When I say mobile marketing, I don’t mean a flatbed truck driving down the freeway with a billboard mounted in the back.  I mean delivering content, messaging, coupons and offers directly to mobile phones.  After all, people are adopting Smartphones like iPhones and Androids in record numbers and using them to access the web, check e-mail, access apps, shop, post uninspired status updates to social media, and just about everything else that used to be reserved for PC’s.

According to a comScore report on mobile marketing trends, last year saw amazing growth in consumer adoption of Smartphones and a growing appetite for using mobile phones as shopping companions. Today consumers are integrating mobile behaviors into their daily lives.

Smartphones as Shopping Companions

The Smartphone became an increasingly useful shopping tool in 2011, though men and women displayed different patterns of shopping behavior:

• Women were more likely to use their Smartphone to make shopping a more social experience: 24% took product pictures, 20.2% sent those pictures to friends/family, and 22.3% called or sent text messages to family/friends about a specific product.
• Men were more likely to use their Smartphone to find information: 20.4% scanned a product barcode, 14.1% compared prices, and 10.9% researched product features via Smartphone.

The Numbers

• 48.1% of all US mobile subscribers owned a Smartphone as of December 2011, up 21.1 percentage points (PPs) from one year earlier.
• Smartphone ownership among men (51.3%) is slightly higher than for women (48.3%), while the sweet spot in terms of age is between 25 and 44: 25.6% of mobile subscribers are age 25-34 and 20.7% are age 35-44.

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2012/7236/key-mobile-marketing-stats-and-trends-for-2012#ixzz1uFNQ4Ebz

Mobile Advertising and Marketing Now the Fastest-Growing Media Sector

In another study by PQ Media, mobile advertising and marketing is now a $3 Billion dollar industry.  In fact, mobile marketing is growing faster than the Internet did.

“The mobile media sector alone reached the $1 billion revenue mark in 2008 – faster than any communications industry in history – taking only five years compared with 16 for the Internet,” said Patrick Quinn, CEO of PQ Media.

“Mobile will also reach the $100 billion mark in 2015 faster than any other communications industry, driven by several key growth drivers, including strong growth in overall mobile device penetration, the transition to Smartphones and tablets, the torrent of new mobile content launches, and the continued growth of consumer and business time spent with mobile media.”

Among three broad categories of mobile and social media revenues—mobile advertising and marketing, mobile content and access, and online social media—mobile advertising and marketing was fastest-growing sector in 2011, expanding 53.7% year over year to $3.39 billion with the ad segment soaring 60.9% and the marketing segment expanding 46.2% during the year.

However, the mobile marketing segment is now forecast to grow faster than advertising from 2012 to 2016, fueled by location-based coupons and marketing apps revenue streams.

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2012/7188/mobile-ad-and-marketing-now-the-fastest-growing-media-sector#ixzz1uFKHsvDx

First, the tribe collects some smelly carrion or fragrant root and places it in spots likely to attract their favorite prey. Then the cavemen sharpen their wooden spears and head out into the forest to kill any critter they can sneak up on. Upon a successful hunt the prize is carried home where somebody butchers it so that no morsel goes unused, and the whole tribe eats well for a couple days. After the food is consumed the entire process is repeated. When a new tribe moves into a nearby cave there is less for everybody until the cavemen are clubbing each other over the smallest scraps. Once the forest no longer holds enough game the cavemen try to join with or run out the other tribe, resort to cannibalism, then abandon the area completely.

Sound familiar? This is exactly the business model of most industries today.

The marketing department prepares slick campaigns, places ads in various media, organizes events and identifies likely prey – I mean prospects. The hunter, or account executive, goes out and kills the prospect converting it a customer and the shareholders are happy for one quarter. Back at the cave an account manager does the butchering and operations does the cooking, while accounting draws marks on the cave wall to keep track. When the goodwill of the account has been exhausted public relations issues a series of defensive press releases, carves the corporate logo on every tree and hands out free branded T-shirts to all the animals in the woods to combat the negative word-of-mouth. Meanwhile, the account executive is back from vacation with the gold plated club he won as the company’s best salesman and must start the process over again with diminishing returns due to increased competition. Upon reaching near saturation of the market the company will go through several rounds of mergers and acquisitions accompanied by mass layoffs in a desperate attempt to keep their share of a shrinking market.

Then one day about 12,000 years ago everything changed.

One of the cavemen looked just outside the cave where they threw out their refuse and noticed new vegetation sprouting. Just for fun he watered the spot and told the other cavemen not to walk there. Within a couple full moons the caveman harvested his crop, replanted, and thus agriculture was born. From that point forward the tribe no longer had to rely on the hunt, kill, eat, and repeat model of sustenance, but rather could nurture a garden to provide food with substantially less effort and more predictable results.

