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If you’re a brand marketer looking to establish a mobile footprint, there are three important questions you should be able to answer to set the foundation for sustainable and modular mobile programming.

I’m not going to give you the answers. There are too many variables unique to your brand, your product/service and your customers to address these properly here…and that’s why there’s an industry built around mobile marketing and advertising.

This is a quick post to hopefully orient your thinking about mobile in a way that will set you up for verifiable success that offers your customer genuine and recurring value.

1. How discoverable is your brand via mobile?

Check your web analytics. Getting visits from mobile devices? What’s the experience like for them (god help you if your site has flash)? People are using mobile devices to source information. But mobile devices and user context require different design and content strategies. Make your mobile web presence customer friendly.

Use SMS and QR codes to activate media and promotions, build a mobile database and establish a permission-based on device interaction with customers. Always keep the value exchange in mind. It should be heavily weighted towards to consumer and deliver clear, compelling and ideally repeatable experiences.

If you’ve jumped into apps, how are you driving awareness via existing brand properties and mobile advertising (display + search)? CTRs are high. Consumers are willing. There’s a great opportunity to bridge between ads and other mobile destinations or even to physical destinations.

2. How are you addressing customer fragmentation?

Fragmentation is more commonly used to describe versioning within operating systems that creates development and support headaches. It’s a big issue. I’d argue a bigger issue for brands is customer fragmentation. Not only are consumers spread across the 3 or 4 major Smartphone operating systems, there are also differences in which features consumers are using and to what extent. And never mind the Smartphone vs. Feature phone user.

Understand your customer habits, preferences and device profiles to guide how to best address your target audience.

3. How are you balancing experimentation with ROI?

For many organizations mobile has the ‘experimental channel’ yoke around its neck. Marketers are mandated to deliver clear and favourable ROI.  How to balance this? First accept the test and learn mentality as a good thing and not inconsistent with great ROI. Think beyond the single campaign towards a sustained presence.  Mobile is highly measurable so set clear objectives and goals at the start. Don’t be afraid to iterate and definitely stay abreast of new technologies and tactics.

Mobile isn’t going anywhere. Embrace it and be determined how to make it work for your brand and you will prosper.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Managing Your Mobile Marketing Strategy: Introducing the Mobile Maturity Diagnostic.
• Two Words For The Mobile Future
• Frictionless Mobile Marketing
• Classic Guide to Mobile Commerce. Featuring…
• Putting ‘Slacktivism’ To Work In Your Mobile Marketing

It’s an unfortunate truth that many potentially successful mobile marketing + mobile advertising campaigns fall flat because the end to end experience has not been properly thought through.

The biggest culprit for this is a post click experience that directs the consumer to a non-optimized mobile web experience.

I continually see mobile advertising or QR code driven executions that push people who have done exactly what you want them to – click on the ad or scan the code – being taken to a wired web destination.

Pinch and zoom full web browsers that are common on most advanced Smartphone allow you to view wired websites with some degree of success (unless you’re using Flash) but don’t remove the fact that:

a) you’re forcing consumers to work harder than they need to in order to get where you want them to go

b) consumer context and need are often vastly different when on mobile than when comfortably seated in front of a desktop.

Two recent examples documented by mobile dude Phil Barrett at Burning the Bacon and pop culture academic Sidneyeve Matrix at CyberPop! drive this point home.

In each case, the failure to match expectations with experience created friction for the consumer and ended with dissatisfaction. In each case, people who were genuinely engaged with what was being offered are now disappointed with the brand and have blogged about it.

Regardless of the mobile channel you are using, put the consumer experience first, understand the habits and expectations, think through the various campaign touch points and ensure a seamless flow from initial interaction to value exchange to gratification.

Mobile can and should be frictionless. Good mobile marketing always is.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Managing Your Mobile Marketing Strategy: Introducing the Mobile Maturity Diagnostic.
• Two Words For The Mobile Future
• 3 Mobile Marketing Nuts For Brands to Crack
• Classic Guide to Mobile Commerce. Featuring…
• Putting ‘Slacktivism’ To Work In Your Mobile Marketing

During a mobile advertising presentation at a recent digital marketing conference, I heard the presenter say sheepishly that this was not “the year of mobile”.  Besides injecting a self-defeating note into an otherwise interesting and compelling presentation, I have a hard time understanding why some people feel a need to constantly parrot this statement.

