A Mobile Game-Changer Apple unveiled the iPhone Application List and boasted that it sold one million of the new 3G (third generation) devices in the product's first weekend on the market. More important than the sales figures is the coup that Apple has pulled off: The iPhone 3G looks to be the first mobile device to make the leap from telecommunications to data. That makes it the first mobile platform to merit serious attention from marketers.

The iPhone inspires a passion among its users that few technology products have ever achieved. Ask an iPhone user to tell you what he or she likes and you’ll get a 20-minute sermon, complete with demos. What strikes me is that most people tell me they use the iPhone more for data than for telephony. This is where the product is a game-changer.

The mobile Internet has been an unholy mess for several years. Each handset maker, network operator and service provider uses a slightly different technology. This pointless incompatibility has frustrated application developers so much that many have decided simply to wait out the market until consensus is reached. About the only standard anyone has been able to agree upon is Mobile Web, a hobbled subset of the World Wide Web standards that doesn't do anything particularly well.

Apple is bidding to change all that. The two big innovations in the iPhone are a usable http Web browser and sufficient local memory and storage to run applications on the device. This second feature is critical. Few people will choose to interact with their iPhone primarily through the browser, although they will browse to retrieve information. The beauty of native applications is that they can take full advantage of the iPhone’s speed and interface. When combined with a robust Internet back end, some truly interesting uses will develop.

In industry lingo, this setup is called client/server. Millions of people already take advantage of a mobile client/server architecture every day when they use their BlackBerries from Research in Motion. The BlackBerry’s e-mail interface is second to none, but an equally important usability factor is the device’s rapid performance. That’s because the BlackBerry downloads messages continually and displays them locally for rapid access. If the Blackberry’s performance was as slow as a Web e-mail program like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail, I suspect few people would bother with it.

Apple’s applications initiative is meant to give developers the means to build client/server applications on the iPhone. This can give users a fast, pleasant experience that’s optimized for the platform. Mobile Web doesn’t come close.

With an impressive list of more than 500 out-of-the-box iPhone applications and the capacity for developers to create really functional client/server programs, the iPhone stands to be the first truly mobile data device.

No cell phone maker I've seen has yet produced a meaningful competitor. Their origins are in voice, and most still don't get the data thing. Apple's early lead with mobile applications makes it the front runner in his new field.

Here's the opportunity for marketers. Facebook pioneered the idea of using applications as a means to sell products, but there are so many Facebook applications right now that it's almost impossible to break through the noise. The iPhone is currently an open field, and since people spend a lot more time away from their computers than in front of them, there's more potential for audience engagement. The audience may be smaller, but the prospect of getting them to actually use your service is greater.

The applications that succeed on a mobile device will undoubtedly be different than those that work on a social network. Location awareness will be critical. Think in terms of what people want to do and know when they’re standing on a street corner or waiting in an airport. Give them services that help pass the time or entertain them. Better move quickly, though. I suspect the iPhone Application List won’t be a short one for very much longer.

Labels: iphone mobility socialnetwork

  ¶ 10:28 PM 1 Comments

  Daily Reading 07/26/2008

• Complaining Bloggers Have a Cable Company’s Ear

  Comcast, which owns one of the worst reputations of any US company, is finally listening. The cable firm has deployed a team of people to listen in on and respond to customer complaints at a speed that is almost creepily fast. Customers are noticing and the tide of negativity is turning.

  tags: daily_reading, twitter

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  I'm Going Viral: 250 Free Galleys of My Next Book Available In the spirit of viral marketing, and with my publisher's enthusiastic consent, I'm giving away 250 copies of my new book, Secrets Of Social Media Marketing, to anyone who fills out this form on my website. I’m betting that if people start talking about the book before it reaches the shelves, it will be good for sales.

I'd like to take credit for the idea, but it was actually proposed me by my friend and colleague David Meerman Scott, who co-authored Tuned In, a business book that has been number one on Amazon several times in the last few weeks. Scott’s New Rules of Marketing and PR was the number one marketing book of 2007 on Amazon, so if it's good enough for him..

