June 2010
6 posts
Quick Response Codes: Doing It Right!
Recently I blasted a national magazine for their inept use of Quick Response codes:
None of the promotions delivered anything of immediate value to the reader
Most required the reader to fill in lengthy forms
Several directed the reader to desktop-only websites
One advertiser sent me an email this week. I had “won” a $5 off coupon (which I need to print to redeem) seven weeks...
Beyond the Sugar High
At the beginning of every trend, businesses experience the “Gee Whiz” moment when doing anything related to the trend is enough. And the flashier, the better.
But over time, the sugar high passes. The experiment turns out to be the P&L equivalent of empty calories.
Typically businesses next start to explore how this newest development can generate revenue and earn its keep.
...
No Matter Where Your Customer Is...
Not so very long ago, we associated mobile use exclusively with being out-of-home. After all, why would you need a mobile at home when your landline was at-hand?
We know more and more households (now 1 in 4 according to the CDC) are going “mobile-only.” This story has always implied simple substitution of one device for another.
But the narrative is actually more interesting than...
Whose Garden?
As readers of our blog know, I write often about the virtues and traps of “walled garden” approaches to mobile. Today, instead of writing about closed vs open, I’m going to ask you to think about a different aspect: in whose mobile garden will your clients and customers live?
Recently a client with whom we have been exploring mobile marketing related an interesting experience.
...
Creating Mobile Offers is Now Even Easier
Tonight we deployed a new set of features to make it even easier (and fun!) to create and maintain Offers and MixMarts in MixMobi.
These new features include:
Adding/removing offer elements (text, headers, images, links) at any time
Drag & Drop reordering of offer elements
When creating a new offer, easily select between offer templates we provide, copying one of your existing offers or...
The most exciting opportunities in mobile?
Lars Erik Holmquist, of the Mobile Life Centre in Kista, Sweden, wrote an insightful piece titled “The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up” in Crunchgear last week:
“This is where I believe the most exciting opportunities lie right now in mobile applications: picking and mixing from hundreds of mobile web services and social networks, moving the grunt work from the handsets to the cloud,...
May 2010
3 posts
Want Loyal Buyers?
A new study from iVillage and SheSpeaks highlight the “dramatic” influence that online community and digital coupons have on women buyers. Key findings:
68% of women are influenced by digital coupons
Coupons and others’ comments impact food and beverage, health and beauty, and household product purchases the most
60% of women surveyed said digital offers influenced...
How NOT to use QR
I often use newer technology as it is deployed In Real Life to stay up to date with how mobile is being used in marketing. This past week I had an experience that stunned and saddened me. So here’s my Public Service Announcement: Don’t Let This Happen to Your Brand. A major US magazine published an interactive print version this month. Over a dozen advertisers included a Quick...
How to be a Mobile Marketing Genius
In addition to providing fast, easy, effective mobile offers through Software as a Service, MixMobi also consults with larger firms to integrate MixMobi in major projects.
Our goal when consulting is simple:
We want you to be confident and to feel like an expert without spending months on research.
Regardless of industry, these basics inform every recommendation:
Demographics are...
April 2010
4 posts
If You Build It...
Earlier this week, I blogged about Morgan Stanley’s latest predictions, focusing on their observations and forecast on mobile.
We enthusiasts, hip-deep in the details (and often guilty of gazing too far into the future), need to stay grounded with where companies are today and what happens next.
For a bracing counterpoint to Morgan Stanley’s projections, I found Multichannel...
What Just Happened ?
Mary Meeker and her team at Morgan Stanley published an updated Internet Trends mega-deck yesterday. It updates her startling predictions of a few months ago. Here’s a cheat sheet to the slides you need to read to avoid being left wondering “what just happened?” in mobile marketing.
The mobile internet continues to ramp far faster than the desktop internet did. The...
Start Your Engines!
In times of tumult, we can easily get over-stimulated. Like second graders eating too many birthday party cupcakes, we get distracted by every. little. thing…and unable to get much of anything done.
Fourth quarter 2009 and first quarter 2010 have been an endless parade of distractions in mobile marketing. New devices, turf wars, what Tomi Ahonen calls a “bloodbath” in...
WatchMobile worldwide “by the numbers” at Mobile March, Minneapolis, MN, March 27, 2010
March 2010
5 posts
Driving Miss Daisy
Knowing how to drive an automobile wasn’t required to participate in modern life during the first half of the 20th century.
Many men and women in particular were unlikely to know how to drive until mid-century. Women’s increasing participation in the workforce during World War II, the growth of suburbs, and the new American Interstate drove near-100% participation very quickly.
...
