Via Advertising Age 01.27.10 J. Spero

In 2009, the media buying community discovered mobile media works. Advertisers in a broad range of verticals shared results proving mobile is an effective medium for driving awareness, acquisition and purchase. “Is this the Year of Mobile?” can be retired. Media buyers are being asked — ‘What’s your mobile strategy for 2010?’

Many factors contributed to the development of the mobile ecosystem and the excitement we see. Dozens of companies, including the MMA and the IAB, worked to build the foundation of mobile media. It all came together in 2009 as mobile web usage exploded, with more than 61 million people in the US accessing it in December 2009, according to Nielsen. In 2010, agencies, advertisers and publishers will need a plan for mobile.

The top five things you need to know about buying mobile media in 2010:

1) Ask for data. Ask for help.
Mobile advertising is 3-4 years old and evolving rapidly. There’s valuable data for media buyers and mobile sellers can educate and assist you in gathering it no matter what your target audience. Ask sellers for case studies on mobile campaigns in your category and with your goals. There are a number of free reports with valuable market data to help with planning. These include Nielson Mobile, comScore, Flurry Pulse and AdMob Mobile Metrics.

2) Learn about (don’t worry about) different platforms.
The mobile Web is accessible from most phones, and you can run your campaigns across all platforms to target mobile Web users or on a specific platform. You can take advantage of rich-media formats designed specifically for smartphones and create a more robust version of your landing page for users on devices supporting a richer Web experience. You can also reach users as they engage with apps on a specific platform or promote your own app if you have one.

3) Talk to publishers and ad networks.
Prior to 2009, ad networks drove much of the innovation in the space with their focus on mobile. However in 2010, many publishers will have ad serving capabilities and mobile rate cards due to investments in 2009. Marketers now have more mobile media options than ever before.

4) Set your expectations for what mobile can and can’t do.
Focus on your needs and let your mobile seller explain the options available. Mobile promises powerful granularity based on location, need states, device capabilities and more for precise targeting — albeit on a limited scale in 2010. Sellers can provide data to target effectively and to ensure you don’t overcut your audience.

Rich media will grow significantly in 2010, but the solutions are limited compared to online. Web-based Flash is still not available on most phones. There are different rich media solutions for different platforms; some work on webkit browsers (Android, Research In Motion, Windows, Palm Pre) and some are vendor-specific solutions for iPhone apps.

You can use tools for tracking in mobile, but third party ad serving and campaign management functionality is limited. Site-tracking offerings will improve dramatically in 2010.

5) Drive traffic, track user interactions, repeat.
Jump in. Ask sellers what brands in your vertical are active in mobile and read case studies. Start with a basic call-to-action and drive users to a simple landing page with a few relevant means of engagement. Track what happens. Mobile user behavior may surprise you — you won’t believe their insatiable appetite for video content, for example — and use the learnings from one campaign to inform future mobile campaign strategies.

Review our free mobile marketing report http://blog.apollobravo.com/mobilemarketing/

Media Buyers: Roll Your Own Mobile Strategy – Advertising Age – DigitalNext.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt put mobile at the heart of the Internet giant’s future in a special keynote at Congress late this afternoon.

Schmidt outlined how Google’s top programmers were now concentrating on mobile as their primary focus; he also pointed to recent acquisitions in the mobile space, notably AdMob.

Unveiling a new Google mantra – ‘Mobile First’ – Schmidt proclaimed that three unique areas had now converged on the mobile device: computing power, interconnectivity and the cloud: “The phone is where these three all interconnect  and you need to get these three waves right if you want to win.” He highlighted Internet phenomenons such as Spotify, Facebook – and Google itself – as leading the cloud concept across both fixed and mobile. “If you don’t use the power of the cloud you will fail,” he said.

He added that in places such as Indonesia and South Africa Google was now seeing more searches on mobile than via the desktop.

Google programmers joining Schmidt on stage demonstrated the firm’s latest developments, including efforts to merge its speech and image recognition technology; the firm impressed with a preview of an optical character recognition (OCR) tool that was able to recognise and translate a picture of a German menu into English. Google announced that German has now been added to its speech system as its fourth language.