Social networks are growing gardens. Do you have a green thumb?

According to Pew Internet Research, 50% of adults in America use social networks and the number is growing every year. But are they just for kids? No. Baby Boomers are increasingly adopting social networking with a 60% growth rate (2011).

Meanwhile, traditional media continues its downward slide.

Newspaper Advertising Lowest Since 1950

Newspaper advertising, adjusted for inflation, is at its lowest level since the early 1950′s (see graph).

The implications on the typical marketing organization are profound, and the effects are as dramatic as the change from the hunt, kill, eat and repeat model to sustainable agriculture. Customers are your crop, and they have already sewn themselves into neatly organized furrows by demographics and likes in easily accessible fields. Whereas a deer in the woods runs away when he sees you coming with a spear, customers in social networks welcome and even crave interaction with their favorite (and most despised) brands, products and services.

So put down the spear and pick up the watering can instead, caveman.

“Monetizing” is the act of converting something into legal tender – and that’s the trend in social media today.  How Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare and others convert their traffic and subscribers to cash from advertisers will determine who ends up on top according to the bottom line.

The danger of monetizing a popular digital property or service is backlash from users or subscribers.  Remember MySpace?  When Rupert Murdoch of News Corp purchased MySpace and immediately tried to monetize the site, the subscriber base crashed dramatically.  Another, albeit difficult to measure, factor is the “coolness” factor and general user experience.  Through almost unlimited user customization and advertising content, MySpace lost control of the user experience, and then lost the only thing it really takes to monetize a site – traffic and eyeballs.

Monetization trends in social media today include Facebook’s Ticker, Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, and above all else localization and inclusion of user-generated content for search engine results.  The computing platform also is a huge driver.  Mobile devices are expected to exceed PC/laptop usage for Internet access very soon, thus forever eliminating the so-called digital divide.  This changes the paradigm from a digital property to a mobile app, affects the demographic profile of users, and also changes the behavior of web surfers and their expectations completely.  This in turn creates opportunities to monetize their offerings.

Competition is, of course, always a constant pressure, and thus new players with innovative properties/apps have the ability to change to landscape of social media almost overnight.  Google+ is experiencing rapid growth due to mass media advertising, and they already have an established client base from their monopoly in the search advertising market.  But will they make it cool enough to steal users away from Facebook?  Or in the process will Google, or any of the others for that matter, end with a fiery crash in MySpace fashion from the pursuit of profit?

I wish I could site the source to give credit where credit is due, but still wanted to pass along this graphical, flow-chart style quick overview of various popular social media sites.  If only Anthony Weiner had carried a wallet-sized cheat sheet with this information.

Social Media at a Glance

Have you tried to register a domain name in, oh say the past decade?  Tough isn’t it?  Seems just about every good domain name has already been taken – whether currently in use or simply purchased and parked by a cybersquatter hoping to sell it to you.

Well, today ICANN (the company that decides and manages these things) announced the expansion of domain name suffixes of the .xxx (AKA Generic) variety.  What’s that mean?   It means that instead of registering and using a domain name with the standard suffixes of .com, .net, .edu, .gov, .name, .org, .mil, .int and .biz you can now register just about anything.  But before any of you would-be bloggers or cybersquatters log in to your GoDaddy account and register .TodLock, .Walmart or .ExxonMobile, you might want to check your PayPal account for sufficient funds.

Come January 2012 you can register a new domain suffix for the low, low price of only $185,000.00. That’s US money folks, not Pesos.  Why would somebody spend that kind of coin on a domain name suffix?  It’s not only for vanity, SEO (search engine optimization), advertising, trademark preservation and to drastically reduce cybersquatting of domain names, but also it’s a whole new way to make money which in turn will change the way the world uses and surfs the web.

Let’s say my rich Uncle Abdul the Arabian Prince drops his wallet and $185K falls out.  I scoop up the cash, fill out my application and camp out overnight to be first in line to register the domain suffix “.dfwnewcardealer”.  Now I’m the registrar for that suffix and can charge people to have their website name in front of it.  So what?  While it doesn’t mean much right now, you can bet the search engines (Google, Bing), internet security companies (McAfee, Symantec), web filtering software specialists (Websense, Barracuda), registrars (GoDaddy, Tucows), and other effected parties will change their offerings and algorithms very soon.