It's for you: Reality on Line One
Mobile March this past Saturday in Minneapolis was a big success. The speaker lineup was outstanding, and attendees Lisa Grimm, Aaron Weiche, and Vanessa Bright have each blogged recaps worth reading. Slides from presentations are posted here.
What stood out most for me about the day were:
Diversity of attendees I chatted with a striking number of marketers who said they were attending...
Mobile Web 2.0: Evaluate your route
Juniper Research forecasts that Voice over Internet Protocol (VOiP) and social web activities will increase sector revenue to $18.9 billion in 2014.
I was pleased to see that, In addition to the usual dazzling growth projections, Juniper acknowledges that there are many paths to market and “fragmentation at every level.”
Mobile marketing in this tumultuous moment reminds me of...
Time to Make YOUR Donuts!
As we know, the most common challenge to social media marketing innovation has been return on investment.
Happily, we appear to be getting well past the “You just should” engagement arguments and into quantitative territory. (Disclaimer: While it’s possible that companies should “just” do it, having worked in the Fortune 500, I’m here to tell you it...
Start Here! Mobile Marketing for Small Business
I had the pleasure of appearing on Pamela Muldoon’s Next Stage Business radio show this past Saturday. Pamela is a small business expert and always produces compelling content for her listeners.
You can listen to the interview here.
Interestingly, the most important steps in understanding mobile marketing is the least technical: understanding your customers’ mobile device...
February 2010
6 posts
1 tag
New Look!
The informational side of MixMobi got a new look last night thanks to some great work by the folks at Livefront. Over the next few weeks we will also be incorporating that design into the application itself along with some usability enhancements and other new features. We’re very excited about all the new customers who found us via Mashable and other venues the last few days. If you have...
MixMobi Featured: Mashable's Spark of Genius
Thanks to the Spark of Genius program at Mashable for our outstanding coverage today. The entire team is very gratified to get this recognition and to spread the word about MixMobi’s easy, fast, effective mobile promotions.
In addition to the Spark of Genius writeup, we’re talking to many people about our Enterprise and White Label programs, designed expressly for larger companies...
Testing... Testing...
Feeling confused about digital marketing?
You have every reason to be!
Digital marketing is at an inflection point not seen since the advent of the internet. Social media and mobile are shaking up assumptions at a furious pace. A marketer who has just started to feel comfortable with Facebook may be astounded to learn that he now must cope with not only Facebook Lite but the new, mobile,...
"Mobile Coupons for All"
Thanks to Chris Harkin, Mobile Commerce Daily, for the “Mobile Coupons for All, not just Smartphone Users” in today’s edition.
Mobile Commerce Daily and its sister publication Mobile Marketer are an important part of of our daily updates here at MixMobi, and we appreciate the coverage.
1 tag
MixMarts and More
We’re very excited to announce some significant enhancements to MixMobi that we’ve rolled out this weekend. These include:
MixMarts
You can now create a unique landing page that will automatically contain all your current MixMobi offers. This gives you an additional offer deployment method that will be especially useful for multiple location companies (franchises, chains,...
Taking Twitter Everywhere
Although it’s not yet adopted at the “mass marketing” level, Twitter is increasingly being used by smart marketers to find and engage passionate fans.
I’ve been watching companies like Tasti D-Lite, where Director of IT and Social Technologies BJ Emerson has cleverly leveraged Twitter. Noting that “People were already talking about Tasti D-Lite on these networks,” Emerson...
January 2010
8 posts
"Mobile coupons...go mainstream"
We received great coverage from Howard Wilcox, Juniper Research, today:
“I think platforms such as this will help to develop the mobile coupon to become mainstream going forward. After all, one of the most important advantages of mobile coupons is that campaigns can be personalized to suit the prefrences of the individual mobile phone owner and so have a greater chance of response than...
The Power of Re-Location
Location-based marketing is a hot topic, especially among mobile marketers. However, chatter about smartphone-based features and services distracts from a bigger and more compelling aspect of this change.
In the days before the Walmart-ization of America, small merchants sold virtually everything we purchased.
The growth of “big box” stores has brought us more goods and services...
1 tag
Sense & Sensibility
I learned an important business lesson this week. Like all hard-won lessons, it has left me smacking my forehead:
Businesses flourish when their leaders focus on customers who genuinely share their sensibility.
We have been energetically test marketing our new platform. Classic “Crush It!” coaching tells you to, well, crush the market with your persistence.
But I realized this...
Glory or Guts?
Most of us daydream that we might become the next internet “overnight” sensation. Several friends experienced with startups call it the “lottery” phenomenon. “A few hit the lottery,” Steve Kickert of OnePlace told me last year. “Most of us grind it out.”
