Digital Influence Mapping Project

4 Killer Slides for your Mobile Strategy

I was re-reading a presentation from Mary Meeker and Matt Murphy from Kleiner Perkins on mobile trends and found 3 killer slides that articulate why we are taking mobile so seriously this year. Often research reports from VCs like KPCB are designed to guide investment choices that will pay off down the road. That runway gets shorter and shorter. These slides tell me what we need to do today rather than 12 months from now. I encourage you to view their full presentation and hope KPCB is comfortable with me sharing three of their great slides. 

 

Social Network Use Accelerating the Use of Mobile

Roughly 30% of Facebook's 600mm+ membership are mobile active users of the service. Even more interesting - these mobile users are 2 times more active than the desktop users. There are all sorts of implications here. "Using" Facebook often means publishing pictures, identifying your location, event posting videos. This is over and above the text-base updates, chat and simple, gestural interactions with friends. Partner apps like Instapicture which help process mobile phone-snapped images into a richer image start to drive their own behaviors (taking "artful" photos). 

High-bandwidth content like video and streaming music are changing services like Pandora which sees 50% of their use base subscribing via mobile. We will take our experience with us and expect it to seamlessly follow. That is why I love my Ford Fusion Hybrid (cl) - my iPhone connects when I step into the car and starts playing my playlist with no effort on my part. Hands-free calls drop back to the handset as I get out of the car. Brands who are not creating useful and frictionless mobile content and services will not only not reach people, but people will drop their service or avoid their content just because they find it too hard.  

Mobile "Device" Doesn't Mean Phone

 I don't know how many handset types and manufacturers their are but I know its a lot. Even with the growing domination by Apple, Google/Android and Blackberry in the smartphone space, there are all the many more Web-enabled non-smartphones as well. That's a lot of devices for brands to make content or applications for. Now add to that tablets, cars and new home appliances and there is a lot more to device types to think about. More importantly, there is a lot more user behavior and intent to think about. What I am trying to do from inside my car (not while I am driving, of course) is likely very different than when I stand in the sile at the pharmacy. Brands must continue to hone their skills at understanding the "user journey" and the different intents all along the way to successfully deliver content and services. 

 

Location-aware Shopping Will Earn Loyalty

I was reading a great study a while back on what engenders loyalty from customers. The assumption that "delighting" customers with great service or imported chocolates quickly gave way to the reality that we really appreciate simplicity. If you can reduce the number of button clicks it takes to submit a claims form or get through a checkout line (I would pay good money to get the Barnes & Noble cashiers to stop asking me if I have my member card each time. I always say no. They always say would you like to open an account. I always say no. Meanwhile, an unnecessary :15 seconds has slipped by. Before you say "get over it," time is all I have; that's my scarce resource). 

Smart brands are jumping on location-aware commerce and hopefully many of them have it in their head to simplify and streamline the customer experience. That will earn more loyalty.    

 

The High Relevance of Mobile Ads Done Right Will Outperform All Others

Let's face it, advertising is changing dramatically everyday. And I am not talking about the growth of digital. More and more advertisers see advertising as a way to extend the reach of their efforts to provide something of additional value via utility or entertainment. Advertisers agonize over whether the content they create to market a product actually meets some genuine need for the user. Not the product, itself, but the advertising supporting that product. Mobile advertising must serve a purpose for the user, and it must resist the temptation to fall back to ways interuptive just because it can. The demands and high performance of mobile advertising will do more to change advertisers (and their agencies) than anything since the emergence of 'social media.'  

Three Ways to Make This Your "Year of Mobile"

Nothing says "Doh!*" like the statement that this will be the "year of mobile."

We have heard it (and said it) for years. Some very smart people I know do believe that we are really at a watershed moment with mobile. They say the equivalent of "this is the year of mobile" with a quick follow-on apology acknowledging that every year since 2001 (year that the 3GSM World Congress was held in Cannes, France; precursor to World Mobile Congress) has been the year of mobile.

