Old habits die hard (internet marketing-Part 2)

137 cookies and 3 lumps of coal ago, I left off with a blog that went through some history and background on internet marketing.  In the process I mostly bashed marketers use of the internet to do exactly the same marketing things they had been doing for decades.  So that leads up to the good stuff – how do you rise above the noise that is marketing on the internet?  The previous blogs mentioned two possibilities – 1) Using the internet in a different way; 2) Going mobile.

Since we are a company that sells a marketing service using a smartphone app as the primary platform for delivery, guess which one I am going to write about first?  (Next blog will discuss a potential game-changer on the internet.)

To set the background…
Who figures they saw at least 20 banner ads yesterday while browsing the web?
How many did you click on? 
How many did you purchase from?
Who received 20 or more emails from companies yesterday? 
How many were quickly categorized as useless spam and not even opened before being deleted? 
Even of the other emails from companies that you did recognize and probably opt into at some point, what percent of those did you open and spend more than a few seconds reading?

But on your mobile phone…
How many spam-like calls or messages have you received in the past week (not counting email that you opened on your phone)? 
And compared to email, what percent of messages do you actually read/listen to?

The mobile marketing window will close quickly.  It is only a matter of time before the mass marketers arrive and this medium is filled with noise like the internet.  With regard to mobile marketing, businesses have a short period of time to:

1) Get there before the mass marketers arrive en masse and make it all seem like noise just like banner ads and spam.  (Quick stat: Click through rates for banner ads have been falling precipitously for years reaching a 0.09% rate reported by Google for 2010.  That’s 9 out of every 1,000 ad impressions!) 

2) Figure out how to use the new mobile medium in a manner that is more “customer pull” (people actually want the information) than “business push.”

Those who are late to mobile marketing will struggle to do anything but add to the noise.  And because of consumers’ aversion to noise and defense mechanisms for it, it will become incredibly difficult to get attention, and the margin for error in terms of providing customers with something of value will become incredibly small.  Right now, with mobile marketing still in its infancy it is much easier to get attention.  People are not annoyed with mobile marketing to the point where they block it out – yet.  This affords early mobile marketers some margin for error and time for trial and error to develop a mobile marketing program that is value add to customers before they start indiscriminately categorizing everything as noise.

So mobile creates an opportunity to start over noise-free with a new digital marketing platform.  Or does it?  The anytime/anywhere, always at your fingertips convenience is great, but is the smartphone just another way to reach the internet and all of the noise sources that go with it?  You get the same banner ads, spam, email, etc. except on a smaller screen.  How many people are already starting to receive spam texts and telemarketing phone calls on their mobile phones?

How do we keep mobile from just becoming a more accessible and therefore more frequent source of noise?

Consumers need a way to opt in to only information valuable to them and slant this new communications medium more favorably than the 95%/5% “business push” versus “customer pull” imbalance of traditional internet marketing.  But we already said that the traditional internet information sources are irreparably stuffed with noise.  And no way will we be able to perfectly hide our phone numbers from texts and telemarketing.  So how do we do it?  We need to create a medium that consumers can control and sort what is noise versus what is useful information to them.

Let’s try this:
--A mobile smartphone app.
--That works as a business to consumer mobile communications platform.
--That aggregates communications from a variety of businesses in one place in a way that is familiar and easy to use.
--And most importantly, gives the consumer control (via opt in that they can easily change at any time) over what they receive from whom.
--With an app overseer that has the best interest of the user in mind and does not allow non-opt-in access to the consumers that leads to a bunch of spam.

That is what we are trying to accomplish with miPlaces.  For the miPlaces community member who downloads the app, miPlaces is a smartphone-driven digital medium where the user controls the content that they receive via opting into what they choose to receive from whom.  For the merchant, the opt in prerequisite for communication with the customer makes for a balance of “business push” versus “merchant pull” such that the messages have value and will actually be heard.

