Mobile marketing

There are estimated 2 million Internet users, but as many as 5 million mobile phone users (January 2011) worldwide. It is a huge global reach for any company, isn't it? In the EU, however, you need a permission from a recipient if you want to send a promotional text. The opening rate of SMS promotion texts is very lucrative: 90% of the people read company text messages (cannot be even compared to the e-mail opening rate).

Many services move into mobile phones:

• mobile optimized web pages
• m-services

For example, Estonia has been in the forefront of m-services already for many years:

• m-parking
• mobile public transportation tickets
• mobile payments
• m-banking
• m-teacher
• m-neighbourhoodwatch
• m-library

The list is endless, because mobile phones can be used for so many other services. The technology is there.

Mobile optimized webpages. As people leave bookings and information search until the very last minute, then usually the information is checked on mobile devices, therefore, companies should critically think if their webpage doesn't have a mobile-friendly version, then this is the last chance to do it. Companies can check how mobile-friendly their m-page is on howtogomo.com or W3C mobileOK Checker.

SoLoMo (social-local-mobile) or some may talk about SoLoCo (social-local-commerce) refers to a more mobile-centric version of the addition of local entries to search engine results. SoLoMo emerged as a result of the growing popularity of smartphones and provides greater local precision to search engine results than what's available via a PC. The GPS technology integrated into smartphones and tablets provides more accurate geo-location results than the "IP mapping" approach necessary for home/office PCs. 47% of smartphone users are heavy users of social media, 54% use maps. Companies should really turn that knowledge into their advantage :) To a marketer, SoLoMo is a complete paradigm shift -- instead of pushing messages to a user via a TV commercial, radio or online advert, the message in pulled as a result of the users' location and activity on social networks. Dramatic shift, isn't it? The best example of this is a social check-in service like Foursquare, which would exist without the idea of location. So how far are we then from local advertising? There is Groupon, but that's basically it. There is plenty of room for development :)

Combining mobile & reality. We use QR codes and hide all sorts of information under them (additional info about a product, animal in the cage, voting platform, etc), we use bluetooth to transfer data, we track the closest ATM/shop/restaurant by LBSs (location-based services), we even explore augmented reality on mobile devices.

There are many examples of location-based services. Geofence is the digital equivalent to surrounding your business with a circle of greeters, welcoming customers to your area. It uses a virtual boundary set around any location and alerts mobile users as they cross it. How can a business benefit from this? For example Starbucks uses this service. If a person crosses a Starbucks geofence, they will receive a message from their location-based app highlighting an offer, coupon, or just a reminder to stop by. This messaging is more relevant to a user and more effective for a company. "Care for a cup of coffee?"

How should mobile marketing be used in hospitality industry?

1. pre-trip -- info sent on e-mail, by SMS
2. during travel, at commodation
• check-in
• schedule check & changes
• luggage info
• up-selling, cross-selling
• premium boarding/seating, pre-purchased meals & drinks
• lounge & club access
3. post-trip -- feedback questionnaire by e-mail, new sales offers

Social Media

Everybody can create content (like me :) but not everyone can create unique ideas. Even though I have this blog I cannot consider myself as a content creator. I think I belong to the 90% of population that looks for the information on the net and shares it. I guess I trust too much unknown people who put up information on the net :) Well, not entirely, of course. I definitely restrain myself from sharing all kinds of posts on FB. You really need to be critical about the info that's out there. I agree, that niche publications on the net are becoming more and more popular because people publishing their ideas are specialists in their fields. What is happening with the minds of people?

Many companies employ interactive value creation, i.e. creating content with the help of customers / partners. Customer involvement may bring you a lot of good marketing and sales, not to speak about increased revenue. There is a noticeable shift from monologue to dialogue happening nowadays, literally, companies ask help from customers. There are many names for interactive value creation: collaboration, crowd sourcing, crowd funding. There is a clear shift in thought going on: taking customers as part of a company, finding out what's going on out there. It's a fast way to understand the changes on the market, in people's mind. And the customers love you for that :)

The technology behind social media is Web 2.0. Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. By increasing what was already possible in "Web 1.0" (this term did not really exist before the new term was thought up) they provide the user with more user-interface, software and storage facilities, all through their browser. Major features of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, user-created sites self-publishing platforms, tagging and social bookmarking.

In social bookmarking system users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but can be saved privately, shared within groups or certain networks. Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders.

The side-effect of Web 2.0 is increasing spamming. But the benefits are more important: openness, freedom, collective intelligence, user participation. Key features of Web 2.0 include

1. folksonomy (= free classification of information)
2. rich user exxperience
3. user as a contributor
4. long tail
5. user participation
6. basic trust
7. dispersion

E-business intelligence

Indeed, you need to be intelligent to do business online. There is too much information out there, therefore, one needs to learn to listen. Market research is expensive, but cooperation and collaboration with stakeholders will bring you lots of valuable information you would have otherwise paid to someone else.

There are several useful web visitor tracking devices (or CRM integrations) out there. Here are 2 examples:
Google Analytics (most of it free to use)
With the help of Google Analytics you can measure your sales and conversions, get fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they have arrived  on your site and how you can keep them coming back.
Woopra (not free, they ask for a monthly fee)
Woopra builds a comprehensive, real-time profile and timeline for every user, tracking them from anonymous visitor to converted unique customer across multiple devices. 

If you want to know that has been said about your company, then the following sites should be visited:
Radian 6
Radian6 was bought over by Salesforce in 2011. Radian6 helps companies follow what people are saying about them online. Radian6 gathers the discussions happening online (blogs, comments, multimedia, forums, communities like Twitter, etc) and gives companies the ability to analyze, manage, track and report on their social media monitoring and engagement efforts.
Socialmention
Real-time social  media search and analysis. Like with Google Alerts you can receive social media alerts of your brand, company, marketing campaign or what not.


An acronym one needs to know:
SOA (Service-oriented architecture) can be seen as a continuum, from older concepts of distributed computing and modular programming, through SOA, and on to current practices of mashups, SaaS and cloud computing (which some see as the offspring of SOA)


PS. Pasi Tuominen (Haaga-Helia UAS) wrote his PhD on social media intelligence and reputation control.