Labels: marketing free book, socialmedia

  ¶ 10:37 AM 3 Comments

  Creating Content From the Ground Up One of my clients has been experimenting with an innovative and efficient approach to content development and I want you to know about it.

The company is in a highly specialized and big-ticket b-to-b industry. Its executives are very busy and very well paid. The VP of marketing wanted to develop some thought leadership white papers, but the prospect of pinning down these executives for hours to develop the content wasn’t practical. Instead, the marketing departing is using podcasts to construct white papers from the ground up

Here's how it works: We schedule a 30- to 45- minute phone call with these busy executives to capture background information and hot topics in their areas of expertise. I then create a list of questions that are intended to draw out the executives’ thinking (journalists are pretty good at this!).

We record an interview of approximately 30 minutes’ duration. An edited version is posted as a podcast on the company's website, but the marketing group also has the full interview transcribed via a low-cost outside service. Marketing cleans up and reorganizes the transcript and posts the document as a position paper.

Over a series of interviews, an executive's observations and experiences can be rolled up in interesting ways. Multiple interviews with one executive can yield an in-depth white paper. Or point interviews with several executives can be combined into a corporate backgrounder. Customers and prospects can also subscribe to the podcast series. For the small transcription fee (services can be had for as little as a dollar a minute) and some inexpensive editing, the VP has a series of byline articles from the most visible people in his company.

Rethinking Research
I’ve recommended this approach to more and more clients lately. New online tools enable us to rethink our approach to assembling complex documents. It used to be the process demanded hours or days of research. Now we can take notes in real-time and assemble them later.

Blogs are ideally structured as collections of thoughts, observations and insights expressed in short bursts. It's fast and easy to capture these brainstorms online. Got an idea? Twitter it for prosperity. When you go back and look at information assembled in this way, you often see relationships that weren't obvious at the time. Between search, tags and bookmarks, it's possible to assemble these building blocks in different ways.

Some thought leaders take this to the limit. Marketing guru Seth Godin, for example, is known for writing entire books based on collections of interesting blog posts. The blog is his notepad for ideas that can be combined into coherent themes.

In some (though certainly not all) cases, this is a more efficient way to research a topic than spending hours mining the Web or library stacks. For my client, it's also a way to repurpose content across multiple media. Maybe it will work for you. What do you think? Twitter me @paulgillin.

Labels: marketing blog podcast contentmarketing

  ¶ 10:34 AM 1 Comments

  Daily Reading 07/20/2008

• WordPress 2.6 Adds Some Great New Features

  They include wiki-like functionality for shared authoring, the ability to add other sites to your blog through a pop-up window and image captions. If there was any doubt about what is the best open-source blogging software, this release should dispel them. Have a look at the video.

  tags: daily_reading

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 07/16/2008

• 36 Credit union social media do’s

  Here's a useful list of actions you can take to make your social media programs more effective.

  tags: daily_reading

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 07/14/2008

• Scrabble Comes To Facebook, Way, Way Too Late

  Hasbro badly fumbled the opportunity to profit from the popularity of Scrabulous, a knock-off version of Scrabble that is a megahit on Facebook. Instead of partnering with or buying the developers of Scrabulous, Hasbro sued them instead. Now it is bringing an officially sanctioned version of Scrabble to Facebook - a year late. Expect audience indifference.

  tags: daily_reading, facebook

• Practical Search Engine Optimization Advice

  An SEO pro looks at three business websites and offers practical advice to improve their search performance. There is good meat-and-potatoes wisdom in this article. Any company could benefit from these tips.

  tags: daily_reading, search

  ¶ 8:32 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 07/12/2008

• The Social Web Analytics eBook

  Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group sums up a variety of tools - both free and paid - that marketers can use to tap in to online conversations. There are some in here that I had never heard of.

  tags: daily_reading, conversation_monitoring

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Be Careful About Pinning Your Hope on "Communities"

I was a guest on a webcast about social software this week (you can watch it here; it’s free) and the question came up about what publications can do to build community. I responded that they can’t do much and they shouldn’t even try because, with few exceptions, readers aren’t a community.

