Simply put, I’m excited about the potential of mobile marketing and particularly the convergence of social networking and mobile. New capabilities on phones are opening doors to limitless new marketing innovations and, simultaneously, developing countries are having entirely new segments of their population enter the digital world. I spend a lot of time in the day dreaming about how to bring entirely new digital experiences to people, but I think we need to proceed with caution. Marketers, the frequently reckless group of individuals we are, are in danger of screwing it up (again).

Consider the lessons from social media. One of the factors that caused so many marketers to fail in this space is they forgot basic web etiquette and lost sight that all successful marketing (on the modern web) is some form of value exchange. Consumers must be approached in a way that is not disruptive or disrespectful of their time. Social media was never free — the buzz created around your brand or people’s willingness to come together as a community was earned. They would tolerate a certain amount of advertising if it was a reasonable value exchange.

Mobile, the ever-present digital touch point, is for many of us not only an essential daily tool, but also a place of great privacy and perceived intimacy. We’re far more sensitive about the “value exchange” in the mobile world. In addition we don’t click ads as often because, in my opinion, we’re frequently trying to get quick digital or social experiences on the mobile device in between other events. We have frequent interaction with our mobile devices, but the sessions might be shorter.

Sometimes I like to talk about the “paradox of marketing.” As marketers we feel obligated to get our clients/brands where the eyeballs are. We then descend on that thing like vultures and in most cases we destroy that thing we originally loved and saw as an opportunity to reach consumers. (Think George from “Of Mice and Men” with the rabbit.) We’re currently in the process of killing Twitter as well.

The next great mobile revolution will be focused on the culmination of social networks, geo-location services, content creation/sharing, augmented reality and the functions that come with rapidly increased bandwidth, such as live streaming video. My fear is that marketers will be irresponsible and will use these technologies to pound consumers with horrible interruptive ads that make consumers revolt against mobile marketing. We’ve already had epic failures with some marketers’ mass SMS broadcasting and then the totally idiotic idea of connecting to discoverable Bluetooth phones when they’re in proximity of a broadcast point.

There’s so much new technology that has the potential to redefine interaction between brands and consumers, but unfortunately too many of us are still using advertising techniques that we’ve used for the last century — and they are primarily disruptive in nature.

The “techies” have done a great job of continuing to innovate and evolve the medium. Now it’s time for marketers to show the same passion for innovation and evolve with the medium, rethink our approaches and be respectful of the most intimate of digital touch points. We’re marching into holy ground with mobile marketing and if we’re not careful a select few of us will ruin it for the rest of us and this time, I don’t think consumers will be as forgiving.

Twitter Search

This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what’s happening in real time on the Web and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people looking for very timely content.

Twitter Search will also get a “reputation” ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a “trending” topic–a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar–Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

Jayaram did not say precisely how reputation would be calculated; he indicated that engineers are still figuring that out. But this, again, will make Twitter Search more valuable.

It has been suggested that Google is looking to acquire Twitter because it views it as a threat. That line of thinking is completely insane because Google isn’t going anywhere. The company is still the top dog in terms of financial stability, commitment to innovation and business strategy. Depending on what research firm you ask, Google owns roughly 80 percent of the search engine market and is still gobbling up market share. In terms of users, Twitter doesn’t even match Facebook’s potential as a rival. Twitter is simply not a threat to Google; in fact, the search giant could simply consume the Twitter API. The good news is that it probably won’t because Twitter is a piece of the greater problem Google is looking to solve.

There’s no question that the Web is getting crowded with content. The user-generated era is spawning such a huge amount of data that it’s nearly impossible to find anything with traditional keyword-based search anymore. The ideal search should be personalized and capable of referencing search history, relevance, social bookmarking, micro-blogging and contextual relevance with each search. Google has been working on this semantic Web model for a while because it will theoretically allow search engines to tell you what you’re looking for before you try to find it. As Twitter has created an online collective consciousness on virtually any topic, it makes sense that as Google labors toward its Web 3.0 ambition to organize all of the world’s data, that it would be interested in this new data stream. Real-time search is the catalyst to this goal, a cultural paradigm shift, but data without context is useless, and this is where Google excels.

