR and just about anything else, anytime I want to.

Send time optimization - the conundrum of the email marketer - is an artifact of the Desktop Experience because people in this context are constrained by the times and places they have access to a computer. The mobile context has no such limitations. People read their emails on their mobile devices whenever and wherever they happen to be.

Mobile email is all about the immediacy that is unique to the mobile context and cannot be matched by the desktop computer. For this reason, mobile email needs to be different from desktop email. Mobile email needs to be short and sweet. There should be only one or two images and the copy should be right to the point. The entire message should be easily understood within 10 seconds or less. The call to action must be fulfilled quickly and easily.

I'll now give you three simple examples of effective mobile emails.

Mobile emails are a must-have for brands that have made the investment of a mobile app. Promote the mobile app using the mobile email. Include a link to download the app in the body of the email. Keeping the consumer within the same device for reading the promotional email and using the app greatly increases the likelihood that the app will be downloaded and used.

Brands that require an in-venue experience benefit greatly from mobile email. For example, Hot Topic is a major retail clothier whose target market are Tweens, who, by the way, are not online buyers because they are too young to own credit cards. Fortunately, there is a strong overlap between their (and other retailers like them) target market and the persona that is highly interactive with mobile devices. Mobile emails should absolutely be used to drive in-store traffic by containing exclusive special offers and promotions that are redeemable within the store by presenting the mobile email to the sales associate at the point of sale. In the not too distant future, 2D code readers at the point of sale will enable highly personalized (and highly trackable) redeemable offers.

Finally, there is absolutely no excuse for brands in the Travel and Hospitality industry to not be using mobile email. They know when and where their customers are on vacation. People don't take their computers with them on vacation, but they definitely take their mobile devices with them. (People who DO take their computers with them on vacation - like me - only interact with them at night when they are back in the hotel room.) Therefore mobile - not desktop - email should be the communication medium. Mobile emails should include co-branded promotions and offers from those that are local to the vacationer. If the brand has a presence on a social network, the mobile email should invite the customers to post their vacation pictures on the brand's social site to enhance their social community experience.

Hopefully by reading this blog, you'll be persuaded that the time for mobile email is now. Don't get hung up on mobile formatting; by keeping your mobile email within the mobile context, it will naturally render will in a wide variety of mobile devices. Focus instead on the mobile opportunity. Take advantage of the mobile context that cannot be duplicated by desktop computers. Start by giving your customers a preference of reading their emails on a desktop computer or on a mobile device. Don't just sneak mobile email out there either; promote it. Give people a compelling reason to partake of the experience that is uniquely mobile.

Confessions of a Possible Techno-holic

2011-01-11T09:52:00.000-08:00

I have a suspicion that I might be a Techno-holic.

Experts say that the first step on the road to recovery is to admit that you actually have a problem. I don't think I have a problem, but I'm not sure. Just to be certain, I'm going to do a self-diagnosis of my personal habits.

So in the spirit of self-help psychoanalysis, I've put together a list of warning signs that I just might be a Techno-holic.

I just might be a Techno-holic when...

Five hundred bucks is too damn much to pay for a flat panel TV, or a netbook computer - or a desktop computer for that matter. But it's a perfectly reasonable price to pay for an iPad just so that I can watch Netflix re-runs while laying in bed at night.

I now read all my email - both business and personal - on my mobile device.

I carry both a Blackberry and an iPhone everywhere I go. The Blackberry is for company email and the iPhone is for everything else because let's face it: the Blackberry UI sucks and the iPhone UI rules.

Paying five hundred bucks for a Kindle DX back in '09 was perfectly acceptable just so that I could read PDFs of market research while laying in bed at night (even though after 18 months I have yet to read a single one).

I've put my newspaper delivery boy out of work and haven't shed a single tear because I now read The Wall Street Journal on my Kindle.

I'm too lazy to turn on my TV just to set my DVR to record a program. Instead, I use the Xfinity TV iPhone app to do it. Oh...and I have the same app on my iPad too.

I'm now systematically replacing all my classic LPs with downloads from iTunes.

I love looking at that flashing blue Thingy on my iPhone's GPS.

I've bought a second Blu-ray player just because my other one doesn't have built-in WiFi - just so that I can watch Netflix re-runs while laying in bed a night.

I've completed this blog post using the HTML Edit iPad app while waiting in line for an oil change at Oil Can Henry's.

So, whaddya think? Am I a Techno-holic? My wife is vigorously nodding her head with an emphatic "Yes!" along with the classic eye-roll thing too. But I don't think so. I consider myself "an enlightened consumer."

Are you possible Techno-holic too? Post a comment to this blog post with your list of warning signs.

The Mobile Experience: Instant Gratification For Your Welcome Email Program

2010-11-02T10:44:00.000-07:00

Your email marketing messages reach your subscribers' inboxes via the Internet. We are in the midst of an evolutionary shift in how people are accessing the Internet. Analysts including those at Morgan Stanley and Gartner Research are predicting that within the next three to five years, mobile devices will become the number one access point to the Internet worldwide. Since the commercialization of the Internet about twenty years ago, online marketing (which includes email marketing) has been all about The Desktop Experience. With more and more people subscribing to mobile services, customers are starting to demand the next evolutionary step: The Mobile Experience. Brands that do not have a mobile experience to offer their customers are in danger of losing many of their customers to competitors that do.

Mobile devices are ubiquitous, and they are highly personal; people share computers but they don't share mobile phones. The most important quality from a marketer's perspective is that mobile devices are the enablers of instant gratification. If a call to action can be performed within the same snapshot of time as the moment of decision, the greater the likelihood that the call to action will actually be accomplished. It's time that email marketers start thinking about The Mobile Experience in their programs - starting with the Welcome program.

The vast majority of brands allow interested people to subscribe to their email marketing programs by entering an email address on a form directly on their web sites. Brands including Chuck E. Cheese's, Target, Perry Ellis, Walmart and Olive Garden all feature an email marketing sign up form directly on their home pages.

While each of these brands have successful email marketing programs, there is a shortcoming to this web page sign up approach. The shortcoming is that there is an inherent disconnect between the time that a person experiences the brand and the time when the person is able to subscribe to the brand's email marketing program. For example, I am experiencing the Olive Garden brand when I am in the restaurant with my family enjoying their food. Will it even occur to me to sign up for their email marketing program hours or even days later when I'm at my computer?

It is with scenarios like this that the power of email marketing becomes enhanced through the power of text messaging. Not all cellphones have the ability to surf the web; but all cellphones have the ability to send and receive text messages. People carry their cellphones with them wherever they go. If a person can subscribe to a brand's email marketing program simply by sending a text message containing his email address, then this capability is a powerful boost to the brand's Welcome program. The text-to-subscribe capability enables people to sign up for email offers and promotions while they are in the midst of the brand's experience. Chuck E. Cheese's is one example of a brand that has a successful text-to-subscribe feature of their email marketing program.

The Mobile Experience of text-to-subscribe should carry over to the Welcome email itself. Anyone who subscribes to the email marketing program in this manner should receive a mobile-formatted Welcome email that is immediately sent as soon as the text message containing the email address is received. Furthermore, the Welcome email should contain a reward that is immediately redeemable. Give people the ability to further experience your brand while they are in the moment. According to a recent study, offers within Welcome emails have "significantly higher transaction rates than those within bulk messages".

B2B brands can likewise take advantage of text-to-subscribe for their email marketing programs. Conferences and tradeshows are excellent scenarios for this type of opt-in mechanism. If you are exhibiting at the tradeshow floor, don't wait for people to return to their hotel rooms before they opt-in; let them subscribe right there on the spot.

Mobile devices are the enablers of instant gratification. Have confidence in your brand to make your email marketing program an object of a person's desire for instant gratification. Implement The Mobile Experience in your Welcome program.

Could Apple Be the One to Unleash the NFC Revolution?

2010-09-27T14:30:00.000-07:00

Last month, Near Field Communications World had a quick blurb that Apple had hired an "expert in near field communication technology" as its mobile commerce product manager. Since that announcement, the press world was all aflurry trying to find out who the heck this Benjamin-guy is. While he may not necessarily have a blue-blood technology pedigree in NFC, he may apparently have what the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field needs to bring passion and evangelism to this emerging world.

In case you're reading this blog and wondering "what the heck is near field communications," it is, in short, one of the many varieties of "contactless technologies" being explored today. Ever since I first learned of near field communication at CTIA back in 2008, I've been intrigued by NFC technology and the possibilities that it entails. I've written about it from time to time here and here.

Here in these United States, we make payments by sliding a card embedded with a magnetic strip through some type of reader. We've been doing it with our credit cards, debit cards, and transit passes for several decades now. My local laundromat has likewise gotten into the magnetic strip act. Instead of stuffing quarters, I now just slide a plastic card containing a magnetic strip into the slots and pay that way. How convenient!

Near field communications takes the magnetic strip to the next logical step. Instead of physical contact between magnetic strip and reader, one just needs to hold a miniature data storage chip very closely to the reader. An antenna transmits data over a very short range - within just a few centimeters.

Mobile devices are the logical candidates for NFC because they are small, self-powered, ubuiquitous, and highly personal devices. Heck, it wasn't all that long ago when we all scratched our heads asking, "Take a picture with a cell phone? Why?" Since we do just about everything else with our cell phones why not use it to buy things like clothing, groceries, bus passes, and junk food from vending machines?

There are two main reasons why NFC for e-commerce hasn't really taken off here in the U.S. - even after many years of speculation. The first barrier is the cost and effort required to update all point of sale systems to support NFC. Imagine every single ATM, cash register, gas pump, public transit station being upgraded to support contactless payment. Would I be too far fetched if I were to throw out a number of perhaps hundreds of millions of these devices that would need replacing?

The other barrier concerns regulation of the industry to ensure consumer protection. Credit cards carry a $50 limit on consumer responsibility for unauthorized use, and debit cards can carry $500 and even higher in liability, depending upon how quickly consumers report the incident of fraud. So what happens if some one takes your NFC-enabled phone and makes fraudulent charges? What rights do you have as a consumer to be protected from these incidents? ... (silence) ...

So now...back to the original topic of this blog. Patently Apple keeps track of all patents that Apple has filed, and certainly their list of patents relating to NFC are many. Now one thing that I will say that is blasphemous in our day and time: Apple's core competency is not about inventing new technologies. They did not invent the portable media player. They did not invent the notebook computer. They did not invent the mobile phone. They did not invent the touch-screen. Heck! They didn't even invent the graphical user interface that they are so famous for. (They "borrowed" it from Xerox PARC.) Apple's core competency is The User Experience. Apple masterfully builds upon existing technology and provides a superior user experience by extending the experience beyond the device itself. The iPod would not be what it is today without iTunes. The iPhone (and the iPad) would not be what it is today without Apps. And because they focus so much attention upon extending the user experience beyond just the physical device, they have a proven track record of success where others have failed.

So when I see that Apple has some interest in near field communications - however obtuse that interest is at this point - I'm a happy camper. I know that NFC totally makes sense and adds value to our daily experience. I also know that for NFC to be successful, the experience must extend beyond just the NFC-enabled device. And this is exactly what Apple is so good at doing.

Check out some of the things that Apple's looking into with an NFC-enabled iPhone. They could just be the tipping point (once again!) that sets a whole new industry in motion.

Can Microsoft Develop a Successful Mobile OS?

2010-08-30T13:57:00.000-07:00

Last week Microsoft announced that it was ready to launch Windows Phone 7 - just in time for the 2010 holidays. And by the classic Microsoft playbook, Windows Phone 7's (re)emergence into the marketplace was going to be accompanied by serious moolah - a lot of it to the tune of at least $1,000,000,000 on the launch, half of it on marketing alone.

Will Windows Phone 7 achieve the success Microsoft is looking for? I have my doubts. Microsoft dominates the desktop computer operating system market. It has done so for decades. And it is precisely this dominance in the desktop OS market that leads me to have my doubts.

Back in the '90s when PDA's still existed, I really enjoyed using my Palm V for all my appointments, contacts and note-taking. Thanks to PalmOS, the performance was really zippy, start up was quick, and battery life was good. I then tested the Compaq iPAQ which used Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system. My experience: slow boot up time, slower performance and shorter battery life. It was as if Microsoft was attempting to cram an entire desktop computer operating system into a tiny little PDA. Sure, the iPAQ could do a heckuva lot more than the Palm V could. But therein is the crux of the problem: a bloated one-size-fits-all OS (who the heck really used Excel on a PDA) versus an OS built for exactly the use case of the device.

Now I've never used a mobile device running Windows Mobile, so I can't personnaly comment on how this OS works compared to RIM, iPhone, Android, and PalmOS. But according to Millennial Media's MobileMix July 2010 report, Windows Mobile OS has a 4% marketshare of U.S. smartphones (a complete freefall compared with a 19.7% market share in October 2009).

So it would appear that Microsoft still struggles with producing a meaningful operating system for portable devices.

My point is that I'm not yet convinced that Microsoft's engineers are capable of producing a competitive operating system within a constrained form factor. Since the very beginning, Windows was all about including more and more features resulting in a resource-hungry, feature-bloated operating system.

I'm old enough to recall good ol' MS DOS which used to fit nicely on a single floppy disk. But with each "upgrade" to Microsoft Windows came the need to have it running on beefier and beefier hardware. More processor power, more RAM, more disk space, and more power. Windows 7's system requirements now include 1 to 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of hard disk space - that's 16,000,000,000 bytes, or 13,000 of the old 5.25HD floppy disks which if laid end-to-end would equal a line over one mile long!

Earlier this summer, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying that mobile devices are just like PCs in a different form factor. There are different ways of interpreting this statement. My interpretation is that Ballmer feels that mobile devices are just like desktop PCs but shrunken down to pocket size. I don't get any indication that there is any understanding in the halls of Redmond that mobile operating systems are fundamentally different than desktop operating systems.

In my opinion, for Windows Mobile 7 to be successful, there are three required elements:

The OS kernel must be completely re-architected from the ground up for mobile devices, AND

The chief architects of Mobile 7 must be completely new blood; not a single one of them should have ever worked on the Windows desktop operating system, AND

The team must allowed to innovate - free from the internal politics, turf wars, and meddling hands of old-school executives (Mssrs. Gates and Ballmer included).

Only if Windows Mobile 7 can be cultivated in this Microsoft corporate contaminant-free environment will it be a success.

Can it be done? One word: Xbox. The Xbox team has been allowed to function semi-autonomously and the results are evident. According to Bloomberg, Xbox became the #1 U.S. game console last March.

Microsoft has proven they can do it...and can they do it again?

Your thoughts? Can they do it? Leave me your comments.

ShopAlerts and Shopkick - Two Different Approaches to LBS

2010-08-23T16:51:00.001-07:00

We've all heard the business plans for Starbucks rewards being broadcast to your mobile device just as you pass by. Apparently that's just something that sounds nice but doesn't translate to reality. If it did, then certainly Starbucks would have already done it by now.

It's refreshing to see new ideas emerging that represent the next step in monetizing Location-Based Services (LBS). Startups like Placecast and Shopkick exemplify two different approaches to the same opportunity.

Placecast got some press last spring with the announcement of their ShopAlerts program. In a nut shell, consumers who enroll in this program receive text messages from their favorite brand whenever they are physically near a retail outlet, or other location of interest.

The ShopAlerts technology uses "geo-fences" that are boundaries of a certain radius as defined by the marketer. Any consumer who has opt-ed in to this program receives a text message as soon as they cross this virtual boundary. The idea is to take advantage of people's likelihood to respond to a call to action requiring in-store participation through things like special offer alerts or other types of notifications.

The nice thing about ShopAlerts is that it will only send a maximum of 3 messages within a given week from a retailer. And, of course, to comply with SMS marketing regulations, consumers can opt-out at any time simply by texting "STOP" back to a short code.

Shopkick takes a different approach. Instead of using cell towers to triangulate the consumer with text-messaging as the vehicle of communication, Shopkick relies on in-store broadcast devices and a mobile device app.

When you walk in to a Shopkick-enabled store and your app is running, your mobile device will pick up a high frequency signal from the device and record your presence in the store. Once it's recorded, you get awarded points, or "kickbucks", which are redeemable for in-store discounts or even cross-brand promotions (e.g. Facebook Credits).

The approach that ShopKick is taking is that there is a distinct value to a person physically in-store versus a person physically "near" a store. This is especially helpful for physical locations where cell tower triangulation is not possible or certainly not as accurate at identifying a person's precise location within the store.

I applaud both Placecast and Shopkick for continuing to innovate in the field of LBS marketing. I don't see them as competing but rather as complementing simply because their approaches are founded upon different assumptions.

In the Placecast model, ShopAlerts is like the sideshow barker, whose job it was to grab your attention as you were walking by, and get you to do something that you originally weren't planning on doing.

In the Shopkick model, the consumer is specifically going to the retail outlet either in direct response to a prior call to action or just because there is a totally unrelated need to go there.

Personally, I'm less likely to respond to the ShopAlerts model and more likely to respond to the ShopKick model. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, when I'm out of the house, I'm usually going from Point A to Point B - fast. I'm not interested in detours to my flight plan. On the other hand, I like BestBuy (one of the brands piloting ShopKick). I shop there quite frequently 'cause I like shiny things with little blinky lights. As long as I'm already there, it's nice to be rewarded.

I'm thinking that Shopkick is good for brands whose own online marketing efforts still relies heavily on in-store conversions. For example, Hot Topic is a clothing retailer whose prime market is the 14-18 year old. Hot Topic has a strong online presence with not only its branded web site, but also its Facebook page with almost a million followers. The catch is that 14 year olds aren't old enough to have a credit card, so calls to action for online purchases are not very effective. As a result, almost all of their promotions - online and email - are designed to drive in-store traffic. So for this brand, awarding Kickbucks to their online followers that are redeemable in-store at Shopkick-enabled outlets could be a resonator with this audience.

