Google Canada continued to tweet that, cost, simplicity and time were stopping small businesses and big business to I might add from leveraging online initiatives. They answered with “Canada Get Your Business Online” initiative. With this initiative Google will hand out websites and domain names to at least 100,000 small and medium sized Canadian businesses, with the bill being footed by Google.” Great way to get businesses started in the online space.

I believe though – that although many of these business owners and marketing managers are familiar with the internet and use it in their everyday life,  many have Facebook pages, smart phones and use those too daily. There is still a lack of understanding and evidence as to the link for these online tools and the success of their business. For most – success means seeing data, and monetary growth in their particular business that – is derived specifically via online channels.  To make an online investment it may mean – taking away current successful dollars from the offline marketing campaigns to invest in that “unknown, unproven space“. At the end of the day – any investment and cost that involves marketing – needs a big return on the investment made – to make sense and be of value no matter the size or success of the business.

In Canada alone -it is ironic that “Canada may be known as the most plugged-in population in the world (spending 43.5 hours per month online, nearly double the global average)” yet there are 1 million companies that do not have  presence online, let alone an e-commerce component. The power of total communications means, a business can leverage their current success offline to build quick success online. That dollar can be shared and used to benefit both aspects of your marketing to enhance your customer reach, broaden opportunity for brand exposure and sales. You also ensure that you reach each and every customer where they are most comfortable.

This new world is about  relationships. Understanding who they are, getting to know where  they are, how they want and like to communicate and the respectful act of slowly developing a meaningful relationship – that benefits both of the parties objectives, values and goals . As an example; creating a campaign on Facebook for a business that has  a retail location, will most certainly be more powerful – if you promote and share your online campaign in your in-store signage, your print materials, receipts that you provide at cash registers and other offline modes of communication that you currently use. What about the sales people in your store – that get to talk about the partnership that has been created with your online business. They want customers to continue to visit their stores. Some of those visitors can be the ones that find you online and have yet to come to your bricks and mortar locations. Others that have not visited you online may be unfamiliar with the idea that they could research certain products or services at home, before visiting your bricks and mortar locations. Now all parts of your business team are working together for mutual success rather than as separate entities. This gives your business more ways to make money and it makes it more meaningful- for your team members to be included in the various ways your business can grow.

It is that total communications mentality that can help grow your business and add to the current success you have had online or offline. You do not have to sacrifice one to benefit the other. There are so many ways to bridge that gap online – in ways that are far more cost effective than many of the offline marketing tools. With a clear understanding, effective and simple measurement and tracking tools – you can effectively find success that far exceeds your current planning and previous monetary success. Being digitally ahead, leveraging your total communications marketing tools = more customer reach, establishing meaningful customer relationships and more opportunity to meet your business objectives.

Time to get online and SHARE your offline communications dollars and success for a digitally ahead, total communications campaign!

Best Nicole

Normally I post a link to articles that touch me or incite something that I wanted to talk about and share with our readers. For today I am going to post an article that I though was important as more businesses focus on how to market to women. Most of us are familiar with TED Talks. I have posted many of them on this blog over the last few yrs.  Engage Boomers: Media Posts rss feed from today – had a beautiful article written by Stephen Riley who attended the most recent TED Talks. What got me was the line “What Boomer Women Look Like” and the subsequent overview of some of the world’s most powerful women and how they reflect accomplishment – not reflected as a targeted age group – but rather as women making a grand difference around the globe – and as Riley writes “creating goals with a purpose.”

As more businesses strategically plan and leverage social media tools, as a way to market their products and services – women play a huge role - not only as decision makers and consumers, but also in helping you create and SHARE your goals and purpose. This new dynamic is about finding ways to create an experience – that incites the recipient of that experience – to take the action you intended them to make.

Best Nicole

What TED Can Teach Us About Marketing To Women

I recently attended the annual TED Conference, which gathers attendees each year to hear cutting-edge scientists, inspiring artists, and global reformers give their own versions of the famous 18-minute “TED Talks.” You have probably seen (or been sent) some TED Talks yourself; all the talks I saw will soon be available to see and share.

As I made my way home after four days of these mind-blowing presentations, I started focusing on some underlying themes. One of those themes was the portrait TED painted (through its speakers) of Baby Boomer women and the true meaning of “aspiration.”