Searching real-time content in its current state finds millions of stream-of-consciousness, rants, and blurbs that are largely irrelevant in their raw data format. However given the right context on the aggregated whole based on desired filters it could provide real-time opinions, sentiment, and behavioral data. If Google finds a way to track it back to the Web search it could be one of the aspects that help the semantic prediction model.

As online utilities, tools and content are created daily, search will have to adapt as well. Many people seem to think that Twitter will become the de facto medium of the common voice. This isn’t true. How does a 140-character opinion replace a full-length article on Wikipedia, a 30-second video spot, a corporate site or even financial or stock information? Humans interact with different channels because of varied contextual factors; relying on Twitter as the end-all be-all simply isn’t realistic.

Twitter is a single service, not the final piece of the puzzle for Google as an increasing number of companies publish real-time, user-generated content. A comprehensive real-time search engine would need to monitor a host of user-generated content from sites including Twitter, FriendFeed, Plaxo, Loopt, Brightkite, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace as a baseline. There are companies already doing this but it’s still data with no context for the most part. These companies are currently charging some good money for their services, but it’s only a matter of time until someone like Google taps into this and makes it available for free.

Another fact that has flown under the radar is that Google has technically already entered the micro-blogging space via latitude. The service combines geographic data with micro-blogging and taps into the company’s existing gmail and Android platform user base as well as its deal with Apple’s iPhone. More than anything, this shows Google understands that context is king and will be the future of search.

Initiatives like micro-blogging, mobile and social media are helping companies get closer to the user experience to provide users with information when they need it most. Innovation is the key to success and whoever figures out how to combine social data with contextual information will have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the search engine landscape.

As featured on AdWeek.

Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform marketing, said that the entire feed will be available through a single API call. A developer could recreate the entire Facebook home page if he wanted to or take parts of the feed and remix it to make something more interesting. For starters, I’d expect most Twitter clients to add the Facebook stream as an additional option. On Tweetdeck, for instance, you can read your activity stream, but you cannot respond in-line. The new Facebook Open Stream API is two-way, so it would allow developers to build apps which allow for that two-way communication inside the app.

This is a big deal. It potentially puts Facebook side by side with Twitter in all of these desktop and mobile client applications where a lot of the real-time conversation is happening and lets it compete head-to-head with Twitter. Whichever conversation stream is more interesting will prevail. [full article]

Coca-Cola Europe launched an interesting project for Sprite earlier this month that I think is worth noting.  “Green Eyed World” is a video series revolving around a 23-year old singer from London as she looks to fulfill her dream of becoming a star. The audience is able to influence her choices as she journey’s through the music world by commenting and voting on the site.

The audience can follow and interact with this 23-year old singer from London as she creates new opportunities for herself by following her dream.  By joining her journey online, the audience can influence her choices through commenting and voting directly in the GREEN EYED WORLD videos using their own Facebook profile.

The interesting twist is that the highly customized YouTube channel doesn’t include the familiar comments that we’re used to using, but only allows users to comment by logging in with their Facebook credentials via Facebook Connect. This function makes each comment act as a seeding element for the campaign across your friend’s list as well as allows you to easily see what your other friend’s have said about the episode.

This use of Facebook Connect stood out to me because it was completely replacing a very familiar commenting system, but I think it works for this branded entertainment campaign. The quality of the video looks solid. The videos views aren’t particularly high yet, but I think this could be very interesting to see how it plays out as it’s too early to see how successful it’s going to be.

The “Episode Zero” show will be immediately followed by several viral extras on YouTube and Facebook updates from Katie leading up to premiere “Episode One” of “Season One” on May 1st. Viewers can also download a free application for their iPod/iPhone in time for the beginning of the season.

There’s been a common misconception for quite sometime that social networks were only filled with teens and young adults, and although this still applies for some very youth focused networks like Habbo, the reality is social network use is now mainstream.

