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Marketers Use Third-Party Mobile Apps – Marketing Vox News

BlogPostman — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:43:23 +0000

Marketers Use Third-Party Mobile Apps Marketing Vox News The LinkedIn online professional networking platform follows with 78% usage. Seventy percent of marketers use blogs. All other types of social media ... and more

Twitter is evolving and still relevant

BlogPostman — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 14:51:26 +0000

SmartPulse — our weekly reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social media practices and issues. Last week’s poll question: With the rise of location-based platforms such as Foursquare and Gowalla, has Twitter become old hat? The new and shiny has worn off Twitter, but it’s still useful — 35.10% Perish the thought; Twitter is still very viable — 35.10% Foursquare? Gowalla? What are those? — 17.31% Yawn. Twitter is yesterday’s news — 12.50% On one hand, the new and shiny has worn off Twitter, but it is reinventing itself to maintain relevance. For example, the company recently announced a revenue model based on advertising. For the first time, Twitter has a chance to become profitable (at least to actually earn revenue). Twitter is also entering the geo-location craze with a new feature called Points of Interest . It is orienting itself to be used ubiquitously in a mobile environment. In his keynote at the recent Twitter developer conference, Chirp , company CEO Evan Williams said that as of today, only 37% of active users use Twitter on their mobile devices. He wants to see that number rise to 100%. Speaking of use, there are more than 55 million new tweets created each day, and more than 600 million search queries per day. Finally, Twitter is putting lots of emphasis on building out and shoring up its infrastructure in order to handle the growth. I won’t say that gone are the days of the “fail whale,” but the platform does seem to be much more stable than in the past. Williams says that “Twitter is evolving. The goal is to serve users. There is much left to invent.” I believe Twitter’s heyday has not yet passed. It will be with us for a long time to come. Paul Chaney is an Internet marketing consultant and speaker on the topic of social media, author of “The Digital Handshake” and a member of the SmartBrief on Social Media Advisory Board .

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Twitter is evolving and still relevant

