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.

That headline has been bouncing around in my head quite a bit. Given I happen to be blogging from the momentary center of the interactive punditry universe – a.k.a. SXSW 2011 – it’s even more immediate.

Too often pundits (and the legions of pundit aspirants) spend more time crafting a controversial headline or capitalizing on a popular event, buzzword, or news item than trying to shine any real light on a subject.

It’s not that there isn’t any information on, well, pretty much whatever you want to learn about. And that’s a good thing. What’s not is that too much of what’s out there is not particularly accurate. Or insightful. Or useful. Or honest.

I have no answer to this problem. It’s a problem that doesn’t get written about much online (can’t imagine why!). In that sense it’s an elephant in the room that the concentric social circles of interactive punditry pretends isn’t there.

Why the elephant? A few thoughts:

• Visibility pays. Purchasers of consulting services find security in the idea that the person they hire is well-known and highly visible. But visibility and effectiveness are two different things, aren’t they? Here’s a little truism: in this business, those who focus on self-promotion are seldom very good at execution. The opposite is also usually true.
• Deadline frequency is much higher than “original thought or idea” frequency.
• Writers don’t have time to dig deeply into complex issues and/or do original research…
• …Or maybe they don’t know how… How many writers at the places you follow studied journalism and/or business?
• …Or care. How many even think adding real value is key to long term success? I wonder.
• A lot of authors that dominate the thought landscape aren’t doing much other than speaking, writing, etc. These people inevitably are talking about doing work much more than they are actually working.
• Authors are paid to generate content that gets clickthroughs – not to enlighten us. Readers are lured to content in myriad ways – often only to be disappointed and (occasionally) misinformed. But by the time a reader realizes they’ve been suckered, it’s too late. Time has been wasted, the page has a hit, and the only recourse left is to leave a scathing comment…but in this brave new online media world, that comment can be culled. Later it can be counted, summed with other comments, and put in an “engagement” chart (Twain’s “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” is in full force).

…So, other than personal ethics, there ain’t much incentive to avoid doing unhelpful things like:

• Writing a post that is equivalent to re-posting someone else’s original thoughts.
• Writing a post that doesn’t mention the likely bias of one or more sources because the conclusions derived are assumed to be well-received by readers.
• Writing a post with a headline that has been twisted for “maximum provocation” and has no relation to the article which follows it.
• Writing a post such that anyone remotely educated on the topic would find it so biased as to be worthless.

Not sure there’s an answer to this. Still – with apologies to Michael Stipe and R.E.M. – I feel better having screamed. Don’t you?

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

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.

Check out this great SlideShare presentation on LinkedIn titled SMAWG – Social Media Overview. Andrew Eklund is a friend and former colleague of mine who owns a local web marketing consultancy. The last several slides in particular demonstrate an unusually deep understanding of how Social Media is changing the online marketing landscape, as well as where it “fits” contextually relative to user behavior and marketing philosophy. When it comes to putting Social Media to work for business, Andrew sure knows his stuff.

I’ll just come right out and say it: the perceived value of an MBA is probably lower today than it has been at any time since universities starting offering the degree in the late 1800s.

I was catching up with an B-school professor friend of mine I’d met in school a few months ago. He was telling me about the newly-concluded summer session of classes and mentioned that he’d seen a major uptick in the number of student protesting when they got any grade other than “A”.

We discussed this for a time, considering the possible causes. Could it be a Gen Y/Millenial thing? Could it simply be the fact that the economy is bad and they don’t want to “slip up” by getting less than perfect grades, thus jeopardizing their ability to get quality employment? We supposed it could be both, plus maybe a few other factors unknown to us, and left it at that.

But a few weeks later, the conversation resurfaced in my mind, and I realized that these students are probably just naive. They actually think it’s worthwhile to protest getting a B in B-school. More significantly, they actually consider getting a grade to be an end rather than merely a means to an end.

Grades are little more than an imperfect measure of a student’s ability to go through the motions of learning – i.e., read articles, take tests, write papers, etc. [full disclosure: I got mostly A's, but I know a lot of people more successful than me who didn't.] Actual learning is something that typically requires doing these things, but is in fact a separate outcome.

So who does care about grades? Well, in an abstract, impersonal way, the school does – they have to measure you somehow, after all. Who else? Hopefully, the student. That’s it. No one else.

Why should the student care? Because their future success depends on it? No. They should care because getting to the real value of an MBA starts with handling the material, and that’s measured by grades. But that’s not the endgame; it’s only the first step. The whole value proposition might look something like this:

H + A + R + D = Real Value

Where:

H = Handling the material
Attending class, reading the assignments, taking tests, writing papers, etc. – in other words, the stuff that affects your grade.

A = Absorbing it
Thinking, discussing, making connections with content from other classes, comparing and contrasting learnings with real-world experience, etc.

R = Retaining it
Holding enough of the material near enough to your consciousness to retrieve it when it’s needed.

D = Doing/using it
Applying what you’re learned in school to real-life work challenges in an appropriate and effective way.

The only reason to care about grades is they measure your ability to do H in the equation above. To get to D, the endgame, you also have to do A and R, which are difficult. A lot of students don’t get to D, because getting there is HARD. Thus the acronym.

So grades should really only matter to the students and the school. If you got a B, you should only care because of what getting a B says about your likely ability to also do A, R, and D down the road.

Your thoughts?

Me: Hi. My name is Chris. I’ve been working in Marketing IT, Online Marketing, Product Development and eCommerce for 11 years. And I’ve never built my own blog.

(Voices of other Online Marketing professionals who’ve never built their own blogs): Hi, Chris.

Me: So, I guess it all started back in 2001. I was working as a creative director for a web dev shop in Minneapolis called Ciceron (they’re still around!) and they had a company blog, which I contributed to once or twice, but never built my own. I actually tried once. Used an early version of Movable Type. It sucked. I gave up after a few hours… (sob!)

Moderator: It’s OK. Go ahead, you’re among friends.

Me: (Pulls self together) Thanks. So I’ve doing ebusiness consulting lately and realized I really ought to build a blog to share and learn from others as a passionate practitioner of marketing, innovation, and product development. After all, I’ve been working in roles that require varying degrees of knowledge in these areas for most of the last decade.

(Voices of other Online Marketing professionals who’ve never built their own blogs): (Fearful Moan…)

Moderator: So, Chris, what did you do?

Me: I discussed the issue with a few colleagues to confirm what the best platform might be for my particular purpose. They suggested WordPress. I set up my own domain, and installed the software on my web server. I set up the database using cPanel. It was actually pretty easy!

(Voices of other Online Marketing professionals who’ve never built their own blogs): Oooooo!

Me: Yeah, I was surprised. As a design guy, I ended up doing a lot of futzing around with php to get everything looking and working the way I wanted it to, but it took me back to my old coding days a bit. The main differences between now and 2001 is the software is way easier to use and there are resources everywhere online to help with every aspect. Nice to see things have evolved.

Moderator: Well! Sounds like you’ve had quite a breakthrough. Let’s give Chris a hand. (Applause)

Me: Thank you… thanks… I’m glad I got that off my chest (takes a deep breath). Whoooo-yah!