So...are any of you subscribing to either ShopAlerts or ShopKick? I'm unfortunately not living in an area where either of these two services are being tested, so I can't comment on my personal experiences. But if any of you are, I'd love to read your comments.

Social Email - Real-life Feedback

2010-08-16T10:23:00.000-07:00

Last week, I attended eTail East in Baltimore. This was the first time that I've ever been to Baltimore, and I was hoping to get an opportunity to be a tourist and have my picture taken outside the door of Charm City Cakes. But alas, time was too tight and I wasn't able to get there. As a consolation prize, I got a chance to sit on the outside deck at the Hilton with about 20 other guests and watch the Orioles win their game against the White Sox in extra innings.

But I digress...

At eTail, I had the opportunity to be a roundtable host on Email Marketing and Segmentation Day. This was the first time that I had ever been a roundtable host - much less participate in such an event. It's a pretty interesting format where attendees sit in a large ballroom at - you guessed it - round tables, each one seating up to twelve people. The job of the roundtable host is to facilitate conversation among those seated at the table on a particular topic. Together with my colleague from Hot Topic, my topic for discussion at my roundtables was "Social Email: What's New? What's Next". After twenty minutes of discussion, a bell rings and the roundtable hosts get up from the table, move to another table, sit down, and then have another twenty minute discussion on the same topic with those seated at that new table.

This time, there were six tables with about twelve people at each. So I was able to have great discussions with about eighty people - the majority of whom were responsible for their respective companies' email marketing programs. I met people from the U.S., the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, who represented both consumer brands (Zappos.com, Staples, and Amtrak) as well as one gentleman whose company sold cable ties and molded connector components.

My company chose social email for my discussion topic because we wanted to talk directly with online marketers and see whether the adoption of social media marketing was as widely adopted as industry analysts and members of the marketing media would have us believe.

For of all, I am a believer in social email. Brands are using social sites as a means of providing a venue for their customers to engage with each other as well as with the brand itself. Social sites are all about one-to-many conversations. Email marketing, on the other hand, when done correctly includes content that is personalized and relevant to the individual, making it a one-to-one conversation. There are times when it's appropriate to have a one-to-many discussion and there are times when it's appropriate to have a one-to-one discussion. (How many times has it been when you've been in a meeting - a one-to-many discussion - and someone says, "let's take that discussion off-line" - a one-to-one discussion).

So, after talking to about eighty different online marketers, here's what I learned about social email:

In spite of what's being reported in the media and analysts, marketers are still experimenting with social media marketing.

Easily 98% of marketers I met at the roundtables are "doing social media marketing" only because "everyone else is"; there is no clear strategy for using social media as a new marketing channel.

Using a social site just to promote products and services is falling flat. Using social sites to drive community engagement is what's working the best; the real question is whether social media is appropriate for all brands, i.e. is anyone in the B2B space that is getting good engagement from Facebook?

Marketers are struggling with proving real ROI with social media marketing. As one person put it: "I have one hour to spend either on email marketing or social media marketing. Email marketing is a known quantity with known ROI; social media isn't. It’s a no-brainer to choose email marketing over social media marketing in that light."

The majority of brands I spoke with have separate people doing social media marketing and email marketing. As a result, coordinated strategies between social media and email marketing are minimal.

Using social media as an opt-in source for email marketing is resonating very well. Hardly anyone is doing it, and when I mentioned the advantages of doing it, there was consistently a lot of head nodding and enthusiastic note taking.

"Share-to-social" is "been there done that" and is falling flat. Marketers are not seeing any benefit to this tactic.

User-generated content (e.g. user-entered product reviews) is a HUGE resonator. As one attendee put it, "If you’re not incorporating user-generated in your emails today, you’re already behind.

Strategies for combining social and email marketing in a coordinated strategy was an eye-opener to almost everyone I spoke with. There was certainly a lot of interest to learn more.

Social sites are excellent channels for building your opt-in email database with highly qualified leads. Assuming that your brand has already set up a social site, then people are already engaging with your brand through posts, "friend"-ing, and "like"-ing. If you provide email opt-in capability on your social site, then anyone going the extra step of opting in to your email marketing program is a person seeking a deeper, more personal engagement.

So, is your brand using social networking sites? Is so, what is it being used for? For pushing promotions? For building community? Anything else? Leave me a comment. I've love to hear from you.

Are Email and SMS Interchangeable?

2010-07-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

A colleague of mine forwarded on to me the recent press release from Message Systems announcing their new product Mobile Momemtum™. In case you've not heard of it yet, it is "a single-platform solution that enables multichannel communication by making it possible to send and receive SMS messages, and then dynamically transform these messages to or from email."

Sez Message Systems in their press release:

"Mobile Momentum affords a critical point of difference over competitors in a multichannel era where customers expect to get messages how, where and when they want them. Now with Mobile Momentum, these companies can seamlessly initiate communication across the customers' channel of choice, immediately transform that message into another channel in the e3vent of non-delivery, and keep the dialog alive with follow-on messages in the channel the customer responds through. And they can do all this on a single-highly scalable and flexible platform that saves them money. The net benefits are: higher short-term revenue, greater lifetime value resulting from improved customer satisfaction, and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO)."

For those of you new to email marketing, Message Systems has become the de-facto standard for mail transfer agents (MTAs) that send emails through the Internet to your ISP - or to your company. It would seem that they are taking their expertise in SMTP - the protocol used for email delivery - and extending it to SMPP - the protocol used for SMS (or text message) delivery.

Let's first consider the pros of their new offering:

Makes good technical sense to take a simple message and translate it back and forth between the two protocols. As they mention in their value proposition, it totally makes sense to have a single platform for both email and SMS since cross-channel marketing is emerging as a highly effective marketing strategy.

A good application for simple alerts where the message is simple and transportable between plain text email and SMS (plain text message with 160-character limit). To this point, Mobile Momentum would be good for simple transportable alert messages like flight status updates, broadcast notifications (like "Come pick up your kids," or "Your dry cleaning is ready"), or appointment reminders.

It may be a good way to jumpstart SMS messaging if you are an Email Service Provider (ESP) already using Message Systems to deliver emails on behalf of your clients.

That having been said, I remain dubious regarding their product positioning for the following reasons:

It doesn't make good practical sense because text messages are limited to 160 characters while emails are not. As I mentioned above, the only types of messages that are interchangeable between email and SMS are those types of messages that should be text messages in the first place: short, simple alerts.

Effective promotional emails tend to be graphical whereas SMS is plain text. Once again, this means that the only messages that are good for this type of interchangeabilty are messages that should actually be SMS messages in the first place.

They are missing the point regarding the distinct advantages of email and SMS. The difference between email and SMS is not just the protocol of transmission, as Message Systems seems to imply. Email and SMS are different; each has their own strengths and weaknesses and they are highly complementary - not necessarily interchangeable. I discussed this unique complementary role in a recent blog post.

Rules for promotional SMS messages are very different than those for email. Wireless carriers mandate that certain verbiage be included in all promotional SMS messages. While CAN-SPAM and ISPs do have guidelines as to what can and cannot be said, there is no such thing as mandatory verbiage in a promotional email. Once again, Mobile Momentum's value proposition of interchangeability between email and SMS is relegated to simple text alerts that really should be text messages anyway.

So from my perspective as an online marketer, Mobile Momentum is a non-starter. Email and SMS are not interchangeable. They are, however, highly complementary. Email is a rich platform that marketers use to tell their story. SMS is the perfect platform to remind people of that story.

So how 'bout it? Are email and SMS interchangeable for situations other than the ones I've already mentioned? Leave me a comment. I'd love to hear from you.

Which Use of Mobile Is Right For You?

2010-06-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

I've finally had a chance to digest the DMA's 2010 Response Rate Report and I'd like to share some of my take aways with you.

The DMA report is based on a survey of 473 members of - you guessed - DMA members. While the sample size is large enough to make inferences of the general population, the bulk of the membership of the DMA is probably different from...say...the Mobile Marketing Association. Hence no surprise that direct mail and email are the two most frequently used communication channels with 60% and 53% of survey respondents respectively using these channels. Only 6% of the survey respondents said that they were using the mobile channel (which includes both mobile advertising and text messaging). This tells me that mobile marketing is still an experimental medium - for members of the DMA that is. If I compare my personal exposure to marketers' messaging across the different media, I would say that this low adoption rate is fairly consistent across the board.

But low adoption rate aside, it's interesting to note that consumer engagement over SMS is much higher than over email.

According to the report, emails sent to a house list produced on average a 6.64% click through rate and a 1.73% conversion rate. In contrast, SMS messages sent to a house list produced over 100% higher engagement with a 14.06% average click through rate and a whopping 8.22% conversion rate. The conversion-to-click rate is another metric that I use for measuring engagement. It a good way to measure how compelling was my offer in the context of my message about the offer. On average, one out of every four people who clicked through in an email converted - meaning they accomplished some aspect of the marketer's goal (e.g. bought something, registered for a class, downloaded a prospectus, etc.). Engagement in the SMS channel was even greater with one out of every two people who clicked through an SMS message converting. Yes, SMS messaging is way more expensive than email. But with almost a 60% conversion to click through rate, the ROI of SMS messaging is highly compelling.

I interpret the higher consumer engagement in the SMS channel to a combination of the type of consumer that signs up for text messaging programs and the technology itself.

Another interesting observation from the response rate report is who's doing mobile marketing and who's not.

As one would expect, Publishing, Media & Entertainment, and Retail are the two industries having the highest adoption rate with 15% and 14% of survey respondents respectively stating that they are using the mobile channel for their marketing messaging. Interesting to note also is that none of the survey respondents that are in either the Financial Services or the Health Care & Pharmaceutical industries are using the mobile channel. Is this non-existent adoption just an artifact of the DMA membership represented in these two industries, or is this representative of the industries as a whole? I'm thinking that it might be the latter since these two industries represented almost 20% of the total survey respondents - so it's probably not just a statistical anomaly.

So why the low adoption rate of mobile marketing in Financial Services? The report may give some insights as to the reason. A closer look at how respondents in the Financial Services industry use each channel, it appears that they use the online channels primarily to drive traffic to their web sites for further information.

Making a financial decision is a thoughtful process that requires focused attention and one that takes time. None of these qualities fit the mobile channel. Mobile is all about immediacy and instant gratification, and the mobile web experience doesn't necessarily lend itself well to content-laden sites. Unless there is a sense of immediacy in a call to action and/or there is content that can be quickly consumed, then perhaps mobile is not the appropriate channel at this point in time for the Financial Services industry's marketing messages. So be careful about jumping on the mobile bandwagon. Just because it seems that everyone else is doing mobile marketing doesn't necessarily mean its right for your industry, your brand or your clients.

While the mobile channel may not be appropriate for Financial Service marketing messages, it is absolutely the right one for Financial Service transactions. In fact, this industry was a pioneer in transactional SMS messaging with text-to-access to account information including mini-statements, account balance verification, recent transactions, canceling lost or stolen cards, and ordering checks not to mention text alerts for recent account activity or passing of preset balance thresholds, and bill payment reminders.

The market for mobile apps on the iPhone, Android and Blackberry platforms is booming. At last count, there are over 300 "favorite" apps in the Financial category on iTunes so "thousands of smartphone apps for Financial Services" would be a ballpark guesstimate across all smartphone platforms worldwide.

With regards to cutting edge mobile payment technologies for point-of-sale and peer-to-peer services, once again the Financial Services industry is leading the way. Retailers and public transportation firms are introducing pilot programs whereby consumers can make purchases by merely touching their payment-enabled mobile device to a similarly-enabled point of sale device. (Of course, businesses in Europe and Asia have been doing this for years already.)

Mobile technology is transforming the way that people interact with their world and as a result, it is transforming the way that brands engage with their customers. Businesses have realized that though the mobile channel may not be appropriate for marketing messaging, it is clearly a strong channel that enables consumers to interact with their brands in other equally important areas. So it's not a question if mobile as a whole is right for you; rather it's a question of which use of mobile is right for you.

How many different ways is your brand using the mobile channel? Leave me a comment!

Consumer Privacy Versus Consumer Relevance

2010-06-08T14:12:00.000-07:00

The draft privacy bill sponsored by representatives Boucher and Stearns is creating quite a stir in both the privacy advocacy and the online marketing worlds. It's a classic battle that pits technology as either a friend or foe depending upon your personal bias.

There are already a lot of blog posts and articles regarding the implications of this draft. I list a few of them here:

Representative Boucher Introduces Privacy Legislation (Kelley Drye & Warren LLP)
What does the draft privacy legislation say about location data? (Mobile Marketer)
Privacy Groups Blast Draft Privacy Bill (Tech Daily Dose)
Draft privacy bill could shake data collection (DM News)

It is ironic to note that both privacy advocates and online marketers believe that they have the consumer's best interests in mind. Privacy advocates believe that consumers have a right to control the collection and the usage of their personal data albeit how obtuse it may be. Online marketers believe that consumers deserve to have the best online experience with highly relevent information.

Two points of this proposed privacy bill causing consternation among marketers include the following:

IP address and browser cookies would be considered "covered information" and their usage for marketing purposes would become highly restricted.
"Precise" geolocation information would be considered "sensitive information" and its usage would become even more restrictive than "covered information".

Web sites (especially e-commerce sites), ad networks, and even web analytics providers rely on information gleaned from IP addresses and browser cookies from anonymous site visitors. Almost all e-commerce sites ranging from Amazon to Zappos all use site visitors' browsing history to display the appropriate products on their web pages. Under the draft privacy bill, using a site visitor's browsing history to dynamically display page content would be allowed to continue provided that

the site provides easy access to the company's privacy policy,
it informs the consumer that he or she has the right to decline consent, and
the consumer either specifically opts in or at least doesn't opt out.

Amazon.com's web site has a nice feature that enables me to prevent the site from tracking my browsing history.
However, once such a person opts out, then the marketer is not allowed to use the information previously collected on the person's browsing and purchase history during the time that he was opt-ed in.

The idea is that while I may still want to receive email marketing newsletter from my favorite brand, I may not want my personal browsing and shopping history to be included in them.

Web analytic providers and email marketers should take note of this provision. Vendors including Omniture, WebTrends, and Coremetrics enable marketers to build profiles of their customers' web site interactions and then target those profiles for specific remarketing campaigns via email or other channels. If the draft becomes law as it is currently written, then any marketer that does not inactivate an opt-ed out customer's web analytics data from his web analytics profile database and his email marketing database would be in violation of the law subject to severe penalties.

Another provision of the draft bill that is causing concerns among all marketers is the requirement that all "covered information" must be deleted or rendered anonymous if it has been 18 months since the date that the information was initially collected. Email marketers should take note of this provision because according to this draft, a subscriber's email address is considered "covered information." This means that even if you are a retention marketer and send your emails only to those who have opted in to receive then, the only ones that you can send to are those whose email records are less than 18 months old. If you have a single email address in your customer data that is older than 18 months old, then you are a law breaker.

While some brands would be thankful to have active email addresses 18 months old, there are many major brands having loyal customers whose email address records go back many years. Just think of the ramifications this bill would have on your email marketing program. How many dollars would you waste on thinking up and sending "re-enlistment" campaigns just to get your subscribers to re-create their email address records that you already have in your database? How many of you have built consumer tenure into your RFM (recency/frequency/monetary value) and RFC (recency/frequency/click through) models? How effective would they be if your subscriber database has artificially skewed tenure data?

Finally, the inclusion of "precise" geolocation information as "sensitive information" is an eyebrow raiser especially when it comes to mobile marketing. Aside from memories of Bill Clinton's famous "it depends on what you mean by 'is'", just how "precise" is "precise"? Precise to a city? Precise to a neighborhood? Precise to a house? Precise to within 3 feet? Precise to within 10 inches?

According to the draft bill, the collection and use of "sensitive information" requires prior consent. This means that the collection and usage of a consumer's geolocation collected either by your computer's IP address or your mobile device may not be done so for marketing purposes without that person first giving you permission to do so. If you are an e-commerce site operator, then think about how this will impact your site's user experience.

Amazon.com approximated my location by examining my IP address and determined that I live somewhere near Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. This is the default behavior of their site.

If this draft bill becomes law, then unless Amazon changes the default behavior of their site, then their web site is engaging in "an unfair and deceptive act or practice in violation of a regulation under section 18(a)(1)(B) of the Federal Trade Commission Act. In addition to being liable to federal penalties, Amazon would also be subject to civil action by any of all 50 states depending upon how motivated their Attorney Generals are.

Fortunately, the mobile marketing eco-system has arisen in a post-SPAM world although much work is still ahead. Marketers may only send SMS messages to those who have specifically opted in to receive them.

But not all mobile apps include the option for app owners to opt-in and opt-out of location based services. For example, I have the ShopSavvy app on my iPhone which finds and compares prices local to me. Short of removing the app from my iPhone, there is no way to inactive the location-based feature.

So what can you do about it?

Keep track of the discussion through the DMA, the ESPC, and others. As Lois Greisman, of the FTC cautioned during a recent webinar, the draft is still just a draft. Reps Boucher and Stearns, and the FTC are soliciting feedback which to some degree will be incorporated in coming revisions of the bill before it is put to the House floor for a vote. In the meantime, I do recommend that you keep track of this bill from time to time just to be informed. Depending upon where it goes, marketers and web site operators may be in for a lot of work to bring their tactics in line with the new law.

So, which side of the debate do you espouse? Both sides do have their own merits. Leave me your thoughts.