This year is special due to four trends coming together:

• 3G/4G device connectivity speeds (We really can watch video now)
• Increase in unlimited data plans (except when I am roaming overseas - watch out!)
• Growth of smartphones (apps make it all easier)
• The fast growth of the iPad (stretches our thinking of what is a mobile device)

See how three of these come together in the US:

We really can do more with our phones in the US, Europe and Asia. That these four factors vary around the world as do socio-economic conditions is a testament to how market-specific strategies have to be. It's not as simple as launching a Web site even one that is localized in 20 markets. ComScore has a great Mobile Year in Review report. (I would also point you to Mary Meeker's preso for Kleiner Perkins) There are great differences in use even between US and EU as seen in the ComScore report:

People using phones for a growing number of purposes has a reached a critical mass. Now, what do I have to do to be successful as a marketer in 2011 and going forward using mobile?

Study People Behavior 

I have this great Powerpoint deck on mobile marketing. It's exhaustive. It covers global stats and all the variety of mobile media use from SMS text messaging to mobile couponing to location-aware services like, well, just about everything these days (How many apps do you have that are able to combine your location with some useful service?).

Don't get me wrong, its a great deck but it doesn't really help start to anticipate or really understand behaviors. It can inventory what people are doing like interacting with Cityville (game), reading the New York Times, or texting but it doesn't connect that too what people are doing in their lives off of the phone. Are they standing in line at Barnes and Noble?  When traveling and finding they are a bit short on wardrobe, are they shopping for a pair of black Hugo Boss Alabama-style jeans (why is that so hard)? Are they guilt-ily trying to squeeze in a few emails at their kid's soccer game?

Mobile will enable more and more behavior change. While 10% of Japan's mobile users (10mm of 100mm) use their phones to make payments, we, in the US, crave that experience. It will change how we checkout and maybe how we shop and decide what to actually purchase. 

To be really successful, we need to think about context. It's not enough to consumer data as if the mobile device were just a channel. Luke Wroblewski at Benchmark Capital focuses on mobile design and puts it this way:

"It's hard to find advice about mobile design that doesn't emphasize the importance of context. While many people are quick to point out understanding mobile context is key to delivering a great mobile experience, few define context explicitly enough to make it actionable. That's why I'm always excited to find concrete insights into how people are using mobile devices."

We need to mix anthropology, psychology and sociology and apply it - again - to marketing to understand this "context." There are not enough studies about this mostly cause it's hard. It requires more than aggregating data. We need studies like Novarra's. They segmented users in 5 groups and came up with this useful nugget about multitasking parents: 

"The study found that multitasking parents rely on their mobile devices to stay in touch and stay organized, never leaving home without their phone. Novarra warns marketers to remember that multitasking parents are more tech-savvy than given credit."

Design Experiments

If all you want to do is shoot out a mobile coupon to the right users, you should barrel ahead. Most other promising uses of mobile have not been codified yet. They remain a little unpredictable which is fine for the marketer willing to innovate (take calculated chances) but drives the hard-core 'optimizers' ("I need a 5% improvement on my CRM ROI before I will do it...") crazy. 

To succeed in mobile, I must adopt an experimental mindset. This is a little different than what Ogilvy calls "agile marketing." The latter tells me to set up a program to be evaluated in the fly to allow for constant optimization. Experimentation is a bit more bald-faced, "let's try some things."

This will work if I do three things:

1. Set aside a modest budget for experiments. Walking around Facebook HQ last week, we were all struck by the slogans on the wall encouraging "failing fast." By identifying that experimental budget I am embracing the ok-ness of failing

2. Define how I will measure the success of a series of programs. That way I can gauge the efficacy of each experiment. It is the only responsible thing to do. 

3. Make post-mortem's de facto standards. I would love to get another Latin term in there. But suffice it to say that beyond just evaluating KPIs, we need to learn as an organization for every mobile experiment. What did we learn about our customer, our business and our organization? How many times have you sworn to do a post mortem examination of a project and then let it slip away? 

Integrate Everywhere

Mobile, like social, is not a standalone strategy. Using mobile devices to engage people can be apart of many, if not most, relationship marketing and even campaign marketing efforts. Treating mobile separately is a short-term neccesity. It is kind of "stimulus-package" approach to jumpstart the organization's use of mobile. In the long run, mobile will just be a part of everything we plan in marcom. 

From the very beginning of these experiments, I need to be looking for ways to integarte mobile into the base level planning on every marcom inititaive. We have gotten pretty good at doing that with social media and are now applying some of that success to integrating mobile.  