I also found myself wondering how these themes will be discussed at this year’s M2W Conference on April 13-14 in Chicago. M2W may not have as many inventors at TED, but it features a lot of speakers and attendees who think about marketing to women of all ages.

What Great Boomer Women Look Like

Most of the women speakers at TED were themselves Baby Boomers, and they reflected a wide array of female accomplishment:

• Indra Nooyi, the 55-year old chairman and CEO of Pepsico, explained Pepsi’s new mission statement: “Performance with Purpose.” On the “purpose” side of that equation, she told the story of the “Pepsi Refresh Project,”, where millions of citizens have nominated and voted for non-profit groups to receive grants from funds that Pepsi would have otherwise spent on commercials.

• Edith Widder, 60, a biologist, conservationist, and deep-sea explorer, told us about her decades-long fascination with bio-illuminescence, the property that lets an infinite variety of deep-sea creatures produce light. Widder’s lifelong passion has changed the way we see and protect 99% of living space on earth that takes place below the ocean’s surface.

• Julie Taymor, 58 and the creator of “The Lion King,” identified her own creative impulse with an experience at the edge of an active New Zealand volcano, then compared that experience to the inferno she finds herself in now as the producer of Broadway’s disaster-prone “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”

• Amina Az-Zubair, a Nigerian reformer, told her own story growing up in a more prosperous Nigeria and now delivering meaningful results as she oversees a $1 billion investment in education to improve the lives of 70 million Nigerians who live in poverty.

As these speakers rolled across my memory, I thought of the portrait they painted of what it means to be a Boomer woman in the U.S. and the world. I saw passions and qualities that we hear about from women but rarely see reflected in any advertisement. Those qualities include:

• An entrepreneurial spirit that is about doing well by doing good

• A reforming instinct

• A creative passion that never gives up

• Knowledge and wisdom that come from years of careful observation

Marketers always talk about what it presenting “aspirational” models for consumers. In the case of Boomer women, that usually means presenting them models who have no wrinkles or grey hair. Yet, the TED Talks I heard reminded me that aspiration can take many forms, and marketers who want to reach women over 50 should also recognize and celebrate the values these remarkable women exhibited: accomplishment borne from a lifelong passion, the wisdom gained from experience and a desire to make the world a better place.

If you remind Boomer women that you recognize these (among other) aspirations in them, you will make it a lot easier for them to help you achieve Pepsi’s goal of performance with purpose.

Search in the world of technology is the main driver and source of revenue for all of us looking to build our visibility online. “As a marketing strategy, SEO is used to increase a site’s relevance. The SEO recognizes how search organics work and what people are searching for. It also initiates efforts to include unique content to a site to ensure that its content is easily indexed by search engine robots, making it more appealing to users.”

As this year winds down it is important to reflect and see what the past year’s successes, failures, tragedy’s and challenges were- in order to help plan and build enthusiasm, goals and growth for the year ahead. I came across this video via Google Zeitgeist 2010 that provides you with a great overview of the top searches in 2010 around the globe. Great way to get the juices flowing as we all plan to search on in 2011.

2010 in Review

Re-live top events and moments from 2010 from around the globe through search, images, and video.

Enjoy!

Best Nicole

When you begin to engage your community it will be come clear within the community – the ways to which your” likers” or community members  love to share information. It may even be in ways that will go outside or beyond the products and services that – you focused your community building on. Finding creative ways to allow these most important customers – to be able to engage others, share their lives, ideas, opinions and interests  -will allow and encourage others to share back. You create a real human association as well – when you are now allowing those who use and love your products most – to be your marketing spokes people. Lets not forget the opportunity to increase sales with people who are so eager to share themselves with others and learn new things in a place that you opened up to them. You also get to learn by listening to this burgeoning community you are building and find out what people love, dislike and are truly interested in – as it relates to your products and services, as well as the customers who are passionate about what you do and want to connect with others with similar interests.

It is no surprise that many companies are now using Facebook as a platform to build communities and engage their customers. 250 million people go on Facebook everyday! There is a wonderful post I came across today – that led to this article from my favorite social media site Mashable.com. It features 5 valuable online community marketing lessons from Kraft’s Philadelphia Cream Cheese. This article is written by Sarah Kessler. The community called “The Real Women of Philadelphia” is led by Paula Deen, as their celebrity brand ambassador. Results have exceeded expectation in community size goals, community engagement and sales. Better yet by letting this community build and form on its own – a whole group of women have found ways to engage and support one another far beyond cream cheese!

All good relationships are about listening, sharing and working together to build value to each person in that relationship. By letting your community take charge – you open the doors to some magical opportunities for both the community and your brand!

Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers.

Best Nicole

Asking kitchen-savvy women to not only invent their own dishes, but also shoot, edit and upload videos to a contest website seems like a recipe for disaster. But when Kraft invited women to do just that in its latest online promotional campaign for Philadelphia Cream Cheese, it got about 5,600 more responses than the 400 it set as its goal. With Paula Deen at its helm, what was intended to be a one-year campaign blossomed into a thriving social network of more than 30,000 women.

“When it was all laid on the table, I couldn’t believe the opportunity. I had to pass on an ‘attagirl’ or a boost to more women out there,” explained Paula Deen at a recent promotional luncheon.

When someone seated at a nearby table reminded Deen that the campaign has also been successful in selling more cream cheese, she looked sarcastically surprised. “It did? I hadn’t even thought of that!” she said.

The truth is that the The Real Women of Philadelphia helped sell quite a bit more cream cheese — 5% more, as of August. As a branded social network, The Real Women of Philadelphia is about as successful as the cream-cheese-infused French Apple Cake that swept the dessert video competition. These four aspects contributed to the campaign’s sweet success:

1. Leverage an Existing Community

There are arguably few personalities who could represent cream cheese with more gusto, and Paula Deen’s large fan base was likely to already be cooking with cream cheese. By advertising the Real Women of Philadelphia campaign on Paula Deen’s website and having Paula Deen star in ads on other media, Kraft was able to reach an existing community of the women it wanted to speak to. EQAL, the company that beat out companies like ABC and Yahoo for the opportunity to produce the campaign in partnership with Digitas, referred to Paula Deen’s role as the “igniter.”

2. Create a Reason for Users to Create Content

Even with Paula Deen as an ambassador, it’s hard to imagine that the campaign would have had much success as, let’s say, a social network feature on the Philadelphia Cream Cheese website. The competitive aspect was and is crucial to the success. For the first iteration of the contest, women submitted instructional videos about their invented cream cheese recipes. Sixteen finalists were chosen and flown to Savannah for a live webcast competition, hosted by Paula Deen, that determined the four women who would become “hosts” for the next iteration of the competition and win $25,000. Currently these four hosts are accepting submissions for the cookbook that Kraft will create using 80 of the best recipes from the community, recipes from the four hosts, and Paula Deen recipes. Every day the hosts choose a winning recipe from the community, which earns its author $500.

Because women have invested themselves in creating content for these contests, they feel more ownership of the site and are more likely to visit frequently. Greg Goodfried, the co-founder and COO of EQAL, says that it’s important to have some motive for people to create content on a branded social network. This motive doesn’t necessarily need to be a competition, but it needs to be strong enough to spark the community.

3. Focus on Community Content, Not Your Content

Between videos of Paula Deen and vidoes starring the four hosts, the EQAL team has produced more than 50 videos for the site. But they are careful to keep the spotlight on the user-generated content. During the initial competition, for instance, the homepage featured select submissions. One main feature of the site is a gallery of community recipe submissions, and the team will post especially impressive contributions from the community on the LoveMyPhilly Facebook and Twitter accounts.

“There was a really great sense that the content people were sending in was the main attraction and made them feel like stars, and it made people thoroughly engaged,” Goodfried says.

4. Step Aside

When Kraft launched the campaign, the company wasn’t sure what to expect.

“I think originally we thought that they would talk a lot about food, a lot about the competition,” Goodfried says. “[We thought] there might be a little bit of competitive component to it, and they would just all be excited about the opportunity to win.”

When the women started talking about their personal lives, it surprised the community’s architects. At one point, a woman mentioned that she couldn’t afford a dress for her daughter’s school dance. Other women in the community offered to ship their own grown daughters’ dresses to her. One woman offered to make a dress. Another woman who wasn’t sure how to use a video editing program mailed her raw video submission to another member of the community who had volunteered to edit it.

Instead of trying to divert these discussions back toward cream cheese, EQAL decided to let the community shape the site. When the managers saw the conversations shaping around individuals lives, they added a weekly “spotlight” post in which they profile a community member that has been nominated or shared something interesting on the site. When forum topics popped up that were unrelated to Kraft, cheese, or food, they let them be. The tools on the site allowed women to create a robust profile, privately message each other, and participate in whatever way they wanted. By letting the members shape the community, Kraft was able to build a stronger one.

