Digiday Mobile – Who’s Coming With Me?

I’m going to be in Los Angeles on Monday for Digiday: Mobile participating in a panel about location-based services – a topic that has been getting a lot of attention recently.

The Digiday panel, entitled “Location, Location, Location,” should be a very informative discussion about LBS – where carriers fit in; overcoming privacy concerns; the basics on geofencing and the technology that drives mobile marketing LBS; and ROI-tracking.

I’m very much looking forward to sharing the panel with reps from Verizon, NAVTEQ, JiWire and Geodelic.  And I am especially excited to share the stage with Steve Madden and to hear more about that brand’s mobile plans.

You can find the full Digiday agenda here.

If any Mobile Demystified readers will be in attendance, I’d love to meet up.  You can reach me at msilk@waterfallmobile.com.

See you in L.A.!

– Matt

Don’t Just Dive In To Social Media

Many high profile brands are using social media these days.  But beware: just opening a Twitter and Facebook account won’t automatically help you reach your business goals.  Social media strategy is just as important as social media itself – perhaps more so.

Yes, you should definitely activate some sort of social media for your brand.  If not, a more visible, more social competitor may edge out your market share.

But you need to set clear goals for what you want to accomplish with social media.  Defining success early is a smart way to monitor ROI.

As e-Marketer recently pointed out in an article on strategy in social media, with more and more brands in the social media game, the bar keeps being raised on what users expect.  Only the savviest will survive.

On the consumer side, users of social media know the difference between those companies that are “faking it” and those that are legitimately immersed in social media.

For instance, despite their recent difficulties with Kevin Smith, Southwest Airlines is clearly invested in Twitter.  Dunkin’ Donuts is clearly invested in both Facebook and Twitter, and has appointed a specific employee (“Dunkin’ Dave”) to be the chain’s social media face.

Equally as important as “real”ness is keeping a close watch on how social media marketing reflects your overall brand direction.  If it does not, consumers will either be confused or, worse still, annoyed that they seem to be getting contradictory messages from the same company.  Starbucks in particular has done a great job of making sure that all company voices are whistling the same tune.

To kick-start a social media plan, determine what your organization wants to use social media to accomplish.  This can range from brand-building to lead generation to relationship building.  e-Marketer recently found 82% of brands are using social media for brand-building; most likely, your strategy will be a combination of multiple goals.

Remember, just like in life, relationships take time to build – and you should expect the same from the social media world.  You need to commit time to getting the results you are looking for.

Location, Location, Location

Today Waterfall Mobile is announcing a new strategic partnership with WaveMarket to power location-enabled mobile messaging.

As Mobile Demystified readers know, I’ve had LBS (location-based service) on the brain recently, and that’s because of this exciting new capability that will now be available to Waterfall customers.

WaveMarket’s Veriplace® product can access the location of all 125MM phones on the AT&T and Sprint networks with no application download required.  Waterfall will be able to leverage that capability to bring still more targeted location-aware marketing to Msgme’s already robust skill set.

The full press release on Waterfall + WaveMarket is here.

Benefit from Mobile – E-Commerce Times

I recently wrote a post for E-Commerce Times covering ways to leverage the mobile channel.

As we all know, mobile is a great way to drive sales and is an excellent addition to any marketing and advertising campaign you have running.

In the post, I run through some mobile no-brainers – SMS store locators, mobile subscription lists, and mobile websites – to more innovative ideas such as adding location-based services and offering SMS ordering.

You can read the full post here.

If you have any questions on using mobile to drive purchases, feel free to give me a shout at: msilk@waterfallmobile.com.

– Matt

May the Best Ad Win – Period.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article called “Giving Mobile Ads a Makeover.”  The gist of it being that with all the hubbub surrounding the iPad, on-the-go advertising may soon become a mainstream advertising technology.

Haven’t we heard this before?  With this new different ad sizes, interactivity options, CPC/CPA/CPM, etc., all of our mobile ad prayers will be answered. Here’s my question.  Does this same story deserve all of the hype it’s been getting over the last few months?  The iPad may well mean a renaissance for mobile advertising – which would be fantastic.  But, is a new ad type of size/shape really the nirvana that deserves this much ink?