Inside Facebook ‘s latest data reveals some fascinating details about the Facebook’s user base. For example the number of US users over the age of 35 has double in the last 60 days, women over 55 years of age are the fastest growing demographic in the last 90 days, and the 26-44 year old age group now account for 41% of Facebook’s audience.

Facebook is just one of many social networks undergoing comparable demographic shifts. We’re living in an age where social networking and social media destinations site are big business and are easily as recognizable as major portals of five years ago. The concept of “social functionality” is being built or has already been built into most major sites and this trend will only continue as social networks de-centralize through tools like Facebook Connect.

What does all of this mean for marketers?

 
In a nut shell over 25’s are now open game on Facebook and not only are they are there in numbers but there substantially more comfortable with living in a socially networked online world.
 
I don’t think the marketing world has caught up and there’s a huge opportunity for brands to leapfrog their competition in this space.

If you look at the types of applications, groups, and friend pages that are being created in the social networking space they have a tendency to be focused on youth.  There’s a fairly wide gap in quality apps, groups or destinations that have been created by brands, as opposed to user generated, that are focused on subjects, needs, or desires that the over 25 age group have.

A quick word to the wise – if you represent an adult focused brand either internally or as an agency – you might want to look for user generated success stories first and participate in their success as opposed to starting from scratch. I think Coca-Cola hit the nail on the head recently. They leveraged the success of their existing fan base. They brought some of their best advocates and brought them even closer to their cause and inevitably made them fanatical advocates.

These kinds of shifts are not without repercussions. Our teenage kids and young adult children probably don’t want their parents watching witch boys or girls leave messages on their page, show up in photos with them, or even seeing if they’re answers on some kind of “booze” app.  Facebook has made some admirable attempts to allow us to isolate our friends into different groups to stop attrition and allow people to decide which information they share with which friends, but I don’t think this is going to be enough to stop youth from seeking out a new place to hang out in the virtual space.

The important thing to note though is that unlike a couple of years ago I don’t think youth leaving a social network is a sign of the end. Social networks are now mainstream enough to survive without being the next exciting thing (at least for a while).

In pursuit of revenue, Twitter faces the same challenge that has dogged social-networking platforms like Facebook. If advertisers can tap into its network free of charge, why would they pay the company to do so?

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the San Francisco start-up is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year, but doesn’t view them as competition. “We want to work with those companies that are already making an effort,” he says. Mr. Stone says Twitter recently hired a product manager to oversee the development of commercial accounts. The accounts would offer users more features in exchange for a fee, but Mr. Stone says Twitter hasn’t set a launch date for them, according to the wsj.

My thoughts are that there are two groups of people using Twitter’s search API: personal, and commercial. Personal users use it for fun, low hits, personal websites, little mashups that don’t make money, and commercial users try to monetrize it, like those mashups that will charge for fee-based services, or listening platforms that monitor brands, sentiment, behavior on a mass scale… these companies would be happy to pay for the API use … Isn’t that simple? I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

There are many approaches to marketing in the digital-media space, but I subscribe to the belief that consumers live at the intersection between owned media, such as your brand’s web properties; bought media, such as display and pay-per-click campaigns; and earned media, which includes all the user-generated content in the social-media space, from blog posts to comments on YouTube. Although I don’t believe all three approaches must be represented in every campaign, I do believe that in today’s world you do always need to include the earned-media perspective, because consumers will start the dialogue and build value or destroy value for your brand, whether you want it or not. Ultimately it comes down to how you want to engage in these conversations as you evaluate how they add value.

Arguably a single Super Bowl ad is the ultimate “splash” in terms of bought media, but once it has created that initial wave of awareness and conversation, how do you channel and harness that energy to sustain and expand your marketing campaign? It’s what I like to call the ripple. Traditionally, we have driven consumers to websites, micro-sites, mobile sites or even SMS interactions to engage on a deeper level. Now the most effective approach is to monitor and analyze the conversations that are happening online, in as near real-time a fashion as possible. You can then set up and maintain digital-engagement teams to participate in the conversations as they take place.