DoubleDutch: Foursquare for the Enterprise

BlogPostman — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:25:25 +0000

The buzz on geolocation marketing is hot. Recently Lawrence Coburn released the beta version of DoubleDutch, a platform for creating your own geolocation check-in app, ala Foursquare. I connected with Lawrence to ask more questions about DoubleDutch and to get tips for marketers that want to incorporate geolocation and review services into their online marketing. First, can you share a bit about yourself and your company RateItAll? We spoke on a panel several years ago at Pubcon and I remember that you have a great story about how your company started and really exploded with media attention. Sure, RateItAll is a story of endurance. I ran it out of a coffee shop for years (along with a number of other niche sites). By 2007 it had started to grow to a point that I couldn’t handle it by myself. It was making decent money, but I was struggling to keep the servers up. Mathew Spolin, our CTO joined us in 2008 and we were able to go out get a little funding for it. We now have a team of seven based in San Francisco’s Mission District. Congratulations on launching your new project, the iPhone App: DoubleDutch. I appreciate getting a pre pre alpha view of it and now you’re really added some great features – especially the ability to white label it. What prompted you to create DoubleDutch and how is it different than Foursquare and Gowalla? Lee, you were actually one of the first people to see DoubleDutch in the wild. We’re really excited about it – it has been called “Foursquare for the Enterprise” and “Ning for Mobile Social Networks.” We’re OK with both of those descriptions. We had been eying location based services for a long time. I was an obsessive user of Dodgeball (the SMS precursor to Foursquare). By the time 2009 SXSW rolled around, Mathew and I were determined to do something with location. We approached Foursquare to team up on a reviews + check-ins combo, but weren’t able to get their attention. So we set out to build the thing ourselves, leveraging RateItAll’s massive database of geo tagged data. Over the years we had signed a number of geo data partnerships, giving us a big advantage in entering the location fray. Our goal was to put together a collection of mobile, social components that could be remixed and customized by white label partners. In addition to the check-in functionality, some of our features include game dynamics (leaderboards, achievement stickers, and “Rockstardom,”), ratings and reviews, photo uploads, Facebook / Twitter integration, and many more. This app was in development for more than 6 months and we’re quite happy with how it turned out. Our big difference from Foursquare and Gowalla is in our emphasis on reviews. We think there is an endemic relationship between a social check-in and a review of a local business. Just as Amazon has been able to leverage sales data to convert more reviews than anyone else, we think that check-ins are the first step towards posting a review. We also believe strongly in the concept of “The community IS the social graph.” What I mean by this is that on public networks like Foursquare or Gowalla, you need to recreate your social graph for the apps to get any value from the service. Not so on a private network like DoubleDutch. You can imagine an app white labeled for a conference like Pubcon, in which every attendee could see the check in activity of other attendees. Think about what a boon this would be for networking – no more just heading to the lobby bar and hoping for the best. And because everyone was there for Pubcon, no friending would be required. Are widgets still sexy ? Of course! Just not as sexy as geo at the moment. In fact, I’m not posting much on Sexy Widget any more. I started a blog called Location Meme a few months ago with a friend. The folks at The Next Web took notice, and invited me to be an editor at that network’s Location blog , and that’s where I’m doing most of my writing now. Back to DoubleDutch. Not only is this a (another) geolocation iPhone app, but you’re offering companies or organizations the opportunity white label the DoubleDutch platform to create their own location-based iPhone app. Who is your target and how do you see them using it? What are your plans to make it competitive with the other apps out there that are already well entrenched? Our three target verticals right now are Conferences, Hotels, and Universities. We think that almost any community that is tied to a location could benefit from a location and knowledge sharing service, but we needed to narrow the universe down a bit. Conferences and Hotels are interesting because they typically are communities of people who are converging on a new city looking for recommendations and interaction. DoubleDutch helps on both counts. Universities are interesting because of their tie to a specific geography, and the demographic. You can check out some sample use cases on DoubleDutch.me. How does the Double Dutch app tie in to your main business, RateItAll? Great question. We are seeing signs that DoubleDutch has the potential to become our main business, with RateItAll taking a supporting role. RateItAll provides a tremendous foundation for the service, with its massive amount of geo tagged data, and its 4M+ reviews. Our server infrastructure is key as well as it allows us offer SLAs to our clients. Also, all check in, ratings, reviews, and photo activity is aggregated on RateItAll.com, making DoubleDutch another content collection channel. You were at SXSW, who won the geolocation prize there? Gowalla or Foursquare? I guess that’s a loaded question. What did they do right? Did you see any big mistakes? I think geolocation won the geolocation prize. Both those services got a big boost, but I think the whole space benefited from all the attention. At DoubleDutch, we are huge fanboys / fangirls of both services and wish them only the best. If you believe that Enterprise trails Consumer by two years (which we do), the faster that those services blaze the trail, the faster that DoubleDutch will grow. Please share 3-4 best practices and tips for companies that want to use geolocation based mobile apps to market their businesses? I think it really depends what kind of business you are. If you are a local business, you don’t really have to do much other than ensure that your address info is up to date on the mobile services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and of course, RateItAll. If you are a bit more savvy / experimental, you can try offering discounts / giveaways to Foursquare Mayors, and try and incentivize your customers to check-in and push to Twitter / FB. If you are a big brand, perhaps it makes sense to try and cut a deal with Foursquare or Gowalla to sponsor some Badges. Lots of companies are cutting these sorts of deals, and it’s a good way to drop your brand into the experience of those apps in the context of the location game. But if you are a big community, it might make sense to use a service like DoubleDutch to create a more pervasive connection with your customers / members / employees and extend your community out into the real world. Social check in apps are not only fun, but they can be productive. We’re talking to companies with some pretty innovative ideas for putting geo to work – for example, a real estate company wants to put this app in the hands of their agents to encourage more property visits, and help those agents capture photos and thoughts about each property. We have been amazed at how creative some of these companies are. What about tips for marketing within the consumer reviews marketplace overall? How important is it for companies to be active, whether it’s editorially, through advertising or offline promotion with services like Yelp, Epinions or even RateItAll? I strongly recommend that businesses be active on the big review properties. Being active does not mean being confrontational and bullying – it means engaging thoughtfully with customers, even the insane and / or angry ones. If you suspect cheating, don’t call out the customer – go to the host site. Most of these services allow commenting and messaging – on RateItAll, which is the 9th biggest review site, we see a number of big brands on the site every day making use of the free tools like commenting and messaging to engage their customers. Some of those folks pay us for access to a few more tools, but you don’t need to have a budget engage your customers. One question I like to ask smart and busy entrepreneurs like yourself is: How do you stay current with technology and marketing? Do you have favorite events, books, blogs, networks or some kind of crystal RateItAll ball to keep you on top of what’s important for the future of your business? I read and write as much as I possibly can. Writing makes me smarter about a topic, because I don’t want to come off as a moron. It takes a lot of research to write a post. Sexy Widget was born out of my desire to get smart about widgets, and my role as Editor at the Next Web was born out my desire to get smart about geo. In terms of reading, I hit Techmeme and Hacker News all the time, and also get a lot of good links from Twitter. My two favorite blogs are AVC and CDixon.org . Living in San Francisco, I have access to a number of technology meetup type events – I try and hit a couple per month. There’s nothing better than talking to entrepreneurs, because for them, predicting the next big wave is life or death. I tend to listen to folks running companies more than I listen to journalists. Thanks Lawrence. You can download the Double Dutch app here. RWW did a great overview with screenshots here. Lawrence Coburn is the founder and CEO of RateItAll and co-founder of the white label geolocation app, DoubleDutch . In his spare time, he is an editor of The Next Web’s Location blog . Lawrence is also a mentor at Ventures.io , a San Francisco based technology incubator. © Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | DoubleDutch: Foursquare for the Enterprise | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