“These incredible personal connections that extended beyond food, beyond cooking, beyond anything related to the competition just occurred,” Goodfried says. “There are substantial numbers of women that we have talked to that have way more friends on Real Women of Philadelphia than they have on Facebook.”

5. Play a Supportive Role, Not a Director’s Role

If the creators of the social network can make it richer by getting out of the way, what are they supposed to do once the site launches?

In this case, they spent a lot of time helping women participate by fielding questions about editing and uploading videos. After a couple of weeks, other women in the community started answering these kinds of questions in the forums. But the role of the managers remained supportive.

“The only reason we build these sites is to encourage people to come to them to make content and submit content,” Goodfried says. “It’s not one-way where we’re just publishing things and people are coming and consuming it. We’re trying to start this spark of a conversation, this spark of community, and then encourage the community to be engaged.”

Most of us, even those of us who still do not have smart phones own phones that provide cameras, texting and email. We take those phones with us everywhere and use them as a beacon to stay connected, informed and give us the answers to the info. we need immediately. This simple deduction makes mobile a key player in how we live our lives day to day. For those that have a smart phone such as myself – apps are a key way to get information from brands, products and services we use and evangelize and keep customers  informed. In some cases these apps allow the purchase of products from a mobile device, other apps provide updates about sales, events, promotions and new product launches. It makes sense in the retail world that finding ways to leverage mobile commerce should be high on the marketing budget and strategy list.

There are some of the big brands that have mobile apps both in the retail world at large – but also in the fashion world which is directly related to our attached article. Where I think that retailers can really start to think big- is by utilizing all the ways they can leverage different types of mobile commerce including mobile websites and texting to enhance the customer experience.  Currently most retailers are still not interfacing with customers via their mobile phones in bricks and mortar locations. Most sales people are not using in-store mobile phones to share info. with customers, or using their computers to help customer take photos or share via text which is one of the largest uses for everyone.

Nordstrom’s has enhanced their customer ability to find product online and know where  and whether it is in stock .  Net a Porter the designer online fashion site allows you to purchase product from your mobile phone. Joe Fresh the stylish and economical fashion line featured in Canada’s grocery chain Loblaw’s uses their application to feature product, prices and style options in a fun way attached to store locations where looks can be found. Yet in-store experiences have still not been leveraged. As mentioned in our article free wi-fi is still not offered and many sales people are not thinking about the ways that they can leverage sharing, product colours or options that may not be offered at one location or available at another. What about helping a customer text products  to friends  -that can help them make a choice or decision to purchase? We are starting to see rewards for geo-location via mobile from companies like the Gap – who launched a contest for a free pair of jeans if you are one of the first 10,000 to check into Facebook Places on Friday.

As more people use their phone to manage all of their daily tasks – it be vital for retailers to think creatively on a variety of phone platforms – ways to communicate with customers in-store and out by the device that goes with them everywhere – allowing access to customers instantly and regularly. BNET features an article “How Fashion Brands Can Make the Most of M Commerce” authored by Lydia Dishman. The key for all retailers is not to just think in the world of apps  -but to think of how mobile commerce can best be used in the way their  target customer – is most likely to use their mobile device, integration of m commerce in-store and online and the engagement of employees that manage the sales in both of those venues.

Best Nicole

It took them a while to embrace e-commerce so it’s easy to forgive fashion brands and retailers for taking so long to use leverage smartphone technology to reach customers. But they won’t get a free pass for much longer. At a panel during WWD’s CEO Summit, savvy apparel retailers are having no trouble wrapping their heads (and dollars) around mobile-friendly sites and apps as a way to boost revenue and connect with consumers.

James Gardner, CEO and co-founder of CREATETHE GROUP, an interactive agency whose clients include Burberry, Calvin Klein, DKNY, Neiman Marcus (NM) and others told me:

Spending is higher on the web, but the mobile apps help brands reach the consumer wherever they are with their mobile device, and offer another engaging way to interact with the brands, strengthen brand loyalty and to offer a creative way for shoppers on the go to browse a brand at their own convenience via an iPhone, iPad or another connected device. This ultimately helps drive sales. While a consumer may spend a few minutes window shopping via a mobile app but may not make a purchase, that action helps convert more sales online and in-store.