Reaching your customers and prospects in this fragmented multichannel on-the-go world is what we should be talking about.  Let’s spend our cycles discussing and solving those problems for the industry rather than looking/expecting to find a silver bullet in the ad space. The variety of channels marketers now have to address to reach consumers presents a huge challenge and I would love to see more press and op-ed articles helping us solve that business issue.  Not only do marketers need to craft messaging that works in the context of each individual channel, they also need to keep an eye on ROI and track user engagement within each technology vertical.

It’s no longer a world of the Internet and email only.  Now mobile, social media and portable gaming devices are a part of the daily fabric of people’s lives.  Even my refrigerator is a connected device…  How best to insert brand messaging into that web of technology and habits?  And what types of messages, in what permutations, will actually stick – and be effective? Look for some interesting announcements in the coming quarters from Waterfall as we take these issues head on!

It’s no secret that the big guys, as well as the start-ups, have been nipping at the heels of marketers in the technology space, hoping to be the company/technology/app that takes mobile advertising from “small banner ads and spammy texts” into the big leagues.

What the news media has failed to recognize is that with all of these new technologies, there has to be a unified sense of consistency and brand unity, whatever the media.  It’s also worth pointing out that not every mobile user actually has access to the mobile internet, let alone the iPhone, or the latest gadget of the moment, the iPad.  A diverse digital messaging strategy that doesn’t alienate potential customers is sound policy in this fast-moving situation.

Let me step off my soapbox and get back to the original point of this post. Bottom line,: yes, mobile advertising will fully mature, and it will do so in line with market demand.  Relevance needs to go hand-in-hand with media and creative.  In short, may the best ad win and let’s get back to work.

Don’t Bet Against Mobile Coupons

Time and again, mobile coupon redemption rates have proven to be exceptional when employed as part of both pilot and real-world marketing programs.

As Mobile Marketer concisely put it,

According to Forrester Research, 30 percent of consumers would like to receive mobile coupons.

Redemption rates for mobile coupons range from 5 percent to 15 percent, which is much higher than typical print coupon rates of 1 percent or less.

Thus I’m a little puzzled by this survey from Honeywell and Harris Interactive – which our friends at eMarketer have teed up with the headline “Consumers Slow to Take Advantage of Mobile Coupons.”

Really?  According to the survey, 50% of 18-to-34 year-olds said they would be willing to share their mobile numbers with retailers in order to receive coupons.  To me that screams “green light.”

Maybe the issue is how the questions were phrased – something that has been shown to substantially impact polling in political campaigns.  Obviously, if you ask somebody if they want more advertising in their lives…they’ll probably say no.

But as this generation ages, digital life – specifically organizing one’s activities, shopping and entertainment through mobile devices – will become the norm.  In fact, it already has.  What’s lagging is significant participation by major brands, which will mature mobile coupons as an established marketing channel.

Mobile couponing can take several forms:

• 2D bar codes
• QR codes
• Text coupons
• Calls-to-action driving customers to mobile Internet sites
• Calls-to-action driving customers to mobile apps
• Mobile sites that are themselves coupons
• Mobile apps that are coupons
• ….Or some combination of all of the above

I’ve already moved past the question of “whether or not mobile coupons will catch on.”  They will.  Trust me.  The real horse race is which of these competing technologies, and factions within the ecosystem, will win the day to power mobile couponing and other marketing efforts for major brands.

Oh, and one last thing to watch out for –

The killer app that could permanently dispense with any confusion in this arena will be cloud-based “closed loop redemption systems.”  These systems will allow a retailer to redeem a coupon from any of the above listed channels within their cloud, and will also give retailers the opportunity to seamlessly push coupons out to multiple channels.

Happy couponing, everybody.

Credit Where Credit is Due

Mobile Demystified is the in-house blog for Waterfall Mobile – so we rarely, if ever, give air time to our distinguished competitors in the digital messaging space.  But I do have to hand it to Hipcricket’s Jeff Hasen.

