Your Personal Life Remote

For most of us there are three things we will not leave the house without; your wallet, your keys, and your mobile phone (not necessarily in that order).  Many would rather forget their pants than their cell phone.  This small (yet powerful) device has one of the fastest adoption rates of any other technology in our time.  Has becoming more dependent on our phones changed our current lives?

The cell phone has evolved to become something so much more.  Even its name no longer fits.  The first cell phone call was made in 1973 on a Motorola phone that was a little smaller than a shoebox.  From that point the race was on and the technology has grown leaps and bounds beyond voice calls. We now use our cell “phones” to do much more than calling.  In fact in the United States text messages have surpassed the number of calls made each year (this happened in Europe and Asia years ago).

Beyond voice, the platform has developed text, picture, and video messaging capabilities, then added email and mobile web access.  More recently, experiencing the Internet on a mobile device has become less of a watered down version and more like what we experience on our desk and laptop computers.  The latest news in the mobile industry is of location-based services, apps, and augmented reality just to name a few.

Our phones have worked their way into almost every part of our lives.  We use them as an alarm clock to wake us, as a news service to fill us in on the latest news, traffic, and weather, and a calendar to keep us on schedule.  All of this and we haven’t evenfinished our morning coffee yet.  Your phone can help you find a location using GPS, recommend a place for lunch, and even encourage you to keep that New Years resolution by urging you to choose a salad over the burger.  Then there is the after meal entertainment from the ebook reader, MP3 player, or streaming video options.

We stay in constant contact with our families, friends, and work using applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.   While staying connected to work may seem like a problem, it really creates new opportunities.  We now have the ability to virtually office anywhere.  We can now accomplish much of days work on a device smaller than a calculator.  Armed with a laptop and a cell phone we can turn any local coffee shop into our office.

Social networks are also getting into the mobile market.  We can tweet about the great meeting we just had, accept a new friend request, and update our status all while waiting for a latte.  We can pay bills, find movie times, and set your DVR to record your favorite show.  If you’re not going to be home anytime soon and just can’t wait, you can have your Slingbox just send your show to your iPhone or Blackberry.

Mobile devices have also changed the media industry.  Recent data suggests that there is over 24 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute.  CNN has begun airing mobile phone reports from what they call “iReporters”.  Blogs have become one of the most frequented activities on the web.  Mobile technology allows us to be able to witness an event, capture it with your mobile device, add your comments, and post it to the internet all live as it’s happening.

Google has been a part of the mobile industry since the early days of text messaging.  Last week Google announced their entrance into the social media arena with their social network called Buzz.  An article from Fast Company (http://bit.ly/bm8Avg), shows off how your mobile device has truly become the remote control to life.  The article discusses a timeline where your mobile device wakes you up, feeds you info and email on the commute to work, helps you collaborate at work, suggests lunch, and recommends a happy hour to you and some of your friends that it sees are in the neighborhood.

So my question to you is this: How does your “Personal Life Remote” enhance/hinder your life?

Brian Evans

Where to Spend Your Advertising Dollars?

Deciding how and where to allocate your advertising dollars can be a bit of a crap shoot.  The traditional mediums like television, radio, and print are all showing signs of decline.  At the same time they can easily reach the largest audience.  The question comes down to quality vs. quantity.  By the end of 2008 television advertising was down 10.1%, newspapers were down 18.7% and magazine and radio were down a respective 14.8% and 11.7%.  While the traditional advertising mediums are in a tailspin mobile and web advertising rose 18.1% and 9.2%.

Even if the traditional methods are down, they still reach more people than the new web 2.0 style will, right? To answer that, let me tell you a story about a liquor store on the east coast that was trying to start an online delivery channel of its business.  They were already locally successful and figured why not take it to the next level and open up an online division.  Once all of the logistics like building a e-commerce site, factoring in the new costs (hosting, staff, delivery, etc) they were set to go.  Now all they needed was traffic.

They bought a billboard on a busy freeway, launched a direct mail campaign, and placed a radio ad.  All three campaigns offered the same thing, free shipping on all orders from their new website.  The results from the different campaigns are as follows:

The billboard returned 170 orders, the radio ad delivered 240 orders, and the direct mail yielded over 300 orders.  Overall they netted 710 orders from their initial investment of $7500.  This works out to a $10.56 per order ROI.  Not bad, but it wasn’t exactly the turnout they were hoping for.  Not to mention that during a busy rush their retail location could do that in an afternoon.

They decided to try some of the web 2.0 technologies to see if they could improve upon the original campaigns performance.  Since they had been using Twitter to alert customers about new products they had already developed a decent sized fan base.  The first step was to ask their fans to recommend them to their friend and families.  Next they put out the same offer of free shipping via Twitter.  After the first 48 hours of the offer being tweeted out, they received 1700 orders.  The ROI on this is amazing since there was no additional media costs involved.

So why was Twitter able to return more than double the orders in a fraction of the time?  Basiclly, they were sending the offer to people that had already expressed an interest in their products and services.  From there the basic nature of social networks took over.  In this case Twitter users saw the tweet offering them free shipping on any online order.  From there individuals are able to re-tweet the original post and it then goes out to their entire friend (or in Twitter’s case followers) list.  This happens again and again and the message is sent out to a very large (and rapidly growing) number of people.

According to the Did You Know 4.0 video on Youtube (http://bit.ly/33INWM), Americans have access to over 2300 cable TV networks, 5500 magazines, and 10,500 radio stations.  As impressive as that is it is nothing to the next generation of media.  We now have access to over 140,000 iPhone applications and 1,000,000,000,000 web pages.  Combine this with the ability to with a few clicks share what I find interesting and useful with my friends, family, and followers, you get a very powerful tool.

If you want to pin it down to the main reasons social marketing is performing better than traditional marketing you can look at it this way.  Ads that come across Twitter are coming from companies that you have chosen to follow.  In the case of Facebook, ads are sent to you based on information in your profile.  From there it is left up to the end user to disregard, act upon, or share the information.

What is more valuable, having millions of people see a 30 second spot on about your product or service, or thousands of really interested people speaking praises about you and giving their personal recommendation?  People are becoming increasingly skeptical of marketing tactics and as a result looking toward their social networks for advice on their purchases.

So again I ask you. Where will you spend your marketing dollars?

Brian Evans

Atomik Ink