We’ve been hearing about mobile marketing for years. But until recently most pundits would only point the misty future and say “It’s coming! We just don’t know when it will be here!”

At last, it is safe to say mobile is most definitely in play. But we tend to see a wide range of interest and knowledge among marketers, which reminds me of social media circa 2008/9. Back then, most were asking fairly basic questions about social - what it is, what it means, etc. The usage numbers back then were rapidly increasing and already so astonishingly huge at that time that it really shocked marketers; the ensuing scramble for knowledge and understanding is still playing itself out to this day. That said, almost no one raises an eyebrow anymore when you mention “social media strategy”. They might ask you to be more specific, but they don’t question the concept or the need.

But that’s not necessarily so today when it comes to mobile. Does your organization have a mobile strategy? Based on experience, I’d have to bet it doesn’t. You may have run one or two pilot projects, and by now have an app or a mobile-ready website. But no long-term, holistic plan.

And the thing is, mobile is already plenty big enough to merit having a plan. And it’s going to keep getting bigger.

1. Most experts suggest that by 2014, more internet sessions will happen on mobile devices than on PCs. There are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers (that’s 77 percent of the world population). Growth is led by China and India.What other medium offers that reach?
2. Mobile devices sales rose in 2010, with smartphones showing strongest growth, Nokia remains number one in both smartphones and mobile phones, but Android is expected to become the top OS for new smartphones in 2011.
3. Feature phones sales (let alone ownership) still outnumber smartphones 4:1. If your mobile strategy doesn’t include feature phones, it doesn’t include most of your customers.
4. Top mobile network operator for subscribers and revenues is China Mobile; for average revenue per user is 3UK; for lowest monthly churn is NTT DOCOMO Japan; and for proportion of revenues from data is Smart Philippines. But it’s not all good news. Mobile operators in developed countries could run out of profit in the next two to four years if they do not change their business models.
   (source: Mobithinking.com)

In light of all this, here are a few interesting (disturbing?) things you should probably already be addressing:

• Mobile IS social: 91% of mobile internet access is to socialize. Are your Facebook apps mobile-ready? Is any aspect of your Facebook experience mobile-purposed? These questions are merely examples. There are more than 350 million active users [44 percent] currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook as non-mobile users. – Facebook official statistics (November, 2011).
• The mobile marketing universe has probably expanded since you last looked. What haven’t you yet tried/considered? Near-Field Communication (NFC), Mobile device security, Mobile cities, Device detection, Mobile health (m-health), B2B mobile marketing, Mobile research (m-research), Mobile barcodes, Mobile applications: native v Web apps, Design for mobile, SMS marketing, Mobile social networking. Lot of potential ground to cover here.
• The way people use search is going to change because they will increasingly be doing so on mobile rather than a PC. This represents a huge threat and concurrent opportunity for Internet marketers, and it is only those that can truly appreciate how the Internet will be consumed via these various new mobile devices that will prosper. A few examples*:
• Using mobile to type-search. Using a traditional keyboard to enter a search query into Google is usually easier and quicker than doing the same on a mobile device. It is highly likely therefore that users will search for shorter keyword strings on mobile devices, or rely more heavily on tools such as predictive text or Google Suggest. This will likely influence the way sites optimise their content and carry out their link building.
• Search by image. Tools such as Google Goggles allow users to very quickly search the Web using images on their phone or photos taken on the fly. Applications of this technology include taking a picture of a book in a store to find the best price, or using the picture of a restaurant front to find customer reviews. Ensuring your content and imagery are optimised for this form of search is likely to become increasingly important.
• Sociability.  91% of mobile Internet access is to socialize, compared to 79% on desktops. If Internet marketers haven’t been listening to the “search turning social” talk of recent years, then they certainly should be now. If they still cannot engage with individuals and groups on a social level they will be missing out on a massive proportion of mobile Internet usage.
  (*Source: Duncan Heath via Forbes.com)

Let us know if you’d like to talk mobile strategy. We’re all ears (and thumbs!)

This post was also published to the Gage Marketing Blog.

So, my last post was about how the integration of search and social has the potential to transform search in a good way. Scott Bryden, my analytics counterpart at Gage, then wrote me the following note:

Hi Chris,

I read your blog post.  Good stuff man.  I have a question for you.  After the webinar, it occurred to me that if Google incorporates their +1’s into search results, what’s to stop someone from trying to “artificially” manipulate this variable as well.  Will you be able to run a promotion and require someone to +1 your site as consideration for entry?  Or have they already thought through that and it’s not allowed as part of the terms and conditions?