As the registrar for .dfwnewcardealer, I have my standards.  I will check on dealers with the Better Business Bureau, read customer reviews on the web, and maybe even visit each car lot before accepting a car dealer’s application.  While I can’t do anything about pushy car salesmen, web surfers can feel confident that any car dealer represented by my domain suffix is not a fly-by-night outfit.  Further, I’ll advertise my own site www.find.dfwnewcardealer and help drive traffic to my clients’ websites.  While the 2,000 bucks per year I will charge is 100 times higher than it costs to register a dot com name, that’s a drop in the car dealer’s advertising budget and the incremental traffic and revenue from being found on .dfwnewcardealer – a trusted and popular domain suffix – results in enormous ROI for my clients.  All I have to do is find 185 new car dealers in the DFW area to give me $2K per year and I’m making a 50% gross profit margin before my own overhead and marketing costs.  While this is an oversimplified, low volume, and geographically specific example, you get the idea.  Now what if I owned .Travel or .Airline???

Let’s say I’m the Chief Marketing Officer of Ford Motor Company.  I register the suffix .Ford, then internally charge all my product line managers to use it.  For example: www.mustang.ford, www.focus.ford, and so on.  But wait there’s more!  I could also include a domain suffix fee in the franchise agreement for all my dealers, approve and allow after-market parts manufacturers and even certified independent repair shops to use it.  Since I know the value of word-of-mouth marketing, I’ll probably allow any Ford fan club with at least 50 members to use it for their website for free.

Let’s say I’m a web filtering company such as NetNanny who sells software to protect your kiddos from accessing inappropriate websites.  Unfortunately, to do that effectively I must constantly index and search websites for that bad content, add it to my list of millions of blocked websites, and then push out updates to you almost daily.  Why not just register the generic top level domain suffix “.KidSafe”?  I’ll combine the domain registration service with hosting where all the websites on .kidsafe use my servers and I can scan and approve all clients’ content changes instantly instead of scanning the entire web every single day.  Then I’ll give away my web filtering software to home users who are assured that any website with a .kidsafe domain name is 100% OK.  Just seems like a much better and profitable business model to me.

In marketing we call this “disruptive” because it changes the whole industry.  Competitors cannot simply lower their prices or spend more on advertising; they will have to change.

How disruptive?  That’s up to consumers – meaning you.  Back in the dot com heyday of the mid 90′s every geek with a business plan and elevator pitch promised to “change the paradigm” of something via the web.  By the dot bomb days of 2000 however, if you heard somebody say “change the paradigm” with one hand outstretched for venture capital you ran away as fast as you could.  Turns out consumers didn’t want to wait a week for dog food and medicine ordered on a pet website to arrive while Rover crapped all over the carpet and got fleas.

Last week I moved my kitchen trash can from the utility closet to the pantry closet.  It’s closer to the sink and stove, and much more convenient.  Or at least it will be once I stop opening the utility closet and wondering where the hell I put the trash can.  Let’s face it, people usually hate change even when it’s good for them.

Plus, who really cares about (most) websites anyway?  Like most people, I have about a dozen sites bookmarked and I’ve forgotten why I saved half of them.

Today it’s not about the website; it’s about the content and interactivity.  And that, in turn, can be accomplished on Facebook without knowing the difference between html and a hole in the ground.  Plus, people barely use websites anymore – it’s all about the app and mobile devices.  While ICANN has been thinking about this change for the past three years, smartphone adoption and now tablets have been growing at approximately a gazillion percent per year.

So while this change of generic top-level domain suffixes has the potential to disrupt and improve the web industry, I wonder if by the time it’s in effect and potentially adopted by the masses whether or not anybody will notice or even care due to the wholesale change in how and where we access the web.

Now I’m going to download an app for my iPod so I can find the kitchen trash can.

There’s an offering in Google Adwords called call metrics for phone extensions. If you extend your ad with a phone number, then it can appear clickable on mobile devices with browsers, and when the (high-end mobile device) user clicks to call you get charged for a click and that’s great, because assuming the call goes through it’s also a conversion.

But, if you enable call metrics for a phone extension, a custom “redirect” number appears on your text ads for each campaign on desktop browsers too and you can report on the placed, answered, and missed calls, and even the call duration. However, unless that call originated as a click from a mobile device you don’t get charged the click price. That means Google is offering a free yellow pages service with call tracking statistics, and if the desktop user simply sees the ad and picks up the phone without clicking the ad first, it’s a free lead.

For now anyway. It says it’s a new service and subject to change. Available to select USA advertisers only. Just remember to manually add the number of received calls to your conversion totals then recalculate the average cost per conversion to include those conversations. Also, you can only view the call statistics at the campaign level, not by the ad group or ad or keyword.

Just don’t tell any of my competitors about this, because not many are taking advantage of this feature.

I just installed the Akismet anti-spam plug-in for comments, plus a secure contact form with a CAPTCHA code.  Hopefully this will save me from deleting 100 spam posts per week and deter all those crafty Nigerians who need my bank account number in order to transfer 10 million dollars.

Please pardon the construction zone that is this website.  I am searching for widgets and a secure, spam-free contact form for this new WordPress theme, plus will add social media links soon.  For now I have populated the pages and need to add tags…..lots of tags.