Schmidt also provided an update on Google’s Android platform, which he said was now running across 26 different devices. He said that Android handset vendors were selling  more than 60,000 per day, a figure that has doubled over the last quarter. During an Android demonstration, Google’s Eric Tseng announced that the platform now supports Flash – the full Flash version (10.1) rather than Flash Lite – allowing gaming and movies over handsets. The announcement will give Android devices an advantage over Apple’s iPhone, which does not support the technology.

http://www.mobilebusinessbriefing.com/article/google-embraces-mobile

Learn more about the smart phone revolution and how marketers can reach today’s mobile and social consumer. Visit www.apollobravo.com

Our 2010 Mobile Marketing Presentation reviews the latest trends in Mobile Marketing. The presentation explores many types of mobile advertising and promotion used by brands and agencies. Presented by ApolloBravo a leader in mobile marketing and social media. http://blog.apollobravo.com/mobilemarketing/

After the Tsunami in 2004 more money was raised by small donations from individuals than all government aid combined. We call these small donations the Long Tail behind the traditional big donors. If you text the Word Haiti to the number 20222 a $10 dollar donation will show up on your next mobile bill. The entire $10 will go to the charity. Please help now, death toll could reach 6 figures. If you want to give more visit www.crs.org or www.redcross.org

Thanks

Some 19% of Americans will use their mobile devices for shopping this holiday season, according to a Deloitte survey. The number is twice as high for young consumers: 39% of those 18 to 29 say they’ll use their phones to find store locations, obtain coupons and sales information and research products and prices. One-quarter of all who plan to use their phones to shop say they will make purchases on the devices. Read More.

More shoppers use smartphones to study, find, buy – USATODAY.com.

Social media isn’t complicated. When you boil it down it’s about listening to your customers, being helpful by offering your knowledge and giving them interesting content to share and thereby advocate for you. The IMS speakers shared several case studies (yes, too many of them mentioned Comcast and Zappos) on how organizations have embraced social media to connect with and built trust and affection among customers. None of the examples required hyper-specialized knowledge or technology for a company to connect with people.

So why is it so difficult for so many companies to successfully integrate social media? I dug through my (30 pages of) notes to try and find some themes in what the speakers shared and came up with a this list of why organizations might be getting hung up.

1. They can’t talk about anything broader than their own products

Chris Brogan shared how Citrix Online created the Workshifting community to address the rise of telecommuting and remote work. Sure, it ties in with Citrix’s GoToMeeting/Webinar/PC product line, but the blog isn’t a commercial for its products. The same holds true for Kodak’s photography blog that Chief Blogger Jenny Cisney talked about. It’s about photography and creativity in general, not about Kodak cameras. Greg Matthews shared how Humana developed the Freewheelin bicycle sharing communities with plenty of online and “real life” components to the program. Bicycles don’t have much to do with health insurance specifically, but they are about being healthy. If a company is only talking online about its specific products and not looking for ways to connect to the bigger picture, it’s pretty difficult for people to be engaged.

2. They listen to customers but don’t take any action

If you’re going to listen to your customers, you’d better be ready to do something about what you hear. Valeria Maltoni noted that if a company creates an online presence that’s open and allows customer feedback, it creates the expectation that the company is going to do something with that feedback. Worse than not being heard is being heard and then ignored. Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines shared how a simple blog post stating the airline was considering assigned seating amassed tons of customer comments showing a lack of support for the idea. This feedback changed the direction of their internal debate and led to a new boarding procedure that maintained the open seating arrangement.

3. They aren’t calibrated internally with the technology

Jason Falls chastised corporate Web sites for being little more than online brochures. Customers expect interaction. Content creation is key to social media success, and every company should have a Web site with a content management system that allows for quick, easy content creation without the IT department needing to recode a Web site. Anyone in the organization should be able to publish via a CMS. And companies can’t expect to have a strong social media presence when social sites are blocked internally to employees.

4. They’re not framing risk accurately

Dharmesh Shah reminded us all that a corporate blog has never been fatal to an organization. NBC cameraman Jim Long said the often a company’s entry into social media is a clumsy, shotgun blast and that there’s an equal chance of looking foolish by having a ham-fisted marketing department launch a social media presence as there is if a rogue employee “goes off” on Twitter. The risk of social media is not abated by not participating. And really, while there have certainly been some hiccups and miscues along the way, social media has yet to be the undoing of any company.

5. Their internal culture isn’t aligned for social media success

In Shiv Singh’s presentation, he discussed how the customer should be at the core of the brand. When policies, procedures, products and processes become more important than the customer, there’s no way social media efforts can be effective. When your employees are more concerned with what’s in or out of their job description than doing the right thing to help the customer, that’s not a culture that’s likely to build trust and advocacy for your brand. Yes, Zappos was cited time and again as a case study, but largely because it has a culture that makes social media work. All of its employees are focused on customer service at the core. The same holds true for Southwest Airlines.

I could go on and on. So many of the speakers at IMS shared great examples of simple, effective social media strategies that have humanized organizations and allowed them to build better relationships with customers. But time and again companies are either rejecting social media or participating in a way that defeats the purpose.

It’s not rocket surgery.

Read more Social Media Today Five reasons corporations are failing at social media.