Simon Salt's Blog, page 8

How Apple Will Change the Smart Phone Landscape

News released today indicates that Apple is planning on releasing a pre-paid iPhone in the fall. Based on the current iPhone 4, it will be named the iPhone 4S. I wrote about the expansion of the smart phone market a week or so ago and pointed to the appearance of pre-paid smart phones by cell providers like Verizon as an indicator that the user base will expand rapidly in the next year but the household income indicators that are currently pegged to these users will decline.

A Pre-paid iPhone Changes Everything

While I am not a huge Apple fan, even I would be lying if I said that the iPhone especially on a pre-paid plan holds no appeal. Realistically this is likely to change the landscape of smart phone users dramatically and rapidly. The impact on marketing plans for 2012 cannot be underestimated and I would suggest that the plans you are making now need to be altered to reflect the news of the pre-paid iPhone. Yesterday I wrote about the need for mobile as a central element in any social media campaign. The news that Apple will release a pre-paid iPhone only reinforces that message.

The availability of apps, the overall reliability of the phone and its perceived cachet mean that the iPhone is probably the number one desired device among teens and others who are currently unable to secure one. If your organization isn't already considering how mobile plays into your marketing mix then this should be the clarion call you have been waiting for. Ensuring your website is optimized for mobile, thinking through mobile specific offerings like an app, considering how location will play a role. All of these things will now need to jump up the priority list.

The Pre-Paid iPhone & Data

The most likely incarnation of the pre-paid iPhone will be on a fixed rate data plan, that is, users will decide how much data they want to use in a month and purchase a plan that meets that need and their budget. What this means for  content creators is that they will have to provide the users with a very compelling reason to consume the content and therefore expend their data allotment on it and not content from someone else. I think we will see a big shift in apps that are downloaded from the app store, those that are data hogs will fall out of favor and those that provide real value in terms of experience will become increasingly important.

The Pre-Paid iPhone User

Will the pre-paid iPhone user be that much different from the current iPhone user? I'd say they are likely to differ in several ways. Firstly, this is more likely to be their first Apple product, secondly it is more likely to be their only Apple product, thirdly it is more likely to be their only mobile device on which they consume the social web. No one buys a smart phone just to make phone calls. A smart phone extends our ability to reach our network through email, the social web and text. However, with a pre-paid iPhone the user will have to make smart choices about how often they upload photos, change their Facebook status or update Twitter.

I think the pre-paid iPhone has the potential to change the landscape of mobile marketing permanently. Quite what that change will be we will have to see. What changes do you think the pre-paid iPhone will bring?

image used under CC license from William Hook

Can you have Social Media marketing without Mobile?

Is it possible to have a social media marketing campaign without a mobile element? This question came to me as part of a conversation I was having on Twitter over the past couple of days. It started as an observation that a lot of social media "guru's" are still selling fluff but that the medium isn't really showing results. I countered this with a couple of case studies, it was pointed out to me that my case studies were both centered around mobile implementations.

Social Media Marketing and Mobile

I suppose I am somewhat focused on mobile, as for me it is where social really occurs now. But it got me thinking, can you truly run a social media marketing campaign without having a mobile element to it? When I say mobile I am including all mobile devices not just cell phones, so that extends to tablet devices, many of which run on a mobile operating system. While there are a lot of social media marketing campaigns, all of them incorporate, willingly or not, a mobile element in them. If you are marketing using Twitter you have no control over which device the user will consume your campaign, maybe at their desk, maybe on their phone, maybe on the couch from their iPad.

Knowing this is extremely important, because whatever links you supply in your tweet, Facebook post, Foursquare shout, Gowalla tip or other channel had better work in a mobile environment. I recently came across a project being run by the Sunday Times – a British newspaper – called the Social List. Touted as "the definitive list of who's who in the world of social networking", I was curious to see what the project was doing. I accessed it from my Android tablet only to be greeted with the message below:

What I love about this is that they use the phrase "normal browser" – apparently the Sunday Times thinks that mobile browsers are abnormal. This is an example of the type of thinking that kills good creative ideas. The poor execution. With all the numbers showing that the web will be accessed by people via mobile devices more than "normal" devices by the beginning of next year believing that you can control how people consume your content is a dream, one that organizations need to wake from rapidly.

Social Media Marketing – Device Agnostic

Device Agnostic – What does that mean? Literally it means your social media marketing has to work on any device anywhere in any format. Which means your organization is going to have to spend a lot more time and possibly money on thinking through the deployment of that campaign. How many times have you scanned a QR code only to find that it links to a non-mobile optimized website, a website you then have to scroll around to read on your mobile device (if in fact you can access it at all)?

Mobile marketing isn't a separate entity anymore, it isn't an add-on luxury that you might do if your campaign goes well. It now sits at the core of your social efforts. Organizations that recognize this now and embrace this will be the ones who have their content consumed by their target audience, those that don't will simply be passed over.

