Mobile Marketing a 1960

I found an interesting picture while surfing that Internet thing today. It is two old, Ericsson labeled busses on what seems to be the Island in Toronto, circa 1970. Since my girlfriend is Canadian, and used to live in Toronto, the CN Tower is a very easily recognizable landmark to me. The added bonus of the Swedish vehicles sparked my interest and I decided to do some digging into this picture and its origins.

Ericsson opened its first Canadian office in Montreal in 1953, selling telephones and intercoms systems to telephone companies and to private businesses. As the Canadian market and business continued to flourish, in 1976 Ericsson came up with an innovative way of meeting its customers – on wheels. So in 1976, Ericsson in Canada introduced the Eribus, a customized motorhome developed and designed for visiting clients for on-site product presentations and meetings.

The Eribus was a fully equipped mobile meeting space with a conference table, projector, various product demonstrations and a small kitchen to host customers who were unable to visit the Ericsson showrooms. In a country as large, and scarcely populated as Canada, the Eribus proved to be an excellent take on an early virtual office.

Today this idea seems rather stone age, virtual meeting rooms are a given at any modern office, but it is a interesting idea that it all started with a pair of busses.

MaMaMarketing

A rapidly growing interest group among technology and social media today are women in the ages 30 and up. The next big thing within online marketing is (most likely according to trends) going to be an explosion within the older age groups (65+) using social media, and as a smaller introduction to this we are know seeing moms gathering their info online. 

Mom’s top two priorities are her relationship with her child and the quality of communications with her child. She values technology because it helps her with both of these priorities. Marketing strategies need to engage with the benefits mom gets from using technology (the benefits), rather than focusing exclusively on the features (the attributes) of the products.

Technology enables Mom in two ways:

1. It helps her communicate with her child, caregivers and significant others. As we all know, today’s technology allows for communicating in more ways than have been possible in the past—Skype, texting, Facebook, FaceTime, etc. Many moms feel that technology has allowed their family life to be as close or closer than their families were when they grew up themselves.
2. It helps her accomplish tasks more effectively, and makes her life easier. The iPhone’s turn-by-turn directions is a good example of this convenience, so Mom doesn’t have to locate directions before leaving her house.

Many moms also believe it is important for them to stay on top of technologies, both to communicate with their children in the way that is most effective, and as a tool to juggle their busy lives. Moms today are highly wired, using mobile and smart phones with texting and e-mail to communicate real-time information with their children and other caregiving adults. These technologies help moms navigate complicated family calendars with working parents, divorced parents, blended families and myriad extracurricular activities.

Marketing strategists need to keep in mind that Mom is tech-savvy, but she doesn’t necessarily care as much about tech specs or latest release schedules. She cares how technology can make life easier, improve communication quality and bring her family closer together.

Bezos + Washington Post = ?

Well now this is interesting. 

Jeff Bezos recently acquired the majority of Washington Post, making the former Amazon.com wunderkid the helmsman at this physical media. This has been the grounds for a lot of questions and controversy - what is Bezos REALLY doing? What has he seen in this old, by many doomed, media that we have missed?

Now, Bezos has always had a affection for the printed media, so it is possible that there is a bit of heart in this purchase, however, I think he can do much with this. One should not forget a couple of important details in this: Bezos in an expert on the printed medium, he knows every aspect of push, he owns supply, and he rules advertising. It is possible that he found an opening in these areas not previously thought of .

Bezos also said on the purchase :

" We've had three big ideas at Amazon that 've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient."

I think if he sticks to these, he will take the Post far; especially if he holds true to the the last. It has been shown quite clearly (going back to Kevin Costner dilemma) that just building a solution on the new "in time" technology, will not get newspapers on the market again.When Swedish newspaper "Svenska Dagbladet" (SvD) saw sales declining they quickly responded by creating and pushing out iPhone and iPad apps, but offered little to nothing new with them. 

The app also requiring a customer subscription number to log in, another step halting the user from getting excited and engaged in the app. Consequently, it was withdrawn after less than a year, the reason for this in my opinion is that you just copied the magazines articles straight into the app. A subscriber, already reading the paper in its physical form mind you, was left wondering what the hell he/she needed the app for? Sales generated from the app was pitiful (mostly because people on the Internet do not expect to pay for news) and everything just collapsed. SvD is in this point NOT good at relating to its customers, something that ultimately will bring them down.