Will Mobile Help Save a Dying Industry?

2010-06-01T10:39:00.000-07:00

Last year in November, I posted my blog entry on how mobile is breathing new life into a dying industry: print. Back then, the word "iPad" had not yet been unleashed on the marketplace. Interesting to note that here we are a half a year later and my prognostication is proving to be correct. Once again, Apple proves that it has the uncanny ability to take existing product concepts, perfect the experience, and knock it out of the ballpark.

But first: a presentation of evidence to what you probably already knew. The U.S. newspaper industry continues it's 10-year tailspin. A simple search on Google using the keywords "declining newspaper industry" turns up almost 140,000 results, with about 4800 results for articles written in the past ten years. According to an April 27th article carried by The Sydney Morning Herald, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that the average daily U.S. newspaper circulation declined 8.74 percent during the six months ending on March 31 compared wiht the same period a year ago. Circulation dropped even more the previous period with a 10.62 percent drop.

Magazines aren't doing any better. According to the Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast 2009, consumer magazines will suffer a compound annual growth rate of -2.8% in the 2008-2013 period.

The plain and simple reason for the decline is that people's consumption of media has changed from print to digital. Unfortunately, the heavily-unionized print industry has been slow to adapt.

So while I was partly right back in November with my prediction, I was also partly wrong. Back then, I saw netbooks as the consumer devices that would help breathe new life into the dying print industry. Wrong. But six months ago I didn't know about the iPad. Knowing what I do now, I believe that the iPad will both breathe new life into the print industry while at the same time greatly crimp the growth of netbooks.

All major U.S. newspapers and magazines have either already launched iPad versions of their content, or are quickly on the way to doing so. Publishing giant Conde Nast has already introduced iPad versions of GQ, Vanity Fair, and Wired. Softbank Corporation of Japan announced last month that they will be offering more than 30 magazines and newspapers to their iPad subscribers.

But not everyone is under the spell of Jobs' Reality Distortion Field. Disgraced former equity research analyst turned blogger Henry Blodget in his March 25th entry states a strong case as to why the iPad won't save the print publications' asses. (His words, not mine.)

Nevertheless, there are progressive minds at work in the crusty halls of Old School media. Marketers are starting to combine print media with instant interaction via mobile devices.

Mobile Marketer reports that Macy's has teamed up with magazine digitizer and distributor Zinio to present their traditional print ads for presentation within Zinio's iPad application. A two-page advertisement has a link-away to Macy's Spring/Summer Journey catalog.

Since catalogs are expensive to produce, Macy's has to be highly selective as to who they send it to. But with the iPad, Macy's can distribute digital versions of their catalog and also get real-time feedback.

Consumer electronics giant Best Buy is also starting to build mobile into its print campaigns. One of their circulars includes a QR code that enables readers to view a special trailer for a soon-to-be released video game. The print ad also includes call-to-action encouraging consumers to text the keyword BBYAPP to the short code 332211 to download the QR code reader application.

Slowly the print publication industry is recognizing that our collective preferences have shifted towards mobile devices. That is how we choose to consume our media and that's the way we been choosing it for the past ten years. We listen to music on mobile devices. We watch videos on mobile devices. We take pictures on mobile devices. We take movies on mobile devices. We get directions on mobile devices. We communicate with one another on mobile devices. We surf the web on mobile devices. We make purchases using mobile devices. We even read our email on mobile devices. Now, thanks to mobile devices like the Kindle, eReader, iPad, and others like them, we choose to consume our print media the same way. Let's hope the print publishers wake up in time to save themselves and realize that mobile is what will breathe new life into their dying industry.

So what are your thoughts? Do you think mobile will save the print industry? Will the iPad and similar products be the boost that they are looking for? Post your comments.

Accelerating Innovation with the Product Innovation Quadrant

2010-03-04T13:52:00.000-08:00

One of the hardest things to do in today's uber-competitive environment is to innovate fast enough to stay ahead in the marketplace. Every business wants to succeed by having some type of advantage over the competition. But when it comes to competitive advantage, you need to be clear as to which one you want - there are actually two types. The first type is an advantage occurring with valuable resources in limited supply. The De Beers Family of companies is an excellent example of this type of competitive advantage. Though diamonds themselves are not necessarily a rare resource, the supply of them on the open market is tightly controlled by this corporate entity. The other type of competitive advantage is the one that most of us know about and it refers to an advantage that exists during the period of time between the introduction of an innovation and its subsequent imitation and commoditization. The key to successful business strategy is to have a culture and a process that accelerates product innovation.

There is never a shortage of innovative ideas. The separation between market leaders, followers, and stragglers is not always about who can come up with the best ideas. Rather, the separation is based upon who can execute the best both in terms of time to market and customer appeal. At one of the companies where I worked, I lead the creation of the Product Innovation Quadrant, a new product management framework for accelerating product innovation that was quite successful in helping us to get our arms around the literally hundreds of new product ideas and assign appropriate priorities to them. I'd like to share this framework with you.

When planning out your product roadmap, its good to look at each of your product enhancement candidates along three dimensions: (1) time to market, (2) revenue potential, and (3) customer appeal. This latter point is something that our company president liked to talk about in terms of "Steak vs. Sizzle". "Steak" refers to the roll-up-your-sleeves, in-the-weeds, non-glamorous capabilities that comprise the lifeblood of the product. Without the "steak", there is no product, or the product is so anemic that it doesn't help the buyer achieve any advantage using it. "Sizzle" is what gets our attention. It's the sound of the steak searing on the barbecue and the its aroma that gets us excited in the first place. Sometimes a product feature needs to be implemented purely for the purposes of sizzle - getting people's attention, capturing the imagination, and building excitement about it. Products lacking sizzle are perceived as boring in the marketplace - regardless of how capable the product is. A healthy product roadmap needs to include a balance between steak and sizzle.

So here's how the Product Innovation Quadrant works: as you plan out your product roadmap, create quadrants in two dimensions with time horizon and customer appeal as the two axis. Then, draw a circle for each of your innovative ideas, placing it in whichever quadrant best describes the interplay between the two measurements. Make the size of your circle based upon your estimated revenue potential. Just to keep things simple, I recommend three sizes: small, medium, and large. As you map out each of your enhancement candidates, you will begin to get a good idea how they all fall out. Then you can decide which enhancements to accept for your roadmap, which ones to defer, and which ones to reject.

If a product manager at a typical company were to plot its existing product roadmap on the Product Innovation Quadrant he might be surprised (or not surprised) to see that almost all of the roadmap is clustered in the upper right hand quadrant.

Companies - typically technology-driven companies - tend to focus their attention on swinging for the home run each and every time at bat. While this tends to be the most common approach, this practice is risky because it places all of the company's fortunes in long-term projects leaving themselves vulnerable to competitors who can innovate faster than they can - not to mention the risk of finding out too late after all the time and money that they've given birth to a total dud.

In the example below, feature candidates A and B should absolutely be accepted for the product roadmap. Feature candidate C should also be accepted for the product roadmap because without it, the company does not have any long-term development projects and may be at risk of mortgaging the future for the sake of the present. I would also recommend that feature candidate A be prioritized ahead of feature candidate C even though it represents a lesser revenue potential. Why? Because it represents an earlier recognition of revenue. Feature candidate D should not be accepted to the product roadmap because its small revenue potential does not justify the long-term commitment of resources to implement a feature that is just there for sizzle and doesn't make that much of a difference in terms of the overall product's capabilities.

Now if you're working at a software company that implements the Agile software development methodology, then you have a distinct advantage over those that don't. You have the unique ability to accelerate the introduction of long-term product features by slicing it up into smaller iterations that Agile facilitates.

In the diagram above, we have feature candidate C that is accepted for our product roadmap because it represents a good revenue potential and it's a good balance of long-term and "steak" for our product mix. We then break up the implementation of this feature into a series of three iterations as shown below.
The first iteration is purely a short-term, sizzle implementation of the feature. The purpose is to minimize our risk by getting the product into the marketplace as quick as possible. Real market feedback trumps focus groups, market research, and "gut feelings" every time. You then have a second iteration scheduled which works on more of the "steak" features and incorporates the market feedback you've gotten from that first iteration. The third iteration is intended to be The Full Monty. This is the one where the fullness of the product is realized. In real life, it could actually be more than three. I've introduced product features to the marketplace that took ten iterations.

Remember: we're dealing with product innovation here. So this means that you have a little bit of a head start over your competitors when you introduce your first iteration. They key is that you have already scheduled the subsequent iterations so that you maintain your lead over your competitors.

The Product Innovation Quadrant I've introduced here is a suggested framework for evaluating all candidates for product enhancements. It's value is that it doesn't take weeks of analysis. It's a quick tool to get a sense of how things stack up. I hope it helps you as it has helped me. Do you have other frameworks that you've successfully followed? I'd like to hear from you.

Genachowski Dreams Big for 21st Century Mobile Broadband

2010-02-25T10:34:00.000-08:00

I still like Julius Genachowski. There I said it. From everything that he's said since becoming chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, it appears to me that He Gets It and his policies are good for the long term growth of the mobile marketing industry. His most recent speech at the New America Foundation in Washington continues to illustrate his grasp of what needs to be done to move an infrastructure so mired in the days of vacuum tube radios and black and white TVs into the new century of mobile smartphones, video on demand, and location-based services.

You can read the entire text of his speech here in Giselle Tsirulnik's column of the Mobile Marketer, and you can quickly browse some of the points that I especially like below.

I like how he starts out his speech with a simple sound bite to serve as the rallying cry, "we are lagging behind when it comes to broadband." When I was in business school, I learned that the key to initiating organizational change - especially in times of laissez-faire status quo - is to clearly articulate a crisis that everyone can relate to. In this case, Genachowski's opening remarks appeals to the competitive nature and the drive to succeed that historically compels our national psyche.

All eyes will be on the FCC next month whey they are scheduled to announce their National Broadband Plan to Congress. Genachowski gives a five-point summary of this plan:

Accelerate mobile broadband deployment by recovering and reallocating spectrum
Revise outdated policies to reflect 21st century technologies and opportunities
Remove barriers to broadband buildout
Lower the cost of deployment
Promote competition

While each of these points have merit in themselves, the devil, they say, is in the details. I clearly see government's role in helping to recover and reallocate unused spectrum, and to revise outdated policies. But call me a cynic: putting government in the same sentence with removing barriers, lowering costs and promoting competition strikes me as an oxymoron.

The answer to growth for the mobile ecosystem is "more bandwidth". We can all agree to that. But the problem is, unlike vegetables, you can't grow spectrum. The spectrum is what it is - it is a finite resource, and the problem is that somebody somewhere already owns the spectrum that mobile broadband needs to grow.

Says Genachowski,

"One of the best ways for us to achieve the right balance in the supply and demand of spectrum is to establish market-based mechanisms that enable spectrum intended for the commercial marketplace to flow to the uses the market values most.

The Broadband Plan will recommend one such mechanism. It will propose a "Mobile Future Auction" -- an auction permitting existing spectrum licensees, such as television broadcasters in spectrum-starved markets, to voluntarily relinquish spectrum in exchange for a share of auction proceeds, and allow spectrum sharing and other spectrum efficiency measures.

Now, I’ve mentioned broadcast spectrum – so let me be clear: the recommendation is for a voluntary program."

Yeah right...

I can just see all the television network executives choking with laughter when they heard that idealistic statement of hubris and wishful thinking.

If you owned vast tracks of open undeveloped land and you learned that within ten years an entire city will be built on your land - the land that you solely own - would you voluntarily give it up in exchange for a share of the auction proceeds?

Uh huh...

The reality is that TV networks are on a downward trajectory as viewing audiences are moving to other forms of video entertainment. The fact that bland reality-based shows have replaced high-production quality dramas underscores the cost-cutting wave that is sweeping an industry disparately grasping for new ideas to grow.

Spectrum - unused as it may be - is one of the last golden egg assets that these networks own. The day that the FCC can convince even one of the networks to voluntarily give up its spectrum license, is the day that I'm looking out for flying bacon.

But don't get me wrong. I truly agree with Genachowski. In order to grow, the mobile ecosystem absolutely needs more spectrum - spectrum that unfortunately is firmly held in the grasps of the TV networks. It may just boil down to an Obama-esque "stimulus program" courtesy of your taxes and mine to get them to give it up.

Blockbusters Versus Bombs: Storyboards and The Pilot

2010-01-12T10:16:00.000-08:00

(I continue my temporary digression from my usual posting about the mobile industry to blog about a topic near and dear to my heart: Product Management.)

Product Managers at technology-driven companies are challenged to evangelize their exciting new product ideas. Effective product managers need to paint the big picture first and foremost - whether to management or to their peers. To this point, there are some amazing parallels between the making of a blockbuster movie and the making of a blockbuster product. I'd like to draw your attention to three of these points: (1) The Pitch, (2) The Storyboard, and (3) The Pilot.

My previous blog post was about The Pitch. This blog post finishes with a discussion on the final two items: The Storyboard, and the Pilot.

All movies - be they animated or be they live action - all start with a storyboard. It's during storyboarding that writers and directors work out the plot, the flow, and the structure of the movie. The structure of the movie includes things like lighting, and camera angels.

In the world of software application development, storyboarding is akin to requirements gathering and feature definition. The concept of storyboarding fits nicely with the Agile software development methodology in which requirements are defined in terms of "user stories." If you're not familiar with the Agile methodology (or others like it), user stories are small and atomic feature implementations that when strung together, make up the full product, or product feature functionality. If you've ever seen Agile development at work, you'll see a remarkable similarity between the user story cards pasted on a wall and the individual scene drawings of a movie story board. Just as scenes of the story board cards are quick hand-drawn sketches, user stories are quick definitions of a specific feature capability.

In my opinion, all software development processes should include storyboarding. This enables all stakeholders including Product Management, Developers, Executive Sponsors, Sales and Marketing, and Technical Support, to map out the framework of a product or product feature long before a single line of code is written. Unlike traditional full blown requirements documents that can take weeks or even months to write up, storyboards are fluid, dynamic, and easily modified.

Television series for both comedies and dramas always have a pilot. No television executive would dream of providing full financial backing without the pilot. The purpose of the pilot is to test the concept of the series in real life. Feedback from the pilot is crucial. Projects many times never make it past the pilot. Other times, modifications are made to the cast of characters, to the story concept, and even to the title. (Quick Quiz: for those of you alive during the '90s, what was the original title of the "Seinfeld" comedy series? Who were the original characters and actors?)

Once again, the Agile software methodology fits well with the concept of The Pilot. Basic functionality is quickly introduced to the marketplace. Though not the full-blown product, the initial releases are used to gain valuable market feedback. Is the market need for the product still viable, or has it changed to something different? Better to know quickly before sinking time and money down a black hole.

The art and science of developing toward the first product release is so much like the television serial pilot. The pilot does not go into any depth and detail of character development, or of where the series will be going. It's only purpose is to see if the audience (a.k.a. the marketplace) will accept the concept. In like manner, the first iterations of a product should not be the full solution - but yet they should be complete enough to effectively tell the story of the product roadmap to the marketplace.

Here's also where people used to traditional software development are uncomfortable with the Agile process. They are more comfortable selling a complete solution; they are more comfortable supporting a fully end-to-end developed solution. Frankly put, these people need to "get with the times." Waiting around for a full solution before unveiling it is very risky. Market needs move at light speed because competition is fierce. If you take too long to move, someone else will. Believe it.

So, in conclusion, how do you increase the likelihood of a Product Blockbuster versus a Product Bomb? Take a lesson from Hollywood. Adopt the concepts of The Pitch, Storyboarding, and The Pilot into your product management process.

Blockbusters Versus Bombs: Perfecting the Product Pitch

2009-12-15T09:25:00.000-08:00

(I temporarily digress from my usual posting about the mobile industry to blog about a topic near and dear to my heart: Product Management.)

Product Managers at technology-driven companies are challenged to evangelize their exciting new product ideas. Effective product managers need to paint the big picture first and foremost - whether to management or to their peers. To this point, there are some amazing parallels between the making of a blockbuster movie and the making of a blockbuster product. I'd like to draw your attention to three of these points: (1) The Pitch, (2) The Storyboard, and (3) The Pilot.

This blog post is all about The Pitch. Future posts will expound upon the other two.

Technology products are ... well ... technical. Technical products require technical explanations. Or maybe not. Psychologists tell us that the human mind needs context before it can grasp detail. To be an effective product manager, you must be a Master Storyteller.

Imagine that you're sitting in the Brown Derby making your pitch to a movie studio exec. You only have ten minutes - fifteen at the most - to get him interested enough in your idea to give the go ahead and proceed to the next step. Are you going to start talking about camera angles and special effects details and who is going to play what part? Of course not. What are you going to do? You're going to tell the big picture story, a summary, an overview. But not just any overview. You're need to present a summary that is so compelling that in fifteen minutes or less, the exec is willing to commit millions of dollars to making it happen. Can't be done? Dude. It's Hollywood. It happens all the time.

How do you tell your story? Movie plots always have three elements: (1) the hero, (2) the villian, (3) the resolution. Here's an example of a movie plot overview. See if you can spot the hero, the villian, and the resolution:

A Mumbai teen who grew up in the slums, becomes a contestant on the Indian version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" He is arrested under suspicion of cheating, and while being interrogated, events from his life history are shown which explain why he knows the answers.

Recognize the story line? It's Slumdog Millionaire, this year's Academy Awards Best Picture winner.

As a Product Manager, you are the evangelist for new product ideas. Work the three elements of the story plot into your pitch. Naturally, your idea is the hero. What's the villian? Is it an unserved need? Is it a rival company? What's the resolution? What's so gosh-darned exciting about your idea that makes it the perfect solution? It is absolutely essential that you perfect your story in three sentences or less. If people don't get it, or they aren't as excited as you are, then keep working at it.