Social Media And The Changing Career Environment – OfficialWire (press release)

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:19:19 +0000

Best Mobile Contracts (blog) Social Media And The Changing Career Environment OfficialWire (press release) There are also networks that are very useful for professional networking such as LinkedIn . For those that work in the creative industry or those who work in ... Why Twitter has an uncertain future Utalkmarketing Businesses wake up to social networking Emirates Business 24/7 Social networking in schools Lexology (registration) MSN Money

App experts name favorites

BlogPostman — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 11:10:50 +0000

Applications are a bright spot in mobile advertising, and loads of marketers have plans to jump on the mobile app bandwagon. An overwhelming 64.8% of marketers and publishers reported planning to invest in mobile applications this year, according to a recent survey . That said, the discipline is still young , and everyone’s trying to gather as much intel as possible on what’s working for marketers and consumers in appville and what’s not. I got shut out of the app-related sessions I was slated to cover at SXSW , but Shari Yoder Doherty , consumer marketing and communications guru and SmartBrief on Social Media reader, graciously agreed to share some of the best stuff she heard. “You can’t be into social media if you aren’t into mobile as well,” said Shiv Singh , vp and global social media lead at Razorfish, during the session Extending Your Brand? There’s An App for That moderated by Adweek digital editor Brian Morrissey . By now, most brands are aware of the powerful combination of social, mobile and local. The popularity and content of the standing-room only SXSW sessions I attended on mobile applications indicates, however, that many companies are still struggling to find the right mix of these elements. Experts engaged in lively debate about what brands can learn from services such as Foursquare about the power of social status, reward systems and peer referral to inspire and curate local discovery and decision-making. One thing they agree on, however, is that some marketing apps are hot and some still have a ways to go. Hot: Amazon Mobile for iPhone enables people to take pictures of products you see out in the real world, which are then identified and placed in your cart to buy later. – Zeus Jones founder Adrian Ho . ShopSavvy , a bar-code scanner app similar to RedLaser , shows shoppers the cheapest product prices online or at nearby stores. — Artefact co-founder and principal designer Rob Girling . Vice Tracker proposes to keep people on top of their indulgences, “whether for health or for money.” Translation: it tries to change people’s spending behavior with social gaming and incentive features. — Shiv Singh, Razorfish . Not: The popular VW GTI Real Racing app got the thumbs-down from Ho because “it doesn’t drive additional brand interactions and sales.” In Girling’s opinion, many luxury brands, such as Mercedes-AMG, have a tendency to release branded microsites as apps and miss the opportunity to connect and interact with passionate owners and potential buyers. Singh singled out the New York Times app as one that could greatly benefit from the addition of location-aware and social features. One to keep an eye on: One of my personal favorites, StickyBits , launched during SXSW this year. StickyBits is an innovative app that bridges the digital world to the physical world via bar codes. Users can scan any bar code and easily attach digital content like photos, videos or text to real world products. Then when anyone else scans the bar code, a myriad of digital content is revealed. It’s not hard to think of the practical uses of an app like this. Imagine viewing cooking videos as you scan foods in the grocery store or browsing styling advice and hearing new music as you decide which pair of jeans to buy. Keep an eye on this one as brands and consumers experiment with creative ways to bring digital content to life in the real world. Which of your favorite apps should be on this list?

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App experts name favorites

What are the roadblocks to establishing a mobile strategy?