Mobile is a marketing channel, not a religious experience.

Would anyone know what “the year of mobile” will actually look like? Will marketing spend suddenly leap exponentially? Will consumers rise up in revolt demanding more brand presence in the channel?

Today, I’m taking a stand and refusing to participate in the “is it/isn’t it the year of mobile” discussion anymore. It’s unnecessarily apologetic and absolves everyone of the responsibility for seizing the opportunity in front of them.

And there is significant opportunity.

Mobile penetration in Canada skirts around 75% (a number greater than internet penetration at least according to some). We send over 20 billion text messages annually (and have been doubling that number just about every year). Over 20% of Canadians regularly use the mobile internet. AdMob, one of many mobile advertising networks, served just under 200 million Canadian impressions in August ‘09. And let’s not forget the iPhone, right? The audience exists and is exhibiting appealing behaviour.

There is second debate that I’m going to stop getting drawn into – the cost of data in Canada.

Yes, it’s higher than just about everywhere else and should probably be lower. Yes, the carrier oligopoly doesn’t help. But the truth is you can get 500MB of data for about $30/month. I’m definitely an above average data user and rarely come close to that amount. If you have 1GB of data (probably costing about $45/month), you’ve probably got way more data than you need unless you’re regularly streaming video.

For me, the data debate is less a question of cost and more an issue of a disproportionate value ratio. That is, it seems overly expensive because there’s a relative lack of available content and experiences. Your internet and cable bills are likely to be at least as much, and probably more, than your mobile data bill. But less issue is taken with that because of the dizzying mass of content those channels support.

So what to do? Well, there are grounds for optimism. The very fact that there is talk of “the year of mobile” suggests that we all recognize the channel’s potential and want to see it realized.  There are certainly marketers and publishers that are active in mobile and succeeding.  Perhaps the blame for the sluggish uptake is two-fold. The mobile industry needs to do a better job aligning and defining expectations, measurement and ROI. Marketers need to be willing to invest, build, test, learn and refine. There’s rarely reward without a little risk.

Elsewhere, it’s been suggested that 10% of your marketing budget should be devoted to mobile. If that number frightens you, I challenge you to invest 5% of your budget in mobile for 2010. Launch a mobile internet site. Test some mobile advertising. Build a mobile opt-in database. If you are concerned about the data issue, try SMS marketing. Text messaging offers the widest reach and enables all kinds of promotional and direct response tactics.

The right tactical mix will be different for each marketer but there are plenty of willing providers to help you navigate the options and manage the technology side.

Don’t wait. Make this your “year of mobile”.

Note: This piece was cross-posted on Profectio.com

Possibly Related Posts:

• Managing Your Mobile Marketing Strategy: Introducing the Mobile Maturity Diagnostic.
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As announced on Twitter and picked up by Profectio, I recently joined Toronto-based agency Digital Cement as their Manager, Mobile Marketing Solutions.

It’s a new position for the company, but a natural one given their mandate to “help leading organizations start, grow, deepen and measure relationships with their most valuable customers.”  They’ve got a lot of experience in the life sciences and CPG/retail verticals, which is a great fit for mobile when you think about how personalization & contextual relevance can make such a huge difference for customers in those settings. The client mix goes beyond those industries and, let’s be honest, what organization wouldn’t benefit from strengthening the bond between its brand/services and its customers?

My first two weeks have really been about onboarding as much information as I can about the organization and fleshing out how mobile will fit into the overall service mix.

A couple things have really jumped out as tremendous assets for the growth of the mobile practice:

• There’s a real emphasis on making sound strategic decisions backed up with well-researched qualitative and quantitative analysis.  Programs are always based on solving real business problems and with clear, measureable ROI (whether ‘return on investment’ or ‘return on innovation’) in mind;
• The in-house marketing design & technology is really strong, especially on the user experience and database management side;
• There’s a lot of very smart people who really care and work hard.

Broadly, my mandate is to be the go-to-guy for mobile subject matter expertise and business development. I’ll be hands-on with both program strategy and campaign tactics, working with mobile media partners and managing any outside vendor relations.

A big bonus for me is the platform offered by the emphasis on strategic analysis and measurement. Mobile, especially in Canada, lacks solid benchmarks for program spending and results.  There’s the firepower here to change that and move mobile from a ‘nice to have’ to an essential digital channel.