– Scott

Great point, Scott. First the short answer: we don’t know yet. Google hasn’t given any explicit guidance that I could find on what brands can and can’t do to entice users to “+1″ them, or add them to their Google+ Circles (by the way, you heard it here first: “Circle me!” is probably going to take on a whole new meaning once Business get active in G+). I do know that shadowy types are already offering clandestine services to game the +1 system. So it has already begun…

But let’s consider the dark side of integrating search+social more broadly. I used this PPT slide in a recent pitch to illustrate a point on Facebook strategy:

Makes sense, right? Brands that put out a Facebook presence dominated by salesy deals and such to win fans will naturally tend to attract low-value, “mercenary” fans who will seldom if ever do anything valuable for them. Conversely, brands that cater to and encourage a bona-fide fan base will attract fans that will actually do something of value for the brand if asked. Of course the challenge is then to put ways to generate value in front of those true fans, e.g, activities that help build awareness, increase engagement, drive conversions and advocate for you.

But because of its implications on search, the integration of social + search has the potential to turn this paradigm into a much more mercenary thing – for example, a brand in Google+ won’t necessarily have a business obligation to care at all why you +1 or add them to your G+ Circles, because those acts are beneficial ends in and of themselves. Each “end” has a direct immediate potential benefit to their search outcomes – regardless of what you, the fan, might choose to do at any time thereafter.

Note that the Actual Value to Business was once a green triangle – but now it’s a fat trapezoid. This is obviously different than the Facebook model, where you still have the essential task of coaxing a new fan to do things of actual value before you can make any statement about the business benefit you’re getting from them. A dark side, indeed.

On the other hand, you could make the argument that adopting a totally mercenary strategy in G+ will be transparent to audiences and turn them off. But surely, effectiveness for G+ will end up being somewhere north of the level of “mercenary-ness” that represents the virtual ideal for a brand in FB? What do you think?

Note: This post was also published on the Gage Marketing blog.

A few thousand people saw our Google+ slideshow in one of  its various incarnations on SlideShare, volume which blew anything we’d done in the past away. I also did a webinar last week for Gage clients and a blog post last week on the upshot of G+ for marketers – you can check that here.

To briefly recap the webinar, we believe G+ is indeed going to work, for a few specific reasons. Brands who are dependent on SEO and PPC in Google (which owns 70% of the search market) will flock there because they will feel they have to, even though the network only has about 25 million users. The smarter brands will try hard to get their fans on Twitter and Facebook to come over to G+ and engage there as well, offering them exclusive interactions, promotions, etc. They’ll do this mostly to protect and (maybe) improve their Google search results, but also because the connection between +1s, G+, and search outcomes will be made clear in the analytics package that comes with G+ Profiles for Business (a nice departure from Facebook). Meanwhile Google also bought Motorola. Now Google will have a much greater ability to dictate to android OS handset makers to build experiences on par or better than what they can (and will) build themselves. The Motorola acquisition also gives Google a huge leg up in the battle with Apple over control of the home. But I digress.

In a year, G+ will have 100 million-plus members and we’ll all be wondering again at the incredible speed of massive change in this crazy business. It’s all well and good.

I want to talk now about what will happen next: the total integration of search and social.

You know who Facebook has a strategic partnership with? B-I-N-G. Microsoft chose to ally itself with Facebook years ago after acquiring a small ($240 million, ~1.5%) piece of the startup. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that Bing and Facebook will find themselves increasingly driven into each other’s arms as Google+ takes off.  Microsoft’s purchase of Skype came only weeks before Facebook unveiled a video chat client using the technology. Bing has already fully integrated Facebook’s social graph to show which friends have liked your search results. Even Windows Phone 7’s “People” tab has deeper integration with Zuckerberg’s social network than any competing OS. Bing and Facebook  will roll all this out with increasing urgency to compete with the sudden huge threat coming from Google. If Facebook is smart, they’ll work a Bing deal in such a way that they can also integrate personal recommendations into Yahoo and Ask and putting Google in search/social in the same boat as Apple is in the mobile market – vertically integrated, but isolated too.