BlogPostman — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:21:11 +0000

Every new technology has a learning curve — and sometimes it feels like this goes double for social technologies. First, you need to learn how to use the tools, then you have learn how to use them to engage others. It can seem like an awfully long road to walk, as Dave Curry explains in today’s lead story in SmartBrief on Social Media . It might even be tempting to wait until there are more case studies and best practices for these new services. But waiting for a blueprint to magically appear has its own dangers. Three reasons to jump in now: No one can teach you but you. Social-media marketing case studies can be valuable teaching tools, but that abstract learning can only take you so far. The most memorable lessons don’t come from the triumphs of one brand or the blunders of another. They come from personal experience. You’ll never learn as much by watching as you will by doing. Your mobile strategy needs to be tailored to your company’s needs, not taken off the rack. Starting small keeps your risks low. Keep your expectations in check and your ambitions modest — at first. Fail early and often, but do it in front of a select audience. That way, you can learn in a controlled environment, where very few people will notice if your earliest efforts aren’t as strong as they could be. Once you understand what works for your brand, you can expand your efforts. If you don’t, someone else will. While you’re waiting for the technology to be perfected, for the rulebook to be written, for the blueprint to appear, your competitors are on the ground and figuring it out for themselves. The extra experience and the additional opportunities to establish a community will be difficult obstacles to surmount. Of course, not every company will end up embracing mobile — and some of the holdouts may have great reasons for doing so. But apprehension over the learning curve shouldn’t be one of them. Are location-aware networks part of your social strategy right now? What are the biggest challenges these services present? Anyone want to make the case for waiting? Image credit, HelleM , via Shutterstock

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What are the roadblocks to establishing a mobile strategy?

Mobile making a difference: A SXSW roundup

BlogPostman — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 22:11:34 +0000

We had two roving correspondents at SXSW Interactive last week in search of fascinating nuggets at the intersection of health and mobile. Doug Naegele, founder of Infield Communications , and Rebecca Pollack , SmartBrief Editor both contributed to this session roundup. At ER 2.0 , Doug was captivated by FrontlineSMS:Medic , a content management system for mobile messaging that’s used worldwide to bring medical care to rural communities. Created by two Stanford grad students on only a few thousand dollars, the software turns a laptop and a mobile phone into a central communications hub — no Internet required. In Malawi, rural community leaders use Frontline to send texts to the nearest hospital 50-100 miles away. Text in a drug name, and Frontline automatically texts back dosage and usage information. Doctors report saving $5,000 per year in fuel costs and are able to care for twice as many patients. Bravo! Handheld Awesome Detectors: World Changing Mobile Apps spotlighted a couple remarkable technologies making a difference. Ushahidi , a mobile platform born during the turmoil of the 2008 Kenyan presidential elections, crowdsources information during crises. Kenyans who witnessed or experienced violence during the election sent SMS texts to Ushahidi’s central server. The central platform then mapped the incident reports and posted them to the Web for viewing by the international community. Since then, Ushahidi has been used in South Africa, Congo, Palestine, and Haiti to allow citizens to document and report violence in places where police can’t or won’t. Also in that session, Doug was impressed by The Extraordinaries an on-demand volunteer service which matches willing helpers with small bits of extra time (think: 10-30 minutes) with charitable organizations. Via their iPhone App, volunteers can sign-up for a variety of tasks such as translating a single Web page, mapping healthy eating places in a neighborhood, or tagging photos of disaster areas to find missing persons. Recently volunteers applied 80,000 tags to 8000 photos from Haiti. Those efforts located 700 missing persons and led to 24 family reunions. That is awesome. Rebecca was blown away by the presentation How Telemedicine is Healing Haiti by High Alert International Publisher John Hedtke. Telemedicine is a collaborative mission, with doctors in the field teaching teams back home what to expect, and experts at home base doing legwork on research and analysis for field personnel. The cameras they use are “whole telemedicine suites in your hand,” said Hedtke. Although they require low bandwidth, the camera feature plug-ins that interface with medical equipment for monitoring vitals, touch-screen drawing, and two-way VOIP with built in speakers and mic for voice, messaging and videoconferencing. And if you can believe this, they also interface with digital records systems and are HIPAA compliant. Truly inspiring mobile technology indeed. Image Credit, Stephen VanHorn , via Shutterstock

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Mobile making a difference: A SXSW roundup

Social, Mobile and Email Integration: Maximizing Your Digital Marketing Mix – Smart Biz

BlogPostman — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:28:42 +0000

Social, Mobile and Email Integration: Maximizing Your Digital Marketing Mix Smart Biz Social media marketing includes participation on social networking websites such as: Facebook, LinkedIn , MySpace, video and photo sharing websites including ...