Can't be done you say? Your products are too technical to get people excited in three sentences or less? Au contraire. Which of these two product descriptions gets you the more excited:

A new portable MP3 player combining a small 5GB hard drive, a FireWire port, and a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack in an ultrasleek white and stainless steel case with a 2-inch white backlit LCD display and an estimated 10 hour battery life.

or,

A thousand songs in your pocket.

Anyone who attended Macworld when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod will recall that single memorable sentense that brought the house down.

The Pitch is absolutely essential in order to establish crystal clear product vision within your company. Above all, the perfect pitch minimizes scope creep and scope dilution. It helps keeps everyone focused with a clear understanding of WHAT they are all working towards, and WHY they are doing it. There's an old saying, "Without vision, the people wander aimlessly". Likewise, without The Pitch establishing the clear product vision, the product wanders aimlessly in development, in marketing, in sales, and in the marketplace.

Finally, every good product just like any good movie needs a memorable tagline.

"A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." - Star Wars

"Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water..." - Jaws 2

"The Last Man On Earth Is Not Alone" - I Am Legend

"A Thousand Songs in Your Pocket" - iPod

"The World's Thinnest Notebook" - MacBook Air

"Can You Hear Me Now?" - Verizon

What's the tagline to your product? What is the one sentence that sticks in peoples minds and brings instant connection with your idea? Be creative. Be imaginative. Make it memorable.

I Still Like Julius Genachowski

2009-12-02T12:28:00.000-08:00

Last June, I stated my case that FCC Chair Julius Genachowski is good for mobile marketing. Today, I re-iterate my case, though with a bit more guarded enthusiasm due to greater education on my part.

I originally was highly in favor of Network Neutrality which was one influence in my support for Genachowski. Since that time, I've had the opportunity to hear both sides of the story - especially after having a good chat with two representatives of the CTIA when we were all in Los Angeles for the Mobile Marketing Association Forum last November.

How would you feel if a complete stranger moved into your house, ran his business out of your house and make millions every month. Meanwhile, you're stuck with the mortgage payments, the utility bills, the food bills, and oh - by the way - you have to clean up after him. And you don't see a single penny of that money much less even get a thank you. I'm sure that you wouldn't even allow this stranger anywhere near your property. But what if the government said that you had to, and there was nothing you could do about it? That, my friends, is Network Neutrality in a nutshell.

The network infrastructure providers maintain that Google and others like them have made vast fortunes freeloading on their groundwork. Meanwhile companies like Global Crossing, Level 3, and Nortel Networks took a beating in recent years.

The FCC's recent inquiries into competition in the mobile wireless industry is another cause for raised eyebrows. As long as the inquiry remains an inquiry and does not devolve into intervention, then I'm okay with that. I believe in free market principles - not "fair market" principles. There is no such thing as "fair". Only little children and socialists believe that "fairness" is a reality.

So even with this dose of reality, I still am a fan of Julius Genachowski.

Genachowski's recent speech at the Innovation Economy Conference in Washington D.C. gives me reason for hope.

He displayed a fascinating insight when he equated his vision of the impact of universal broadband to the impact of universal electricity - something that we today take for granted (at least until the lights go out).

"Broadband is reshaping our economy and our country more fundamentally than any technology since electricity. Indeed, there are echoes in the current moment of the era when electricity became widely available in America, unleashing a torrent of innovation. Ubiquitous electricity extended the day into the night. It brought us refrigerators and washing machines; radios and televisions; phones, wired and wireless; data processors, then computers. These and other electricity-driven appliances transformed virtually everything about how we live and how we work."

"Ubiquitous high-speed broadband, like other transformative general purpose
technologies, can spark innovation of every kind -- many we can imagine, and even more we can’t. Indeed, broadband offers particularly powerful opportunities for accelerated innovation through the broad and fast collaboration and information-sharing it enables.

Because of its power to propel innovation, broadband can be our platform for economic prosperity and opportunity for all Americans. It can be our engine for enduring job creation and economic growth. Our Internet ecosystem has already created millions of jobs, and universal broadband can accelerate that. Studies show that increases in broadband penetration translate into increases in GDP." (my emphasis added)

"...we see huge opportunities -- and real risks -- around mobile broadband. Much of what we see suggests that mobile broadband can be the preeminent platform for innovation in the next decade. To be the global leader in innovation 10 years from now, we need to lead the world in wireless broadband."

I think Genachowski "gets it." He clearly understands what's happening in the world today and where it is heading tomorrow.

Check out this quote from the closing of this speech:

"While invisible, spectrum is the lifeblood of our wireless networks and a critical part of our innovation infrastructure. In recent years, the FCC has authorized a three-fold increase in commercial spectrum. But experts anticipate a 30-fold increase in wireless traffic. Given that spectrum can take many years to reallocate and build out, if we don't start the process now, we'll pay a steep price in innovation down the road.

To meet this spectrum challenge, the FCC will have to encourage more efficient uses of spectrum and devices through innovative spectrum policies. We’ll look at increasing spectrum flexibility and opening secondary markets for licensed use. And we’ll look to unlicensed spectrum as well, so that entrepreneurs and inventors have some open space in which to dream up the next miracle wireless technology.

I totally love the idea of opening up an unlicensed spectrum to facilitate innovation incubation. By lowering the barrier to broadband spectrum access, the FCC helps to make it easier for entrepreneurs to develop world-changing inventions.

By recognizing the economic value of broadband - including mobile wireless broadband, Genachowski bodes good news for the growth of the mobile marketing industry.

I'm not a starry-eyed follower of Genachowski, but so far so good.

Is THIS the Year of Mobile Marketing?

2009-11-19T22:50:00.000-08:00

"Is this the Year of Mobile Marketing?" That was the running gag at the recently concluded Mobile Marketing Assocation Forum in Los Angeles.

I attended the Forum back in 2007 and again this year. Oh, what a difference two years makes. Back then, the iPhone was only a few months old. Android phones weren't even on the market. Carriers controlled the majority of subscriber's web experiences; "on-deck" and "off-deck" were the buzz words of the day. Fast forward to present day and here's what we have now:

100,000 apps in the iPhone app store with a total of 2 billion downloads
For the first time in this year, the total number of text messages sent exceeded the number of voice calls placed.
The average age of "texters" is 38-years old.
Mobile phones outnumber PCs by 4 to 1 worldwide with 6.8B people, 4B mobile phones, 1.4B TVs, and 1B PCs
Mobile adoption is no longer the domain of the affluent. Of the 4.1B mobile subscribers, 70% of them live in so-called "developing nations".
An extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts GDP growth by 0.8 percentage points. (The Economist, November 2009 issue)
There are >4.1B text msg sent in the US every day compared to 304M Google searches in the US every day
The mobile phone has become the convergence of many consumer devices. Quick question: who is world's largest manufacturer of digital cameras by total units sold? Who is the world's largest manufacturer of MP3 players by total units sold. Answer: Nokia on both counts.
There are seven Mass Media Channels defined as: Print, Recordings, Cinema, Radio, TV, Internet, Mobile. The mobile device has become a single device that can consume all 7 channels of mass media.
Thanks to the precedence set by the iPhone, carriers' roles are changing from media empire to ecosystem enablers.
Revenue from voice has been consistently falling over the past 7 years while revenue from data has been consistenly rising over the same time period.
The Kelsey Group projects that total US spend on mobile search will grow from $162M 2009 to $2.3B by 2013. 50% of US mobile search ad revenue is local search.
Monthly searches per user are ~20% greater for mobile local search vs. online local search. Call through rates are 30x greater.
For many people across the world, the mobile device is the only way to access the Internet. By 2020, it will become the #1 access point to the Internet worldwide.

So what's still next for mobile marketers?

Mobile marketing works best when integrated with other media channels. But how to tie all channels together with integrated consistency? It's still too fragmented; it's difficult to communicate the value of mobile advertising; metrics have to be understandable.
As mobile marketing becomes more mature and marketers become more sophisticated, the need to have independently verified measurements becomes greater.

...and it wouldn't be a gathering of mobile marketers without a dig at carriers for continuing to make the SMS campaign provisioning process unnecessarily painful.

So was 2009 the Year of Mobile Marketing? Only time will tell. But from what we discussed this time around at the 2009 Forum, mobile marketing is certainly one of the fastest growing channels worldwide.

Pitching the Mobile Storyline to the Studio Exec

2009-11-12T20:59:00.000-08:00

My fellow Product Managers and I recently met to brainstorm ideas on how we could accelerate innovation within ours organization. Over the course of the discussions, we realized that there are amazing parallels between producing a product and producing a movie. In our company, the Product Management Team meets with the Executive Team on a monthly basis to review key product initiatives for the company. The executives are the ones who review and approve the commitment of resources to bring a product to market.

Pitching an idea for a movie is an experience similar to ours. A good movie is all about the story. Whether an idea for a movie gets approval or not depends on how well you can tell that story within the first few minutes to a studio executive. Even if the actual plot is complex with convoluted twists and turns, the story about the story has to be concise and it has to be compelling.

So - in three sentenses or less - what's the story for SMS marketing?

This is what we came up with: You're a marketer and you're already engaged with your customers through your existing marketing mix. Your prospects and customers are holding your brand message and calls to action in their long term memory. An SMS message at the right time brings an instantaneous connection with your brand, pulling your brand and call to action out from memory into the here and now.

Here's a simple plotline: You're a national retailer and it's that time of the year to jumpstart your sagging sales with special promotions to bring traffic to your stores. Your marketing mix includes TV, radio, newspaper, email, direct mail, search, and your web site promoting your call to action. "Sale starts this Saturday at 9AM! Come in for discounts between 30% and 70% on all items." People have seen your TV and newspaper ads, heard your radio ads, and read your email alerts at one point or another during the week. It's now Saturday morning. Peoples' awareness are focused on the here and now, "it's the weekend, "what's for breakfast", "what's a fun thing to do today?" Bing! A reminder about the sale sent via SMS on Saturday morning brings instantaneous recollection and connection with your call to action that you spent the whole week building awareness for.

Every movie has a tag line, too: "A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away," "Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water."

What's the tagline for SMS marketing?

"Add instant energy to your marketing mix"

What one-word keyword(s) best summarizes SMS marketing?
1. NOW
2. Impulse
3. Anywhere

What's your take on our story? Do you have a better one? How would you tell your version of the story in three sentenses or less? What's your tag line? What one-word keyword do you believe best summarizes SMS marketing? Post your comments!

The State of Mobile Marketing

2009-11-05T13:00:00.001-08:00

Here we are getting ready to wind down the year 2009. Or, stated in a reverse way, here we are getting ready to gear up toward the biggest push of the year - Holiday 2009.

The interest in the mobile channel continues to grow, and certainly there will be a big push in mobile marketing in the 7 weeks remaining in this year.

So what have interactive marketers been doing these past several months? If you're an interactive marketer, are you curious to see where you fit with your peers?

According to Forrester Research Analyst Shar VanBoskirk's US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 to 2014, total mobile marketing spend is projected to grow in the U.S. from $391 million in 2009 to $1.3 billion by 2014 for a compound annual growth rate of 27%. This is quite illuminating in light of the fact that the Kelsey Group estimates that the traditional segment (i.e. newspapers, direct mail, television, radio, print Yellow Pages, out of home (non-digital), cable television and magazines) will decrease from $141.3 billion in 2008 to $112.4 billion in 2013 for a compound annual growth (or more accurately "shrinkage") rate of -4.5%, and total ad spend will likewise decrease at a CAGR of -1.4%.

In spite of a 27% CAGR, spend on mobile marketing in the US is still a very small piece of the pie.

Forrester Analyst Neil Strother says in his research report, Best Practices: Mobile Marketing, that 65% of survey respondents either currently use or plan to use the mobile channel in their marketing mix, but that about half will do so with a budget of $1 million or less.

Of the marketers using the mobile channel, only about half increased their 2009 budgets over the previous year.

So it appears that marketers are adopting the mobile channel - but doing so cautiously.

SMS, or text messaging, dominates the mobile tactics being used today.

But, be on the look out for increased spending in search as location-based marketing will get bigger and bigger mindshare thanks to the growth of GPS-enabled mobile devices.

So there you have it. Total marketing spend is shrinking in this tightened economy. Interactive marketing - including the mobile channel - is growing, but only because marketers are shifting their media buy from traditional channels into the interactive.

But though long in the tooth traditional channels may be, they are still the tried and the true. Marketers are tempering their budget shifts with caution.

How do you compare to those that Forrester Research surveyed? Leave me a comment.

Mobile Gives Life to Yet Another Channel: Email

2009-10-15T22:07:00.000-07:00

In last week's blog posting, I mentioned how mobile devices are giving new life to a dying industry: printed publications. Wouldn't you know it, but thanks to an article by Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Vascellaro - or more specifically the firestorm that is caused, it appears to me in a round about way that mobile devices are extending yet another venerable means of communication: email.

In her piece, "Why Email No Longer Rules...And what that means for the way we communicate", Vascellaro makes the argument that "a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine". While I agree with that statement to a certain degree, I do disagree on other points. Social media have not displaced email as a communication platform; rather, I submit, it is that social media have replaced email for only a specific classification of communications. Twitter and Facebook (in the U.S., that is) have replaced the email containing the pithy witicism which was then forwarded to a friend which was forwarded to a friend which was forwarded to a friend which was forwarded to a friend which was forwarded to a friend which was finally forwarded to you which you then forwarded to a friend which was forwarded to a friend...

Now, thanks to tweets and retweets, I can get my fill of banality without having to scroll through three quarters of the email content just to get down to the original topic. Also, thanks to mobile apps like Echofon, I can be connected at all times through my iPhone.

Also, thanks to Flickr and other photo sharing sites, you are spared the merciless torture of sitting in your friends' living rooms watching slide after slide of what they did on their summer vacation, stalking the Speckled Greeb in the underbrush of Albuquerque. You can now choose to view or not view them
at the time and place on your terms.

Since SMS, micro-blogging and social sites have become the media choice for quick bits, email is still the channel of choice for all the things that you'd like to say in more than 160 characters.

Thanks to mobile devices, email is enjoying another growth spurt. Email service provider Exact Target recently published its email utilization report for 2009. According to Exact Target's findings as people grow older, they tend to use email more and more for their communications. This is not to say that they don't eschew the other channels. In fact, according to the CTIA, the average age of a "Texter" is 38 years old.

Also mentioned in Exact Target's report are the findings of Professor Mike Handley, director of the Institute for Mobile Media Research at Ball State University. He explains that "as of September 2009, 38% of students at Ball State University said that use a smartphone. And one of the biggest winners is email. Two-thirds of smartphone owners say they use email on their phone. Only 9% of feature phone ownsers use email. The increased use of mobile email is significant because computer email use by college students has declined over the past five years. The ability for students to have email on their smartphones fits their mobile lifestyles perfectly."

The Radicati Group reports in its latest study, "Wireless Email Market, 2009-2013," that "in 2009, the wireless email market will total 139 million users. Over the next four years, we expect this figure to increase at an average annual rate of 68%, totaling over 1 billion mailboxes by year-end 2013."

So there you have it. The mobile platform is on one hand a platform killer (think PDAs, low-cost digital cameras and GPS devices). On the other hand, it is a platform extender: (printed media and email).

Mobile Breathes New Life into a Dying Industry

2009-10-07T07:52:00.000-07:00

Printed media is dying. There I said it.

In case you've missed the news, publishing giant Conde Nast recently announced that Gourmet magazine, which has celebrated cooking and travel in its lavish pages since 1941, will cease publication with the November issue. Also chopped by the falling axe are the parenting magazine Cookie and the wedding publications Elegant Bride and Modern Bride.

We, the people, do still know how to read. It's just that our preferences for the medium over which we consume our printed content has changed. Reading words printed on a piece of paper just isn't as popular as it once was.

We prefer to read our content on computer screens - whether they are desktop computers, smartphones or eReaders.

There is one chance for print publishers to save the future of their industry. That one chance is called "mobile".

I highly recommmend that you download and read the executive summary of a recent study, "Going Mobile: How Publishers Are Preparing for the Burgeoning Digital Market." I am encouraged to see that print publishing execs have recognized that the mobile platform presents a new opportunity for their industry.

Here are some of the survey highlights:

More than 80% of newspaper and magazine respondents believe people will rely more heavily on mobile devices as a primary information source in the next three years
Nearly 70% of respondents agree that mobile is receiving more attention at their publication this year than last. More than a third believe their publication already has a well-developed plan for attacking and conquering the mobile market
44% of respondents who track mobile's impact on their Web site traffic said the devices increased visits by up to 10% today. Half believe mobile traffic to their Web sites will increase by five to 25% in the next two years
Among senior executive respondents, 56 percent said their publication has plans to develop a smartphone application in the next 24 months, in addition to the 17 percent of respondents who already have an app in production.
Regardless of mobile’s anticipated rise, survey respondents do not plan to abandon their print publications in favor of a digital-only product in the near term.
While 55 percent believe that digital delivery of their publication is important to their strategic future, three-fourths believe that their publication will be available in a print form five years from now.
More than half of the survey respondents believe the future business model of mobile content will be supported by both advertising and subscriptions.
Nearly a third believe that mobile will have a significant impact on their publication's revenue in just three years.
More than half of respondents believe that smartphones (e.g., the iPhone and BlackBerry) will become a vital way to distribute their publication within three years, while nearly 42 percent said the same about e-reader devices.

Here's one reason why I believe that the mobile platform just might be the salvation for print publisher: Android.