What should be added to this now is that we are also seeing a new trend in users on social media in 2013. Suddenly 50+ people are acquiring and actively using social media, and all of the Internet in general. The mistrust among that generation has passed, and suddenly 50+'ers feel safe engaging on and with the Internet. These individuals also - in general - have more time and money than the average person, making them a very attractive group of customers.

Now if Bezos manages to create a new Washington Post app that takes over new customers, and in addition manages to reduce the cost of pushing unsold newspapers, he can quite possibly have found a very profitable business. It is unclear whether this is his intentions, but I think if there is anyone who can turn on the newspaper market back on its feet, it would be Jeff Bezos.

Subway Supermarket

While most food dealing businesses sell their products in grocery stores, Homeplus decides to sell theirs in a virtual subway supermarket.

Homeplus is Korea's second largest home goods store chain next to E-Mart, which leads in first place with more stores. To increase the amount of traffic to its stores, Homeplus decided to create a virtual store in the subway so people can easily shop without the need to travel to a store. Subway riders purchased goods by scanning the QR code, which automatically stores every item into the cart.

The selected goods are then packed and delivered right to the buyer's doorsteps. As a result of this clever marketing technique, Homeplus became number one in the online market and if it keeps up the good job, they'll eventually become number one overall.

Living like a LODDER

I recently went on a vacation with a few close friends of mine to northern Sri Lanka. My friends are avid kite surfers, and I have long since wanted to try this new fad, but residing in artic Sweden limits my options for most any water-sport quite drastically. For this reason, and with the added opportunity to spend some good time with excellent company, I packed my bags and left for Sri Lanka.

Before we go deeper into the social media nature of this post, there is a few things that needs to be said about kite surfing first. The sport combines elements from wakeboarding, surfing, paragliding and acrobatics to form a very addictive extreme-pastime. Once you have mastered the arts of controlling the kite, and you are able to surf back and forth, the next thing is to start practicing on your tricks. A kite is not a transport vessel, nor is there any credit given to the fastest kite surfer. Rather than that onlookers will gasp at the one who jumps the highest, or pulls of the most daring stunts. Kite-looping seems to be the main focal point. 

Adding to this, the untouched part of the Sri Lankan nature, the jungles, and its people, makes for a lot of very good and beautiful photo opportunities. Needless to say; we took a ton of pictures during our trip, most of which ended up on our shared DropBox folder (amassing some 3 GB in total), but some of them also found their way out on the social scene.

Now, after the mandatory heavy retouching, obligatory #nofilter, as well as comrade-tagging, the photo was posted on Instragram and/or Facebook, instantly followed by offline haggling, bartering, and finally complying.

As you all surely already know, a post’s popularity on any social network is determined in part by how many “likes” it gets. If a post gets a high number of likes, it will reach a larger scale of the entire network, and the poster will become more influential. This is core, old news.

Consequently, nights in our hut, in the remote wildernesses of Sri Lanka, consisted of getting the rest of the group to like your photo, while at the same time making sure no other photo got more likes than your own. This is a tricky business, especially in a closed group of friends, and immediately triggers back-stabbing, connivance, and deception. Often a person fishing for likes would formulate set rules for how the other would get liked back; effectively making the other person “Like on Demand” or LOD, for short.

Quickly the word LOD, and the affiliated person the “LODDER”, became regular practice for the trip. “Don’t be such a damn LODDER Erik. Just like what you truly like!” was a standard façade statement, often utilized by con-artist Jesper, covering the heavy LODDING taking place behind the scenes. 

LOD carried on all through the Sri Lanka trip, and got more and more intense by each passing day. LODs could be traded for small favors; borrowing sunblock, fetching the next rounds, even throwing the occasional game of Settlers of Catan - just to name a few examples. Paying for LODDING was not far away. Obviously you didn't want to be caught as a LODDER, LOD was synonym with swindling, not something you wanted to be public with. This also carried over the Sweden as we got home; we would send PMs on Facebook, encouraging the other to comment or like certain pictures to raise it to the top of the feed, again with a re-comment or re-like not far away.