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Social, Mobile and Email Integration: Maximizing Your Digital Marketing Mix - Smart Biz

BIGLIST Social SEO Blogs Update 031110

BlogPostman — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:02:25 +0000

Welcome to the post-Winter/pre-Spring version of the BIGLIST review of SEO blogs . Snow is starting to melt and you can actually walk around outside (in Minnesota) without your eyelashes freezing together. We have a nice group for you to review so fire up your RSS reader and subscribe. LyndiT blog gets our attention for great design and user experience in this BIGLIST update. Lyndi Thompson is a Social Media and Online Marketing Specialist and like me, is addicted to peanut M&Ms. Besides writing about a mix of social media, SEO, web design and online marketing topics, you might be interested to know Lyndi lives on a mini farm, owns several animals including a donkey and supports some great causes in the Northwest. Frank Thinking About Internet Marketing – Frank Reed blogs on several sites including Marketing Pilgrim and Biznology. Here, he shares is talented writing skills to tell stories about SMB internet marketing topics. This isn’t a how to blog, it’s a broader topic and things to think about blog as the name implies about Search, Mobile, Social and Local. State of Search – What’s going on in the search and social media marketing space? This new blog from Dutch internet marketer, Bas van den Beld of Search Cowboys fame, and friends promises to be a source for what’s happening in the world of search and social. It also compliments a weekly radio show on WebmasterRadio.fm of the same name. ezlocal blog – If you’re in search of great advice on local search marketing, this might be your lucky day. You can expect detailed how to posts including those about Google Maps and Local Business Center and local marketing topics. ezlocal itself is a local business search resource and directory. Digital Marketing Zen – David Wells is a digital marketing strategist for an agency in Charlotte, SC and publishes a blog that documents his observations via posts, podcasts and a curated collection of videos on topics that include everything from Augmented Reality to SEO and Social Media to Web Analytics. Single Grain Blog – This agency blog is written by Sujan Patel and Ross Hudgens on SEO, PPC, Design, Link Building and some social media. Website Workshop – Buzzhound Learning Lab is a St. Louis, MO based agency with a newer blog that has started writing posts again about SEO and topics that support the SEO training courses offered. Hopefully they continue. Aussie Internet Marketing Blog – Sean Rasmussen writes “down under” about practical tips on a variety of online marketing topics including SEO, blogging, social media and general web 2.0. Did your SEO or SEM blog make the cut? Share the good news with your readers using the badge and link below or choose one from the badges page .

Is mobile good for the titans of social?

BlogPostman — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:03:55 +0000

Social networks are seeing more users access their sites via mobile devices –Twitter got 347% more mobile usage in January 2010 than it did a year earlier, while Facebook saw its mobile usage increase by 112% over the same period. Is that a good thing for these mega-popular social networks — or a signal that the winds are starting to shift? Techies have been talking about the potential of the mobile Web for almost as long as they’ve been excited about social media. The difference is that while social networks have taken off in a big way over the past seven years or so, mobile has been crawling along. It’s not hard to see why — surfing the Web on a non-smartphone is a pain and it’s only in the past few years that smartphones have become cheap and plentiful. Finally, the masses are catching up to the technophiles. That sounds like great news for today’s dominant social networks, right? Except that Facebook wasn’t designed with mobile in mind. Neither was LinkedIn or MySpace or any number of other traditional social networks. It’s not clear yet who will make the transition well and who won’t. While they’re figuring out how to make the most of mobile, we’ve already got a number of social networks that were meant to be used on a mobile device. They’re natives to the platform. This is when industry shake-ups happen: When something fundamental about an industry changes, it invites competition that the former titans of the field may not be prepared for. Of course, it doesn’t happen every time — and in this case, Facebook has had more than ample notice that the shift is coming. I’m certainly not suggesting that Facebook is just going to lay down its crown and walk away because of a little paradigm shift. But mobile gives its competitors an opening they didn’t have before. If someone is smart and finds a way to exploit that weakness, we may be in for another Friendster/MySpace-style changing of the guard. What about Twitter? Twitter is a special case. It was, in a sense, born out of text messaging, and it’s already taking location into account. So it’s even harder to say whether mobile gives Twitter the boost it needs to become truly ubiquitous or whether it presents a vital opening to a would-be competitor. Is mobile good or bad for established social networks? Do you think any of the mobile networks on the market today pose a real threat to the likes of Twitter and Facebook? Image credit, kavione via Shutterstock

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Is mobile good for the titans of social?