*("Doh!" is that Homer Simpson expression that telegraphs disappointment usually in oneself like getting caught doing or saying something stupid. It has a nice self-effacing quality. This is not to be confused with "Duh!" which is usually said about someone else ad in "that is so obvious and you are so stupid for having said it." This is too negative for my blood.)

Visiting the 4 Giants of the Valley

A team at Ogilvy spent last week on the West Coast. Among other things, we visited 4 of our partners in quick succession: Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter. There is nothing like popping in on these folks in this serial fashion to provoke comparisons.

The reason we visited in the first place was informed not just by the fact that we already do some great business together but that these 4 companies represent the most successful ventures in the Valley. I have deep admiration for each and remain enthusiastic about how our businesses will be connected long into the future. Every major marketer and brand shoudl have a strategy (and practice) of working with each of these companies. They will not just innovate their own forms of advertising but will each change how brands are built. 

Facebook vs. Google

Google felt like the mature one out of the three software-based companies. That makes sense of course as they are older and their business model is proven.  They reflected a curiosity in how people behave and how their services might support them. Interestingly, they also shared a POV on how to foster innovation and look for the "innovators" in an organization. I sensed a deeply curious culture, one that had arisen and not been forced upon the new recruits. 

Facebook was more about the platform, the software and the engineers who keep it alive and growing. Their insight into people seems to come from the interactions they have with that software. No one could be more committed to Facebook.Their 24-hour Hack-a-thons are a piece of their culture now and symbolize that drive to push individual limits to achieve something cool.  Both companies feature similar support systems for workers that enable them to focus more on work and less on picking up dry cleaning or the mundane chores many of us wrestle with. That, like stock options, is an attribute of Valley life. Workers considering a gig at the big guys come to expect that. 

Apple vs. Twitter

Apple is a product company. Twitter is an information network. Apple has more than endured, they have prevailed. Twitter is still punching itself up from start-up fervor to true business. interestingly, they do share something. They both know who they are. I was struck by the self-awareness at each company about what business they are in. I admit, I often thought Apple was on the road to becoming a software company where, in fact, the software is completely in service to the hardware.

Meanwhile, Twitter continues to deflect comparisons to Facebook which are unfair. The differences are clear. The Social Network connects people in ever-expanding ways. The Information Network gets us all news and information via the filter that matters most - people and sources we have affinity for and select. 

Apple's iAds, born from their successful acquisition/integration of Admob are impressive. They certainly look better that most other onlne ad experiments going on out there. Traditional agencies love them as they challenge a highly visual creativity. The best work will be defined as the work that delivers enough value via entertainment, information or utility. That is a bit of a universal recipe these days and the iPad and iPhone will be defined by it. 

Twitter has three interesting ad solutions - promoted tweets, accounts and trends. Used by great Twitter accounts (those who really deliver value and engage their followers), these solutions can do great things like bump follower acquisition by 10-15%. While nascent, Twitter's advertising reflects options that are in sync with its service. 

Four great companies. Each quite different yet each will define how marketing and communications evolves over the next 5 years. 

Helpful resources:

• Apple's iAds Center
• Facebook's Marketing page
• Facebook's Ads page
• Google Analytics Conversion University 
• The Twitter Blog
• Google Analytics Blog
• Google Advertising programs

Jeremiah Owyang Sums Up Social Business Investment for Brands

I had a chance to meet up with Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li from the Altimeter Group last Thursday. Always good to see them. I noticed this NBC interview on his blog and thought he did a great job capturing some of the current challenges for brands online. The most critical is that brands are underspending in social media and have not caught up to consumers (remember when we said the same thing about digital in general?)

 

 

Google and Facebook Become The Electric Company and the Water Company

What is a media company? What is a tool? What is 'technology? 'And what is a Utility? 

More and more Facebook is growing beyond a simple social network into serving as a virtual operating system (is that an oxymoron?) for our lives. We access Facebook functions via our smartphones and anything we still call a 'computer.' our group updates and friend requests show up on our inbox. the blue "F" is embedded in web sites and out-of-home billboard ads. Facebook open graph is a doorway to into many Web sites. The list will just get longer. 

Jeffrey F. Rayport at Castanea Partners shared about the absence of Facebook at a C-suite summit of media executives. He does a great job of showing how Facebook transcends the job fo simple "publisher."

