Show notes. Here are the links we discussed in the podcast:

• ComScore: Mobile Social Networking App Audience Grows 126% In Past Year (ReadWriteWeb)
• Half of adult cell phone owners have apps on their phones (Pew Internet)
• Internet Trends via Mary Meeker — October 2011
• Why Mobile Social Media Matters – Statistics, Trends, Technologies
• Google GoMo Helps Businesses Go Mobile (Mashable)
• List of countries by number of mobile phones in use (wikipedia)
• WPtouch Pro (mobile plugin for WordPress)
• 11 Ways to Create a Mobile Friendly WordPress Site (wpbeginner)
• 10 Mobile Plugins for WordPress (DailyBlogTips)
• Lifehacker.com (good mobile site)
• Wunderground (good mobile site)

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A Story of Frustration…

First, I was confronted by a decision, whose answer was not quite clear: use the college game day mobile website or the regular Michigan mobile site. I chose the game day mobile site (it was game day after all), but it was mostly devoted to articles and videos covering the games of the day (which was nice, but not what I was looking for). Time to try to Michigan sports mobile site…

The Michigan sports mobile site showed a list of the games Michigan was currently playing. It showed the football game as live, so I clicked on that link and it displayed what supposedly was a game tracker.  The score was at the top — but it was displayed as the score per quarter, which had to be decoded to get the current score.  Plus, the play by play was just a list of text that you had to scroll down to see the current play (instead of updating at the top). A link to the audio stream was nowhere to be seen.  Onward to the next stop…

Time to try the normal Michigan sports website.  I knew I had seen free audio streaming there… How to get there from the mobile site though? My browser was now defaulting to the mobile site… Looking all around for a link to the normal site, I finally found the link buried at the bottom of the page. Once on the normal site, I clicked on football link, and got a page full of articles reviewing last week’s game and previewing the current game. Ugg! By this time, I was pretty frustrated, but was also determined to hear the game (it probably would have been easier to just wait until we got home).

Finally I found a link buried in the side bar to get live audio streaming.  After several more clicks (because the “listen to the game live” link didn’t just go right to the audio stream), I made it to a page with a dead plugin.  Flash. The streaming audio plugin was Flash, which doesn’t work on iphones. Are you kidding me? Well, we had Aaron’s phone, which is Android, so I tried to retrace my steps (with a lot of backtracking) and finally got to the audio stream, which we were able to listen to for 10 minutes before we got home.

Making a Mobile Website Work

The point of this story is to think about what you think your mobile users may want to do on your site and present them with easy ways to complete those actions. On a sports website, getting schedules, current scores and listening to live streams (or watching videos) are probably top actions from a mobile device.  If you’re not sure, taking a look at the analytics for incoming keyword searches, click trails and top pages on game days can give you more insights.

Complete mobile website failure.  Most people wouldn’t bother to go through the number of steps I went through.  A few tries to get the information and they would go elsewhere (which I actually did, but there aren’t any live audio streaming iphone apps for Michigan football either — probably due to licensing?). Mobile websites need to be designed completely differently from regular websites.  The information people are looking for on a mobile site (on a small screen, out and about) differs from what they’re willing to sit through on a laptop or computer (longer browsing time).

What tips do you have to make mobile websites more successful?

(photo by music2work2, on Flickr)

Promotions and marketing have evolved very much over the past few years. We have seen the evolution of social media websites, discount businesses, and online incentives for customers. Advances in mobile broadband technology have brought the internet right into the hands of millions of consumers around the globe. Along with these tools, companies have found ways to entice customers to the store more frequently through price reductions, rebates, specials, etc. These new marketing tactics have enhanced sales tremendously for many businesses, even in times of a tough economy. Let’s take a look at the top approaches for marketing locally on a social level.

Facebook

Facebook has made some important changes to the way they involve local businesses in their social network. They hope to better capitalize on the hundreds of millions that update their status every day by incorporating a “location” tag right in the update. Users can not only tell the world what they are doing, but also where they are when they’re doing it. This is a vast improvement over using the now obsolete Places application to “check in” at a given location.