His Mobile Marketer essay on the more or less total lack of a mobile presence during the Super Bowl is right on point: precise, funny, indignant, and full of good ideas.

If linking to a competitor – once – is all I must do in order to get major brands to incorporate mobile calls-to-action in their Super Bowl ads, then so be it.

– Matt

PS: Am I the only one who misses the Bud Bowl?

Google – To Text or Not To Text?

Google recently launched a pretty cool program that links online content to real world locations with their new QR-code based program, “Favorite Places on Google.”

For the program, Google identified the 100,000 most searched stores in the US and provided those stores with a barcode to place on their windows. Consumers can now scan the barcode with their cell phones to get more information on the business, including reviews, coupons, or an option to review the business. The program is based around Google’s “Local Business Center.”

You can read about it on MobiADNews here.

Obviously there is one big problem with the program – only people with barcode readers installed on their phones can use it.

Sure, more and more people are buying smart phones and utilizing App stores, but how many are really using barcode readers? Wouldn’t it be smarter to incorporate a messaging side to this program so all 270 million mobile subscribers can participate?

The Company currently has a popular SMS option in place that allows consumers to text in the name of a location to 466453 (Google) and receive a message back with the business’ address and phone number. Why not take this option to the next level? Decals could continue to have the barcode but also include a keyword and a Google short code. Any costs could be offset by selling the messaging costs back to the businesses.

After all, Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Wouldn’t making the “Favorite Places on Google” accessible via SMS make the information more universally accessible?

Not to mention, SMS could be another potential revenue stream for them by selling mobile messaging packages into the SMB market.

Great Outlook for Interactive Marketing

Forrester recently released their “US Interactive Marketing Forecast” for 2009-2014, and the outlook is good.

Forrester is predicting that interactive marketing (including email marketing, social media and mobile) will become a more significant part of the overall marketing mix in the coming years, which is expected to grow to an impressive $55 billion by 2014, and to increase from 12 percent of the overall marketing spend to 21 percent.

Over the next several years, mobile marketing is expected to grow by 27 percent and social media by 34 percent. Social media has the steepest expected growth as marketers continue to try and keep up with the consumers increased use of social networking sites, which has surpassed email as the primary source of communication in 2009, according to Nielsen Online.

The increase in mobile data usage, continued development of mobile applications and mobile maturing as a marketing medium all will attribute to mobile’s growth.

Forecast: US Interactive Marketing Spend, 2009 to 2014

Although Email marketing had the smallest expected growth, this can be attributed to the already high adoption. The report found that marketers will continue to utilize email as a tool, with 97 percent of marketers planning on using/continuing to use email marketing in 2010.

It’s imperative that every company is asking themselves how they plan on utilizing interactive marketing over the next 5 years. And, with nearly every print publication feeling crunched and the “TIVO” phenomenon taking a bite out of TV advertising, do we really think only 21% of these budgets will be allocated to interactive?

I am going to go out on a limb here and say significantly more budget will shift into these incredibly cost-effective and measurable direct marketing mediums. My number is 30%…

2010: Hard Work, Sunnier Skies, and Multi-Channel Digital List Management

A new year has just been born, and in our industry various self-appointed “thought leaders” in the digital messaging space have taken to their blogs to give their predictions for 2010.

Sure: in general, I’ve got ideas about where the business is heading this year. And Waterfall in particular has some exciting and significant announcements coming soon about the direction of its business – namely in the area of multi-channel digital list management.

But rather than prognosticate and pontificate, we here at Waterfall Mobile would rather simply roll up our sleeves and get to work.

For the purposes of 2010, that means continuing excellent client service, technology delivery, and marketing ROI. It means laser-targeted messaging that delivers impossible-to-ignore customer communications through the most personal and precise media available.

We will continue to over-deliver for our customers, and will see to it that Msgme remains the most robust and comprehensive messaging solution on the market today.

Happy New Year, everybody.  Let’s get to it.