iPhone icon for evwigo

Testing the Google Docs Share Feature

Using the Google Docs "share" feature to embed an iframe containing the presentation. This one is 700 pixels wide.

Restaurants reducing YP spend

• 60% of restaurants said they have decreased their Yellow Pages directory spending over the past two years
• 69% of respondents who decreased their Yellow Pages expenditures over the past 2 years, eliminated their directory expenses altogether by going to a free listing.
• 42% of restaurants indicated when decreasing their directory expenditures, “the Yellow page [sic] reps applied more sales pressure than usual and sometimes even threatening scare tactics.”
• 80% of the restaurants surveyed said they didn’t feel that the various Yellow Page [sic] directories are successful in getting them new guests.
• Over the next two to three years, 44% of the restaurants do not see the Yellow Pages as being part of their advertising budget, with 36% projecting it to be extremely minimal.

Hotels Can Evolve Too

With the launch of it's Hotel iPhone app, guests at a Malibu inn get set up with deluxe customer service upon check in. We've discussed some of these ideas before and it's probably worth revisiting.

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And finally, Forget the front desk: Hotels go high tech. A new iPhone app is reviewed on the Mobile Crunch blog. Runtriz, a software firm out of Hollywood, CA, is aiming to bring hotels up to speed. Following a series of quiet test runs at other LA hotels, they’ve debuted a product called “Hotel Evolution” at the Malibu Beach Inn in Malibu, CA. When a guest checks into the hotel, they’re asked if they have an iPhone or iPod Touch. If they do, the hotel staff will load the Runtriz Hotel web application to the device. If they don’t, they’re given a 16gb iPod Touch (with the application pre-loaded, of course) to keep for the duration of their stay.

Once you’ve punched in your room number and security code, all of the hotel’s service offerings are but a click away. Straight from the device’s screen, you can order room service, set a wake up call, request your luggage, dry cleaning, or car (or if you’re going all out, a limo), request linens or toiletries, check your messages, or set your room to “Do Not Disturb”. They also provide information about nearby nightlife, attractions, and shopping ... The cost of getting such a system up and running varies on a hotel-by-hotel basis. According to Matt Allard, president of Runtriz, the cost of the first month is generally about double that of the standard monthly fee of $10 per room.

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LifeHacker Reader Poll Reveals More People Text Than Talk

A poll run by the popular life optimization site LifeHacker.com on September 28th, 2008 resulted in the following data:

DO YOU TEXT MORE THAN YOU CALL?

Definitely--text messages are faster and asynchronous, which makes them more efficient. 65% (1334 votes)

No way--the whole point of my cellphone is to call people. 21% (423 votes)

I do both equally. 14% (293 votes)

Total Votes: 2050

"the NY Times notes that for the first time ever in the fourth quarter of 2007, Americans sent more text messages than made voice calls on their cellphones. Since then, the volume of text messages has gone up 64%, while the volume of calls has only reduced a bit."
- LifeHacker.com

Foodies

Among others, "Kroger (KR) is testing a mobile coupon for shoppers through its loyalty card program".

Driving awareness and foot traffic to... Your Tradeshow Booth!

Piney Bowes' Mobile Marketing Strategy for Tradeshows - Q & A
Pitney Bowes’ entry into mobile marketing is only a year old, but the company is convinced that the channel works best when combined with an incentive.

Pitney Bowes is using mobile as an integrated component of their marketing campaigns at key trade shows and events to help drive awareness and foot traffic to their booth.

"The challenge is getting customers and prospects to the show in general and once they are there, driving them to your booth.

"The key is finding effective ways to set your company apart and communicate your value proposition for helping customers and prospects to help solve their business challenges and take advantage of opportunities for their organization.

"World Business Forum ’07 (New York, October 2007): We handed out business cards, using recycled paper, with instructions to receive speaker notes that were being transcribed by a professional note taker for the 12 different sessions.

"Attendees could text us their email address and we notified them when the notes were available and could be viewed.

"This campaign was successful not only for the mobile aspect, but once attendees visited the Web site they were able to opt in to receive additional information including Pitney Bowes’ editorial advisory publication, “Pivotal Thoughts.” This enabled us to continue a dialogue with attendees.

"GraphExpo ’07 (Chicago, September 2007): The target audiences for this show are service bureaus and printers. We developed a program to help drive prospects to our booth with marketing elements including a bus wrap, a handout in the shape of a card and text messaging.

"The offer encouraged attendees to text message the words “Graph Expo” to PITNEY and show the acknowledgement to receive a free gift. This helped spark interest in driving people to our booth.

"After qualifying prospects and interest, we directed attendees to the appropriate Pitney Bowes subject matter expert to provide additional information and demonstrations.

Rich people

Some target market implications. Perhaps it may be best to target businesses in affluent areas.

"If you want to experiment [with mobile], they should probably be doing it much more in the affluent space, because these people are already doing it"

"These people are much higher up the learning curve."

"The survey also found that about 10 percent of the affluent make Internet purchases using their cells or mobiles. Takeout food was the most common purchase, made by 5.8 percent of the upper-income tier, followed by hotel reservations (2.5 percent), prescription drugs/medicine, plane tickets, event tickets and music/video (under 2 percent). "

Text messaging activity

Beyond the impressive increase in SMS, this prediction could have some interesting implications:

"Text message usage is expected to grow in the near future as the application continues to gain mass-market traction in North America and some emerging markets. But mobile instant messaging eventually will cannibalize SMS and computer-based e-mail, according to a recent study from TNS Technology, as users eschew messaging fees in favor of all-you-can-eat data plans."

Do you agree or disagree?

Impressive case study

Some highlights of this impressive case study:

"The effort on behalf of Ashley to build highly-interactive contacts with a growing base of active subscribers, has ensured that its consumers want to continue receiving messages from the retailer based on positive and relevant subscription and sending policies."

“These new forms of digital marketing via email and especially SMS have really impressed us out of the gate, and shown us a clear path to offset declining response rates and poor ROI in some of our other forms of advertising,”

“We have been most surprised with the revenue generated from a simple 160-character text message with a sale offer. No doubt about it, this has been a game-changer for us,” Mr. Malouf continued. “With two simple SMS campaigns, we’ve generated over $100,000 in new business."

Obama Releases Impressive Mobile Site

Following up a groundbreaking move to turbo-charge their SMS opt-in list with the text for VP Pick announcement opt-in, the Obama camp released a really nice mobile site, created by iLoop.

The press release:

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The Obama campaign's aggressive push into mobile is the most important development in the mobile market this year.
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Agreed.

Beyond the fact that the site is a fully functional piece of the campaign marketing strategy, with effective calls to action and registration paths, here are some of the features:

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The news and press releases sections of the site deploy cutting edge
mobile technology from iLoop Mobile that easily selects and extracts content
automatically from the Obama broadband Web site and dynamically places it in
the mobile site instantly as it changes. Other Obama mobile features include:


-- Opt-in to SMS alerts for appearance schedules, speeches, downloadable
content (video, wallpapers, ring tones) and more
-- A viral "Tell-a-Friend" component on every page of the site which
allows a user to easily forward the site to another person's phone
-- Meet Barack section with media rich bio information
-- News and press releases dynamically fed by the Obama Web site
-- Video downloads of portions of important Obama speeches
-- Downloadable Obama ringtones and wallpapers
-- "Share the Hope" viral component where the user can forward an animated
image to a friend with a personal message of "hope" attached
-- Mobile voting page that polls the users opinions on the issues
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Is Google right?

Mobile ads will one day be a bigger opportunity for Google than the desktop. Or so Google's Schmidt says.

However, skepticism is abound.

So, perhaps Schmidt is wrong, and the opportunity with mobile is not with advertising but is with other mobile information services. It wouldn't be the first time that one technology didn't translate directly to a newer technology.

The key is to be adaptive, not replicative.

The Music Biz Is Perect For Mobile Marketing

A press release from Mozes regarding their Faith Hill mobile promotion just reinforces this fact further. Gives their opt-in list prior access to singles from the upcoming release - calling it "mobile listening parties" - a perfect fit.

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“If you take a poll of the music industry, executives will all agree that mobile is a wave of the future in the music business and is one of the few areas showing rapid growth,” Mr. Stacey said. “It allows artists to connect to fans in a more immediate and personal way than ever before.