While you can contact me though this site or on Twitter, if you’d like to connect when I’ve got my work hat on, reach me at jdunn[at]digitalcement[dot]com.

Possibly Related Posts:

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Mobile’s a new enough channel that some sort of education/explanation is still usually required when introducing the marketing opportunities to internal, brand or agency partners.This is especially true when reviewing the right tactics to reach your target audience.

iPhone applications get most of the attention in marketing/technology circles. While the device’s market share is growing steadily, and handsets with similar capabilities are becoming more common among the average consumer, when a brand launches an iPhone app it gets lots of attention in the trade press but the majority of mobile consumers are left to either drool jealously or yawn (if they’re aware of the app at all).

It remains true that the vast majority of consumers have non-smartphones and the more widely used non-voice phone feature is text messaging (though some studies say the camera).

I could trot out stats to back this up but they aren’t hard to find. Okay…here’s a decent summary of US-specific stats.

Instead, I was thinking about a simple analogy to explain the difference.

Mobile is like pie.

Take a look at any dessert table and you have an assortment of tasty treats to choose from. Same with mobile where you have apps, advertising, internet, messaging, gaming, video, etc….

Think of apps, especially iPhone apps as that rich, creamy chocolate eclair (or cheesecake, keylime pie…). It’s a delight for your sense, offers the most intense flavour, but not everyone’s going to able to have it. For starters, they may watching their weight (just as consumer’s have to think about their wallets before getting a iPhone).If you have it at all, it will be a small portion….just like the audience reach for these devices currently.

On the other side of the spectrum is apple pie. Who doesn’t like apple pie? It’s simple, homey goodness that still gives you plenty of sweetness and won’t offend people’s taste buds or waistlines (unless you start dumping cream all over it). Apple pie is like SMS. Go ahead and have a bigger slice…and reach a bigger audience.

We can debate where mobile internet, advertising and so on fit into the continuum. But what’s important for me is that you need to find the right tactics to reach your target audience and device-specific programming may be right for you, but it could also be unneeded calories.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Managing Your Mobile Marketing Strategy: Introducing the Mobile Maturity Diagnostic.
• Two Words For The Mobile Future
• 3 Mobile Marketing Nuts For Brands to Crack
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• Classic Guide to Mobile Commerce. Featuring…

Last Monday (July 20th), I spoke at Refresh Event’s Stay Fresh 10 session. The topic was how mobile can be used to engage and grow communities.

I took the line that let’s not focus on emerging applications and top of the line handsets. While they offer the richest experiences and most robust tools, they make up such a small percentage of the overall mobile market. Instead, let’s drill down to more basic tools such as SMS and even the trusty camera and look at mobile as both a set of tools that everyone has available to them and as an extension of a living, breathing, human out in the real world.

Anyway, here’s the deck:

This really just represents some preliminary thoughts on how mobile can be leveraged to acquire, engage and mobilize a community of interest. I may be way off base so feedback, as always, welcome.

The session was recorded so when that comes out I’ll update the post, or you can check out the Refresh website for yourself…the deck might make more sense with my running commentary.

You can also find the decks from the other presenters who did 5 minute talks on their experiences with community here.

I’d like to thank the Refresh team for inviting me to speak. I really enjoyed myself and had some great conversations after my presentation. If you haven’t been to one of these events, you really should. Next one is, I believe, a summer social.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Have Brain. Will Travel – Mobile As Essential Artifact
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On Monday July 20th I’ll be speaking at Refresh Events’ Stay Fresh 10. If you’re not familiar with Refresh Events here’s what they say about themselves:

Refresh Events encourages collaborative partnerships, fosters education at all skill levels and creates networking opportunities within the Toronto interactive community.

I’ll be sharing some thoughts on the role mobile marketing can play in community engagement for both brands and ‘communities of interest’. I’ll spend some time on the implications of some of new and shiny things we’re seeing in mobile but also emphasizing more traditional and accessible tactics for reaching a broader audience.

Here’s the spiel:

“Talking You Down From the Bleeding Edge: Making Mobile Work for All Communities”

The early days of widespread telephony often involved “party lines” where a community shared a single phone connection. Conversations would be shared, sometimes unintentionally; gossiping was practically a sport but important news could also be spread quickly.

Simpler times, but doesn’t it sound familiar?