So what will THAT mean for marketers? WOM recommendations are going to be more important for businesses than they already were, because they’re going to matter in “e” at the point of attraction and conversion. It’s going to be really hard to be a “quiet” company – especially a “quietly bad” company – anymore. It also means that more and more, every time a company has a good transaction with a customer, they are going to have to ask that customer to undertake a dizzying array of follow-on WOM activities, such as:

• Like us on Facebook (needed to keep those Bing results up, you know)
• Add us to your Circles on G+ (needed to keep Google search results healthy)
• +1 this service on the webpage that describes it. Oh, and could you “Like” it, too?
• Share it with your friends on countless other social networks, email, SMS, etc.

If they’re particularly enlightened (and wired), they’ll offer the customer a discount on the next transaction for each of these activities as well.

Until now, search results have been driven by two core variables: Relevance and Popularity. In the new era of the Person, you will have relevance, popularity, and  personal recommendations. And I think that’s a good thing. Search is a bit of a mess these days – in SEO, there are all kinds of bizarre actions sometimes recommended by practitioners to improve perceived relevance and popularity. A lot of it is a lot of work, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the business itself. With PPC, results are mostly just a function of the highest bidder. Both of these fields are currently such a far cry from rewarding the company with the best product or service and who is most pleasant to work with, it makes you wonder. Personal recommendations, at least for now, are hard to fake, and are directly related to the quality of the product or service offered as experienced by someone you trust.

Strikes me as a probable improvement.

Note: This post was also published on the Gage Marketing Blog.

The deck below was created for a webinar conducted for Gage clients on 8/11:

The “ah-ha” was (finally) getting to a logical vision of Google’s underlying strategy for G+: in other words, how +1′s, Google+ and Google search are intended to work together to essentially force brands to “care” about G+, and be active there to defend and/or improve their own paid and organic search results.

Here’s how and why the land rush is going happen:

1. Opportunistic brands will see the imperative to defend and/or improve their Google search-based conversions (Google owns 85% of search, so this is relevant to pretty much every brand) and realize the importance of making early investments on Google+ for Business to attract and engage users. They will set up Business Profiles as soon as they are available. This will happen in 8-10 weeks, probably early/mid October 2011.

2. Opportunistic brands will immediately use every means at their disposal – especially exclusive promotions – to lure fans to their brand on G+, because it will be obviously worth it to them to do so, thanks to the value-oriented analytics Google+ Profiles for Business will almost surely bring to the table. More cautious brands will not understand for a while why their Google search performance is declining. And when they do figure it out, it will probably take quite a while for them to take effective action. So there will definitely be a first-mover advantage here.

3. #2, in turn, will result in a lot of everyday social users gradually shifting their activity away from Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin to G+, because all the best brands are going to be doing and offering a lot of cool, exclusive stuff in G+ to attract them.

One funny thing about this is that even if the search implications weren’t there, brands will trip all over themselves to get up and running in G+. The evidence of that is plain from the brouhaha over companies’ setting up personal profiles – against Google’s clearly-stated wishes – shortly after the G+ beta launched on June 28.

So: G+ is coming. Are you ready?

One of the more interesting things learned at last week’s Social Media ROI Salon in Redmond, WA concerned the latest changes to Facebook Pages.

With the changes, the default setting of the News Feed will only show status updates from friends and posts from Pages you’ve recently engaged with in some way. Users will have to know how to change this to make it work like it used to. Also, it will become much easier to “Hide” or “Unlike” a page (the earlier design tacitly discouraged such things by making it relatively difficult to do so).

Sounds innocent enough, but it isn’t. For marketers, it means what once was free and easy is now going to be harder and/or cost money. It’s practically analogous to what happened when Google started offering paid search listings alongside organic ones (remember that?!).

One of the best things about Facebook had been its inherent excellence at generating free viral spread of content through “Liker”‘s News Feeds. If a user “Liked” a brand, it meant that brand’s subsequent posts and activity would show up in their Feeds indefinitely unless or until the user “Unliked” the brand… which statistics indicate hasn’t tended to happen more than 1-3% of the time. So as long as you just managed publishing and interaction well, you stood a good chance of growing a good following through viral spread of posted content alone.