Then I checked my RSS reader the next morning and noticed this item from Content Ninja that makes the very same point: “You cannot build a community around content.”

“Community” is a poorly understood term (just look at the variety of definitions in online reference sources) and, like many buzzwords, it is being overused right now. Mainstream publishers trying to escape their sinking businesses are clinging to the community life raft, hoping that it offers hope for a future. For some it does, but for many general-interest publications, it's a waste of time.

Newspapers, for example, have historically defined their communities geographically because that’s the business model that worked. While people who share a common space on the planet are technically a community, they’re the least cohesive kind of community. Outside of a shared interest in certain issues like public safety or schools, residents of a city or town have little in common. They may occasionally form strong communities around common interests like a school bond or tax increase, but those groups invariably dissolve as the issue goes away.

There are readership communities that work. Subscribers to a special interest magazine about needlepoint or scuba diving are a type of community. Those people have intense shared interests and they are much more likely to bond together in an online forum that serves those interests. Publishers of special-interest magazines have the best chance of turning their readership into self-sustaining online communities.

General-interest publishers serving broad audiences don't. Their strength is creating content and their best chance of building community involves giving people a chance to discuss, comment upon and contribute to their content. USA Today does about the best of any major newspaper at encouraging this kind of reader participation. It encourages readers to comment upon and discuss its stories within the the limited confines of non-threaded discussion, but the readers themselves have no means to create groups, initiate their own discussions or contact each other. There’s nothing wrong with that. USA Today doesn't have the illusion that two million readers are a community. It's comfortable with its place in the world.

Labels: community, newspapers, publishing, social_networks

  ¶ 7:12 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 07/11/2008

• Are virtual worlds old news? TechCrunch begs to differ

  A lot of people have been dissing virtual worlds lately, but that hasn't stopped the inflow of investment. TechCrunch surveys the scene and says that $345 million have been invested in new virtual properties this year - a record. The blog has a list of who's getting funded and with how much. There are also links to a few of the players.

  tags: daily_reading, virtual_worlds

• Has social media lost its luster?

  The inevitable disillusionment is setting in with social networks, which has proven to be poor outlets for banner advertising. But anyone who is relying on these outlets to deliver banners is missing the point. As this story states, "The premium inventory on social networks isn't a highly trafficked page, it's an individual user."

  tags: daily_reading, social_networks, advertising

• Did the “Enron of Norway” Pull a Fast One On Microsoft? More Details About the Mess at Fast Search & Transfer

  I used to share a building with this company. How "fast" the mighty can fall.

  tags: daily_reading

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 07/09/2008

• MediaPost Publications - Forrester: B2B Blogging Takes Nose Dive - 07/07/2008

  Surprise! Corporate b-to-b blogs aren't a cure-all. Forrester examined 36 companies that touted blogs a year ago and found that only half of them were sustaining the commitment. The problem: topics are boring, the voice is institutional and uninspiring and the authors don't invite conversation. There are tricks to blogging right, but just yammering about your products and company isn't going to stimulate conversation.

  tags: daily_reading, corporate_blog

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 07/08/2008

• Fair Use and Online Video

  The Center for Social Media at American University has come up with some fair use guidelines that attempt to preserve copyright-holder rights without infringing on people's ability to mash up content.

  tags: daily_reading

  ¶ 8:31 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 07/07/2008

• Some coffee fans get grim delight in Starbucks woes | U.S. | Reuters

  Over-expansion and high prices are no doubt a big part of the coffee shop's woes, but the persistent tide of negative customer sentiment can't be ignored. Bloggers have trashed Starbucks for its packaged coolness and its insincere corporate responsibility.The current political incorectness of coffee is probably a factor, too.

  tags: daily_reading

• The easiest blogging platform in the world?