Communities today are empowered with powerful digital tools and platforms for connecting, sharing, expression and organization. Increasingly, the mobile channel is extending and complementing the community experience bringing it with you anywhere you go and available at all times.

Whether you’re managing a brand or a community of interest, mobile can assist in acquiring, connecting, empowering and mobilizing your constituents. This talk will provide some tangible, practical solutions for engaging communities of all levels of sophistication proving that mobile is not just personal, it’s social.

I’m very excited to have the opportunity to share some ideas with the Refresh crowd. If you’re in Toronto, it’s only $5 to attend and you actually get that refunded at the door if you show up.

Here’s the link to register: http://stayfresh10-rfevent.eventbrite.com/

Hope to see you there!

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Go Forth & Mobilize

In many respects, mobile remains an emerging communications and media channel. While consumer adoption of mobile has reached a critical mass and features such as mobile messaging are tightly integrated into day-to-day use, use of the medium as a channel for corporate and brand communications is still at a formative stage. Marketers are integrating mobile into their tactical toolkit, but the public relations discipline has yet to take the same step in any real and meaningful way.

However, mobile’s characteristics of being ‘always on, always with and always personal’ offer public relations practitioners the ability to connect with stakeholders in ways that can aid them in meeting their communications objectives.  If public relations is the practice of executing programming that earns public understanding, acceptance and support, then the permission-based nature of mobile coupled with its ability to provide contextually relevant content that can drive action-oriented response should make it key touch-point for stakeholder engagement.  In previous posts in this series, we have explored how mobile can aid in brand communications, community building, media relations, assessing public attitudes and crisis communications.  We have also seen how mobile can empower consumers in ways that will impact how public relations practitioners manage their organization’s reputation and response to external circumstances.

Mobile is a two-way communications channel. Just as the technology enables consumers to engage the world around them, it also allows communicators to manage relationships with their publics.  Careful attention to contextual relevance and creating programs that add value for the consumer can go a long way in building and strengthening relationships. The thoughtful communicator can use mobile to pro-actively establish conditions that are favourable to their organization’s messaging and that enhance reputation.  Communities of interest can be established, engaged, measured and mobilized. Crises can be controlled.

For the public relations practitioner, the opportunity to use a communications channel that is so pervasive and personal should be a powerful call to action to examine how their strategic objectives can be met by mobile.  Their publics are mobile. They should be too.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Four Mobile Web Experiences You Can Offer Customers
• The 3 Dimensions Of Effective Mobile Email
• Launch and Learn – Driving Campaign Success with In-Flight Optimization
• 5 Steps To Address Mobile Customer Fragmentation
• Mobile + The New Direct White paper

With mobile devices basically glued to the hips & ears of most people, they’re a marketing channel filled with powerful opportunities for brand engagement, direct response and relationship marketing.  The device, though, gets a disproportionate share of attention – what’s the latest & greatest handset, what new features or software/applications are being introduced, etc…

It’s important to remember that mobile marketing is about people not devices.  The devices provide the platform and tools to engage, but you are still attempting to reach living, breathing human beings in all their rational and irrational glory.

Here are three people-centric ways you can go wrong with mobile marketing.

1. Abuse Consumer Permission

The mobile phone is a highly personal consumer extension. For many people it’s the most direct conduit into their lives. It’s no accident that one of the most often bandied about phrases regarding mobile is ‘always on, always with, always personal’. While this presents great opportunities for marketers to gain direct access to consumer preferences and intentions, it can also be a slippery slope if one isn’t careful about they communicate with consumers that have taken that first step and ‘opted-in’ to a marketing program.

Publisher Simon & Schuster recently got dinged for $90 million in damages for sending unsolicited text messages to consumers. If you can get a consumer to engage your brand via mobile, whether through SMS, an application or the mobile web, you have to take care to manage how any future communication is rolled out. The best approach is to explicitly ask the consumer if they want to receive future communications. You can take that one step further by getting a consumer to define the type of communication they would like to receive, when they would like to receive it and how often you can send them information.

This kind of thinking gives you more information about who you’re talking to and increases the relevance of your content. You’re happy because you’re increasing the depth of engagement. The consumer’s happy because you’re offering increased value.