Regardless of how you take your marketing to the mobile world, the summary goes:
1) Get their early before the noise.
2) Find a way to use mobile in a means more slanted toward “customer pull” versus the old “business push” such that your message is value add to customers/potential customers.

Next time around, I will take a shot at the second way around the noise – a better way on the internet.

For a quick heads up when a new blog is posted and occasional other company tweets follow us on Twitter at miPlaces.

Matt Karash (VP Sales and Marketing @ Social eMotion)  mkarash@social-emotion.com

Old habits die hard (internet marketing-Part 1)

In this blog: 3 nuggets / Theme: Holiday classic shows. Post a comment below or zip me an email if you can find all 3 and say from which show each comes.

At first glance, the smartphone seems to be just another step in the progression of digital delivery channels for marketing and a simple extension of the internet. But businesses that stop there are stopping at the tip of the iceberg. The smartphone has the potential to drive revolutionary change in digital marketing.

The internet made it possible for marketers to reach people directly and inexpensively in a means other than direct mail or telemarketing. Businesses also gained the ability to provide a wealth of information about their products to anyone with an internet connection whenever they wanted to go find it. Customers could suddenly shop a dozen stores and read everything printed in terms of reviews, features, etc. in a matter of minutes and minus a day driving around in a car.

But in terms of pushing messages out to customers and/or potential customers, the internet and email did not have the revolutionary effect originally anticipated. Similar to traditional mail, the ability to reach people was limited to a specific location - home mailbox for mail versus location of home PC for email. And only minimal change occurred to timing and frequency of reaching people – email was accessible any time of day, but for the most part people checked email intermittently and sometimes on a schedule that did not work for when businesses wanted to reach them – i.e. a pizza place sending out coupons that were received right after dinner when a person typically checked email.

The internet is a tale of two divergent stories:

 1) For making information available for customers (customer pull) to find, the internet, led by Netscape initially and more recently Google, was revolutionary. Consumers’ ability to research product, prices or anything else increased by a factor of 100.

2) But for sending information to customers (business push), the internet, basically email, has proven underwhelming in its ability to drive significant change to old ways of marketing.

With marketers, it appears that there is not a Hermey in the bunch. More than anything, they took the brand new tool of the internet and narrow-mindedly combined it with the old, habitual marketing model. Rather than developing new frontiers, they mostly just used it the internet as a new channel for the same old process and sought to control of the information people received/viewed. New delivery channel – same old marketing of selecting and then pushing information at people just like advertising, direct mail, telemarketing, etc. After all, that is what they had been doing for 60-70 years since the emergence of radio shows in the 1920s and the advent of commercial advertising. The same “push” advertising model carried over to network TV starting in the 1950s. Later telemarketing and direct mail followed pretty much the same model. Common to this 60-70 years of marketing was the concept that the marketer chose the message that people were to receive and then pushed it at them without them having much choice as to whether they received it.

For the internet, this model gave rise to email marketing which has become spam and noise more than anything else. Today much of the marketing email we receive is really just junk/mass mailings packed in a digital wrapper using a similar model to the 1920s “push the information at them” approach to marketing. Search engine capabilities (Google) shifted control of the internet back to the user to some degree, and opt in email marketing does shift some control back to the user. But banner ads and search engine optimization tried to take back even that part of the internet that users controlled and found most useful.

At this point it is difficult to be heard as a marketer on the internet. People are saying –that’s one thing I hate - all the noise, noise, noise, noise! Marketers have created so much noise that they have rendered marketing via the traditional internet difficult at least for old-school marketers who are still trying to devise better ways to push their selected information at customers. So how do you get heard above the noise? First, try another medium – mobile. Second, come up with a better way on the internet.

These two ways to get above the noise will be the topic of the next blog or two.

Hope everyone gets a few days off work and a membership to the jelly of the month club and has a great holiday season!

For a quick heads up when a new blog is posted and occasional updates about our company, please follow us on Twitter at miPlaces.