“With television, radio and print promotions, artists are hoping that someone is listening,” he said. “With mobile it’s a more definite connection and since it’s on an opt-in basis, artists know that they are reaching people who are truly interested.”
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Obama Camp To Baloon SMS Database with VP Pick Alert

The Obama Marketing Team (aka his campaign) seems to have learned something about SMS opt-in lists that most advertisers have yet to discover. The biggest news of the pre-convention summer will go public via text message, in a bid to heighten the effect of the announcement and giant-size the opt-in list. Illustrating the team's increasing mastery of marketing 2.0, it chose the highly anticipated VP pick event as a catalyst for lightning viral spread of their traditional-media-bypass strategy. Here's the message sent to supporters Sunday night to announce the strategy:

Barack will announce his VP candidate

choice through txt msg between now

& the Conv. Tell everyone to text VP

to 62262 to be the first to know!

Please forward.

Here's the response message:

Welcome to Obama Mobile. You will

now be one of the 1st notified when

the VP candidate is selected. Text

HELP for help. Std charges apply.

Please forward.

Give a Gift via SMS

Nothing is more viral than allowing people to give something to their friends. For now, this is just in India and Canada, but it appears that it won't take long for the US. Are there any others in this space?

MyGiftMate.com

From the release:

Now it is possible to send a gift by MyGiftMate.com, a website that makes it easy to let your loved ones know you are thinking of them. Gifts tug at the strings of people’s hearts and lets them know that you are thinking of them. Special occasions deserve special gifts, but there does not have to be a reason to gift someone.

“MyGiftMate.com has all the ingredients to be a staple of the connected NRI,” says Shabbir Evershine of Evershine Group, a South-Asian and Middle-Eastern marketing and consumer behavior consulting firm. “It is instant, secure, and readily accepted. More and more people in India have cell phones and Gift Mate allows people in US and Canada to ‘text gifts’ to their loved ones and colleagues in India.”

Pay Mate is funneling over nine million dollars (USD) in various stages into promotions and business development – focusing intently on achieving a superior platform of technology by enhancing security and advanced ease of features for all mobile users. Pay Mate and Gift Mate is setting its sights on providing services globally, not just limiting it to Asian Americans.

Meanwhile over in Mobile Advertising Land: In-SMS Ads

This is being reported as a first. Interesting, since ad monetized services have often emerged as stronger survivors compared to paid/subscription services on the web.

The story is worth clicking into to get the background, but here's a snippet:

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Ads inserted in peer-to-peer SMS have a much higher chance of being read as they are less intrusive than the usual SMS push. In-SMS advertising allows for the integration of multiple interactivity features such as click-to-WAP, click-to-call or click-to-download. Moreover, thanks to Amobee's technology, Orange is able to accurately target specific geographical zones or delivery times.

Test results measured during the nine-week testing period are very positive in terms of acceptance rate, service delivery, click rates, number of inventories and the impact on brand recognition.

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FTEU

Longer-term concept to watch: Free to end user messaging. Essentially subsidized consumer messages paid for by businesses.

"Carriers need to map out the business processes for these FTEU programs"

State of the mobile web

This report confirms some things we already know, but has a few new perspectives on demographics, devices, and demand.

Locals Only: Is an Online vs. Offline Local Search All That Different?

This post has some interesting results of local search using online and offline (print) methods.

Basics are that there are subtle differences between the two, and "The type of local search consumers use depends on their degree of need." Along those lines, "nuances such as short-term vs. long-term need and product vs. service-oriented searches do exist and businesses should consider the type of local searches their consumers conduct when determining their advertising spend."

I think the lesson for us is that online is not the same as offline, online is not the same as mobile.

Pepperjam Launching New Mobile Marketing Division

The industry press is picking up on the announcement from a local affiliate marketing company, Pepperjam, that they have partnered with M3 Mobile and are planning to release a platform that combines mobile marketing with affiliate marketing. It seems to be based primarily on text message campaigns, and most likely enables affiliates to earn revenue by registering consumers on behalf of advertisers. The Pepperjam blog seems to be the place to get a bit more info and links into what they are planning.

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Long story short, we expect to be first to market with a revolutionary pay for performance mobile marketing technology that will allow both advertisers and publishers to synergize mobile and internet marketing and ultimately make more money.
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