This whole social experiment does not come without some reflections. I know there must be professional LODDERs out there, I just cannot see any social media campaign run today that does not employ some fact catalysts to get posts flying, even though no one would ever admit to doing so. What our Sri Lankan LODDER Experiment also have shown us is that as soon as you know the post has traded likes - a LOD post - you lose all respect for it. And the higher the percentage of known LOD the less likely I am to actually fall for it. If I knew that the status update of a company with 1000 likes got 500 of those like directly from LOD, all my respect and trust for that company would go out the window.

The question here is naturally; is LOD and the employed LODDER already an Internet norm, and if so is this to be expected as the next evolution of online marketing? Word of mouth marketing has long since proven itself as a powerful tool; social media likes is a marginalized, but still influential version of that. Would you trust companies, political campaigns, or think tanks that had a LODDER on its staff? 

In the words of Jesper: “Don’t be such a damn LODDER. Just like what you truly like!”

This is why I'm Leaving You

So people are not really into what you're selling. And subsequently leaving you. Gone. Alone. But why? On the Internet people don't smell (yet), but people do smell when they are being served crap - and this is usually why users, customers, clients, and potentially new business leave websites. The Internet is cluttered with information, and if your website is not interesting enough or serving up the right info, the visitor is going to leave. This is your bounce rate.

So, what is a good bounce rate? Sadly, there isn’t a golden number for bounce rate or average time on page. Also, many factors can go into these metrics, such as what kind of traffic your site is attracting and the SEO that’s been done.

In general, a good bounce rate would be anything under 50%-60%. A large factor influencing bounce rate is what kind of page you’re looking at and what the content is on that page. If the page is largely informational on a topic without many links to other parts of your site, then a bounce rate above 60% wouldn’t be out of the norm. However, if the page is mainly a directory of links to, say, products you make or services you offer, than you should see a much lower bounce rate than 60%.

If your bounce rate is high, the first place to look is your site design. Make sure that links are easily identifiable, relevant, and intuitive on each page. Main site navigation links should be located on every page of your site, with the exception of landing pages. The aesthetics of your site should also be up-to-date since an ugly or out-of-date site can cause a user to turn away instantly. Unfortunately, your flashy confetti animations on the sidebars are not as attractive as they were last decade.

Finally, look at how long it takes to load pages on your site. If you have a ton of large, high-resolution images, pages may take too long to load. People are impatient and will most likely hop off your page and go onto the next one if the load time is excessive.

For more about bounce rates, check out this infograph from KissMetrics.

Social Trends 2013

Social media networks were a novelty 5 years ago and today they are no longer debated around the dinner party table. Its old news, the conversation has moved on. Social media is not new, its the norm.

And with that norm comes expectations, development, and new trends. The Global Web Index recently compiled a study concerning the Social Stream of Q1 2013. Here are two key factors driving the social web in 2013:

• Mobile – with the number of people accessing the internet via a mobile phone increasing by 60.3% to 818.4 million in the last 2 years. 
• Older users adoption – On Twitter the 55-64 year age bracket is the fastest growing demographic with 79% growth rate since 2012. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook’s and Google+’s networks are the 45 to 54 year age bracket at 46% and 56% respectively.

It is clear that both the social platforms and the marketers that use them to engage consumers will need to adopt a mobile first strategy in future.

This brings with it significant opportunities for brands to leverage social, mobile, in-store, TV, outdoor, and print using creative, integrated campaigns and engagement strategies.

Facebook Marketing Success

I’ll be honest. I am getting so tired of reading article after article of people writing about how marketing on Facebook is a waste of time. Whether you are a B2C or B2B company it doesn’t matter. If you are not getting results from Facebook you need to change your strategy plain and simple. While it does take a bit of time, effort and budget there is no doubt Facebook is effective and should be at or near the top of your company’s digital marketing plan.


Tips for creating a successful Facebook page:

1. Understand Facebook’s EdgeRank System
If you want to be successful using anything you need to first learn how to use it. By creating new posts that best follow the EdgeRank criteria you can guarantee that it will be seen by the most possible people. Updates are key: post regularly, include videos, photos and links, have clear call to actions, and post content relevant to your audience. Essentially, the more engagements your post get the longer they stay in the news feed. (read more here: How to EdgeRank)

2. Content is Still King
It all comes down to producing good content. No one is going to engage with your posts and you will have trouble building a quality Facebook community if you are not consistently posting content that is relevant and interesting to your network. No, this does not include posting cute puppy pictures or grumpy cat photos. Those tactics are short lived and will not provide long term Facebook success. Plus that is not what your company is about so why post it? It is good to mix in some funny posts or off topic items once in a while, but you will want to make sure the majority of your posts are related to your company or industry.

3. Sponsored and Promoted Posts
Going the free route will only take you so far. Sometimes it helps to get a little boost by trying out the Facebook paid advertising options. If you have a smaller budget try out the Sponsored Stories and Promoted Posts. These two options keep users on Facebook rather than sending to external sites and this is the preferred method of Facebook. Sponsored stories are great since those are essentially word of mouth recommendations from friends. So if a friend checks in somewhere or ‘Likes’ a page your brand can sponsor those posts so their friends will also see and be likely to ‘Like’ it as well. Promoted Posts are also great when you have an important announcement or content that you want the most amount of people to see and engage with. This option allows you to stay at the top of news feeds longer and when people engage with it their friends will also see it as well.

4. Test, Test and Test!
In marketing you can never keep doing the same thing over and over again. You have to constantly switch things up and test your strategies and Facebook is no different. Test different kinds of posts between text, pictures, video, links, polls etc… See which one’s your followers enjoy engaging with more and also what kind of topics resonate most with them. When you try out the paid advertising options test out different budgets, tactics and see which ones provide the best results. Over time you will find the winning formula that works best for your brand or company.

To me there is no doubt Facebook is a viable and effective advertising option that should not be ignored. Next time you read an article about how it does not work for someone don’t jump to conclusions - give it a fair shot, it will pay off!

Digital Marketing Transit Map

The digital landscape covers a wide, complex territory. To plan and manage technology effectively, digital marketers need to understand the inherent relationships between diverse operational areas, applications, technologies and vendors.

The Gartner Digital Marketing Transit Map shows the relationships among business functions, application services and solution providers. Use it to create a digital marketing solutions strategy, improve operations and plan initiatives.

Looking at this map, you cannot help but be awestruck by the breadth and depth of digital marketing. I mean, I work in this space for a living and write this blog as my hobby — I know, I don’t get out much — and I don’t even know some of these stations. Many of them I have only a passing familiarity with.

The Digital Marketing Transit Map is designed to identify the best sources for your needs and acquire systems that work well together. It will help you:

• Identify the connections among business functions, application tracks and providers.
• Find additional research or structure questions about strategy and best practices as well as providers, products, and selection criteria.
• Mediate discussions between marketing and IT.

At first it may seem like an overwhelming source of information, but spend a few minutes studying it and it will quickly turn into one of this years clear enlightenments!

How to EdgeRank

Ever wondered how Facebook always seem to know what´s best for you, and how to target you for those ads just you want? If this algorithm (left) is clear to you, then you can stop reading now. If not, here’s how to decipher this important calculation. 

The method has been dubbed “Facebook's Edge Rank”, and is an algorithm that determines what content appears in users' news feed. An Edge is basically everything that "happens" in Facebook. Examples of Edges would be status updates, comments, likes, and shares.

Facebook looks at everything published - status updates, links, images, video etc. - as "objects." Each object then receives an over-all point-ranking (an EdgeRank if you may), determines whether the object will be displayed in the user's personal news feed. An object's EdgeRank is based on several factors, where only three factors are officially known: the relationship between the creator and the user, the interaction with the object (how many likes, comments, etc.) and immediacy (time-decay parameter).

Affinity: is a one-way relationship between a User and an Edge.

Weight: is a value system created by Facebook to increase/decrease the value of certain actions within Facebook.

Time-Decay: refers to how long the Edge has been alive; the older it is the less valuable it is.

Objects with high EdgeRank appear in the "Top News" feed. Objects with low EdgeRank may not appear at all. Unlike Google's PageRank, which remains the same from user to user, each EdgeRank is based on the individual Facebook users who may (or may not) see the object in their news feed.

If a Brand generally has low EdgeRank objects, then the Brand's updates will be seen by less people. This means that their Facebook marketing budget is less effective than it could be. Brands that are succeeding with high EdgeRank objects are leveraging their Facebook budget by multitudes. The difference between leveraging and being punished by EdgeRank is substantial, and your brand will ultimately be judged by your ability to engage your content. Some Brands have natural success such as the NBA and NFL due to their media rich content, and highly engaged audience.

Tracking your EdgeRank is vital to anyone who wants to run a Facebook marketing campaign, since it is probably the only way to get an actual reading on the campaign’s penetration. Combining EdgeRank with a strong Analytics monitoring will yield a successful Facebook campaign!

Heres a quick tutorial:

SEO for Newbies

Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) is pure rocket science - and beyond. Not even actual rocket scientists can always make SEO work for them, as proven by the fact that if you search for "rocket science" on Google your result will rather yield movies and memes, than physics and math.

However, as the inventors and creators of this new field of study, Google have also release a guidebook vital to anyone slightly confused by SEO - I dare to say that this document is bread and butter for web-novices and PHP-dragons alike. It details what to work with, how, to which extent, and probably most importantly; why?

Find the guide here.

Word of Mouth Failures

Sometimes, word of mouth doesn't work.

As much as personal testimony, first-person persuasion and even hands-on demonstration of products can be more effective than any advertising; there come times when others are impervious to such efforts. This is often above and beyond the usual array of television, radio, email, print, direct, search and other marketing swirling around in the background, doing their best to reinforce the brand and drive awareness.

Sometimes, people are just too set in their ways to ever try something new. Perhaps they are comfortable in what they know (or in what they think they know) and they can't begin to comprehend or believe that a competing brand has made great strides in quality or performance.

Maybe they don't want to believe. Or maybe they'd rather ignore the facts and instead stick with their comfortable little world of perceived realities they've built around them. When they've lived with a brand, product or experience for years, it's extremely difficult to overcome that with any kind of marketing. Whatever their reason, it's unlikely that you'll ever manage to reach such people with your messages.Stubborn or stupid don't respond to word of mouth.

So, what do you do - as a marketer or as a brand advocate - when you simply can't persuade even those closest to you?

Move on. There are plenty of people out there worth pursuing who are willing to hear what you have to say. Don't waste your time on people who refuse to ignore facts. Let them live their lives blissfully unaware while you go on improving other people's lives.

Facebook Engagement

Ever asked yourself; “Why is nobody visiting our Facebook page?”. You are not alone. One of the hardest marketing segments to understand for small businesses is social media, and but default so is Facebook. Honestly, most business do not understand Facebook at all.

The main concern seems to be the uncertainty of not knowing if the Facebook Page should perform better or not. Should we get more follower/likes, or have we reached the market we can reach through this channel? Is our online market segment already saturated? The answer to these questions is most likely; no, you can always increase your following base. The nice thing about online marketing is that is far much cheaper than regular marketing (should be a no brainer everyone by now), which gives you an enormous room for experimenting. And often just growing your online presence, increasing the frequency on your updates, will yield a tremendous return in fan-following – almost regardless the content!

This Infographic by Quintly shows a report of the average engagement pages get based on their number of Fans/Likes in April 2013. Look for the correct bracket to figure out if your Facebook-page is performing above or below average.

While this will definitely not determine what kind of engagement your page should be getting because of course, your case is unique and you could be way higher or lower, at least gives you an idea of what’s normal out there for pages with similar sizes.

101 ways to increase your conversion

Our friends at unbounce have compiled an excellent list on how to increase your ROI. In here they cover most everything from the fundamentals of campaign-related landing pages to actually seeing your conversion rates going up.

Whether you've just begun to scratching the surface of conversions or if you´re already a complete conversion stallion, this presentation is definitely worth a few minutes!

101 Landing Page Optimization Tips from Unbounce

Welcome to the Social Gnome!

Hi all and welcome to the Social Gnome!

I hope you will enjoy this, my latest blogging venture, focused on Social Media, Marketing, and CRM. In this blog I will try and give an insight to my thoughts concerning how to grow your own and your company's network.

I hope you will enjoy the upcoming entries!

Cheers!