Though the preponderance of purchases happen on the Web, Gardner asserts that two of CREATETHE GROUP’s largest luxury retailers average eight to nine percent of their total sales through mobile. Flash sale site Rue La La projects even bigger results with 20 percent of its sales expected to come through mobile by next year.

The most successful brands to convert will offer customers an array of ways to connect and shop. But you don’t necessarily need to rely on an app. Gardner tells me that mobile commerce enabled sites are more important.

While apps were a craze and a focus for 2008 and 2009, what quickly became important to CREATETHE GROUP’s clients is mobile commerce – and really making their sites accessible and shopable on all mobile devices including the iPhone and iPad that do not support Flash, because anyone can access a retailer’s site on their mobile device whether a branded app is available yet or not. The focus shifted away from apps to mobile commerce, and our most recent examples of mobile commerce enabled sites include Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, DKNY, and Juicy Couture. With these clients and others, we are in progress of the next level of optimizing mobile design and the checkout process.

If a brand has the resources to do it, developing an app can offer the potential customer a more robust way to shop remotely. David Yurman’s iPhone app for its timepiece collection allows users to browse collections, view detailed descriptions, make purchases through a personal shopper, and view product images in their actual size to see what the piece would look like on their wrist.

Smart brand managers would do well to begin incorporating location based services that go beyond a store locator. Nordstrom’s (JWN) recent inventory integration between stores and warehouse allowed shoppers to see what was available in nearby stores or shop online and pick up in the store. The initiative has made Nordstrom’s inventory turn at record-setting speeds (to 5.41 in 2009 from 4.84 in 2005) and improved margins on merchandise that would have languished on racks until marked below 50 percent.

There’s still plenty of room for improvement. Piers Fawkes, founder of trend research firm PSFK, believes retailers should encourage mobile phones in stores and provide free wi-fi for shoppers to enhance the browsing experience. Fawkes also suggests retailers to take control of their inventory cycles by synchronizing special discounts for groups.

You can encourage people to purchase when you want to move stock. You can also focus on your loyal consumers and reward them with group purchases. And you can test the popularity of new concepts or product ranges or brands before you make them.

One thing’s clear: if a multichannel shopper spends four times, on average, what a one-source shopper spends, fashion retailers who haven’t started developing mobile-friendly sites yet better get busy.

As I drove back to my office after the conference I realized – even with all the information available on this most important marketing shift and the SHARING we have done – there are many large and small companies – that are just getting started and are still unsure of how to ensure success.  I thought I would offer some ideas – that can be applied to any  social media marketing efforts to help garner immediate results as quickly as possible.

1. Most brands have established who they are product and service wise – but many have not allowed themselves to reveal their personality. By this I mean – you must be assessable and approachable. Encourage your visitors to share their ideas, opinions and provide feedback. You want to retract the traditional methods of talking at people or pushing information and facilitate a two way conversation that welcomes your participants, encourages them to talk with you and makes them feel so good they want to come back and share with others. Don’t forget your employees. They are your first and best brand ambassadors. Create rules and guidelines that fit your companies policies – but encourage them to talk about your business and galvanize your customers to join in with them.

2. Create information and content that can be shared! Make it fun and interesting. Ask questions and listen to the feedback and the content that gets passed along – as guidelines of what your audience enjoys and connects with. Be sure to be consistent and respond to any requests, questions and opinions so that your audience knows that you are listening as well as providing information. This will help add value to the online conversation for your entire community.

3. Acknowledge your brand ambassadors and community participants. Let them know how happy you are to have them supporting you. Be sure to respond to every comment, email, blog comment, Tweet or Facebook post. It is no different than how you would treat a friend. You don’t want them to think that you are ignoring them – all good relationships are built on taking time to nurture each person individually.

4. Continuity of marketing channels is key.  Integrating all of your marketing tools from your website, to your blog, email campaigns, in-store and offline campaigns and your online communities which might be microsites, Facebook and Twitter pages. All must be unified – sharing the same message but communicated in different ways. Like all of us we have different ways of communicating and taking the time to understand the way your target market likes to communicate- gives you have a much better chance of engaging them. Leverage your various sites to promote one another. So on your home page – you might include find us on Facebook and Twitter. Do the same on your Twitter and Facebook pages and provide links where they can easily access the way they would like to connect with you and share you with their communities.