Say what you want about Facebook management, but they aren’t dumb. Most of the changes we’re seeing appear intended to:

• Make marketers “pay to play” (News Feed, Unlike/Hide)
• Increase marketers’ level of control over their own Facebook presence to increase willingness to shift development dollars away from traditional platforms (e.g., websites) and toward Facebook (FBML deprecation, adoption of iFrames)
• Make Facebook increasingly critical by offering easy, effective intercommunication between brands’ non-Facebook (e.g., website) and Facebook presences, and between users who engage with those presences and their extended social networks (commenting Plug-in)

The changes mean marketers are going to have to work much harder – and pay! – to get attention in Facebook. It also means brands who have already built a large following are now at a decided advantage over their slower-moving competitors, because the slow movers will have a much tougher time building a similar level of fans. With Facebook’s new intercommunication plug-in, brands will also have to adopt more integration between Facebook and their web pages, further insinuating Facebook into users’ online lives, and making it much harder for any brand to ignore Facebook publishing and engagement in budgeting.

Brands also have to be aware of some very specific things these changes are likely to cause:

• First, brands’ “unlike” rate is going to go up. Now, all it takes is one undesirable post, and the user can “unlike” or “hide” you. The links are right next to the post itself – couldn’t be any easier for users:
  
• Second, brands’ organic “like” growth rate is likely to go down. It’s going to be more difficult to get viral impressions now, and that’s going to affect all value-generating metrics in Facebook – awareness and engagement in particular are going to be harder to come by.

How to respond? First, there’s not much marketers can do about the overall situation. As long as Facebook continues to command the attention of our target audiences, it also demands our attention. The power lies with the people, and, for now at least, the people have chosen Facebook.

Marketers are going to have to play the hand we’re dealt. To wit:

• Use the new tools. Increase the conversation happening on websites to offset the disadvantages of changes to the News Feed.
• Choose a great engagement and publishing platform and provider. Careful management of content publishing and engagement management is now even more important. If you don’t use a platform that lets you measure fan engagement, active fans and
  interactions by post, you might want to consider investing in one now. And be sure choose someone you can trust to watch and optimize your publishing and engagement activity (like Gage!).
• Step up efforts to win engagement. To avoid disappearing from your fans’ News Feeds, it is more important than ever to keep fans engaging through compelling content, applications, and promotions that get them interacting and sharing with friends.

Alas, the gap between Facebook Haves and Have Nots is about to widen considerably; make sure you’ve done what you can to ensure your brand is on the right side of that divide.

Got comments, questions, or cries of outrage? Fire away!

Note: This post was also published on the Gage Marketing Blog.

Recently, I helped a consulting client put together a new web-tech-based strategy for growth. We used a combination of tried-and-true innovation techniques and industry- and company-specific stuff that seems to have worked very well, so thought I’d quickly share what we did:

1. Define the problem(s) (Drucker Methodology: Define the Central Problem)
   Drucker makes a big point of isolating ONE problem. While I appreciate the reasons for doing this, in practice, making a point of stating the “one problem” to your client can be stating the obvious, and also is sometimes not the best starting point for solutioning. On the other hand, when a client hands you a set of challenges it is definitely helpful to assess whether there is an overarching theme that ties them all together. In this case, the “one problem” was that the industry’s value chain had evolved and was out of sync with company strategy. Stemming from this unstated “one problem” were a  set of problem statements involving various aspects of the company’s operations and marketing. So, whether one tells the client to start with the “one problem” or accepts their thematically-unified framing of the problem and just keeps the “one problem” in mind while in process, it is key to understand the problem(s) thoroughly and ensure all involved in brainstorming understand them as well. If there is more than one problem and there is no thematic linkage between them, they should be handled separately.
2. Develop a solution ideation plan
   Leadership already had a general idea of how they wanted to work on solutions, so the consulting challenge was to help flesh out a plan and it was executed efficiently. We gathered a diverse team of experts for a closed-door, one-day ideation session. Some participants had deep expertise in the company, others had expertise in potential markets and technologies that leadership identified as likely fertile ground for innovation and growth. Outside participants were to be compensated and non-disclosure agreements signed. As an outside consultant and a solution space expert, my role was to gather key information from internal and external sources, develop written guidance to prepare participants in advance of the meeting, moderate the meeting itself, and create final written recommendations including next steps and mid- and long-term goals.
3. Gather information and create a narrative for participants to absorb in advance
   I gathered background information to understand the problem/solution universe in a series of meetings with key management. Initially, I met with four of their management team; once I understood better the dynamics of the team, I homed in on one or two team members to get deeper-dive answers. I did this to minimize  involvement of team members and to encourage in-depth conversation, asking specific questions about market conditions, operations, marketing resources and capabilities, etc. In this case, that person was the Marketing lead, because marketing was the central to the challenges at hand. As I gathered information, I put together a narrative of the situation complete with supporting company and industry data. The final narrative was a combination of information authored by myself and management. I also included a description of the purpose of the session and the agenda. Overall, this document was critical: by developing a shareable narrative of the company and the relevant problem/solution space, I could be confident that all participants would start from a baseline understanding and that I could effectively guide the session, fading back or directing as needed.
4. Conduct the brainstorming session
   The session itself was comparatively easy and enjoyable. I emphasized informality but strove to enforce a policy of respect for everyone’s point of view (e.g., no squelching!). In this case, the group was comprised of respectful but strong-willed people, so there was little need to suppress dominant participants or encourage shy ones. While it can be a risk to use a group for ideation (groupthink, for example, is one cause for concern) I believe that the combination of independent preparation combined wit the group working session can be optimally effective. By engaging several well-prepared knowledge experts in a controlled working session, we were able to develop solutions on one day that might have taken weeks for a single consultant to identify and elaborate alone. With this approach, keeping the session on task and on-time was relatively easy. I took copious notes, both personal, in a notebook, and for the group on a whiteboard, and engaged a second note-taker as well to help ensure the outcome was balanced. This was also worth doing because, after all, note-taking had to take a back seat to mediation at times.
5. Summarize findings and make recommendations
   The big payoff! This task was time-consuming, yet pleasant. I gathered up all the notes, which I was careful to record in such a way as to make this part easier, and wrote the final document. The task involves: restating the problem(s); listing relevant decision factors; delineating the solutions (or ideas) developed; explicitly stating how they will address the problems; and finally, creating plans to pursue each solution, broken out into immediate, mid, and long term goals.

