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?

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.

To: Customer Service Center, http://www.cellphonesforsoldiers.com/

If you want people to donate cell phones for our soldiers (and it sure looks like you do!) my suggestions for increased success are as follows:

1) Make it obvious and clear what the correct donation process is for a user up front – and walk them through it step by step through your website. Don’t leave it up to the user to decide whether to delete the info on the phone. This should be built into the process because it’s a best practice. Because this is true, building it in will boost your credibility as a legitimate charity immediately and make it more likely that people will follow through.

2) Re: Deleting the info from the phone to be donated, the current process breaks down impossibly when it comes time to input phone model. Most people aren’t going to remember whether their *old* phone is a Razr V3C or V1H or A2Q, for example. They may not have used the phone in question for years, and most (like me) probably never knew the exact model. You need to explain how people can find out what version they have and make that as easy as possible to figure out via your own website.

3) Note the above items are necessary if you want to maximize the number of phones you get, and by extention, the number of soldiers you help. Don’t go thinking that because most of your current donated phones don’t use the data deletion feature that it isn’t important: many more would use it if it was easy to do and you made it clear it is a part of the standard process, and more people overall would actually donate, because they would know it is safe to do so.

4) By the way, are you REALLY refurbishing and donating these phones to soldiers? How do I know this isn’t a scam? How about showing me real soldiers using your phones? How about some testimonials? Maybe some press coverage from a reputable source? Also, if this is a legitimate charity, can I deduct this on my taxes? I know some of this is on the site, but it’s buried. You have to convince me this is legit on the first screen view; orient the landing page strategy around this and conveying the impression that this site makes it straightforward and easy to donate, with a well-thought out process.

Please let me know when the above issues are addressed, and I will gladly donate my phone and encourage others to do so as well! Thanks.

If you Google Sears Sucks, you’ll get about 317,000 results. So I’m hardly breaking new ground here. What I’d like to do is tell you is provide an example as to why Sears sucks, give you an opportunity to vent your spleen about Sears, and hopefully convince a few executives to pay attention and/or a few people to give up on Sears and shop elsewhere.

Excerpted from the recent annals of Sears’ home service web chat exit survey, which I recently took time to complete:

OK, if high-quality, efficient customer service is the point of all this, I have to laugh. First thing I did was Google “Sears service” plus my Sears’ location, hoping to find a direct number to call. No service number. Only a general number for the location. So I called that number. I then waded through a preposterously poorly designed phone bank – Service, which I found out is only findable directly if you happen to know in advance it’s called “Parts, Service & Repair” – might want to make the voice-recognition system recognize parts of that compound name and or similar names; got news for you Sears, no one is likely to know your precious little term for this offhand. Then I’m in “Waitsville” for about 20 minutes. While waiting, I thought I’d try to find something online and discovered the home services site. But there’s nothing in the UX that tells me where to go to get status on a repair!! So after several fruitless clicks, a chat invite automatically pops up. Note any UX person worth their salt will tell you that auto-triggered chat popups are a last-ditch option for bad websites seeking not to fail users completely. Nevertheless, still on hold, figured I might as well give it a try. Lo and behold, though I had to give the chat person more information than he should have needed to find the status – location and last name should have been plenty, not that plus phone and home address which they ALREADY HAVE – collecting it again for “security reasons” for an appliance repair is preposterous) he DID get the status eventually; ironically, I got my answer literally at the same moment as someone finally took my phone call. I hung up when they said hello. Elapsed time: 33 minutes of my precious Saturday, just to find out if my vacuum was ready to pick up. Now, I ask you: is this good customer service?

More to the point, is that really the best a struggling American corporation can do for its’ customers??? What the heck going on over there??

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.

How has the phenomenal growth of Minneapolis-based content strategy agency Brain Traffic come to pass? Serendipity? Hard work? Probably a bit of both?

Kristina hit on something that has been horribly askew with online marketing, and she’s been remarkably successful at evangelizing a better way. In building web-based marketing assets (websites, microsites, web-delivered applications, etc.) marketers have made great online content an exception, rather than the rule. Yet success still depends on creating great user experiences, and that means marketers must relearn the art of incorporating and managing great content. Good to see this trend happening, as it should improve the web for everyone: