Mobile phones enable customers to take action - plan your digital presence accordingly!
Mobile marketing has grown in significance, as the number of mobile devices sold in the US has increased. This is only the tip of the iceberg for global mobile device sales and the consumer culture that has developed. Research mobile marketing in other countries, such as in South Africa, Kenya, South Korea, and the UK, and you'll see deeper penetration rates than that in the US, and unique marketing campaigns that have sprung up as a result. For an example, see this repost of my Digital Canvas Retail article on Coke and South Korea.
For a few tips for your small business, consider the following:
I wrote this post originally for Digital Canvas Retail October 8th, 2013
The desire to be closer to consumers as they move around can leave retail marketers with an unquenchable thirst for fresh ideas. CocaCola has an omnichannel solution, at least for techcrazed South Korea.
Coke has maintained a dominant marketshare among beverage brands in many countries, and it is working to maintain its longterm global brand position as mobile technology changes the rules of marketing. Many of its markets present challenges. For example, legacy brands in the UK got a terrific boost from sponsoring the Olympics, according to Brand Republic, but that special event is an increasingly distant memory.
Thus, Coke has embarked on a localization strategy that extends its "Open happiness" campaign. The plan is meant to enhance local marketing messages with the company's best digital marketing assets and resources.
One of the most successful strategies has been implemented in Asia. Digital Signage Today reported that Coke has South Korean customers literally dancing in front of its vending machines for a free soda. Customers dance to tunes from the South Korean pop band 2PM and can view themselves while dancing. Their moves earn points toward a free soda. The dance movements are captured with the same Microsoft Kinect technology used with the Xbox 360. A YouTube video showing customers dancing went viral.
This state of the art campaign shows how mobile and social media elements can offer complimentary inroads to relevant local networks. According to eMarketer, incumbents such as Naver and Tistory attract most of the youth market in South Korea a demographic that is quite attractive to Coke.
More globally known networks have just recently made strides in South Korean culture; Facebook has just surprassed Cyworld there. And South Korean companies have benefited from the growth of mobile technology in that country; in 2011, the percentage of South Koreans accessing social media via mobile phone jumped nearly 30 percentage points to 31.5 percent. And eMarketer made other key predictions about the South Korean consumer digital market, reflecting its status as a particularly advanced techinfluence market.
South Korea will surpass Japan for the world's highest mobile device penetration rate. A mobile marketing campaign investment in a deeply mobilecentric society could deliver a quick return. In an Ipsos survey, 54 percent of South Koreans said they had noticed an ad on their mobile phone. As a result of such high awareness, eMarketer expects one out of five ad dollars to go to the mobile channel. Gaming is quite popular in South Korea, and online games are expected to make up 80 percent of the gaming market there by 2014. This bodes well for the Coke campaign.
When a company partners with artists in a local market, gaining popularity outside that market can be icing on the localization cake. That is certainly true for South Korea. For example, PSY's Gangnam Style has become one of the most viewed videos on YouTube. Consumer brands may partner with artists who can achieve stardom in their homeland and appeal beyond their borders.
Coke's strategy is designed to maintain a delicate balance between being multinational and appealing to a local market. Competing beverage brands have begun making significant investments of their own, but that balance will be critical for Coke's longterm success.
(This post originally appeared on UBM Tech site Digital Canvas Retail in July 2013)
Gone are the days of watching a western on TV. But for many retailers, developing an ad budget with a singular focus on television should also be riding into the sunset.
YouTube has long been nicknamed as a second largest search engine behind Google. But steadily more and more users are treating YouTube videos as a pastime no different than watching television. Business2Community noted that YouTube users average 3 billion hours of video viewing per month. That is a considerable percentage; comScore measured 44 billions views in June of this year, noting that Facebook, its closest competitor in views, only had over 700 million views.
Much of YouTube’s appeal goes beyond the various selections of videos available – from mashups of movie scenes to old TV programs. The key driver has been unique video content, and a breakthrough environment in which viewers find programming outside of television and cable attractive (Witness the Emmy nominations for Netflix’ House of Cards as to what is possible for programs produced outside of regular and cable production norms).
The end result is a highly unique value for a video ads exposure. Many independently made webisodes have gained a distinct audience, regardless if the producer is an unknown name or a well-known artist. Daryl Hall, of the music duo Hall and Oates, achieved success with Live At Daryl’s House, playing classic Hall and Oates tuned with recent acts. The program became so popular that it gained television syndication.
Such early successes should interest retailers looking for a relevant audience. These programs acquire the potential customers they are looking for. And media industry standards of varying kinds are acknowledging how these views are valuable. Billboard, the music recording sales chart magazine, recently announced that it was adding YouTube views into its Top 100 music charts. This reflects recent successes from music acts that have garnered high numbers of views.
Such changes also imply that YouTube should be considered as an essential part of a digital marketing planning. Google already provides an integration protocol for its Analytics solution. In addition Google introduced a new measurement protocol to complement its Universal Analytics tag. The protocol provides attribution capability that identifies the devices a visitor used to view a webpage. Marketers can gain a better understanding of viewers who migrated from a tablet to a desktop to see a Youtube video embedded in a website.
Analytics linked to YouTube provide a series of opportunities:
What other opportunities do you see for retailers displaying video ads on YouTube?
This interview with Garrison Atkisson, founder of broadAngle, was conducted via online in 2012. Portions were used as part of a post for Business Agility. I met Garrison during my grad school days at Georgia Tech. Later we crossed paths, and the result was Zimana providing SEO analysis for a broadAngle client, OverTime Magazine.
Garrison is a terrific person, and his insights - even better! So it's great when he shares thoughts from which other entrepreneurs can learn. Read a bit of what he shared with me few of his thoughts below. I am always grateful for Garrison and his wife Aysem for their friendship, and happy for their teams' growth.
1. You started broadAngle in 2007, originally with a video product. What brought about change to services?
We started broadAngle in late 2007 with the intent to develop and market a product that helped corporate clients manage and deliver video content using a custom branded player. The economic crisis of 2008 made this very difficult for us. We found ourselves in a position where we needed to re-evaluate our strengths and the needs of the market to find a more viable business model. We had assembled a great development team for our own product development, and pivoting the business to provide their development services to our clients was a natural fit. It was much easier to demonstrate value with a services-based strategy that it was trying to create a new market for our product.
2. Four years is a long enough time for technology changes to introduce new trends and behaviors. What changes have you seen from customers recently that surprised you?
When we started offering software development services in late 2008, small and medium sized businesses seemed more reluctant to outsource to a company that was delivering its services using offshore resources. I do not know if the market itself has changed, or if our responses to this reluctance have helped to combat their fears. Generally, clients seemed to be concerned with their ability to manage and direct a team on the other side of the world, which is obviously a valid concern. We put several things in place that made it easier to do business with us, and gave our offshore services a local feel. First, we use VoIP technology to ensure that clients have a local US based phone number at which to reach us, second, our development team works shifted hours so there is more overlap with clients in the US and in Western Europe. Third, we only hire employees that are fluent in English. Finally, senior staff members make regular trips to the US to visit clients, and occasionally will work on-site to put a face to our service. Is short, we provide the benefits of offshore development services while retaining a local feel.
3. Your business is unique in having served customers in Europe and the US. Have you discovered unique differences in how businesses in each region approach business intelligence services? How have those differences affected business process management or decision management from your experiences or observations?
I am more surprised by how similar our client interactions are regardless of their location. I do not know if it is a symptom of the globalization of business in general, if the world is “getting smaller” due to technological changes, or if the function of our business and the service we provide is dictating the form of our interactions with customers. The differences that we do see are more related to corporate culture than to any regional differences.
4. How has broadAngle adopted the cloud for its clients and what lessons has the team learned along the way to implementation?
The popularity of different forms of “cloud” technologies, SaaS (Software as a service), PaaS(Platform as a service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) has affected our clients in a lot of ways. The most common seems to be that IaaS makes it easier to deploy software by simply rolling out a new virtual machine instance for development, test, or production use. We’ve built solutions that integrate SaaS services to add customer relationship or salesforce management functionality to custom applications that otherwise would have been out of scope due to time or budget constraints. We haven’t done much with PaaS outside of some internal research projects, but solutions like Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk show lots of promise as the services mature.
While not named after the classic Star Trek movie "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan", you can certainly compare SES to the recent movie "Star Trek Into Darkness". The latest film pays homage to past Star Trek lore as a part of a franchise reboot. Because of Google Hummingbird, SES found unique ways to "reboot" SEO strategy and considerations as well.
Much of the conference centered on the newest influences on search. The expo tracks were divided into three tracks based on media type - earned, paid, and owned media. This organization permitted SES to focus on the latest topics such as semantic search, content marketing, and enhanced paid search campaigns. All of these address the factors considered in Hummingbird, Google's algorithm which throughly updates its parameters for query relevance. In short, a reboot.
I was not able to attend every program but here are a few images and ideas that came up during the event, hosted at the Marriott on Magnificent Mile. The 2014 expo is currently scheduled for November 3rd - 6th, 2014 at the Palmer House.
On the expo floor, Charles Meyer of 7search presented its concepts about the advantages of smaller networks as a part of a general digital marketing campaign. Meyer advocates that smaller networks are generally "more transparent" than the big three (Bing, Google, Yahoo),
The opportunity being overlooked with smaller networks are that niches may be more affordably reached. While Google, Bing , and Yahoo take up 90% of search, smaller networks contain constant audiences that are worthwhile in the remaining 10%. In many cases, smaller networks provide an opportunity to test ad campaigns before attempting to extend the campaigns into larger networks.
Katherine Griwert, Head of Marketing Content & Communications at Brafton shared some tips and ideas on video. You can view this Zimana post for more information.
One nice aspect - I got to see a Google Glass for the first time, courtesy of Josh Braaten of Rasmussen College.
Even Google Glass, thanks to presenter Josh Braaten, made an appearance at this year's SES Chicago!
Next year's SES is being rebranded under the Clickz name - interesting giving the impact of Hummingbird on search services, and the growing emphasis on other strategies that can impact search. So for now, goodbye SES…and looking forward to Clickz in 2014!
The City of Chicago was well represented to explain city services that are augmented with apps and social media data.
Social Media Week Chicago hosted a panel called City Data and Social: Data is changing the relationship between cities and their citizens. The panel examined the topic of how data's growing importance through APIs and digital services was impacting citizens.
Panel moderator was Jordan Ho, digital strategist for Zocalo. the panel included Scott Robbin, a developer who created an online app for locating an automobile; Daniel X. O'Neil, an executive director at Smart Chicago Collaborative; and Danielle Dumerer, Director of Planning, Policy, and Management for the City of Chicago's Department of Innovation and Technology.
Data has importance, one that is becoming more apparent and a starting to show significant affect citizens in ways other the a campaign. The panel discussed how data affect the way cities make decisions regarding their service. Dumerer shared that the city uses dashboards to manage their 311 requests.
The panel agreed that sentiment remains a challenge , particular for projects in which citizen-sourced information is impacting how Chicago respond to its citizens’ needs. Robbins noted that social media "humanizes" government.
Click on the YouTube video below to see a comment from O'Neil about the opportunity for city data and development in Chicago - the idea that optimization between data available and usage has not fully arrived.
#SMWChicago 2013 - City Data & Social Media: Data is changing the relationship between cities & their citizens