We conducted an experiment on behalf of one of our clients before, during and after the event using social-media analysis tools. We used Visible Technologies for this experiment, but if you’re interested in learning more about social-media analysis tools in general, check out this post.

Although I can’t get into any details, I can tell you that the conversation spike around the Super Bowl, not surprisingly, was impressive. However, the real value came from being able to quickly differentiate the types of conversations and identify the people who were actually discussing the virtues of the product (and their general sentiment) as opposed to the quality of the advert.

Each blog post, tweet, message board post, editorial article or comment on a media-sharing site allows us to identify individuals and communities that are interested enough to discuss a product or service, which makes them one step closer to being advocates. By participating with these people you not only extend the life of the conversation, but you breathe new life into it, or even possibly change its direction in a positive manner.

Here are five tips to help extend the life of your campaigns:

1. Proactively reach out to bloggers who have even briefly acknowledged your product or service and offer them an in-depth interview with one of your senior people to encourage further coverage in the social media space.
2. Use social-media analytics as a method of managing audience fragmentation. Work toward individualized treatment and micro-segmentation in your messaging as quickly as possible. This process will drive more focused conversations and enhance demand and engagement.
3. Keep a portion of your media budget in reserve and set up some quick, small media buys on sites where you have identified sufficient interest and conversation around your brand. This intelligent and targeted buying method will bring you maximum ROI in an economy where every penny counts.
4. Openly and honestly leave messages and comments in open forums identifying yourself as a representative of the brand. Thank them for their interest, their point of view and their insights (and actually mean it) and invite them to reach out to you via e-mail or to visit a website. Doing so allows you actually channel the energy of these conversations productively to your branded properties.
5. Don’t be short-sighted. Like any good relationship, you wouldn’t throw away a person’s e-mail address or phone number after you’ve built a relationship with them. Start documenting and storing all your online relationships in one place and categorize them by their interests. You’ll be surprised how many people you can build long-term relationships with, albeit digitally.

As the title implies, great campaigns in today’s digital space (and even more so in today’s economy) must look beyond the big splash and understand how to ride, extend and hopefully even grow the interest in brands using social media.

As featured in AdAge’s DigitalNext Blog.

We live in a marketing world fascinated with talk of Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace. They’re the first thing that jump to mind when you discuss social media or social networks with perhaps a distant 4th being the omni-present “blogosphere“. As we descend on each network voraciously it’s easy to forget to step back sometimes and really evaluate who you’re reaching through each network.

I stumbled across a useful blog post at Ignite’s social media blog. You can download the social network demographic document I’m referencing here.

It brings together demographic data like the gender, age, education, and household income of it’s user base in conjunction with a google trends graph indicating search volume for the domain over time by country. Obviously the google trends data isn’t a clear indicator of site traffic, but it should be able to give you a good idea of the traffic a site might get in relation to another by using sites like Facebook and MySpace as a benchmark. Facebook receives about 4 million unique visitors a day these days and MySpace comes in at about 3.5 million.

Here were the data points that I found really interesting and stood out to me, but I encourage you to dig in yourself and see what you notice.

• It seemed like there was a trend for there to be a skew towards female users on social networks, but towards men on social news sites.
• I was surprised to see how heavily used business social networks are by users over 45. In most cases it seems like almost 45% of LinkedIn and Plaxo were over 45 years old.
• MySpace skews younger and towards a less educated lower income group in comparison to Facebook. It also has a disproportionately higher number of female users. (Ironically I met my girlfriend of almost three years on MySpace.)
• Across almost all instances I found the indication of usage in different countries in Africa, South America, and Asia particularly interesting particularly for networks founded in the west.
• Bebo, Lambored, and Habbo are some of the few social networks that seem to be a great place to reach youth in an environment that seems more focused on their culture.
• Anyone who reads this and doesn‘t believe social networks have gone mainstream and that it’s without question no longer skewed to youth is insane.

I’ve mentioned over the last year that I’m a fan of Kluster. Kluster is a group decision-making tool with its roots firmly set in social networking. It allows you to set up private or public groups focused around generating ideas in a democratic and collaborative environment enabled through technology.

Read the full article at AdAge.com