2. Fail to account for context

Since the mobile is always on and always with, it’s intimately tied to what a consumer is doing at any moment and where they are. This creates a fertile ground for offering a deep utility to consumer action and habits. Applications which leverage location based technology provide the best use case for enriched utility, but even SMS marketing needs to account for context. Delivering coupons through point of sale media offers immediate value and can aid purchase intent, for example.

Content should be ’snackable’. Genuine and practical utility should be baked in to any experience. Ask yourself what are you trying to achieve and where consumers are likely to be when they’re interacting with you. More often than not, they will not be stationary, they will be on the go looking to meet an immediate need or want or entertain themselves.

3. Missing out on ‘bridging’ opportunities

Other than abusing consumer permission, creating a shallow mobile experience is the most common mistake I see in mobile programming.  This can be as simple as a text to win contest which doesn’t offer an opt-in for future information. More commonly, I see mobile advertising campaigns where the post-click experience simply fails to account for the fact the consumer is engaging via a mobile. This includes linking to a non-mobile optimized website. But I’ve also seen badly designed sites with no functionality such as an automotive advertiser who’s mobile site doesn’t include features like a dealership locator, a test-drive sign up form or even an email submit or click to call for more information.

If you’ve gotten a consumer to click on your ad why would you not take full advantage of this by extending the experience and bridging to another destination – either on the mobile device or into the ‘real world’.

As marketers become savvier at developing mobile experiences, these types of issues will (hopefully) fade into history. Keeping the consumer front of mind in any campaign design thinking is vital. The mobile device is just a tool, though one rich with features and a powerful platform for direct-to-consumer engagement. Focussing on the device rather than the user will lead you down the wrong path.  Take care to avoid these three pitfalls and you’ll be that much closer to earning (and keeping) your share of mobile.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Managing Your Mobile Marketing Strategy: Introducing the Mobile Maturity Diagnostic.
• Two Words For The Mobile Future
• 3 Mobile Marketing Nuts For Brands to Crack
• Frictionless Mobile Marketing
• Classic Guide to Mobile Commerce. Featuring…

Mobile & Crisis Communications

The final public relations practice to examine is crisis communications. In many ways, the uses for mobile in supporting crisis communications efforts are minor modifications of what has been discussed previously in this series.  The main difference, as with all crisis communications, is the importance that prior planning plays in successful execution.

It is common practice for crisis plans to include a ‘dark site’ or website that has been built and pre-populated with content and can be instantly made public in the event of a crisis. The same effort should be made with a mobile web site. In some ways, a mobile website might be even more important as it can be accessed from anywhere. The public does not have to be on a computer in order to receive what could be vital or time-sensitive information.

Imagine a situation where a company has to do a product recall. A mobile website would allow consumers to confirm instantly if they are affect says David Jones. “People hear about a product recall, and they think everyone is affected. Mobile offers the ability to control. Consumers can take a picture of the UPC on the products they have in their home, submit it to a mobile website and know immediately if they are affected.”

Simpler methods could also be used to ensure that less mobile savvy consumers are not disadvantaged. UPC codes could be sent in and processed by text message, for example. A product recall notice could tell consumers to text their UPC to a designated shortcode. Responses would confirm whether or not the product was affected and the message could contain a click to call feature to connect consumers to a response centre set up by the company.

Mobile’s responsiveness and contextual relevance can also be used to manage public safety situations. Many universities have implemented SMS emergency broadcast services to alert students in the event of an on-campus crisis. Companies could use their mobile database development efforts to similar effect.  As we’ve already discussed, the ‘always on, always with’ nature of the mobile phone means that members of the public would more than likely receive a text message alert well in advance of any email or public media notification.

Messages could contain links to mapping applications that are included on smartphones and direct the consumer to the closest emergency response units or other safe zones. For those without smartphones, a secondary message could be set up to provide safety information in response to a reply keyword texted in by the member of the public.

Careful planning and consideration of all variables would increase the chances of containing a crisis situation.  While each business or organization will have a unique set of potential crisis situations to plan for, mobile’s feature set, connectivity and contextual relevance provide a powerful tactical addition to any response.

Next Up: Some final wrap-up thoughts on mobile and public relations.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Four Mobile Web Experiences You Can Offer Customers
• The 3 Dimensions Of Effective Mobile Email
• Launch and Learn – Driving Campaign Success with In-Flight Optimization
• 5 Steps To Address Mobile Customer Fragmentation
• Mobile + The New Direct White paper