  Online Journalism blog writes about a new service that makes it possible to launch and maintain a blog with just an e-mail message. The downside: limited flexibility.

  tags: daily_reading

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily Reading 07/03/2008

• LoyaltyMatch - Rewarding Yourself

  Cool new service that lets frequent travelers barter their loyalty points for goods and services. This may be especially timely as airlines cut back further on reward options and increase fees.

  tags: daily_reading, tools

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Lessons From the Campaign Trail

From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

Businessweek’s Catherine Holahan writes this week about the big lead Barack Obama has built against John McCain in online visibility. While I’m not going to declare a preference for either candidate, I do think it’s worth noting the lessons marketers can learn from the Obama campaign’s success.

Political campaigns have long been about the 30-second television spot. Candidates staked their reputations and their success on a series of carefully crafted (and very expensive) image ads that ran in key markets. The high cost of this approach forced campaigns to bet everything on strategic media buys.

The Obama campaign has challenged this conventional wisdom. While the 30-second spot still has its place, it isn't with the emerging population of young voters. When young people do watch TV, it's rarely in prime time and they are usually fast-forwarding through the commercials. Perhaps one reason this group has become so politically disenfranchised in recent elections is that no one is reaching them on their terms.

The Obama campaign, however, has figured it out. Its innovation has been in understanding that mainstream media is no longer the bottleneck of communication. When candidates -- or marketers -- use all the media channels available, they can create significant impact without relying on traditional media or advertising at all.

The numbers cited by BusinessWeek are impressive. The Obama campaign decided at the outset to leverage every possible channel to reach its audience and to take every possible opportunity to drive home its message. The candidate is essentially broadcasting every waking minute. When Obama gives a speech, a staffer videotapes it and uploads it to YouTube. When the candidate is in the car, aides are delivering messages on Twitter. Between campaign stops, the candidate conducts chats on MySpace or distributes position papers on his own social network.

The cost of these activities is next to nothing and the young audience they reach has been almost completely ignored by other campaigns. Perhaps more importantly, the Obama strategy has centered on frequent repetition, which is a classic marketing best practice. Instead of waiting for the media gods to bestow attention upon the candidate, the candidate chooses to become the media.

What can marketers learn from this? For one thing, you are no longer a prisoner of the media. You can become the media. Secondly, if you choose a strategic combination of channels and then deliver messages consistently and frequently, you can get better results than by renting a half minute on TV once a week.

Finally, the Obama campaign has demonstrated the beauty of small markets. When you aggregate the candidate’s 43,000 Twitter followers, 60,000 YouTube subscribers, 1.1 million Facebook friends, 21,000 MySpace friends and 850,000 members of MyBarackObama.com, you're quickly over 2 million followers, each of whom has volunteered for that status. If you can convince each one of those people to spread the word to three others, well, you do the math.

Four years ago, the Howard Dean campaign tried to leverage the Internet to run a grass-roots campaign and fell short. There were several reasons for that, but lack of tools was one of them. Today, the problem is how to choose from the bounty of tools that are available. The Obama campaign demonstrates that word-of-mouth campaigns can open a whole new world of possibilities.

Labels: barackobama, marketing, politics, socialmedia, socialnetworks

  ¶ 7:57 PM 0 Comments

  Groundswell is an Intelligent Approach to Social Media Marketing Some of the books that have been published about social media over the last couple of years have undermined their own message by yelling at their audience.The authors believe that Web 2.0 is a hammer and every marketing problem is a nail. Marketers who aren't getting on board with social media are either in denial or stupid.

This attitude ultimately works against these enthusiasts. Social media isn't a panacea for anything and it isn't even appropriate for some companies and markets. The challenge for marketers is to figure out what makes sense and how to build social campaigns into broader marketing programs.

Groundswell takes a constructive approach to the task. Written by Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, it's the first social media book I've read that attempts to define an analytical and quantitative approach to evaluating and applying social media . While the authors' bias is clear, their approach is dispassionate enough to make their message all the more persuasive. In that respect, this is a breakthrough book.

You would expect nothing less than a quality job from two Forrester analysts. Li and Bernoff propose an innovative model for online adult behavior at the outset and apply it consistently throughout. Their "Social Technographics Profile" is a breakdown of US adults into six categories spanning the spectrum of online participation ranging from uninvolved to active creator. The authors apply the profile to a variety of audience segments, demonstrating that not all markets adopt Web 2.0 the same way. They've also made a limited version of the profiling tool available on the book's website.