So Can You Have Social Media Marketing without Mobile?

I would say that the answer is no. A social media marketing campaign that ignores at the very basic level mobile optimization is a failure. Better yet, it not only needs to be optimized for mobile but should include elements that are specific to mobile. We are all animals of routine, we resist change, but in the world of marketing is changing rapidly and only the swift will really be able to capitalize on those changes. What was once considered an edgy form of marketing is rapidly being absorbed into the main stream.

As smart phones become the dominant type of phone carried, not just in the US but globally, so the mobile web and therefore the mobile social web, will become dominant. Quite simply put your social media marketing better go mobile or go home.

What 10m Foursquare Accounts Means for Marketers

Yesterday Foursquare announced that they had passed the 10m accounts milestone. That is a huge number for any business and to achieve it in a little over 2 years is a phenomenal achievement. But what, if anything, is the significance for marketers?

Along with the announcement Foursquare released an infographic that highlighted some of the statistics behind the 10m number. For example – 169 countries visited by US based Foursquare users. Target, Walmart and Macy's were the most popular retail destinations checked in at. Over 1000 people used the service to announce the birth of a child.

Mash that data together and you get a rather unsurprising picture of a mobile affluent traveling user who has recently started a family. In other words – a smart phone user. Why is that significant? Because it means that quite possibly we are seeing services like Foursquare finally leave the technology early adopter pool and move toward the affluent adopter. That doesn't mean it's gone mainstream yet – smart phones are not yet the dominant technology (though that is rapidly changing), but it does mean that we are likely to see the increase in social location sharing.

This is especially true as the check-in starts to take a back seat to the experience. Gowalla has already indicated that it is making moves to shift the focus of that tool toward a method that is less about the check-in and more about experience sharing. Foursquare released a new update today for the iPhone that increases the speed at which users can check-in and we have seen that they are already experimenting with near-field communication (NFC) that would make the check-in process even easier.

What all this means for marketers is that, if you haven't taken social location marketing seriously before, you better start including it in your marketing mix. With companies like RadioShack seeing 3x the spend by consumers who check-in over those that don't, this is something that businesses can't afford to ignore. Rewarding loyal customers isn't just a nice-to-have anymore, it's an expectation of your social consumers. Social location marketing enables an organization to build a strategy around that concept and deploy it on existing technology.

How are you including location in your marketing?

 

We Want To Give You $500

Yes you read that correctly. IncSlingers is offering you $500 as a reward for sending us clients. Refer a new client to us for our Digital TV solution between now and July 15th and when they sign a contract with us we'll send you $500 USD.

Our new digital TV solution allows people and organizations that are using Video as part of their marketing to have a custom channel on the Roku Digital TV device. The Roku has seen amazing success, having sold over a million units last year just online. This month it hits Walmart and you know how sales will go from there!

Getting your video in front of people at home on their TV rather than on a computer is the way to make a real impact. We launched our solution with Tweetheart TV from Stephanie Wonderlin, in only two weeks she has gained over 2000 subscribers! That is five times as many subscribers has she has on YouTube!

Roku channels offer you the ability to categorize your content in the same way regular TV channels do. Viewers can find your content more easily and get straight to the content that they want. We even offer premium channels that allow you to charge viewers for your content on a subscription basis.

Digital TV is the future of video, so join the future today.

Tell your clients or just Contact us yourself to find out how we can get your video content to a bigger audience.

Smart Phones May Not Lead Marketers to a Pot of Gold

Smart Phones and marketing, a combination made in heaven, its a rich kids playground, right? As a marketer you might be fooled into thinking that mobile phone usage and in particular Smart Phone usage is a good indicator of where the more affluent of your customers exist. I saw just that conclusion drawn by the Arkansas State University in a recent post by them when they highlighted that an eMarketer survey completed in April 2011 indicated that 71% of QR code scanner users, which by default are smart phone users,  had an income of over $50k per year. Its definitely an attractive fact to highlight. A compelling one for someone who is perhaps seeking to persuade a client or C-suite team that QR codes are something worth investing in.

Smart Phones Don't Lead to Gold

The problem with this nugget is, that it ignores the temporal nature of the fact. That is, it will exist for a very finite moment. Quite probably by the time someone has consumed that report, decided how to use QR codes to attract that wealthier demographic and then achieved support from further up the food chain the fact will have changed. The reason it will have changed is the piece of the puzzle in mobile marketing that has been left out of this report, the sale of pre-paid smart phones.

This move, made late last year by Verizon and other cell phone providers enables many of those who were previously unable to acquire smart phones to now do so. Typically those who purchase pre-paid phones trend toward a lower income bracket than those on a contract with a smart phone. This includes those on a fixed income and those who don't qualify for credit terms. All of which adds up to the trend that you just bought into being skewed heavily downward in a short space of time.