"Connection is a human imperative. Technology that hyper-enables it should, logically, thrive. Because Facebook enables it better than any other social network, it has metastasized throughout the Web and beyond — into our mobile devices. (Install a Facebook app on your Blackberry, for example, and you'll see Facebook features integrating themselves mysteriously throughout the functions of your device.) As Facebook expands inexorably, perhaps we should focus less on the asset and more on the impact. By extending its seemingly endless tendrils online, Facebook is surely changing business; it's also changing us in ways that are arguably out of anyone's control — including that of the gifted entrepreneurs who actually run the "site" itself."

 

This level of embeddedness and how we take its presence and role for granted, help define it as a true utility. Add to that its commercial mission and now it is a capital "U" Utility delivering a precious resource to us albeit one without the limits of resource like the Water Company. 

"in the last 24 months, Google's top search term was "Facebook." Of the top five terms in 2010, two were "Facebook.com" and "Facebook Login." If Google has built a "database of intentions," Facebook has built a database of connections. One in every 13 people on earth uses Facebook. With "Friend Finder" — a sometimes controversial feature that automatically suggests people you might want to "friend" — Facebook operates a connection engine of unprecedented scale and scope."

I am less intrigued by any 'search war' between Google and say, Bing, or rivalry between Google and Apple or even Google OS and Microsoft OS, than I am with how Google and Facebook coexist in our lives 3-5 years from now. Between Google Android and Google Chrome OS, there is a good chance that Google will become the fabric on which many of our Internet interactions will play out. Browser-based Web access will continue to dominate even as mobile access eclipses PC access in the next 3 years. Chrome now has 10% of the market - much of that taken from Microsoft's IE. Meanwhile Android closely trails (25%) Apple iPhone (28%) in market share in the US and shows strong growth amongst new users. Google has its hooks in us via search and now via the logic enabling much of our access to the Internet.

The question may be whether Chrome or Android dominate but not whether Google will. One way or another, Google is the new Electric Company.  PCWorld has a POV on which will dominate:

"Thick client or thin, I think Android's hybrid model will be the real future of software development, and not Chrome OS's browser-centric model. Last week, I lamented that the HTML standard seems to have fallen under the control of the browser vendors. The most unfortunate aspect is the implicit assumption that browsers will be the primary consumers of Web content for the foreseeable future. Efforts such as Tim Berners-Lee's semantic Web strongly suggest that this won't always be the case; the evolution we're seeing in the mobile software market all but proves it."

A couple of years ago, social media pundits scoffed at marketers who wanted a "Facebook strategy" as too tactical or too platform specific. They should start with a higher-level social strategy. Now it seems that a Facebook strategy is not only warranted but essential. Add to that a Google strategy. What will your business look like as these two platforms weave their way throughout our lives? 

Ogilvy & Social Media Week

This week is Social Media Week. A bit of a global, collective event that just "happens" thanks to the efforts of Toby Daniels, his merry band and the efforts of many enthusiastic individuals throughout he social media spectrum.  

You can attend a session live in one of nine cities from New York to San Francisco to London and more. Since we have a global team, we are running sessions in many of those cities. 

LONDON - our team in the UK will be running their Idea Shop Social pop-up store where you can walk-in and get strategic guidance for how to apply social to your business.  This is a great small business service and should be a lot of fun. They will also be running an "Idea-a-thon." On Friday of this week, UK time - "People tweet us briefs using the hashtag #ideashop. Together we answer the briefs.  Then the results are posted online for everyone to enjoy."

NEW YORK CITY - our team in NYC will be hosting a workshop on Facebook for brand marketers in partnership with Buddy Media. How's Your Facebook Strategy Doing? is now full. We will have several brands there and Facebook. The session will start with a panel but quickly segue to roundtable work groups on Engagement, Acquisition, Measurement and more.

SAN FRANCISCO - the gang in SF is running a session on Social Experience Design called Beyond the Like Button. This is also sold out at this point. They will be covering "the effects of the decentralization of the singular brand presence, how social media has affected customer contact channels and CRM initiatives and how marketers can best align with user needs and behaviors across the expanding digital space (smart tv, mobile phones, gaming consoles, tablets, smart appliances)."

Should be great week and we look forward to seeing everyone online and offline