Matt Karash (VP, Sales and Marketing @ Social eMotion)

Social eMotion/miPlaces introduction blog

We are only a couple weeks away from the New Year when everyone starts new things mostly to abandon them in 3-4 weeks. It is a perfect time for me to kick off one of the many new initiatives that we at Social eMotion have planned for 2012 – our blog. An early start gives me 2-3 weeks to get a head start on 2012, wear myself out, quit it altogether and still have time to start an alternate New Year’s initiative soon enough pretending the first failure never even happened. :-) Brilliant huh? Hopefully this will work out better than my personal jump start 2012 initiative that involves trying to ride an exercise bike while eating dozens of Christmas cookies…

The plan is to use this first blog for a quick introduction and then get to the real stuff in the next one.

The blog. The focus of our blog is digital marketing for local merchants. Topics will include things like mobile marketing, social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), internet/web pages, email marketing and mailing lists, etc. My intent is to post a new blog near the beginning of each week. I promise not to turn this blog into a weekly sales pitch. I will insert bits of information about our products as relates to a blog topic, but I will aim for a 95/5 split in terms of providing useful, objective digital marketing information versus talking about our company or products. Please call me out if I ever stray from that. The ultimate goal is to work toward more of a blog/message board hybrid that is conversational. Providing a place for small business owners to talk with each other about successes (and failures too) with digital marketing is 10X more useful than someone just posting blogs. This also fits very well with many of the other things we have planned for 2012 to better embed ourselves in the community as ‘helpers’ for local merchants. I realize that the beginning will be the typical blog start whereby I write stuff, post it into the quiet and mostly wonder if anyone is finding it useful or even reading it at all. I strongly encourage people to chime in as they get comfortable. The usefulness of this blog increases exponentially as more people become engaged and contribute. Also, please do not hesitate to contact me with feedback, comments, suggested topics or whatever (mkarash@social-emotion.com).

Me. I (Matt Karash) am Vice President, Sales and Marketing at Social eMotion. I am the ‘owner’ of our blog and will be the primary writer. A couple other people from within Social eMotion will also write occasionally, and I would love to eventually include guest blogs from small business owners. Career-wise, I am a technology start-up company jack of all trades. After 5 years in an accounting role at IBM way back when, I used a return to school (MBA from University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School) to relaunch my career as a small business person. I am now about 12 years deep in that and loving it. In true startup company form, I have done everything from finance to business development to strategy/planning to sales but have spent the greatest amount of those 12 years in marketing roles. Social eMotion is a perfect fit for what I enjoy. I again find myself in the familiar role of working for a small technology company, but even better yet, this time our customers are small business owners too.

Our company-Social eMotion. Social eMotion is a small technology marketing company based in Cary, North Carolina. Our mission is to provide technology marketing services that give local merchants the same capabilities available to the big national chains minus the need for their own IT department. Our expertise and product reach runs the gamut of mobile, social networking, internet, and everything else digital. Our flagship product, miPlaces, is a mobile marketing platform that is driven through a smartphone application available for iPhone and Android. For the app user, miPlaces is a with-you-all-the-time local merchant shopping tool. For local merchants, miPlaces is a mobile marketing platform that can be used for a variety of customer programs (simple messaging similar to mailing list, coupon/deal/promotion offers, frequent buyer program, etc.).

My blogging style: In my stream of consciousness style with some attempt to organize things, I take liberties with sentence structure and grammar. I do this for three reasons. First, (maybe even a legitimate one), it gives me the ability to focus on ideas and not get bogged down in minutiae. Second (and admittedly completely self-serving), it gives me a break from other parts of my job (writing product briefs, presentations, letters, etc.) that require painstaking attention to grammar and syntax. Finally, it makes it impossible for you to tell when I just made a grammar mistake versus when I was using the writing liberties that I claimed upfront. :-)

With the introduction out of the way, I will post our first real blog on mobile marketing early next week.