With this simple tag feature, Facebook is looking to get more users involved and excited about the “Where are you?” concept of their social interaction. This benefits businesses tremendously as more and more people go about revealing the restaurants, stores, and social venues they visit every day. Facebook will be able to more easily appeal to businesses that want to be a featured listing on the “location” suggestion box. These businesses can offer discounts to users or simply pay to be a suggested listing.

This is an excellent way to market locally, as companies can leverage Facebook to increase their visibility and sales. When consumers receive deals, they are more likely to shop in your local store. With the Facebook network reaching hundreds of millions of people every day, consumers are able to find the deals that match their interests and instantly update their location through their status update. The more discounts consumers find, the more they will want to shop. This helps to build brand loyalty with consumers that buy your product and like the product. Customer’s friends will also have access to view the deals once they determine where their friend is located. If done properly, a snowball effect will take place and attract an exponential amount of clients to your business.

Foursquare

Foursquare mayorships are similar to Facebook Places former “check ins” option. Since Facebook no longer runs a separate application, Foursquare is the premier “check in” and discounts app. Customers are awarded in Foursquare with free goods and discounts if they check into a business a certain number of times. For instance, you could check in 10 times at Burger Business and get a burger free or drink. The mayor title is offered to customers that visit often. However, employees, owners or managers cannot participate. Rewards may also be given to those in the special management section. Foursquare allows businesses to reward their loyal customers and increase their revenue with repeat business. This also encourages groups of people to converge onto a location at the same time. If you can bring a crowd, some companies will increase your reward.

Groupon

Customers using Groupon can earn discounts by buying with a group of people at once. They can redeem their discounted services or codes by printing out their coupons or by using their mobile phones. This encourages business by offering exclusive incentives to relevant customers within your area. The Groupon coupons allow customers to receive discounted services on salons, massages, dinner, and a lot more. Users enjoy the discounts and may encourage their friends to get free deals. Sometimes if the consumer encourages three or more friends to purchase the deal, they receive theirs free.

Conclusion

Facebook, Foursquare, and Groupon are all excellent marketing tools. Both the consumer and the company benefit tremendously from the use of these coupons. This form of marketing is becoming more successful as more companies attempt to drive new business to their doorstep.

Note: Photo courtesy of marcopako via FlickR Creative Commons.

What learning strategies do you use for your company?

The Situation

We decided that we wanted to replace the old carpet in our home offices with a wood laminate (real wood is just out of the question with two dogs and a kid), so I went to Lowe’s to pick up some samples. After comparing several samples in our rooms to see which ones I liked, I had to figure out how much each might cost.  Usually you’d have to go to Lowe’s website and then search for the name of the style that you like (Lowe’s also lets you search by an item id number). Some of the samples had a QR code that meant that I could just scan the barcode to find out more:

(disclaimer: these aren’t actually QR codes, they’re a MS tag, Microsoft’s proprietary tag system — leave it to Microsoft to have to try, yet again, to invent their own standard. MS tags do work the same as a QR code, so the example still works.)

Once you scan the code (or tag) with your phone, you’re taken to a mobile site which has some more information about the specific product:

The Lost Opportunity

Unfortunately, Lowe’s hasn’t actually made this process useful to a consumer.  Yes, there’s more information about the product, but the information I want is how much it’s going to cost to install in my rooms. Lowe’s could have easily fixed this by providing the price per square foot (or per package) on the mobile site (which they don’t). The could go a step further and provide a calculator where you put in the square footage and it gives you the actual cost (complete with sales tax).

The Disconnect

QR codes (or tags) clearly could provide extra value to consumers, probably enough so they’d be willing to take the extra steps necessary to use them (download, install, scan). There’s obviously a disconnect between companies understanding what the technology can do and how they can use it to provide additional value to their customers. Just because a technology does cool things (or can provide great data or information) does not mean that it will be adopted by most people. Technology has to provide a real world purpose or value.