Android is the operating system behind a number of popular smartphones. As a mobile device operating system, it's really starting to gain momentum. The recently announced partnership between Verizon and Google matches an open source mobile operating system with the United States' "most reliable and largest wireless voice and data network," (as Verizon claims).

But wait! There's more!! Android is also starting to appear in the hottest new class of computers: netbooks. Ultra-portable computers powered by a mobile operating system introduces a new class of eReaders beyond the overpriced and underpowered dedicated eReaders in the market today.

With smartphone and netbooks, "mobile" takes on a new, much more expanded meaning. All this news is good news for print publishers.

Getting Mobile Marketing Strategy On the Right Path

2009-09-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

Mobile marketing is one of the hottest topics right now. Following the trade journals and newsletters, it seems that if you're not doing anything mobile right now, then your business is doomed to collapse within the next six months.

While there is a lot of excitement about mobile, just remember how journalists get paid and how all those conference speakers get paid.

The natural human response to the generated hype is "We need an iPhone application" or "We need to do SMS right now."

Marketing is a strategic activity. All successful strategies are built upon successful processes. In this article, I submit Forrester Research's POST Methodology that Josh Bernoff, Charlene Li, Cynthia N. Pflaum, and Scott Wright originally introduced in October 2007 as one process you can apply as you develop your successful mobile marketing strategy.

Forrester's POST Methodology builds upon the following tenets:
(1) People: Get to know your people - not the average person, not your competitor's people; your people.

(2) Objectives: Decide upon your goals. Is it to increase brand awareness? Is it to cut your support costs? Is it to move your customers through the lifetime value cycle? Is it to do damage control (think millions of downloads of flaming laptop battery movies)?

(3) Strategy: Determine your approach to meet your objectives.

(4) Technology: Choose the right technology that best enables you to implement your strategy.

I've seen a lot of different strategic processes before, but I like Forrester's POST methodology because quite frankly, it keeps it all simple. It's easy to remember and it's easy to keep straight. When you're talking about marketing strategies that could run into the millions of dollars, the more simple the process, the better the chances of a favorable ROI.

Forrester Research Analysts Julie Ask, Charles Golvin, Michelle De Lussanet, and Laura Wiramihardja recently published their research article on applying the POST methodology to developing a mobile marketing strategy.

Step One of understanding who your customers are is to take a look at the Mobile Technographics Profile they've developed.

The ladder shows progressive mobile interaction and "sophistication" as you go up higher in the rungs.

Inactives, Talkers, and Communicators tend to be mutually exclusive categories. On the other hand, there is overlap between Connectors, Entertainers, and SuperConnecteds.

So now that you have a breakdown of mobile technographic profiles, the key question you need to ask yourself is "where do my customers fit", and more importantly, "where do my customers that I want to target with my marketing strategy fit?"

There are many different ways that you can answer these questions; time and money are your two resources. The first way to learn the mobile technographics profile of your customers is the most obvious but most often overlooked: ask them. If you have an online presence, how easy would it be to put up a simple survey? Give people a simple incentive to fill out the survey. Keep the questions short and simple - no more than 10 questions and make sure the questionnaire can be answered within 2 - 5 minutes.

Another way is to compare the demographics of your customers (based on your marketing objective, remember?) against the mobile adoption "national average" by age breakdown that Forrester Research Analyst Julie Ask presents in her research, Mobile Technographics.

While gender is no longer a differentiator for mobile technology adoption, age is still one - though rapidly disappearing. So just to get things started, do a test campaign matching your targeted audience by age to the type of mobile campaign you should do. Test your assumptions. Do your customers line up with the average? They may or may not.

If you've been reading about the social media space, you'll also know by now that this is a wealth of information that people are divulging about themselves via their tweets, Facebook posts, etc. Social media data aggregators (like Unbound Technologies, and Rapleaf) are building social profile data on individuals based on this public divulging of information. You can certainly take advantage of these services to build mobile technographic profiles of your customers.

And finally, I suppose you can always contract Forrester Research to construct the mobile technographic profile of your customers (no, this is not a paid endorsement, just a suggestion).

The key takeaway is that while mobile marketing is hot right now, you need to find out whether its hot right now for your customers. Follow the POST methodology. Don't start with the technical solution without first understanding your customers, your objectives and your strategy. Remember: if there is a mis-match between your customers, your objective, and your strategy, then no technology in the world can save you - it will only cost you...BIG TIME!

Where is the Growth in Location-Based Mobile Marketing?

2009-08-26T07:37:00.000-07:00

Technologists are experimenting with ways of leveraging a mobile device's geo-spatial awareness to provide money-making opportunities for marketers. Some propose solutions which send text messages on behalf of physical storefronts to individuals who happen to be passing by. Others propose solutions which display Internet search results containing physical storefronts that are within a proximity to the individuals. The former solutions are push-oriented and the latter are pull-oriented. The former solutions involve SMS (a.k.a. text messaging); the latter solutions involve location-aware search engines. Two different solutions using two different technologies with the same objective: to make money leveraging where a individual happens to be at any moment in time. In my opinion, there is more growth in pull-oriented location-based marketing services than there are in push-based. The reason is less about the technology and more about good ol' human nature.

Push-oriented location-based text messaging is all about impulse buying. When we are out and about, we are typically going from Point A to Point B and on to Point C after that. We have specific places in mind that we are going to, and typically we have more on our itinerary of Places To Go than we have allotted time. We are rushing along at 30 to 40 miles per hour. Pushing a text message clear out of the blue to a person who is whizzing by at that speed assumes that the marketer's message/offer is compelling enough and that the individual is impulsive enough to (a) tolerate the interruption, and (b) to immediately act upon that interruption - not an easy thing to succeed at given the normal human reaction time and the speed the person is moving at. Meandering slowly down the Champs Elysees is just not a reality for the most of us. We simply don't have time for interruptions and that's exactly what push-oriented location-based messaging is all about.

There's only one place where impulse shopping is effective - the grocery store. Merchandisers have it down to an exact science knowing precisely what product to put at what height on each aisle, and also what items to place at the check out counter. Department stores implement the same exact science too. All this to get us to buy things that we didn't originally come into the store to buy. So logically, the only real growth that I see for push-oriented location-based marketing is within the grocery store, its cousin the department store, and its distant mega-cousin the shopping mall.

Research shows that grocery stores are the places where coupon redemption is highest. Grocery stores are also places where people do slow down and mill about the aisles - enough to have both the time and the tendency to react to interruptions. It is within these confines that push-oriented location-based messaging works best. Consumer Packaged Goods brands can send mobile coupons to their opt-in subscribers. CPGs know which outlets carry their brands. It's easy to match up a subscriber's geo-spatial positioning with those of their outlets. Is there a match at any moment in time? Trigger the send!

Shopping malls are other places that are experimenting with push-oriented location-based text messaging. Now, the malls are REALLY places where people do mill around. So naturally preliminary results of their experiments are proving to be encouraging.

As I said before, I believe that the real growth is in pull-oriented location-based mobile marketing. We want to be in control of our shopping experience - that's what the social computing revolution is all about. We want to be in control of our information - what we want and when we want it. We prefer to walk into a store and select our perfumes and colognes ourselves rather than to run the gauntlet of reps shoving scented sample cards in our faces. When we are out and about, it's because we have a specific purpose in mind. We are either heading toward a specific destination, or we are looking for a specific product or service. We're going to whip out our mobile devices and do an Internet search for sushi, gas stations, banks, theaters, etc.

The barrier to entry for pull-oriented location-based marketing is much lower for marketers than it is for push-oriented marketing. The reason is that search engine marketing is a heck of a lot easier to set up than is SMS messsaging. There are already a number of services that provide location-based search not the least of which includes Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Jumptap, and others.

Regardless of approaches, geo-spatial positioning of people facilitated through their mobile devices presents intriguing new opportunities for technologists, sociologists, and marketers.

Twitter: RSS For The Rest of Us

2009-08-12T07:54:00.000-07:00

I don't normally comment about items taking place in social media, but an interesting article forwarded to me by a colleague has really intrigued me. (Not to say that I don't find social media interesting. I know that social media is one of the hottest topics in popular culture today. However, I just choose to focus on the hottest topics taking place in the mobile world.)

But I digress...

The well-publicized race to a million Twitter followers between CNN and Ashton Kutcher as well as reports of Twitter's meteoric growth rate seem to give the impression that "everyone's doin' it!"

But as Sysomos' In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World shows us, there is a yawning chasm wider than the Grand Canyon between perception and reality. Sysomos analyzed data from over 11.5 million Twitter accounts and discovered some interesting highlights:

- 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people

- 0.94% of Twitter users follow more than 1,000 people and only 0.68% have more than 1,000 followers

- 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day

- 1.13% Twitter users update more than average of 10 times a day

- 5% of users account for 75% of all activity

- 50.4% of Twitter users haven't updated their status in the last seven days

So what are all these 11.5 million people doing on Twitter? Apparently not much. Most people probably signed up just because they were curious but haven't thought much about it since. There are others too, perhaps that are active on Twitter, but in a passive way.

Twitter in many respects is like RSS for the rest of us. RSS has been around for a long time, but it's adoption has been minimal - mainly because the need to use RSS feed readers discourages the average person. On the other hand, Twitter automatically provides rivers of feeds. True, RSS provides a richer experience than does the 140 characters of Twitter. But let's face it. Most of us use RSS just to scan headlines and click links through to a web page. Isn't that what Twitter is too?

What about these 5% of hyperactive users? Sysomos did a follow-up analysis of these folks.

- Of the most active Twitter users updating more than 150 times/day, nearly all of them are bots operated by sources such as hotels, regional and national news services, regional weather services, the top news within Digg, games, anim services, tags within del.icio.us and financial aggregators.

- Who tweets the most, and why ?!

- Who is @moooris and can anyone who reads Japanese tell me what the heck is so compelling in this individual's life that he feels compelled to tweet an average of 108.64 tweets a day, or one tweet every 10 minutes of his waking life (assuming he gets by on 7 hours of sleep).

- ReTweets among the most active users accounted for 5.06% of their activity - about 20% higher than overall users which is 4.02%.

This latter point is very interesting, however. It confirms two of my suspicions:
(1) Hyperactive tweeters remain as impervious to anything anybody else is saying as the rest of us, and
(2) There really isn't a whole lot of stuff people are saying that's worth repeating.

So there you have it: an insight look at the world of Twitter. I look forward for Sysomos' next report on Twitter.

Mobile Marketing Checklist

2009-08-05T07:40:00.001-07:00

Marketing campaigns via text messaging (a.k.a. "mobile marketing") presents new opportunities to engage with your customers. One benefit of certain types of mobile marketing is that it allows the customer to initiate the engagement by texting in a keyword to receive a coupon, more info, directions, or to opt-in to a subscription-based campaign. But know this: there is a lot of up-front work that you need to budget for both in terms of time and money. Here's a simple checklist to help you get all your ducks in a row.

Step One: Decide where in the world you want to focus your mobile marketing campaign
There is a logistical nuance to this point - mainly because it impacts your decision for Step Two.

Step Two: Procure a common short code ... or a long code
If the decision from Step One is the United States, then you'll be getting one type of common short code. If the decision is Canada, then you'll need to get another type of code. If the decision is Europe, and/or Asia-Pacific, then you'll need yet a different code. Each of the codes are managed by different registrars and each have their own pricing structure. You'll be leasing the use of a 5-digit or 6-digit code - kinda like leasing domain names in the web world. But unlike domain names, you'll only be leasing it for 3, 6, or 12 months at a time. The cost will be also be much higher - anywhere between $250 to $1000 per month.

For example, if you are going to run your mobile marketing campaign in the United States, then whether you get it yourself or the agency you've contracted gets it for you, it will still be Neustar that will be allocating the code to you. If your focus is Canada, then you'll need to go through the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA). If you want to focus on Europe or perhaps Asia-Pacific, then there are other 3rd parties that you'll need to work with.

If you are just starting off with mobile messaging, may I recommend that you start off with a single short code. There is still a lot of work to do, so keeping it simple in the beginning will help you from getting too overwhelmed.

When you request your short code, you'll now be required to provide an overview of your campaign. The registrars will be loading this information into a searchable database that carriers can access. The intent is to speed up the campaign approval process by requiring more information up front.

Some registrars (like Neustar) will let you request your short code before you submit the campaign summary. This lets you know what your short code is so that you can incorporate it into any print, broadcast or other media while in parallel you work out the details of the campaign.

Step Three: Watch your legalese
Make sure that you have worked out your privacy policy and your terms and conditions. You'll need to have this information ready to present to the carriers when they review your campaign brief. Your agency that you are working with will have its own privacy policy and T&C that could cover your marketing program. But you'll still need to make sure that you have one of your own - even if you are a sandwich shop that lets your customers text in their orders.

Step Four: Speaking of campaign briefs...
Yup. Once you've procured your short (or long) code, you'll now need to get it provisioned on the carriers' networks. You'll need to explain to the carriers what your campaign is all about. If you've ever been a teenager before, it will sound all too familiar. "Where are you going? Who are you going out with? Who else will be with you? How can I reach you? Are you going out dressed like that?!"

Here's typically the information that you'll need to provide to the carriers:

Your contact info and your technical person's contact info
The short code (or long code if in Europe or Asia-Pac) that you'll be using. You'll need to provide proof that you have the right to use the short code in the form of a purchase receipt.
Will you be charging your message recipients anything to receive the message or to download anything? If so, how much?
When do you intend to start your campaign and when do you intend to finish it
The URL to your terms and conditions
The URL to your web-hosted opt-in page (if you are allowing people to opt-in from the web)
A summary of your program
The name of your program
Whether you'll be sending transactional (triggered alerts) or subscription (regularly-sent) messages
Keywords that you'll be using to enable people to opt-in to your program.
A step-by-step user experience for your program. The carriers will follow the steps that you detail to test your campaign prior to launch and while it is in process.

WARNING: any discrepancy between what you say should happen and what actually happens could result in the carrier delaying or suspending your campaign on its network.

Define how the customer will interact with your campaign for opt-ins, obtaining help, opt-outs, and examples of messaging from your campaign.

Whew! That's a heck of a lot of information, isn't it? Fortunately, you don't have to go to each carrier yourself. Your agency (or SMS aggregator, if you are directly working with one) will be submitting it to the carriers on your behalf.

Step Five: Refine, Revise
Don't be discouraged if your campaign is rejected. Sometimes carriers reject a campaign due to insufficient information. Make sure that you allocate time to rework your campaign brief after its been submitted.

Step Six: Lock and Load
Once the carriers have approved your campaign, let 'er rip. Have fun and enjoy the benefits of this emerging and engaging channel.

Creative Destruction: Killer Apps and Killer Devices

2009-07-29T07:53:00.001-07:00

The term "killer app" typically refers to the software application that is regarded as the sole driver for mass adoption of a particular hardware device. In the early days of personal computing, that killer app was VisiCalc. This software program is widely regarded as the spark that ignited the personal computing explosion.

In more recent history we are experiencing a complete reversal of the order in which the smart phone - in particular the iPhone - would seem to be the "killer device" that is regarded as the sole driver for mass adoption of an entire class of software applications. In the process, whole categories of products and services are falling by the wayside.

Back in the fall of 2006, I was sitting on the commuter train taking me to my job in Portland, Oregon and reading my daily edition of the Wall Street Journal. Somewhere in the middle pages of the Tech section was a mention of Apple's intention to introduce their cell phone to the market "sometime in the spring of '07." (If you recall, back then Apple was riding high due to the success of its "killer device", the iPod.) The article went on to say that Apple's version of the mobile device would include a fully functional web browser and an email client that fully supports HTML-formatted email. By the conclusion of that article I immediately knew that history would be in the making for two reasons: (1) this was the very first smart phone targeted directly to the consumer, and (2) Apple's core competence is Useability - with a capital "U".

Here we are three years later and the iPhone has proven to be the killer device and is now the Gold Standard of requirements for all mobile devices. The smart phone is truly the killer device because it has actually killed entire categories of hardware devices. First went digital cameras and then PDAs. More recently it appears that dedicated GPS devices are becoming extinct. Some people have suggested to me that perhaps satellite radio may be the next casualty. And now this just in: B of A is shutting 600 of their banking branches. Reason: online and mobile banking trends reduces needs for physical presence.

We are truly experiencing what Joseph Schumpeter called "Creative Destruction".

Privacy vs. Publicity

2009-07-22T06:56:00.000-07:00

Mobile devices present unique opportunities in marketing because they identify the owner's geospatial position at all times. Location-based Services (LBS) is the buzz word these days as marketers are scrambling to find was to reach people with relevant advertising based upon where a person's mobile device is at any moment in time. The reasoning is that mobile devices have become so ingrained into people's lives that the devices are virtually inseparable from the owner. Ergo, if you know where the device is, you know where the owner is.

There is a debate going on in the wired world regarding online privacy whose outcome may have an impact upon location-based marketing in the wireless world. Earlier in July, a federal judge in Seattle upheld an earlier ruling that an IP address is not personally identifiable information. Says US District Court Judge Richard Jones, "In order for 'personally identifiable information' to be personally identifiable, it must identify a person. [um...yeah...] But an IP address identifies a computer."

Now his ruling was in a different context - in which the defendant in the class-action lawsuit is none other than everyone's favorite Big Brother. Apparently back in 2006 there was a software update that automatically installed anti-piracy software. The pain point is that the company violated its own end user agreement by harvesting IP addresses in the process.

But on the other side of the pond, the European Union in its arcane wisdom ruled quite the opposite. In their opinion, an IP address is personally identifiable information. In the same light, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that ISPs cannot disclose a subscriber's IP address to the police without a grand jury subpoena.Though this ruling was in the context of a criminal matter but it does set the legal precedence to be extended to the seamy (Under)world of Marketing.

If people are uptight about somehow being traced by an IP address on the wired Internet to the degree of possible legislative intervention, then it stands to reason that these same people's uptightness will extend to the wireless world - specifically with impact to location-based services. Are legislative restrictions on mobile marketing opportunities using LBS looming as a dark cloud in the horizon? True there are smartphones that have settings enabling one to disable the location-broadcasting capability of their devices. But there are enough people who don't want to take control of their own lives and prefer instead to dictate the lives of everyone else around them. Ya just never know what could happen.

So now I'm just scratching my head. How can a person be concerned about his whereabouts being tracked from his computer's IP address when at the same time, he's telling the whole world where he is and what he's doing at every moment of the day?!

Here's a fer instance: Twitter. It is so easy for me to know in real time exactly what city people are in, what restaurant they are dining in, what conference they are attending, and what room they are currently in within their own home. How do I know? 'Cause they are tweeting about it and telling the whole world, that's how.

And Facebookers? Heck! Not only do they tell the world where they are at and what they are doing, but they post pictures of themselves doing it too!

My point is this: technology is not the villain. Facebook and MySpace are not the villains either. It really doesn't matter what information we enter into our social site profiles or whether the information is accessible via API. We already broadcast so much about ourselves by what we say with our own fingers - on Twitter, in our blogs, and on our Facebook/MySpace/Bebo/etc. pages.

Companies like Zeta Interactive and Unbound Technologies build profiles of people based on publicly available information and make that intelligence available to marketers to build targeted, timely, and relevant messaging. So my advice is, if you're worried about what a marketer might know about you, then at the very least make sure you are selective about what you say about yourself on your social page and in your tweets.

And to the lady sitting three rows back from me on the bus: if you don't want me to know everything about what's going on in your life, your brothers's life, your pastor's wife's life, and your dog's life, then either lower your voice or hang up your cellphone and shut up!

Why Mobile Email Marketing Does Matter

2009-07-15T07:30:00.000-07:00

People are using their mobile devices to talk to their friends and family, browse the Internet, to watch video and live TV, to take pictures and movies, to communicate with their peeps on social networks, to find out where the heck they are and where they are going, to play games, to buy things online, to broadcast the banalities of their lives in 160 characters or less, and much more. If people are using their mobile devices for so many things integral to their lifestyle, then how could it be possible that they would *NOT* be using their mobile devices to read and send email? I'm just asking a rhetorical question, actually. The truth is that email is the Number One data activity that people use their mobile devices for.

Why, then, are mobile marketers ignoring mobile email? Why are email marketers ignoring mobile email?

I subscribe to six of seven email newletters all tracking the mobile marketing industry. I have my Tweetdeck configured to display all tweets relating to mobile marketing and email marketing. No discussion at all about mobile email marketing. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Bupkis.

Mobile email marketing has as much to do with traditional email marketing as mobile web sites have with traditional web sites. Savvy interactive marketers know that mobile web sites are not simply traditional web sites shrunk down to a teeny tiny screen. Likewise email marketers should regard mobile email as a totally different animal complete with a totally different strategy and totally different call to action. Mobile marketers need to realize that SMS and ad banners are not the be all and end all for the mobile channel.

Email marketers need to understand something about the medium that their message exists within. Computers are used to display the emails that they send by the billions to their subscribers. (I'm talking about legitimate retention email marketers; I'm purposely ignoring all those spammers out there.) Computers are not portable. They are tethered to either a phone line or an ethernet cable. Because of the immobility of computers, people are reading emails only at certain times of any given day. Laptops and netbooks? Wifi and Wimax? Oh puh-lease! Try using your laptop while standing in the subway. You get my drift...

People use their mobile devices to read their email anytime and anywhere; and I do mean anywhere. As an email marketer, I should know this. And further more, I should craft messaging specific to these on-the-go people. What message should I have for them? Perhaps an email displaying pictures of products at my retail outlets that -oh by the way, since they are out and about, why not drop by for an exclusive time-limited discount? Perhaps a news article with pictures and link to online video for late-breaking events? Perhaps pictures of my late night menu with driving (or staggering) directions to the nearest diner?

Mobile marketers likewise need to understand the medium that their messaging exists within. Text messaging enjoys the immediacy of response because people are more likely to quickly respond to a text message than check their email. But this advantage is short lived. I spoke with someone from Spain recently who said that he receives so many text messages that he ignores them now. Also, just how rich of a customer experience can you have in just 160 characters? Text-to-vote, text-for-coupon, etc. is nice, but it's not enough.

As a mobile marketer, I should think beyond 160 text characters. Have I really counted the cost of SMS messaging? How much to provision a short code? Do I really have $500 to $1000 to blow each month just on the short code alone? How spontaneous can my campaigns be with 6 to 8 weeks for every single wireless carrier to review my campaign brief and approve it to run on their network? How much longer can I keep paying for the cost of sending and receiving text messages? How much longer can I afford to ignore the fact that text messaging costs me 10 times per message compared to email messaging? Also, not every one has an all-you-can-eat text messaging plan. In fact, 45% of mobile device owners don't. This means that more than 4 out of every 10 persons I send a text message to actually pays to receive that message when at the same time, email is free. How about triggering the sending of an SMS message based on the response or non-response of an email message? That will greatly cut down on my costs and add some smarts to my SMS messaging program. What about mobile email to add to my mobile marketing mix?

Mobile email marketing does matter. It's time to break down the barriers between these two channels in the minds of the marketers. It's time for creative thought. Both text and email messaging can be highly complimentary on the mobile device. Enterprise marketing platforms should enable marketers to construct effective integrated cross-channel campaigns in which subscriber data is available for targeting, personalization, and reporting across both communication channels. Responses or non-responses to messages in one channel should be used to trigger follow-ups in the other channel. Give your customers options in how they want to receive communications from you, and what types of communications they want to receive depending upon each channel.

Have you experienced any effective campaigns combining email and SMS? Leave me your comments. I'd like to hear from you.

Beware of Co-Reg in Mobile Marketing

2009-07-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

MediaPost yesterday reported that a new organization, Mobile Advocacy Coalition, was formed. It intends to ask the Federal Communications Commission to specify that technology companies that act as "mere conduits" aren't liable for wireless ads that violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, according to the group's attorney, Scott Delacourt, a lawyer at Wiley Rein.

The main reason why this lobbying group was formed was response to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal's recent decision in a lawsuit against Simon & Schuster and mobile marketing company ipsh!.

In a nutshell, Simon & Schuster are the defendants in a $90M class action lawsuit stemming from a 2006 incident. Laci Satterfield filed the suit after her young son is said to have received a text message in the middle of the night warning him that the "next call you take may be your last." The text was a promotion for Mr. King’s book, "The Cell." Though the text message was sent in the middle of the night, I'm not aware of whether the child woke up in the middle of the night to read said text message.

First of all, you should get to know a bit more about the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Headquartered in San Francisco, this is the same group of enlightend individuals that ruled in 2002 that it was not legal to recite the Pledge of Allegiance because it contains the words "under God".

At the heart of the matter is the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) that makes it unlawful to generate automated calls to mobile phones without the "prior express consent of the called party." The Ninth District Court of Appeals holds that text messages sent to mobile phones is the same thing as voice calls. The TCPA applies to automatic telephone dialing systems (ATDS), equipment that has "the capacity to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator and to dial such numbers."

But here's where the hair splitting begins. The appellate court wasn't concerned with whether the system used to the send the text messages was an actual ATDS. They felt that the proper question to ask is whether system had the capacity to be used as an ATDS. With no evidence presented during the original trial to the contrary, the court overruled the original judgment and ordered the case back to trial.

The sequence of events that lead to that fateful text message being sent on that fateful night is commonly known as "co-registration". Ms. Satterfield did not directly opt-in to receive text messages from Simon & Schuster. She became a registered user of Nextones in order to receive a free ringtone. During the registration process, she checked a box which read, in part: "I would like to receive promotions from Nextones affiliates and brands" - boilerplate verbiage used in co-registration. The appellate court rules that Simon & Schuster is neither an affiliate of Nextones nor is it a brand of Nextone. Therefore, the text messages they sent in this campaign were unsolicited - a violation of the TCPA.

Co-Reg is a widespread tactic used for lead generation especially in email marketing. It is one means of generating new leads and customers. But it's also one source of messages that recipients classify as spam. Irritating as it is, email spam is nevertheless tolerated a lot more than SMS spam - partly because mobile phones are considered much more personally than the so-called personal computer, and also partly because people originally paid for each text message while email is free.

Mobile marketers should continue to follow this case because it has direct bearing on our industry. While co-registration may be an acceptable lead generation tactic used in email marketing, the case of Satterfield v. Simon & Schuster, Inc. indicates that mobile marketers should proceed with extreme caution if not avoid it altogether.

Why Genachowki is Good for Mobile Marketing

2009-06-18T21:02:00.000-07:00

The news of the day is that Julius Genachowski is getter closer to becoming the new chairman of the FCC. Mobile marketers should take special note to this nomination proceeding because the beliefs and the decisions of the FCC chairman have a direct result upon this nascent industry. Why? Because mobile phones at their most basic definition are radio transmitters and receivers. As such, governmental regulations regarding mobile phones fall under the broad umbrella of the FCC. This agency was created by the Communications Act of 1934 which called for the creation of a governmental agency to regulate communications by radio and wire. Since the government considers all cellphones to be radio receivers and transmitters, their usage is controlled by the same arcane rules and regulations that apply to AM and FM radios. Therefore any ruling that the FCC makes will have an impact upon the mobile marketing industry.

To get some idea of what's in store, take a quick look at Genachowski's background. He's a former legal counsel of the FCC, having served for former chairman Reed Hundt. He also served as a high-level executive at IAC/InterActiveCorp for a number of years. IAC is the entity behind a number of well-known Internet brands including Ask.com, Match.com, Evite, Citysearch and Urbanspoon. So one would hope that during his time there, he's developed a keen understanding of how real the Internet is as a facilitator of commerce. One would equally hope that he will carry into the FCC this same understanding. Already he's given some indication that "he gets it" as he said last Tuesday that he is in favor of the Obama tech plan which calls for the U.S. to increase its development of broadband Internet and reform a $7 billion federal phone-subsidy program to help cover the costs of offering broadband in rural areas. This means that Internet TV and radio have an opportunity to develop further under the Genachowski administration.

Genachowski also supports network neutrality. This is a good thing because it promote a free market underhindered by restrictive practices of ISPs and telecom providers. In 2005, during the Bush administration, the FCC supported network neutrality and declared that consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice, run applications and services of their choice, and plug in and run legal devices of their choice. The FCC also said consumers have a right to competition among network providers, application and service and content providers. With another supporter of network neutrality in the FCC under the Obama administration, expect to have more rulings in favor of the consumer.

As reported in the LA Times, the FCC is expected to begin formal investigation as to whether consumers are harmed by exclusive deals between handset makers and wireless telephone companies. All you Palm Pre and Apple iPhone owners should take note of this. When asked by the Senate Commerce Committee, Genachowski said that he would "ensure that the full record on the issue is reviewed and act accordingly to promote competition and consumer choice."

What does this all mean to consumers though? For one, it does not necessarily mean that breaking AT&T's monopoly on the iPhone with its subsidy automatically leads to higher prices. The subsidy of the device can easily be spread out over more wireless carriers.

Mobile marketing needs mobile devices and it needs mobile broadband. What's happening at the FCC will play a huge role in how this industry shapes out over the long term. Keep your eyes and ears open! Stay informed!

Are Marketers REALLY Ready for Cross-Channel?

2009-05-28T09:41:00.000-07:00

I recently purchased a couple of items last weekend at Sears. The checkout lady asked me if I wanted to sign up for Sears' email marketing newsletter. Huh? Usually I'm asked if I want to sign up for a Sears credit card and receive a 10% discount on the spot. Turns out Sears is really pushing their employees to sign up customers for the email newsletters - in fact, giving them incentives for doing so. Maybe this isn't a nation-wide drive, but it's certainly happening in my neck of the woods.

Acting on a tip, I went to the Sears.com web site to opt-in for text alerts on deals.

The text response was something that I'd expect following mobile messaging best practices. Good summary of what I opt-ed in for. Good explanation of how to opt-out.

But wait! What about an invitation to opt-in for email newsletters? Sure, sears2go.com is a nice mobile-optimized site. But what about using this text alert opt-in event as an opportunity to invite me to opt-in for email marketing?

To be fair, the web site features both email opt-in and mobile opt-in side by side on the same page. But why not use mobile messaging as a lead source for email messaging, and vice-versa? I also opt-ed in to Sears' email marketing campaigns and received the standard welcome email.

And, as I suspected, no mention of opting in for mobile events. A missed opportunity for cross-channel marketing!

I've been monitoring a lot of what marketers are talking about - both in their blog posts, their Tweets and so forth - looking to see if anyone is making the connection between mobile and email marketing. One thing is becoming clear to me: very very few mobile marketers are talking about email marketing and equally rare are email marketers talking about mobile marketing. For example, in her 200-plus page book, "Mobile Marketing Handbook", Dushinski devotes a mere 5 sentences to the subject of mobile email. In their almost 300-page book, "Email Marketing an Hour a Day", Mullen and Daniels are likewise a tad light on ideas for cross-channel marketing. But to their credit at least they do mention US Airways' tactic of combining Print and SMS as channels for generating opt-ins to email marketing.

So what's the deal? Could it be that agencies and corporate marketing departments have constructed walls of separation between mobile and email? Both are interactive online channels. Why aren't there more real-life examples of cross-channel marketing campaigns combining the best of SMS and email? Could it just be that marketers themselves aren't yet ready for cross-channel marketing? Are mobile marketers coming from backgrounds other than email marketing? Are email marketers keeping their feet firmly entrenched in their channel? Or perhaps the answer is the most simple: it's all still new and we're all still trying to figure it all out.

If you're a marketer in the interactive space, what's your forte? Mobile? Email? Both? Is your organizational alignment preventing you from implementing effective cross-channel campaigns? Do you have any real-life examples of effective cross-channel campaigns? Let me hear from you!

Life In Between the Spaces - Mobile Marketing Opportunities

2009-05-12T12:45:00.000-07:00

I have just completed my analysis of a simple survey I ran in early May. I sent out a series of tweets inviting anyone to take my Mobile Usage survey. Some of my tweets were focused to attendees of various marketing conferences that were taking place at the time. Considering that I wasn't giving anything away to reward survey responses, I'm pretty happy with the 42 that I got. Here's a summary of what I found. Compare my survey respondents with your personal observations to see how much they line up.

As expected from the audience that I targeted with my survey, the majority (74%) of respondents said that their mobile device was a smartphone - with Blackberries and the iPhone combining for 68% of all devices.

If this percentage is indicative of the whole population, then I would say that these results seem to support the consensus opinion that WAP is going away as more and more people are purchasing smartphones for their personal use along with the rich Internet browsing experience that they provide.

I asked what people use their mobile devices for, giving them a list of 11 different tasks, with an additional 12th option to fill in. Talking on the device was the #1 usage (it is after all a phone), followed by text messaging, reading email, surfing the web, and using the built-in GPS. The high percentage of people texting on their devices certainly is consistent with what we all know.

But, while the people use their mobile devices for a wide variety of different activities, they primarily use them for talking and for reading email. This finding supports other surveys similarly reporting reading of email being a highly common usage of mobile devices.

Mobile devices are truly personal - it is perhaps the most personal device ever. People interact with their mobile devices at all times during the day and night, using it to both fill in downtime between activities, and also as a defined scheduled activity itself. I especially love the 12% of the people who were honest enough to 'fess that they use their mobile devices while in the bathroom. (Yes, my hand is raised too.)

Which brings me back to the subject of email. People are interacting with their mobile devices "in between the spaces" of their lives. So when they are reading their emails, they are typically doing so less than 5 minutes each time. So just as people do snack in between meals, people are snacking on mobile Internet content in between times of consuming rich Internet content.

Some of the data seems to debunk a bit of posturing going on in the blogosphere lately regarding email and social media. There remains a strong correlation between people who surf the Internet (including social sites) and those who read email. Consider this:
- Of the people who don't use their mobile devices to read email none of them use their devices to surf the Net either.
- Of the people who do use their mobile devices to read email, almost all use them to surf the Net (91%). Of the people whose primary usage of their mobile devices includes reading emails, almost all also use their devices to surf the Net (86%).

- Of the people who don't use their mobile devices to surf the Net, some still use them to read email (25%).
- Of the people who do use their mobile devices to surf the Net, every single one of them uses their devices to read email.

So it would appear that all the talk about social sites replacing email is just that - talk. I believe that social sites and email are complementary communication channels, not competitive.

There is also a strong correlation between using the mobile device for reading email and for text messaging.
- Of the people who don't use their mobile devices for texting, half still use them to read email.
- Of the people who do use their mobile devices for texting, the majority also use them to read email (83%).

- Of the people who use their mobile devices to read email almost all also use them for text messaging (91%).

So what conclusions can I draw from my informal mobile usage survey?
(1) People use their mobile devices to snack on mobile Internet content in between the spaces of their lives
(2) Email reading is a BIG part of daily mobile usage activities.
(3) There is a strong correlation of usage between email reading, web surfing, and text messaging.

The final takeaway is that people are highly engaged with their mobile devices. Savvy interactive marketers must NOT treat SMS marketing as a vertical, stove-piped, siloed (call it what you will) marketing channel. Neither should these marketers treat email marketing as a stand-alone channel. Successful interactive marketers MUST recognize that owners of smartphones are a target rich group of people (I'm including myself in that mix as an iPhone owner) and that mobile cross-channel campaigns are going to be the big winners.

Email me if you'd like a copy of my survey results. I'll send you the results in a pivot table that you can slice and dice for your analytical needs. No personally identifiable information was collected in this survey.

Search Revenue Underreported?

2009-04-29T15:12:00.000-07:00

I attended the Forrester Marketing Forum in Orlando at the end of April. This year's Forum was vastly superior to last year's in that all topics were extremely relevant with specific case studies and highly actionable ideas.

One of the absolute best sessions was presented by Gian Fulgoni, Chairman of comScore, Inc. Based on a study they published in 2007, over 30% of Internet users delete their cookies one average 4 times a month. This is true for both 1st party cookies and 3rd party ad serving cookies. This concept becomes especially interesting in light of measuring ROI of Search Engine Marketing. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, over the course of last year, a total of $13.5 billion dollars was spent on search marketing with nearly 90% of that total spent on paid search ads. Given the amount of money at stake, comScore's findings should be seriously considered.

ComScore partnered with Google in a 2006 study based on holiday-related purchases across 11 product categories for a period of 60 days post-search. The latter point means that they counted any purchase related to an online search that was completed within 60 days of the search. Their findings: 16% of the purchases were immediately completed online at time of search, 21% of purchases were made online within 60 days of the search (latent online purchase), and 63% of purchases were made offline within 60 days of the search (latent offline purchase).

Now if you're a pure online play like Hotwire, Amazon or Zappos, then the latent offline effect doesn't exist. It probably does, however, still hold true that the percentage of latent online purchases still exceeds that of direct online purchases.

So here's where your revenue from online search is being underreported:

(1) If you have an offline purchase channel, then the majority of your purchases directly from your customer's search are NOT being tracked nor being attributed to your search program's keywords.

(2) You are definitely not tracking the purchases of those people that delete their cookies on a regular basis therefore you're missing out on revenue from latent online purchases from these Cookie Deleters.

And speaking of cookies, not all mobile browsers support cookies. If they do, chances are high that they are not enabled to accept cookies or they are only set to accept 1st party cookies. Given that Search is the Numero-Uno mobile Internet activity, and that mobile on-line purchases are gaining traction, (a) it's a darned good safe bet that you are underreporting search revenue from your mobile channel, and (b) yes, you should be concerned about it.

What can you do about it? May I recommend that in your Search campaign ROI analysis, you include a new "pro-forma" metric which adjusts your purchases for missed latent online purchases (the deleted cookied effect), and for latent offline purchases. Since comScore's panel includes 2 million participating members, you can use their percentages in your pro-forma calculations since the sample size is large enough to statistically represent the entire population.

Making Money from Mobile TLAs

2009-04-16T16:08:00.000-07:00

Many of you tracking the mobile marketing space are familiar with the 3-letter acronym LBS which stands for "location-based services". For those of you not fully familiar with this term, it basically boils down to the fact that your mobile device inherently knows where you are (or more accurately where it is) because that's all at the heart of the cellular communication system. Marketers and mobile app developers are feverishly capitalizing on this capability. Indeed, my most favorite iPhone widget is developed by UrbanSpoon. At the shake of my iPhone, I can get a nice suggestion of nearby places to eat.

There's a lot of great ideas around LBS and a lot of new companies springing up based on this concept. The only problem is that no one has figured out how to make much money on it. Social networking sites are the ones that have the best traction on LBS but again, none of these sites are profitable. Yes, they have lofty valuations, but unless you were asleep during the dot-com bust or still in grade school, the lesson learned is that valuations mean nothing except to the investment bankers taking their percentage cut and to the founders taking their pot of gold to the bank.

I'd like to mention another TLA (3-letter acronym)for your consideration: NFC which stands for Near Field Communication. I wrote a while back on this topic and why I believe that this technology is definitely the one to watch in the coming years. The only reason why I'm bringing it up again is that earlier this month, Visa launched the world’s first commercial mobile payments service for point-of-sale transactions using Near Field Communications technology. Citibank Singapore and Visa have announced the Citi M1 mobile Visa payWave payment pilot, the first program in Singapore where a mobile phone will double as a credit card.

The Citi Visa pilot, supported by mobile operator M1, will enable cardholders to pay for purchases using a Nokia 6212 Classic handset at more than 750 merchant locations across Singapore. Participating merchants include cafes, restaurants, book stores and retail and music shops.

Not to be outdone, MasterCard Worldwide partnering with Blaze Mobile have introduced the Blaze Mobile MasterCard PayPass, a mobile payment sticker that can be used at any of the 141,000 merchant locations that are currently equipped to accept PayPass contactless transactions. Though this program uses NFC technology, it's still "close-but-no-cigar" since its all about the sticker and not really the mobile device.

As quoted in the Mobile Marketer earlier this week, Pam Zuercher, head of product innovation for Visa, Foster City, CA says, "With 4 billion mobile devices worldwide and 80 percent of the world's population living within range of a cellular network, Visa has a significant opportunity to offer its products and services to geographies where they don't exist today, and enhance the consumer payment experience."

Having financial heavyweights such as Visa and MasterCard rolling out their pilot programs is a huge step in the right direction. What this really translates to is an acceleration of the development of the worldwide infrastructure required to support touchless commerce transactions using the mobile device as the medium of the transaction.

While smart people continue to struggle with how to monetize Location Based Services, monetizing Near Field Communication is an absolute no-brainer. How? By taking a cut off each transaction - a practice that is already happening. And it's not just banks making a bundle off skimming off the top of each transaction. Payment escrow services like Paypal (which made a whopping $2.4 billion in revenue last year) take a cut off each commerce transaction also.

California-based Vivotech is one major force leading the way in many of the NFC payment pilot programs. Their web site says that they are looking to 2010 when full commercial rollout will begin. Certainly a topic and a company to keep your eye on!

"Mr. Carrier, Tear Down That Wall!"

2009-04-08T15:47:00.000-07:00

Jumping from the world of politics to the world of economics, I believe that wireless carriers' artificial inflation of the rates they charge for SMS messaging are causing a big drag on mobile marketing in the United States. Indeed, others share my same concern among those in the industry and those in the hallowed halls of Congress. The dirty (and very rich) little secret is that wireless carriers are double dipping on all commercial text messages. One, they are charging you, the marketer, for every text message that you send to your subscribers. Two, they are charging your subscribers for every text message that they receive from you.

If you are running an interactive messaging campaign, then the carriers are actually quadruple dipping. One: they are charging the subscriber to text a keyword to your short code. Two: they are charging you to receive the keyword. Three: they are charging you to send the response message. Four: they are charging the subscriber to receive the response. Were you also aware that carriers charge marketers one rate for inbound messages and another rate for outbound messages?

In spite of the Kool-Aid that the carriers want you to drink, remember that a whopping 45% of mobile subscribers do not have all-you-can-eat text messaging plans. If you are an iPhone owner as I am, you pay a per-month charge for unlimited text messaging on top of the per-month charge for unlimited data. AT&T ain't dumb. They know that you love text messaging! You want text messaging! You need text messaging! You can't live without text messaging! And so they can charge you anything they want because they know they can.

If you're a marketer wanting to jump into to the mobile arena, be forewarned that you are going to pay a lot! If you want your own common short code, then you'll be renting one to the tune of $50 to $100 per month. Uh, by the way....how much are you paying to rent a domain name? $30 for three years should be about right. So what justifies a common short code costing up to 120 times the cost of a domain name? One could argue that you can have unlimited domain names, but there are only 100,000 possible common short codes (assuming five digits) hence the higher cost. Sure, but I mean really...120 times the cost?

Let's talk CPM rates now. When its all said and done, you'll be paying five to ten times more CPM for text messaging than you'll be paying for email messaging. Why? An SMS message is only 160 characters long - 140 characters long for some carriers. So why costing so much? SMS messages are delivered to the hand set too. They aren't stored on the carrier's network like emails are stored on the ISP's servers. So why costing so much?

Bottom line: SMS marketing is expensive and carriers are making obscene profits off the billions of text messages being sent worldwide. Dan Butcher from the Mobile Marketer estimates that a small SMS-based campaign can run for less than $10,000, but that you'll be spending in the range of $50,000 to $100,000 for an effective two-month opt-in SMS campaign.

But it doesn't have to be so expensive. And that's my point. The technology for SMS messaging is so simple. The only reason why SMS marketing is so expensive is that carriers set non-competitive prices. I'm not a socialist so I don't believe in government price control as the solution. I believe in the free market and that ultimately the market will set the prices. How long that will take is unknown, but hope springs eternal.

I'm going to keep speaking to all mobile marketers whether they want to hear it or not: don't button-hole yourself into SMS messaging as the ONLY channel for mobile marketing. It isn't. It is one channel and a highly effective one, but it's an expensive channel. Expand your mind and remember that email marketing is also a very effective mobile marketing channel. Mobile email is a heck of a lot cheaper and it's a heck of a lot more widely adopted that you might think.

Mobile handset manufacturers get it. The latest smartphones unveiled to oohs and aaahs at the CTIA Wireless conference last week were all "messaging-enabled" phones. The HTC Snap takes messaging-enabled one step further with special email features built into the device.

SMS Messaging rates will eventually come down. They have to. But until then, don't limit yourself. Think about mobile email campaigns. They have proven ROI ten years running and the cost is within your reach.

Mobile Email: Fast Food vs. Full-in Dining

2009-04-01T15:24:00.000-07:00

Last week, a colleague of mine shared with me an intriguing research report from QuickPlay Media about projected growth trends in mobile TV and video. The online survey of approximately 1000 U.S.-based mobile subscribers between the ages of 18 and 35 reveals some compelling new insights into the evolving viewing habits and preferences of today’s consumer. For example, according to the report, "Consumers also continue to show a preference for snacking on content instead of setting aside dedicated viewing times," with "25 percent respondents view content in between daily activities, 16 percent while in transit (i.e. on the bus, etc.) and 11 percent while waiting in line."

I really liked the term "snacking" because it clearly defines the user experience in terms from our daily lives that we understand. People "snack" on TV and video using their mobile devices while they would use their traditional media devices (i.e. TV or desktop computer) for the "full-in dining" experience.

Using the mobile device to "snack" isn't just about mobile TV, though. It's about the entire mobile Internet experience. Fast food is all about anytime and anywhere; it's about instant and convenient gratification. What do we use the mobile Internet for? Quick and instant information - in as real-time as possible. When we want the full dining experience, then we'll turn to restaurants, not to fast food. Similarly, when we want a fuller and richer Internet experience, we'll turn to our desktop computers.

The concept of fast food vs. full-in dining also can be applied to the world of email marketing in the sense that fast food is mobile-friendly email and full-in dining is desktop-friendly email. Fast food and full-in dining are two entirely different experiences each with their unique purpose and benefit that when properly done are complementary. My belief is that you would never get a full seven course gourmet meal from a drive-thru. Therefore you should never take a desktop-friendly email and simply re-purpose its content to be mobile-friendly. Fast food is all about convenience; it's purpose is to catch you right when you're in the mood. Likewise your mobile email campaigns should be designed to catch your subscribers when they're in the mood - when they are out and about - with quick and easy to fulfill calls to action. Full-in dining is all about the experience; it's purpose is to fully engage your senses on a more leisurely pace. Likewise your desktop-friendly emails should provide the richer experience for your subscribers. Here's where all your graphic and content sensibilities come to bear.

So what types of emails would you consider fast-food versus full-in dining? Leave me your comments!

Tracking Mobile Responders

2009-03-25T15:52:00.000-07:00

I work for an interactive marketing service provider. We provide both software-as-a-service as well as strategic marketing and creative services. Not too long ago, the email marketing manager from one of our clients, a well-known retail brand, asked me about optimizing mobile emails for Blackberries. "Why Blackberries," I asked her. Apparently the corporate bosses thought it would be cool to see the emails they are sending to their subscribers within their own mobile devices.

Recently we began tracking the responses from our clients' email subscribers in a new way. Using open source information that we subsequently improved upon, we are able to identify the email clients that subscribers use at the time of opening an HTML-formatted email or when clicking a link within the email. Knowing the email client with a certain degree of confidence gives us insight into the percentage of email responders that are doing so from their mobile devices. We also know the manufacturer of these mobile devices.

In my recent data analysis, out of a total of 67 million individuals, about 1% of the subscribers are viewing their emails on a mobile device. Out of the 60 known mobile device manufacturers that we currently know about, more than 80% of the mobile responders use either an iPhone(43%), Blackberry(25%), or SonyEricsson(15%).

Mobile responders being only 1% of our population of email recipients may seem like the bottom news story of the day. But over half a million people should not be ignored - both in terms of their actions and their type of mobile device.

So, to finish up the story that I began this blog with, I advised our client that though the corporate bosses were using their corporate mobile devices, their subscribers were not. In fact, subscribers viewing this brand's emails on iPhones outnumbered the Blackberry viewers by a margin of more than two to one. My recommendation: optimize mobile emails for the device that the majority of their mobile responders were using - in this case, the iPhone.

Social Networking On the Go

2009-03-18T14:39:00.001-07:00

It appears that social networking is now the #1 mobile web destination according to a recent research report. The data collected and published by Openwave indicate that Facebook and MySpace are the two top mobile search terms on both Google and Yahoo. The latest study from Nielsen shows that member communities and email are a close 4th and 5th place of global Internet activity (66.8% and 65.1% respectively). However, the same report shows that member community and email showed the two highest growth in 2008 (5.4% and 2.7% respectively). These two studies indicate a high convergence between the mobile and the social networking worlds.

I totally get this convergence because mobile and social are two worlds where people are choosing to spend a lot of their time now. For many people in the world, their mobile devices are the only ways that they are accessing the Internet. No wonder also that Facebook is extending their Connect API to the iPhone.

Will social networking replace email, as one headline asks? Look. Just because there are more sheep than journalists doesn't mean that sheep will be replacing journalists any time soon. Social networking and email are two different communication channels meant for different types of communication. Social Networking is all about airing your laundry in public. Email is a point-to-point communication technology therefore you would naturally chose one over the other depending upon what you want to say - and to whom you want to say it. That having been said, they are highly complementary as well. It is quite common now to receive an email whose content is so good that you'd want to share it with your friends by posting it to your social page - just like you'd share an article from a news web site.

The mobile device is growing in worldwide popularity as the launch platform of choice to the Internet. A surprisingly high percentage of Facebook and MySpace members access these sites from their mobile devices. Next to search, email is the #2 Internet activity on mobile devices. It's high time for marketers to step up and facilitate the bridging of the gap between these two mobile activities. For starters, interactive marketers - this includes email marketers and social media marketers - need to develop mobile-friendly email content that can be easily read on a mobile device and then shared (from said mobile device) to a social site. A lot of people use their mobile devices to triage their email inbox for later reading from a desktop computer. I've seen many a man sitting in the Husband's Chair at Macy's culling his inbox while waiting for the Missus to try on her forty-seven different outfits. (I know 'cause I'm there in the Husband's Chair too.) Give him meaningful and mobile-friendly content that he can immediately recognize the value of so that he can then share it with his Facebook friends. A simple and easy way to extend your brand.

If you want to know more about great social networking strategies, go visit my colleague's blog on Blogspot.

Do you have a favorite social site that isn't Facebook? Let me know what it is and what you like about it.

Mobile Marketing in a Recession

2009-03-12T09:09:00.000-07:00

For those of you who've just recently returned from the "Lost" island, we are in a global economic cool-down. An interesting shift in consumer behavior has started and analysis of this change is starting to make its rounds in the press. According to a recent article in USA Today, online searches that include value words such as "coupons" rose 161% in December versus 2007. Google says that ad spending on value-related words such as coupons rose 30% in the fourth quarter over the same period a year earlier.

Comscore (cited in the USA Today article) also notes that online coupon sites are the number two most important online sites (next to search engines, of course) to consumers when shopping in the past 3 months. Slightly over 50% of consumers say they are using coupons more often due to the hardened economic times.

Maybe it's because of the way I was raised, maybe it's because it's in my DNA, or maybe it's both: I use coupons. I have no problems using coupons for items that I would normally buy. I also have been known to buy because of a coupon. To me, not using a coupon is like leaving money on the table. A dollar off a roll of toilet paper not meaningful to you? Let's put it a different way. Suppose you saw a dollar bill laying on the floor of the toilet paper aisle in the store. Would you leave it there or would you nonchalantly pick it up? The only problem with coupons is that they are required at the point of redemption. So if I forget to bring my coupon along, no joy.

Just as digital cameras and cell phones formed an alliance that changed the world, it appears that coupons and cell phones are forming an alliance that will have similar behavior-changing effects. For example, Domino's Pizza recently announced that they have selected Air2Web to be their sole provider for their new mobile coupon campaigns. This partnership totally makes sense to me. According to the Food Marketing Institute, paper coupon usage has declined 40% in the last few years due to lack of immediacy and the manual effort of clipping. But due to the benefits of mobile devices that we all know about, coupons have a brand new life.

The advantage of mobile couponing is multi-fold. First, mobile devices are highly personal so this means highly personalized and highly relevant coupons. Second, we all take our mobile devices with us wherever we go - so you're never without your coupons. And third, both SMS and mobile-friendly email present a highly interactive medium from which marketers can analyze the performance of their discount campaigns.

So...are you a Coupon Clipper like me? Come forth, Brother! Come on down, Sister and testify. Give me your feedback. I'd like to hear from you.

How To Build Your Worldwide Customer Base

2009-03-02T13:40:00.000-08:00

The industry trends are indicating that mobile broadband is on pace to become the Number One means of accessing the Internet worldwide. A recent publication from the International Telecommunications Union (as reported by the Associated Press) says that six in ten people worldwide now have cell phone subscriptions, indicating that mobile phones are the communication technology of choice - especially among developing nations. One of the fastest growing areas is in mobile broadband subscriptions.