5. Don’t look sideways. So many companies hear or read about businesses that have a gazillion fans on Twitter and decide that they should dive into Twitter hoping for the same results. It could be that your target market doesn’t use Twitter. You want to strategize and understand who and where YOUR customers are and meet them there. It is always great to know what your competition is doing and how they are communicating with their customers but remember – no two people or business are the same. Be true to who YOU are!

Best Nicole

Our guest blogger Blair Currie who we introduced to you last week and is working with BCAD Group on some new projects, has written a post to answer one of those questions. What will be the future for search. We feel there are some very important points to consider here – as this is one of the sure fire ways -  your can ensure your business will make money, garner new customers, improve your page ranking on search engines which in turn will help you sell more products and services.

How you are you leveraging search engine marketing in your business?

Best Nicole

There is no crystal ball to tell what the future holds; however, in the area of search engine marketing, there are a number of developments in the areas of audio search, location-based technology and personalization, that one can paint a pretty good picture of what is to come. Here are a few signs of where search appears to be headed:

1.Audio

Search by voice command will become increasingly common, especially for mobile devices. This will help speed up search and making it more personal.

In Stanley Kubrik’s classic film “2001: A Space Odyssey”, we were introduced to HAL, an intelligent computer that talked with the protagonists in the film. Speaking directly to HAL seemed much more natural and much faster than using a keyboard, trackball and/or mouse. This movie, albeit released in 1968, provides a glimpse at the future of search.

2.  Augmented

Search will continue to be augmented by both past behavior of you and “others like you” to speed up the process of delivering results. This is what Google Instant does when it shaves seconds off the search process letting you see results before you finish tying your search query.

The second form of augmented is “Augmented reality” (AR) where a real image is enhanced or augmented by digital imagery. An image captured on a mobile device can be identified with GPS technology and this image can be augmented or over-laid with search data, such as history of a building in the picture or availability and pricing of rooms in a particular hotel.  Companies that do this include Layar.

A third form of augmented is what can be referred to as  “Augmented humanity”. In this case an engine will search for things without being asked to. For example if you are walking down a street Google will use GPS data to search for history of the area as an example. This requires that your computing device continuously search and anticipate your questions – augmenting humanity in a way.

3.) Broader – will include the Internet of Things.

Everyday objects in the physical world will become searchable with the help of radio frequency identifications chips (RFID). Physical objects are being increasingly embedded with tiny identifying chips with valuable data including country of origin, component parts, manufacturing dates etc.. These chips are decreasing in prices so that more and more objects can be “connected” to the Internet.  Alternately put, there will be an “Internet of things”.

With the ability to search, identify and track physical goods, companies and individuals can manage inventories more effectively and consumers or customers can find and products more readily and compare prices at different vendors.  Individuals can also find lost objects – to mention a couple of functions related to the Internet of things, which is sometimes referred to as “Ambient intelligence”.

4.) Customizable

Search companies will include more tools to allow users to set priorities in what they are looking for and what they want to screen from their searches.

For example an individual may want to exclude social media or video searches and concentrate only on blogs. This will be possible because the search engines will allow us to set these filters.

5.) Future oriented

Major search trends will increasingly be used as “Future data now” that will be used to create new products and services. As such, Search will be used more proactively than reactively and become a more important tool for companies.

While in the past companies produced products and services and then figured out the best way to market them, search will accelerate the use of insights to develop products.

6.) Global

Language barriers to finding search results will decrease, as translation software will permit multiple language searches. The world’s data is not all recorded in one common language making it difficult to find Arabic results using a Japanese search engine. To help overcome this problem technology is being developed that will allow search in many languages.

7.) Location based applications

Location and mobile are really the “Third Wave” of the Internet following “Pages and Search” in the First Wave and “Social and Interactive” in the Second Wave. As mobile e-commerce develops, location based search will become more important.

When consumers are mobile they are generally interested in location based search. By combining search with GPS technology many services are developing that facilitate local navigation and marketing.

8.) Mobile

Mobile search will take an increasing share over the overall search market as mobile penetration overtakes PC penetration and as mobile devices – smart phones, computers in automobiles and wearable devices gain acceptance. .

This is a key reason why all the major search companies Google (including YouTube), Microsoft, Yahoo! and Facebook are all competing in the mobile space many of them developing operating systems and/or telephones of their own.