Have you seen examples of QR codes used well?

What do you think about the potential of mobile marketing for your organization?

(photo by Yutaka Tsutano, on Flickr)

Customers like to be rewarded for their loyalty.  But keeping track of 12309823 loyalty cards is annoying.  With Foursquare, they can show their loyalty while playing a game — and they’re rewarded with points and badges (you might be surprised how addicting that can be).

Your most loyal customers can get a bit of stardom as well.  Not only will the mayor (the person who has checked in the most) show up when someone checks in, you can award discounts to whoever achieves mayorship.

To entice people to come to your location who may be nearby, Foursquare has also added the ability to market promotions.  If someone checks in to a location near yours, they’ll see that you have a promotion and may be enticed to come in.

Foursquare is also rolling out access to some analytics and measurement for businesses about the customers who are checking in to their location, which may decrease the need for in-store other measurement tools.

Foursquare gives local merchants a useful tool for reaching out to their customers, rewarding loyalty, and reaching out to a wider network of customers.

Do you use Foursquare for your business? How?

(photo by KitAy)

You can choose one of the locations in the list (notice it has favorite places you’ve checked in to from that location), or you can search for a different location or add a place that’s not listed.  You can select a place and see who is mayor (more on that later), tips and details for the location:

Once you check in, you’re awarded points.  How many depends on whether this is a new place for you to check in, how many stops you’ve made where you’ve checked in today, etc.:

If you’re the one with the most checkins in a location, you’re the mayor.  For businesses, they can see who the mayor of their location is and can then offer rewards for mayorships.  Businesses are also starting to offer specials based on location.

As you accrue points, you can also earn badges for various tasks or amounts of checkins or points:

So there’s a very addictive game portion of Foursquare – achieving points and badges, which is very attractive & fun for people who use it.

I can also see where my friends have checked in.  And if they’ve checked in to a location near where I have and left a tip or note, I’ll see that too: (friend’s names have been removed for privacy)

The easiest way to learn about Foursquare is just to try it.  If you don’t like it, just delete it off your phone.  Keep in mind who you friend and whether you’re ok with people knowing where you are.  Although, you can choose by checkin whether or not you share your location, as well as whether it’s shared out to Twitter or Facebook.  If you’d like, you can friend me – I’m Sazbean Worsham on Foursquare.

Whether you should use Foursquare for your business is another post entirely.  Look for that later this week.

Do you use Foursquare? What do you like/dislike about it? How do you use it?

Clicking on their listing I could see what offers they had:

When I did check into Biggby, I was reminded again that there are specials nearby:

Pretty useful both for location businesses and for consumers. These are loyalty programs I can get behind (since I hate loyalty cards).

The interesting part of a Winksite mobile site is all the community functions (channels) you can include to increase return engagement.  Such channels include a journal, feeds, links, events, reports, notes, chat, forum, surveys, zine, and guestbook to create an almost Facebook-like social site around your mobile site.  You can also invite people to become members of your site, send broadcasts to members and send messages to other winksite’s.

Winksite currently does not offer any statistics other than basics (visits, members), but David Harper, Founder of Winksite, mentioned that may be a revenue model they’ll pursue in the near future.  Winksite integrates with several different mobile advertising platforms, including Google AdSense, admob, admoda and others.  You can control which channels ads showup on, as well as ad frequency and placement (top, botton, random, or top & bottom).  100% of the revenue collected from advertising is retained by the site owner, who can also create what are called self-service ads to advertise sponsors or self-promotions.

While their terms of service clearly says the Winksite’s service is for non-commercial use only, Harper says that they have many commercial sites using the service and have no problem with other commercial organizations using the site.  Harper’s long term goal is to get as many eyeballs on their mobilized sites as possible and build value eventually (he compared their business plan to Google’s).  Winksite has allowed Harper and parent company, Wireless Ink Corporation, to gather deep consumer insights into the mobile market, which they use for other paid services they offer and are developing (mobile sharing/consulting, etc.).  With over 60,000 publishers, including large companies such as Warner, Nokia, and Atlantic records, Winksite’s services are probably “safe” for use for other companies.

