Yesterday Google announced the acquisition of Motorola Mobility, which was a big surprise for most of us. For more details on this news there’s a good summary on Mashable.

I had dinner with the CMO of Motorola Mobility, Bill Ogle, several months ago at the CMO Council Summit. Among the things we discussed was the possibility of the then recent spin-off from Motorola eventually being acquired. Neither of us had Google on the short list of potential acquirers. But why does this news matter to other marketers?

Take it as another big signal that the smart phone is rapidly becoming THE computing device that will impact how consumers and business decision-makers interact with information and entertainment. According to Pew Internet Research, 25% of smart phone users primarily access the Web from their phones and 23% of adults go online from their phones regularly.

This current adoption pattern has accelerated the need for companies to mobilize their websites. We’re currently helping marketers ranging from restaurants to technology companies deliver a better user experience to smart phone users. Yes, there are many more uses of mobile devices in the marketing mix (text messaging, QR codes and apps to name a few), but if you haven’t prioritized making your website a good experience for mobile users, you may be frustrating a quarter of your visitors.

Want an opinion on how your website is performing for mobile users? Drop me a note or leave a comment here.

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Google buys Motorola Mobility. So why should marketers care?

There has been a lot of “ink” this week about Google+. Is it the next big thing? Is it just another social network? Did Google finally get something new right? All common questions. My answers are “Not sure yet,” “Not exactly” and “Looks like it.”

So here are three things marketers should do next week:

1. Learn more about it. Chris Brogan wrote a nice post “10 Things CMOs Need To Know About Google+”.  Start by reading it.

2. Set up your profile. Nothing helps you get a better understanding of a new tool than using it. