Social Networking On the Go

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.

How To Build Your Worldwide Customer Base

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?

There's a lot of spaghetti on the walls

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?