There are two reports - both published by Forrester Research - that I find interesting as well. A mail survey fielded in February and March 2008 of 61,033 US and Canadian households and individuals ages 18 and older reported that about 7% of these individuals used their mobile devices for Search. Another survey of 5,400 US and Canadian individuals ages 18 to 88 in August 2008 reported that 75% of these individuals used their mobile devices for Search. What would account for this huge difference? A different sampled population? Perhaps. But even so, these two surveys taken at different dates do indicate that Search has risen to be one of the top activities that people do with their mobile devices.

Oh by the way...did you also read that the iPhone is the Number One mobile browsing platform commanding a huge 66% marketshare?

So what does this all mean? It means that a substantial population of customers have their first contact with your brand via a mobile device. So, Mr. and Ms. Marketer: do you have a mobile strategy? Do you have plans in place to welcome these mobile first-contact people to your brand?

Here's some ideas for you:

(1) A really simple mobile-friendly web home page
Don't mess with WAP - just use HTML that is formatted for the small screen. Starting with the iPhone and every mobile device thereafter, mobile web browsers are now standard.

(2) Get yourself listed in Google Maps for mobile devices
You'd be surprised how many people would benefit from knowing about your services just because you're close by to where they are or where they want to be. Also, include the URL to your mobile-friendly home page, not the URL to your main site's home page.

(3) Invite visitors to your mobile site to sign up for email newsletters
Opt-in email marketing is the most effective means of customer relationship management. After they've given you their subscription permission, send them mobile-friendly emails. These are just HTML-formatted emails that are right sized for the smaller screen. Give them timely and relevant offers. Mobile emails are THE perfect vehicle for coupons, for example.

The nice thing about opt-in emails is that you now have plenty of opportunity to engage in a meaningful communication with these people and gradually acquaint them with your products and services.

And speaking of email, I'm disappointed that most of the blog posts I've read on Mobile Marketing are predominantly written by folks with backgrounds in brand marketing and in direct marketing. I've not (yet) read anything written by anyone with a background in email marketing. This dearth of information is a shame since email marketing is still the best real-time direct-response marketing channel.

(4) While you're at it, invite visitors to your mobile site to sign up for text messaging alerts
There's a reason why these people found you via their mobile devices. Engage with them the way that they naturally engage with their world.

There ya go. It's all about maximizing the experience at point of first contact. Very simple, very easy to do and best of all, it won't cost you a lot in terms of time or money.

Email Marketers: I want to hear from you! How are you integrating mobile and email into your marketing mix?

Cross-channel Marketing

2009-02-18T11:27:00.000-08:00

Mobile marketing works best as a compliment to your existing marketing mix. In today's blog, I'm going to discuss how web site analytics can play an important role in your mobile marketing campaigns.

If you've been in online marketing for a while, then certainly companies like Coremetrics, Omniture, and WebTrends are very familiar to you. (Google also joined the pack with their absorption of Urchin Software back in '05.) One thing that advanced web analytics packages can do is give you information regarding individuals who did something on your web site at some point in time. Interactive marketers have been combining web analytics with email marketing for a while now with great results. It's time now to combine web analytics with mobile marketing to boost your results.

Typical web analytics provides three types of data points for customers identified as email marketing subscribers. There is an action (e.g. Viewed, Carted, Abandoned, Purchased), a product (e.g. Product ABC, Prospectus XYZ, etc.) and a date/time stamp. Savvy interactive marketers use this information to construct highly relevant and highly targeted email remarketing campaigns. For example, you can send out a "reminder" email to your subscribers who have purchased laser printer toner three months ago that it might be time to buy some more soon. Include a personalized offer in that email and you're certain to boost your conversion rate.

The mobile marketing channel is another way to leverage the power of your web analytic data. A lot of mobile marketing initiatives I've seen don't go much further beyond sending alerts and offers to people who have opted in to receive SMS messages. Nevertheless, the same segmentation discipline that you use in your email marketing should be applied to your mobile marketing. Just like with an email campaign, you can create a "reminder" text message that is sent to any subscriber who has recently purchased a renewable commodity. And since it's a text message, schedule it to go out during the daytime when it's more likely that your subscriber is out and about and in a position to actually act upon your call to action.

As of today, web analytic data is compiled in batch mode and isn't available in real-time (please comment below if you know otherwise). But if in the future, it does become available in real-time, please heed my advise and DON'T CREEP OUT YOUR CUSTOMER! What I mean by that is, don't send your customer a real-time text message as soon as you discover that he abandoned his online shopping cart...""Why did you not buy,....Dave...?" Yes, it's still a good idea to send a follow up message to someone who abandoned an online shopping cart - just wait a bit before sending that message.

Any additional ideas on how web analytics can compliment mobile marketing campaigns? I want to hear from you!

Real-time Direct Response Marketing

2009-02-12T12:40:00.000-08:00

Ten years ago, email marketing was pretty much the lone real-time direct response marketing channel. In the intervening time, search engine marketing and mobile marketing have joined the family. Being from the same family of real-time direct response, there are numerous ways that mobile marketing and email marketing effectively complement each other.

For example, mobile marketing is a fantastic way to grow your base of email marketing subscribers. To those of you who are experienced interactive marketers: you already know that growing your email subscriber list plays a very important role in your strategy for revenue growth. Using a mobile marketing campaign as one way of growing your subscriber list is a really good idea. It's really simple 'cause it's pretty basic to implement.

Start with a simple text-to-reply offer. You can have it displayed on your website, printed promotional pieces, ad banners, sponsored web search ads, and on your tradeshow signage. The type of offer will depend a lot on your situation. For example, if you're exhibiting at a tradeshow, it's common to have a text-to-register for a free prize. If you are a retail shop or an eatery, you display in your shop window a text-to-reply offer for a discount coupon for in-store purchases. Regardless of the offer, in your reply text message, invite the person to sign up to receive your email newsletter.

One way that the person would sign up for your email newsletter would be for him to text back a defined keyword (like "EMAIL") followed by his email address. Another way would be for him to enter in his mobile browser the URL that you provided to him in your reply text message. And speaking of URLs, use the shortened version that services like TinyURL and others will give you.

While you're at it, make note whenever people sign up for your email newsletters from their mobile devices. Why? Because chances are, they'll be reading your emails also on their mobile devices. This means that you have the opportunity to craft highly targeted and highly relevant email campaigns just for your mobile subscribers.

Any other ideas of how you can combine email and text messaging? Leave your comments!

Voice-Enabled Gift Cards?

2009-02-04T14:54:00.000-08:00

Gift cards - we all get 'em and love 'em. Gift cards have sure taken the stress out of finding the perfect gift for Aunt Edna. They have also taken the stress out of receiving the perfect gift from Aunt Edna. "Gee, thanks for the coffee mug with matching sweater!" Can you ever imagine the day that gift cards will have the technology that enables you use them as a phone to call your Aunt Edna and thank her personally? Sound far-fetched? Perhaps. But let's turn it around a bit. Can you imagine the day that your mobile phone can be used as a gift card to make in-store purchases? Imagine no more. It's real and it's already being tested around the world. But what does this have to do with email? Lots - about $36 billion dollars' worth.

Thanks to the technology called Near Field Communication (NFC), financial transactions such as mobile couponing and gift card redemption can be done simply by touching your mobile phone to an NFC-enabled point of sale device and providing some type of security input. Simply put, NFC is one of the many varieties of "contactless technologies" being explored today. NFC is designed to operate over very short distances, typically less than 4cm, and is being seriously looked at in the world of mobile commerce - mainly because customers worldwide have confirmed that the mobile phone is the preferred form factor for contactless services.

Research firm Strategy Analytics estimates that mobile commerce conducted via NFC will facilitate over $36 billion of worldwide consumer spending by 2011. Nineteen of the world's largest mobile network operators (MNOs) have been working together in a Global System for Mobile (GSM) Association initiative to create and define a global approach to enable NFC services on mobile phones. Together, these nineteen MNOs represent about 45% of the worldwide GSM market, which addresses over 800 million customers.

So what does mobile NFC have to do with email? The fact that more and more consumers worldwide are reaching for their mobile phones for data services (including email) is already yesterday's news. Some consumers, in fact, are starting to use their mobile phones as their only means of viewing their emails. Emails viewed on mobile phones will be around for a long time. SMS messaging is very expensive for the marketer to do thanks to the market-killing practices of mobile carriers in the US.

Opt-in email marketing is the most cost effective channel today and will continue to be so tomorrow. Coupon promotions are well known to drive sales. But email is a digital medium hence coupon redemption is restricted to either digital transactions (e.g. a coupon code entered at time of purchase on an e-commerce web site) or it must be transformed into something physical (e.g. printing an email with the coupon to be redeemed at an outlet). New entrants to mobile marketing are experimenting with barcode images embedded within emails that are scanned by the point of sale reader. The details of this capability are still being worked out.

Mobile NFC will extend the power of email marketing to new heights. Brands - especially those having physical outlets - can extend all kinds of incentives and rewords to their customers. In the not-too-distant future, when you're reading your emails on your mobile phone, you'll see one from your favorite brand with a special offer to you. You click on the link where you go to a mobile site which will download the coupon or gift card which is now stored on your phone's SIM card. You go to the store, try on the size, style and color of the outfit you want, wave your mobile phone over the point of sale NFC reader and the coupon/gift card amount is automatically applied to your purchase. Security? Not a problem. Provide your thumbprint on your mobile phone's screen to verify the transaction and away you go.

Mobile NFC is still a tad in the future - at least here in the US. But don't wait! If you are a mobile marketer, start thinking now of how you can reach your customers with email campaigns tailor-made for your customers' increasingly mobile lifestyle.

Have you ever used your mobile phone to make a payment? How would you rate your experience? Leave me a comment!

Vis, Estee Lauder, Lancome, Clinique, Revlon...What Do You Recommend?

2009-01-29T08:28:00.000-08:00

Customer reviews technology vendor, Bazaarvoice, got a recent write-up in Internet Retailer. They've introduced a new social commerce application, MobileVoice, that creates a mobile web site for a retailer, and populates it with customer reviews listed by product category. This mobile web site lets shoppers search by keyword or by SKU number. Having this information handy really enhances the buyer's choice at a critical point of decision: in the retail store.

One of the first retailers to launch mobile reviews from Bazaarvoice is Sephora USA, Inc. "In-store shoppers can simply read the reviews on any product, or use top-rated products as a guide," so says Julie Bornstein, Sr. VP of Sephora Direct.

Once again, this new site shows that two of the hottest topics these days, mobile marketing and social networking, combine in a powerfully complimentary manner. There are so many cool ways to promote these types of social m-commerce applications - the least of which should include campaigns to their customers who subscribe to their email marketing promotions. It's already been proven that including customer product reviews, buyer recommendations, and Top Rated products in promotional emails increases sales.

So with Sephora, there's a high probability that many of their customers are reading those emails on their mobile phones. Put a link to the social m-commerce site in the email, then. Even better, put a shortened URL generated by tinyurl, bit.ly, is.gd, hex.io, or any others. This makes the URL more mobile-friendly.

Could Sephora also promote this site through SMS messaging campaigns? Sure; why not. But as I said before - there's a higher cost to SMS messaging than there is to email messaging. In today's down economy, budgets everywhere are getting squeezed. Just remember: mobile marketing isn't just SMS; using email for mobile marketing is a powerful compliment.

Do you use a social m-commerce site to get buying advice when you're in the store? If so, share your experience. If not, why not? Leave me your comment. I want to hear from you.

Mobile Marketing In More Than 140 Characters

2009-01-23T13:19:00.000-08:00

Last December, the Nielsen Company published their Top 10 Lists for 2008.

A fascinating list that stuck out to me was their Top 10 list of websites accessed over mobile devices.

Does it surprise you to learn that in October 2008, four of the top ten are for web-based email clients with two in the top three? Over 38 million people viewed their emails on their mobile devices in the month of October. If you are an Interactive Marketer, chances are that a substantial number of these people saw your marketing email. Note: these are personal emails, none of this corporate email stuff.

People checking their emails on mobile devices are probably doing it more frequently during the day than those who do so using their desktop computers. Would it not therefore behoove you, the Interactive Marketer, to create email campaigns just for mobile email readers? Think of the relevance! Think of the timeliness! All this talk about sending your emails at the "perfect" time of day becomes totally irrelevant. People reading their emails on desktop computers usually do it on set days and set times of the day. So as an Interactive Marketer, you have windows of time in which your subscribers and respond to your messages and engage with your brand. People reading their emails on mobile devices usually do it every day of the week (yes, even when they are on vacation) and frequently during each day of the week (and yes...even when they are on vacation!).

Text messaging campaigns are getting all the press when it comes to mobile marketing. I argue that email campaigns should not be discarded by the wayside. Consider these points:
- Email is w-a-a-a-y cheaper for you to send than SMS messages
(text messaging CPM rates are 5x to 10x more than email CPM rates)
- Email is quicker to deploy than SMS campaigns
(doesn't require the carriers to approve your email campaigns)
- Email is a richer experience than SMS campaigns
(pictures says a lot more than 140 characters!!)

Make your mobile messaging strategy mix to include both SMS and email messaging. The two are quite complimentary. Create HTML content for your emails that is formatted for the mobile screen. Thanks to the Apple, RIM, the Android Consortium and soon to be others, you have a lot more screen real estate than before.

I now want to hear from you! Do you read your personal email on a mobile device? How often? Daily? Several times during the day? Are you like me - do you read emails on your mobile device to "triage" your inbox and then view the remaining ones on your desktop computer later on when you have the time?

The Death of Email is Greatly Exaggerated

2009-01-07T12:36:00.000-08:00

I am often asked whether the popularity of text messaging means that email as a marketing channel will become passe. Gartner estimates that there were 1.9 trillion text messages sent across the major networks worldwide in 2007. But make no mistake about it - these messages were pretty much all peer-to-peer. Peer-to-peer communication always occurs on a vastly larger scale than does marketer-to-customer communication. Case in point: I can guarantee you that there are a heck of a lot more telephone conversations between friends and family on a Sunday night than there are between telemarketer and sales prospect.

The smart phone market is white hot right now. Devices from Nokia, Research in Motion, Apple, HTC, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Palm, Samsung, and many others are in high demand. To no surprise, people are using their mobile devices to read their emails. Just as the cell phone enables me to talk to anyone, anytime, and anywhere, the smart phone enables people to read their emails anytime and anywhere. Most people read their email when they are sitting at their computers - which can only be done on certain days and at certain times of the day. Imagine when more and more become emancipated from the temporal and physical constraints on the desktop computer thanks to their smart phones. What new, different, engaging, and more enriching types of communications could email marketers have with these people?

Text messaging as a marketing channel will not supplant email. There. I said it. This is a fact founded in Old-School economics. Carriers don't see 1.9 trillion text messages flowing across their networks. Instead, they see dollar signs, euro signs, yen and peso signs. They've discovered that they have a captive audience hence an inelastic economic model. In fact, they've doubled their text messaging rates even though the number of text messages have increased. And by the way, I'm refusing to drink the mobile carriers' Kool-Aid . All-you-can-eat data plans have absolutely nothing to do with why they raised their rates.

Text messaging is still in expensive channel - both for the consumer and for the marketer. Because it's so expensive as a marketing channel, the high cost causes low adoption. Email on the other hand is cheap; it's free for the consumer and very inexpensive for the marketer. The global economy is contracting and marketers everywhere are being asked to take a hard look at their ROI. Email will continue to prove itself an extremely effective marketing channel especially in the mobile world.

There's a lot of spaghetti on the walls

2009-01-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

Last year, Jupiter Research projected that firms would be spending up to $2.2 billion over the next four years on mobile marketing. So what's the big buzz? It's how to make mobile marketing messages relevant to the consumer and how to integrate it into the marketing mix. Seems to me that there's a lot of spaghetti being thrown on walls as marketers look for the few successful concepts that stick. Yogi Berra said it best, "This is like deja vu all over again."

Seems like there's a new agency specializing in mobile marketing springing up each week. But let's not forget about Email Service Providers - especially those providing agency services. (Full disclosure: yes, I do work for such a firm.) Email service providers have been providing insight into customer engagement for their clients over the past ten years. In my opinion, Marketing is a strategy, not a technology. Given the right strategy, the technology is irrelevant. And no technology - no matter how flashy - can rectify the wrong strategy.

I believe that email as a marketing communication channel will continue well through the next decade. Consider this: from its introduction in the summer of 2007 to the end of that year, the iPhone had captured a whopping 28% of the smartphone market by year's end. The numero-uno data function used by iPhone users? Reading email! And let's not lose site of the fact that reading email on mobile devices has been around for quite a long time thanks to the millions of devices running operating sytsems from RIM, Microsoft, Symbian, and Palm Source.

Mobile email is intriguing to me. No wait. It's REALLY intriguing to me. Consider this: people usually read their email being fettered by both a physical and a temporal constraint. The physical constraint is their computer - either tethered via a network/phone cable or at least within a Wi-fi hot spot. (Cellular modems? Oh pul-lease! WiMAX? Getting there but not yet as ubiquitous to my liking) The temporal constraint is the times of the day that they have access to their computers. Smartphones free us from the shackles of the physical and temporal constraints. People are checking their emails ANYtime and ANYwhere. (Those of you who check email while on The Throne...you know who you are!) As a brand marketer, what communication strategy could you develop if you now know that you can reach your customer anytime, any place? Would you have a different communication strategy to those who are out and about on a Tuesday afternoon versus one to those that are checking their emails at 10:00 at night after the kids are all in bed?