I think the above approach worked very well mostly for two reasons: First, I did enough research and shared it with participants to ensure everyone was empowered to provide maximum value in the session itself. Second, I kept the endgame – a series of actionable, rationalized recommendations – in mind both for myself and for all participants.

Have you attempted to use techniques like this to jump-start innovation? Let me know what worked (and didn’t!) for you.

Consider the plight of today’s economists. Only a few short years ago their profession was at new heights of respect and consensus. Now, “economist” is a curse word on the lips of every unemployed person in America.

Prior to the onset of the financial crisis and the “Great Recession” of today, Alan Greenspan once famously stated that he believed “systemic financial risk had largely been eliminated,” in part through the advent and spread of various new financial innovations. Most everyone who cares to has heard about this enough times to have this line practically memorized by now.

However, what isn’t heard very often is consideration of what Greenspan said shortly after the crisis had really set in. In October 2008 testimony to angry members of Congress, Greenspan testified that his prior assessments stemmed from an ideological belief that financial system participants would regulate their own activities out of a sense of professionalism and risk-aversion. In short, he failed to consider that actors in the financial and credit industries were motivated by other factors, such as a systemic preoccupation with short-term returns – e.g., participants taking a herd mentality toward activities that pushed to the very edge of legality and beyond, and with no consideration for risk – everyone was doing it, so how could it be risky? The irony of this seems to have been lost on the media, and maybe on us as well.

The significance of this is hard to overstate. The Fed Chairman – by way of providing an excuse to the American people – essentially blamed the people in the system for the financial meltdown we are still enduring today. I would’ve asked, but Mr. Chairman, hadn’t these people always acted in a quintessentially predictable way? E.g., in what they believed to be their own self-interest? What was hard to predict about that? Wasn’t it obvious by early 2008 that participants had, out of competitive necessity if not pure greed, stopped critically assessing risk in their decision-making out of self-interest?

As someone who has at times been tasked in the past to drive change in large organizations through introduction of new or redesigned systems, I am trying to take away a few key learnings from this collapse:

1. To build or manage a system well, the “people” variable must be understood. Strive to consistently understand motivations and create incentives to ensure desired behavior.
2. There’s no monopoly on poor judgment when building and managing systems in which people are a critical variable. It will surely continue to occur at the highest levels of politics, government, and business management.
3. Group-think kills. Taking conventional wisdom at face-value, being overconfident, over-focus on executives in attributing success or failure, etc. are lazy and dangerous modes of thinking. Constant critical assessment and independent thinking are still required.

What else? I’m sure there are other considerations. Let me know.