Audio search will greatly help out the spread of mobile search because of the difficulty of using keyboards and touch-screens for sending text.

9.) Personalized

Search will become more personalized and tailored to the individual as the search engine learns and knows more about an individual’s tastes and preferences. For example a search engine should be able to determine whether an individual  is looking for Seal the Musical performer vs. Seal the mammal based on his or her history.

As search gets more personalized search engines will need to increasingly need to better deal with privacy issues through opt-in agreements, full disclosure etc..

10.) Private

The Search Engines will ultimately need to develop a Bill of Rights to deal with the privacy of information and legal access rights by government bodies and the length of time information can be retained.

11.) Specialized

While some search engines will remain focused on mass search there will be niche search engines. For example, Wolfram Alpha, which is a fact based search engine. The user interfaces of specialized search engines may be better equipped to display the results of searched items, just as YouTube has evolved to best present video search results.

12.) Universal and more

Search will become increasing “Universal” in that it will continue to expand in scope moving from websites, books, news, images and videos to video and television as are now being introduced by Google and Apple.

This understanding can allow us to look at that success and then create opportunities here that allow for innovation but more importantly success for all levels and types of users. There are now more than 5,000 types of phones (”handsets”) out there, each with possible different screen sizes, resolutions, speed, and/or operating systems, creating a campaign to conform to every type can be a bear. The most common phones used in the U.S. are iPhones and BlackBerrys (they presently represent about 50 percent of the market).

I came across an article from Media Post that gives you a good perspective of how mobile marketing differs around the world. Posted by Mark Walsh this is a real quick eye opener to how mobile is not just a campaign but a necessity for many.

The fundamentals are the same globally, but what differs is that in many countries mobile isn’t a nice thing to have, it’s a necessity, explains Michael Becker, North American Managing Director for the MMA, in a presentation on mobile use globally. He points out that in Africa, mobile plays a key part in HIV treatment and other health-related areas. You can even use mobile to pre-pay insurance for your own funeral. Yikes.

Mobile commerce company M-Pesa has gotten uptake from the unlikely market of  goatherders in Africa, who use its money transfer system to buy and sell goats at market. Who needs a credit card? In the U.K, the company jobsite has had success with 15-second mobile job ad, boosting traffic to its site nearly 500%. In Norway, you can file your taxes from a mobile phone and in India you can even download a condom-themed ringtone (as part of a health campaign). “So all this shows how critical mobile is becoming to people’s lives,” said Becker. And you thought you were an avid mobile user.

Mobile marketing is now at the forefront for many and if you think about it – it is really the most effective means for communication with your customers both current and new. These days most people have a cell phone which they check religiously.  Using mobile allows you as a business – to reach customers immediately and effectively at lower costs then other media streams.

The key is understanding that all businesses need not worry about creating their own mobile apps. Leveraging phone apps that already exist like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare as places where your business can be found in apps – can be a savvy way to begin. Checking out existing apps stores to find out what is most popular  or what features best suit or mimic your business needs will help you practically find a use case – that makes the most sense for your business.

Don’t forget to look around the world!

Best Nicole

Our guest for this week is Blair Currie.  Blair is a global agency leader – who has run creative, media and digital agencies. He has just returned to Canada – after being in Asia for 20 years and is  working with us at BCAD Group on a number of projects. Blair’s topic echo’s many posts we have written in the past and a philosophy we stand behind – which is total communications marketing and communication plans that include digital tools – using all forms of media to build a story and message that supports a brand and it’s community!

We thank Blair for being our first guest blogger and look forward to having him post again for us in the months to come!

Best Nicole

Video didn’t kill the radio star

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m growing tired of marketing soothsayers talking about the death of this or that medium. Part of it is that I’m more of an “inclusive” versus “exclusive” guy – using the word “and” much more than “or”. But a larger part is that I think we’re being fed too much hype about new media.  For me, it’s not “digital or TV” but “digital and TV”.  And sometimes it will be “digital TV”.

Digital and television play different roles in creating value to exchange for peoples’ hard-to-get attention.  Consider the last time you remembered a banner ad?  (They are difficult to remember.) Or consider when a television commercial caused you to immediately jump in the car to buy the product? (Some infomercials can do this.) These two media have relative strengths and weaknesses, and we really should be talking about how synergy can be created by using both, versus turning them against each other to compete for scarce marketing resources.