Smart Phones And the Bigger Picture

All of this goes to show that seeing the bigger picture is very important when lining up a marketing drive around a particular technology. There is no doubt that QR codes, for example, are going to play a part in the marketing mix over the next year or so, however, the part they play may not be determined by the economic drivers previously indicated. The chances are that QR codes are going to be used as drivers for a much broader demographic than previously thought and this holds true for most smart phone based campaigns.

Knowing this before you decided to bet on a particular technology is extremely valuable especially when the "buzz" seems to indicate otherwise. We are going to see a lot more in the coming quarters as the focus of markers move from the tethered online world to the mobile online world. The trick is to both understand the consumer and how the mobile social consumer differs from the tethered social consumer and how the actions of the mobile social consumer are triggered differently.

Smart Phones And the Social Consumer

Already we are seeing how the social consumer is using mobile devices in ways that marketers had not thought of. We are also seeing that they have different trigger points. For example a recent study by The Baby Center showed that for many women the trigger point for purchasing a smart phone was giving birth. The need to stay connected, socially, through a phone was extremely important to new mothers. The device allows them to take their support network with them wherever they go.

Interrupting that network is unlikely to endear a brand to the social consumer, providing helpful advice on the other hand is. So the way messages are delivered is also changing. The mobile social consumer has an increased opportunity to spread the word for a brand. After all it's still easier to just tell the person you are with about the experience than it is to type it.

How are Smart Phones impacting your marketing plan?

Why Social Media Monitoring is A Waste of Time

Social Media Monitoring is a waste of time and money. There the cat is out of the bag. All those amazing tools that exist like Radian6, Visible Technologies, Lithium, ViralHeat, Social Mention and hundreds of others are a complete waste of your time and money. Let me explain why.

Social Media Monitoring Is Pointless

Full disclosure, my company offers Social Media Monitoring services – this is not a pitch. Here is why social media monitoring is pointless – because just seeing what social consumers are saying about you is meaningless unless there is an action plan that leads to follow up. Unfortunately most companies fail to realize that social media monitoring, whether done in house or by a third party doesn't mean that the workload is reduced by the use of a tool.

There needs to be a strategy behind the results. That strategy has to be effective and include a plan for both good and bad mentions. I've seen quite a few examples in the past week of companies that are either not bothering to monitor their social media accounts as closely as they should or are only looking for amplification of their message. Therein lies one of the problems, just because your organization decides to use social media as a marketing tool, doesn't mean that your consumers will see it as a marketing channel. If they find that you have a Twitter account for example, they are going to use that as a point of entry to your customer service process whether you created it for that purpose or not.

Social Media Monitoring – Good, Bad & Mediocre

I recently stayed at the Hotel Max in Seattle. I had a very good experience with them and decided to write a Yelp review of them. Within a day I had received a response from the team there thanking me for my review. I then noticed that they had in fact responded to every review – good and bad and where the reviewer had a less than optimum experience they had apologized and asked how they could fix the problem. The hotel has received 214 reviews – every one of them has received a response from the team at the hotel. That is good Social Media Monitoring.

On Twitter this weekend I saw a rather ironic event. Frank Eliason, who can quite possibly be credited with being the forefather of great customer service via social media during his time at ComCast, reached out to Audi to say that he wasn't happy with the Audi roadside assistance, he was waiting for a service vehicle to come and get him. I noticed this and followed up with Frank to see if Audi ever contacted him as I couldn't find a response on their stream. Audi didn't. In fact they were completely silent that day, the following day their stream consists of chatting with "Fans". This was definitely a failure to monitor and act accordingly.

Delta Airlines were equally silent when a video of American troops returning home from duty in Afghanistan hit the social media world. The troops had been charged after a confusion over extra baggage. The video – posted to YouTube and then reposted to Facebook and Twitter created a small storm among social media users. Delta responded on their Facebook wall and eventually on Twitter. I think they did somethings right and some things wrong. Firstly what they got wrong – silence. This is basic customer service – allowing customers to create the story and having no response is not the way to handle things. Respond immediately, even if your response is only – "We hear you and we are going to look into this". What Delta did right was to fix the issue, they actually rewrote their policy based on this incident, which is great customer service, but they could have silenced their critics faster had they told people they were working on a solution.

Social Media Monitoring – Don't Waste Your Time

The point of all this is, if you aren't prepared to act, then don't stroke your ego's by simply monitoring to see how many "fans" you have out there. Sure it's nice to know that people think highly of your brand and to be able to pull quotes from social media sources to include in your client/C-suite presentations, but those are meaningless if you are going to let the real opportunities slip pass.

Social Media Monitoring gives an organization the opportunity to not only respond but actually change the way they do business and make them more competitive. What are you using Social Media Monitoring for?

Image used under CC license – anderscismo