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.

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?

It can be difficult to explain the value of going to SXSW. I’ve been back for over a month now and I’m still processing information and insights from sessions like this one…

Session: Got great UGC, poor monetization?

Mundane though the point may be, SXSW is far from infallible when it comes to selecting panelists.  The session was billed as presenting ways to monetize user-generated content (UGC). The Lockerz people who did the session actually had no business addressing this topic because their platform is not about monetizing UGC – it’s about monetizing 13-30 year old eyeballs by offering brands a channel to reach these people (a.k.a. Generation Z) through Lockerz’ eStore and through on-site display ads.

Lockerz home page.

How the platform works

However, the Lockerz platform is interesting. It appeals to young people by leading with the promise of a monetary reward – deals on cool stuff kids want. It gives them these deals by rewarding them with points for practically every single action they take on the site. Users get points for uploading pictures, watching videos (yes, watching videos), answering trivia questions, listening to music, inviting friends to join, and of course, buying things. At any time, users can “cash in” the points they accumulate and buy something – and if they have enough points, discounts can be as high as 100% (you can check out the company’s intro video on YouTube here).

Does it work? Well, in just under a year, the site has amassed 17 million members. And presenters claimed that 25-30% of them log in at least once a day. Serious numbers.

Two things make this model interesting:

1. It doggedly “fronts” itself to the outside world as a community, not as a loyalty program or an ad platform or an eStore, even though it is clearly actually these things moreso than a community. In that sense Lockerz duped #SXSW in suggesting they are a community that monetizes UGC. A quick run through the site during the session made it obvious to me and to others that UGC is not the focus at all. UGC is in fact strictly a sideshow. I think this is sad, because it isn’t honest. And I can only assume the owners are being less than honest because they are afraid – afraid that if parents and advertisers knew the extent to which children were being manipulated into thinking they are part of a “community” there would be outrage. And maybe they’re right. It is a very 1984-feeling model. And I hate to say it, but my guess is this is just an awkward prototype compared to sleeker versions on virtual drawing boards today. After all, young people are both consistently coveted as a demographic and relatively easy to manipulate – and the success of Lockerz shows how these facts can be exploited to advantage.
2. Lockerz apparently supports itself mainly through advertising and through other paid product and media placements from major companies desperate to reach Generation Z. The platform is interesting in that it combines game theory, loyalty, e-commerce, and sharing in a way that seems to be working. They probably don’t make make much on the products sold in the store, but they are subsidizing those sales through online advertising and product/media placements, which are probably selling like hotcakes and for a very pretty penny (again, there is no demographic more coveted by advertisers today). That’s why it makes sense for them to try so hard to get and keep kids on the site as long as possible and as often as possible. But presenting the site as a “community” focused on UGC is just not accurate. The site and its users derive little or no benefit from the vast majority of UGC concerned. There is no real collaboration, idea sharing, life sharing, etc. between members. UGC here is strictly about either exposing kids to media/products or keeping them on the site and/or showing advertisers how “engaged” they are through their activity – thus justifying what are likely some of the steepest online ad fees you’ll find anywhere.

Is it just me or is this creepy?

Prototype for an Orwellian nightmare? Or just a kids’ version of your typical loyalty platform in fancy ”dudz”? You tell me…

Editor’s Note: This post was also published to the Gage Marketing blog.

Recently the inimitable pundit Brian Solis published a “Twitterverse” graphic. You can see it below and also where I originally found it here. 

I saw this because I was looking at a different solutions company that purports to connect marketers and advertisers with “influencers” across social media on a moment to moment basis through channels and brand platforms we all know. I’m constantly evaluating things like this for my clients. 

So, I read their limited website content and then decided to throw them a bone and follow them on Twitter. [This is what I consider to be the lowest form of affinity a user might opt into, by the way. It can be a way of saying, "I don't really know for sure whether your little venture is relevant, but I'll give you a shot on Twitter and maybe you'll put something great in front of me at some point. If you don't, well, no big deal. I'll just ignore your posts and/or maybe even unfollow you later." Of course other times I follow much more enthusiastically, but that's usually a more personally-prompted connection.] 

Anyway, the solutions company’s Twitter feed included something that caught my eye: yet another Brian Solis social media infographic, this time about the universe of solutions available to marketers for Twitter. 

I had to click on it, of course. This is what I saw when I got there: 

Graphic depiction of various solutions associated with Twitter

 Question for you: whose job is it in your company to know all these names and what they do? Who do you think knows the most about what all these things can do to make you a successful online marketer? The eMarketing Manager? The PR department, perhaps? Or more likely, the agencies you work with? What are we to make of this mess of options?

I believe that right now, none of these people have a solid grip on this stuff – and that includes Brian Solis (it takes more than basic categorization, alas). And this goes not only for the “Twitterverse”, but for the eMarketing solutions universe as a whole. The reason why is because it’s too damn big and it changes way too fast – and it’s growing at an ever-increasing rate. And guess what? No one has it in their job description to spend most of their time researching this stuff. We end up doing it as a (small) part of our real jobs and/or in our spare time. And we can’t keep up. And it’s getting worse. eMarketers are thus in a tough spot. 