To better understand and deal with the current “Media battleground” we can turn to history – which tends to repeat itself when it comes to warfare and technology.

Once a disruptive product or media innovation is introduced, it is quickly adopted by pioneers and “early adopters”, crosses a proverbial chasm to the mass audience, and moves on to nearly 100% penetration. The interesting fact is that this progression doesn’t generally eliminate the existing rivals – as video killing the radio star; rather, new technology and media tend to shake up the landscape, and force existing media players to reposition themselves into more defined and defendable spaces.

Source: The New York Times.

Looking at the “1960’s” in the chart above, TV took over the role of “the family’s gathering place”, from radio. Radio did not die but found new roles to play – as a source of background or ambient music, or the most popular in-car medium.  Now television, magazines and newspapers are all facing similar issues with the rise of the internet and the accelerated growth of social media.  It’s a familiar pattern that can teach us how to deal with changes and allocate resources in today’s changing media landscape.

Like most disruptive technologies, a new medium can create great advantages for those who adopt it early in the game.  But more often than not, new media comes with a disproportionate share of hype.  The true and lasting value of the innovation follows later – sometimes many years later, in the shape of Gartner’s “Hype cycle” below – great expectations at the beginning yielding to sustainable growth and maturity only in time:

Source: Gartner

Media advisors need to strike the balance of seeing the potential that the new media will bring in terms of immediate returns, while keeping an eye on the future.  It’s quite comforting to draw upon historical comparisons to help strike this balance – keeping in mind that innovations spread more quickly today.

In closing, technology and media do not play in a “zero sum game” because attention spans are not fixed. Multitasking can increase a 24 hour day, just as filtering out a message can decrease it.  And digital will no more kill the 30 second television spot in the years to come, than video killed the radio star in days gone by.  But digital will help redefine the role of television – which is actually a good subject for another blog.

All sizes of companies big and small have lost their leverage with purchasing customers – because the public in many cases has lost trust in brands. These customers who have had information pushed to them for years and years – now have the opportunity and are armed with the information they need about products and services -without the assistance of the companies that produce and offer those products and services.

This new world for most businesses is scary and unfamiliar territory. The world of open leadership has arrived and it is forcing this change of hands from the company being in control – to that of the consumer now assuming their power and using social media tools to scream from the rooftops – or keyboards- and share their complaints and disappointments for all the world to see. The navigation of this shift is going to be a complex and difficult one to balance for many companies – that for decades have been accustomed – to being in control of the messages and responses. Better yet many have  been able to keep that customer at arms length and quiet in the unhappy eye of a customer complaining storm.

The answer from my perspective is that a relationship must now be created and developed. As with the power of brand evangelism and customers loving a brand so much that they are using social media to SHARE it with others – customer service is no different. For those who have not focused on customer service complaints in particular – there are tools such as Twitter that can provide immediate responses. In the discussion from Mitch Joel’s question – the positioning becomes   how much should be answered and what about all those that don’t have legitimate complaints, but are rather using the platform to build their own profile or cause. What about the people who have few followers and may not be active against those that have many?  What about all the people who prefer to keep their complaints quiet and are not interested in ranting aloud? All legitimate thoughts and questions.

My take is that companies must show leadership in listening, being clear in their responses ( while following and adhering to previously established policies) and use these opportunities – to let customers know that they do want to solve their problems and customers in turn want to be heard. The strength in all of this – is the relationships that can be built and the opportunity to turn those angry unhappy clients into surprised but happy promoters – of how their challenges were addressed and resolved. In many cases people are ok – with understanding that they may have not followed or read the policy associated with their complaint – yet insisted on trying anyway. An immediate response with an open opportunity to find a solution is usually what they are looking for. To those who are looking to leverage their power for what appears as “no good to the business” add value as it allows the companies to create a comfortable habit of making that effort to reach out and engage. One customer at a time.

As with everything that is good there are always a few that want to spoil it for others – but the happy ending is – when building relationships – you must give everyone a chance and show your good will – to create trust worthy long lasting relationships – something that is lacking for many brands. Now is the time to take the opportunity to turn the tables and lead with that open relationship with customers. The holidays are right around the corner.. no better time to start then now! Te read more of the discussion – go to Mitch Joels blog http://www.twistimage.com/blog/

We would love to hear from you! Have you had experiences using social media as a way to respond to customer service complaints and met with success? SHARE your stories with us and we will post them!

Best Nicole