Give Winksite a try and let me know what you think.

Technorati tags: winksite, mobile, marketing, mobile advertising, business

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Security Issues

While it sounds convenient to have a sticker on your mobile device that can interact with devices at a store, there’s usually very little security in current rfid technology.  This means that anyone with the proper device can read the information that’s stored on the rfid chip.  There’s no way for the owner of the mobile phone to turn off the rfid or control what information is on it or who can access it.  There’s also nothing to stop the store that gave you the chip from tracking you in places you may not know about.

Awareness Issues

I wonder just how much people who are using these rfid devices understand how the company is using their information.  Are they aware of the possible security and privacy risks?  Are the companies devulging any of these possible issues?

Scaling Issues

Even if you like the idea of a rfid chip for a loyalty program, how is it going to work when all the loyalty programs start doing it?  Is your mobile device going to be covered in stickers?  Just think about how many loyalty cards many people carry – watch the next lady with a big purse shuffle through a card deck looking for the proper card.  Will the companies be able to access the information on the other chips?

Transferability Issues

What happens when you get a new mobile device?  Will you be able to transfer the sticker to the new device?  Probably not.  So you’ll have to go through some sort of new sticker transfer process.  What if you have multiple devices?  Depending on how the technology is implemented, there may be issues with controlling who is actually using the loyalty chip.

Less Invasive Technology

It seems like there would be less invasive ways to use mobile technology for loyalty programs.  Many new phones are smartphones – or Internet enabled, which means they’re able to connect to an Internet website.  Many also have the ability to connect to wireless hotspots.  As the price for these devices comes down, more people will have them.  A company could use their wireless network in-store to easily create the same sort of loyalty programs without having the issues presented above in an rfid chip.

What Would You Do?

Is there a company you trust enough to put a rfid chip on your phone?  Are you concerned about your privacy and security of your information?  What do you think?

(photo by grey pumpkin @ Flickr CC)

Technorati tags: tetherball, loyalty programs, mobile, marketing, mobile advertising, business, reward programs

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AdMob is a good mobile advertising network for publishers who do not already have their own mobile advertisers.  Their additional services such as analytics and providing various landing page options to advertisers make them a valuable mobile advertising platform as well.  Revenue sharing starting at 40% isn’t bad for being able to get up and running quickly.  Larger publishers should be able to negotiate better sharing percentages. – Monetize Your Mobile Site with AdMob – Sarah Worsham – New Media Hub

Please head over to the rest of my review at New Media Hub for the full details.  If you’ve used AdMob, I’d love to hear your opinions.

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Previously I took at look at Unity Mobile, which was fast, but I enjoyed the experience with MoFuse much more.  Creating the site was as easy as giving the RSS link for my blog, uploading a logo and changing some colors.  The interface was very similar to WordPress or other blogging software.  I was able to preview the site before it launched, and there’s a WordPress plugin which will automatically direct mobile traffic to the MoFuse site.  I can also monetize the mobile site with ads (revenue sharing) and MoFuse has neat features like click-to-call.  For the full review, head over to New Media Hub.

The Sazbean.com mobile site is here.

iPhone Sazbean app can be found here.

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Priced at $99/month, Unity Mobile provides all the tools for local media companies to create a mobile site fast.  By using their templates, adding some images, text, and RSS feeds, a publisher can create and activate a mobile website in around 10 minutes.  Revenue is generated via CPM or CPC based advertising networks with 50% of the revenue going to the publisher.  While publishers cannot sell their own advertising, Unity’s system is ideal for local media who want to concentrate on delivering their content on mobile devices without worrying about finding advertisers. – Quick Mobile Site? Unity Mobile is up in ten minutes – Sarah Worsham – New Media Hub

You can try out Unity Mobile for free.  They have 30 day trials, but even without the trial, you won’t be charged until your site actually goes live.  If you happen to give Unity Mobile a try, I’d love to hear how it works for you.

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