The vast majority of businesses are still trying to figure out digital promotions. ...
Degrading Gracefully ... or Upgrading Gracefully?
Technologists have a great phrase to describe the ability of a system to “continue to operation properly in the event of the failure of some of its components.”
This characteristic is called “graceful degradation.” (I always think of it as the ability to fall down a staircase without breaking anything.)
So, watching companies (especially so-called “legacy”...
2010: Break the Mold? Or More of the Same..?
At the end of an old year, and for a few days of the new, we reflect on what will be meaningful, compelling and profitable in the coming 12 months. Business resolutions are made, themes are considered, the pundits’ “Top Predictions” are solemnly pondered and then…
…we tend to go right back to business as we were conducting it during November of the previous year.
...
Planes, Trains, Automobiles and ... Cellphones
Answer this question: What’s the best car in America today?
You don’t have to go down to the model level; a manufacturer plus a marque is sufficient.
So what’s your answer? GM light trucks? Kia subcompacts? Toyota sedans? Cadillac Escalades?
Come on, it’s an easy question, right? No, as you’re concluding, it’s not an easy or difficult question to answer...
Thank you!
We are formally launching our new platform, MixMobi.com, this week. In spite of the flurry of activity a launch demands, here’s a post of gratitude for everyone who has made MixMobi.com possible.
First, I thank co-founder, Kelly Heikkila (@k2heikkila). Kelly’s keen intelligence, market savvy, rigor, sense of humor and diligence are outstanding. MixMobi would just be another idea...
December 2009
3 posts
3 Steps to Mining the Social-Mobile-Realtime...
This week Google has put real time front and center. And for those of us reading the Google tea leaves, mobile and social are clearly important parts of their mix for 2010.
How can you take advantage of what Fred Wilson call the “megatrend” Golden Triangle of social, mobile and realtime in 2010? Here are three steps you can take to ensure you get your share of this emerging mother...
Location Optional
New media, like so many things in life, is growing in uneven fits and starts. In an agile world, distinguishing among vital features, nice-to-have’s and fads that will soon fade is crucial.
It’s always easy in retrospect to spot the also-ran’s. After a flurry of corporate interest in Second Life last year, Ian Lamont recently wrote about creepy, abandoned Second Life sites:...
1 tag
Advertising is Good (and Bad) ... But not Evil
Pete Cashmore posted “Twitter Ads Are Evil: Here’s Why” on Mashable Nov 29. The post earned a large amount of notice on Twitter. Pete is one of my favorite writers, and I was interested in his opinion on this hot topic. I found I agree with Pete on many of his points. But I disagree with his overall take. First the agreements:
1) I agree with Pete that “interruption...
November 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Florence or Dusseldorf?
Yesterday I outlined three simple steps for mobile marketing effectiveness, Mobile Marketing 101. But if you are a larger enterprise or a developer, you need a more sophisticated perspective. Let’s move on to MM301.
Mobile Marketing 301 considers which mobile ecosystem will be right for you long-term. Last week I spoke briefly about evolutionary cycles; let’s take that thinking...
1 tag
3 Steps to Mobile Marketing Effectiveness
Many marketers, still on the sidelines observing mobile marketing, are confused. They want to be knowledgeable about mobile, and feel pressured to “take a side” in the religious war being waged between Apple and Google. Some, rightly impressed with the iPhone, are blindly transferring that personal preference to their mobile marketing planning.
These same smart marketers, however,...
October 2009
1 post
1 tag
Taking your mobile marketing to a stickier place
footenotes:
Given the significant changes occurring in the rapidly-evolving smartphone and web ecology during the past three months, I’ve been considering what mobile and social media approach is optimal now. It begs for a new approach, and I see one forming.
If your mobile thinking stops at SMS or a lame, one-off app, if your social media efforts go no further than a Twintern, stop here. But...
September 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Mobile: Your Next (Little) Big Platform
Mobile is more than a fad and less than the grail. Increasingly, mobile is the platform where your customers transact business, research and socialize. And mobile is going to take you places most businesses are not quite ready to leverage. But get ready - soon, most of us are going to be echoing Pandora founder Tim Westergren:
“I’m beginning to think that our future is going to be more...
1 tag
MixMobi In Private Beta
MixMobi starts private beta this Wed, Sept 16, 2009. Please contact us if you would like to be updated on MixMobi’s public beta status. Until we complete private beta (probably some time in October), I will be blogging on general mobile topics. Thanks to all our colleagues and friends for your support, thoughts and encouragement as we built this initial version of MixMobi!
—Lisa