One cause of this proliferation is that emerging media continues to evolve and grow in cool new directions. Every time something new materializes, a bevy of point solutions sprouts up practically overnight. This happens because programming and product development techniques have evolved to the point that new SaaS products and services can be created so cheaply and quickly that literally thousands of garage ventures with bona fide value-added point solutions can – and do – sprout. Overnight. 

One of the implications of this is that it’s hard to compare one social media service provider to another. The impossibility of any one of them really knowing the universe of technology solutions out there is only part of it. 

It’s also a question of results measurement. Social media impact can be measured, but you can’t really measure the benefit of one social media practitioner’s benefit against another’s. Oh sure, it’s possible – but ultimately it’s impractical. All one can really say is, “I use X practitioner, they do Y things for me, and they are getting me Z results.” 

Given the situation, another practitioner can always come along and take advantage of victims’ ignorance – by asking questions such as “Are you using the [insert esoteric technology solution here] or the [insert far-from-an-established-benefit keyword-seeding technique here]?” And the client is left without an answer and trying to decide what to do. Is the new provider really better or are they just telling you what they think you need to hear to convince you to switch? 

It’s a tough world out there, and a lot of snake oil salesmen (and women!). Having pointed this out, all I can suggest to marketing services buyers out there is to be wary. Talk to some of their current clients. Are the good to work with? Responsive? Do they bring well-researched, good ideas to you? Are they trying to understand your business and your role as a marketer? Do you trust them? Are they obsessed with getting you meaningful results (your definition of meaningful is what counts, by the way, not theirs)? And, I might add: Do they spend their Saturdays researching new stuff on your behalf? 

It’s not a perfect way to make such decisions, but it ought to be more pleasant than shopping for snake oil.

I’ve found myself asked this a few times of late by divergent questioners, from a small business marketer to a marketing executive at one of the world’s largest global companies.

It occurs to me that SEO appears to many to be people a dark, murky, misty part of the online marketing world – something like that swampy area outside of Mordor in Lord Of The Rings which the protagonists had to slog through to get to their destination. People know it’s important they move in this territory but they don’t know what’s there, and aren’t sure they want to find out.

OK, so what is SEO? The definition is simple, actually. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the practice of improving the performance of web properties by crafting webpages (and their links) to “optimize” the chance that these pages will appear in the first few pages of a search engine’s results page (SERP) for a given keyword search.

There. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Now for the inevitable wrinkles:

1. Back in the mid-90s when they really began to come into their own with the public, search engines used to only rank web pages for a given search based on eacg page’s content relevance to keywords users entered. Then SEO tacticians got good at fooling search engines into ranking their pages highly using what are called “Black Hat”- or illegitimate – tactics such as spamming. So in 1998, Google and their competitive ilk came up with a new way to rank pages that measured popularity in addition to relevance. Google calls their version of this methodology – one of the first of its kind and by far the most commercially successful – PageRank.
2. Lately (last 2-3 years) the focus in SEO has shifted from improving search engines’ popularity and relevance rankings for a given page by using link, title, meta, and keyword-rich content, to doing this PLUS adding Web 2.0 and Social Media platforms such as blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to improve popularity rankings and thus increase SERP rankings. These new tools and approaches work because popularity is (simply expressed) a function of how many visitors your site gets, how many sites linking to your site (and the popularity score of those sites, too), and in terms of relevance, how often your content is regularly refreshed (e.g., via blog posts or Twitter feeds).
3. Because 1 and 2 are not universally known, people hear bad things about SEO and believe them, which only increases the fear and loathing of SEO and fails to increase anyone’s knowledge or understanding. People hear bad things because there are still a lot of Black Hat practitioners out there, and SEO is also good fodder for pot-stirring online marketing bloggers who write provocative headlines like “All SEO practitioners are worthless” or “The only SEO you need is from developers” to get traffic and readers. Sad to say, such posts are generally successful at driving traffic because so many marketers are interested in SEO and so many of those are new to it and are highly impressionable.
4. Ethical SEO involves giving clients sound advice, such as the best way to display text and label pictures and tags. Ethical practioners also encourage clients to develop and maintain good web content (and show them how) and use back-linking techniques to increase the number of incoming links to a page, which in turn boost’s that page’s popularity score. Ethical SEOs also warn clients off from practices that might be seen by search engines as spamming. Ethical SEOs and search engines consider themselves partners who, by exchanging information and tips, together improve search quality. However, unethical SEOs and search engines are continually in a state of battle. Every time one side seems to have the upper hand, the other side comes up with a new way to regain an advantage. And although their relationship is adversarial, some believe they are an essential part of the web food chain, because they drive innovation and search R&D.

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.