Importantly, Groundswell takes pains to point out that social media isn't for everyone. Companies with undifferentiated or commodity products that don't inspire customer enthusiasm are going to be hard pressed to build word-of-mouth momentum or brand advocacy. For them, a support forum or thought-leadership blog may be the best value they'll get. It's all about matching the customer base to the appropriate online behavior profile, and the authors drive home that message again and again. This book is all about understanding Social Technographics.

Groundswell is rich in case studies, many of which were evidently gleaned from client interactions and reflect solid understanding of the business issues at hand. The book also takes the best shot I've seen at defining an ROI model for blogs and social networks. The story of how one customre enthusiast has saved Dell more than $1 million in customer support costs is particularly compelling.

I was somewhat chagrined to find that some of the case studies I write about in my forthcoming book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, are also covered in Groundswell. Fortunately, the two books have very different objectives. Secrets is applied practice while Groundswell is more strategic. The fact that we both landed on so many of the same examples is perhaps proof that this market still has a lot of growing up to do.  ¶ 6:12 AM 1 Comments

  Lessons From the Campaign Trail

From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

Businessweek’s Catherine Holahan writes this week about the big lead Barack Obama has built against John McCain in online visibility. While I’m not going to declare a preference for either candidate, I do think it’s worth noting the lessons marketers can learn from the Obama campaign’s success.

Political campaigns have long been about the 30-second television spot. Candidates staked their reputations and their success on a series of carefully crafted (and very expensive) image ads that ran in key markets. The high cost of this approach forced campaigns to bet everything on strategic media buys.

The Obama campaign has challenged this conventional wisdom. While the 30-second spot still has its place, it isn't with the emerging population of young voters. When young people do watch TV, it's rarely in prime time and they are usually fast-forwarding through the commercials. Perhaps one reason this group has become so politically disenfranchised in recent elections is that no one is reaching them on their terms.

The Obama campaign, however, has figured it out. Its innovation has been in understanding that mainstream media is no longer the bottleneck of communication. When candidates -- or marketers -- use all the media channels available, they can create significant impact without relying on traditional media or advertising at all.

The numbers cited by BusinessWeek are impressive. The Obama campaign decided at the outset to leverage every possible channel to reach its audience and to take every possible opportunity to drive home its message. The candidate is essentially broadcasting every waking minute. When Obama gives a speech, a staffer videotapes it and uploads it to YouTube. When the candidate is in the car, aides are delivering messages on Twitter. Between campaign stops, the candidate conducts chats on MySpace or distributes position papers on his own social network.

The cost of these activities is next to nothing and the young audience they reach has been almost completely ignored by other campaigns. Perhaps more importantly, the Obama strategy has centered on frequent repetition, which is a classic marketing best practice. Instead of waiting for the media gods to bestow attention upon the candidate, the candidate chooses to become the media.

What can marketers learn from this? For one thing, you are no longer a prisoner of the media. You can become the media. Secondly, if you choose a strategic combination of channels and then deliver messages consistently and frequently, you can get better results than by renting a half minute on TV once a week.

Finally, the Obama campaign has demonstrated the beauty of small markets. When you aggregate the candidate’s 43,000 Twitter followers, 60,000 YouTube subscribers, 1.1 million Facebook friends, 21,000 MySpace friends and 850,000 members of MyBarackObama.com, you're quickly over 2 million followers, each of whom has volunteered for that status. If you can convince each one of those people to spread the word to three others, well, you do the math.

Four years ago, the Howard Dean campaign tried to leverage the Internet to run a grass-roots campaign and fell short. There were several reasons for that, but lack of tools was one of them. Today, the problem is how to choose from the bounty of tools that are available. The Obama campaign demonstrates that word-of-mouth campaigns can open a whole new world of possibilities.

Labels: marketing, socialmedia

  ¶ 10:26 PM 0 Comments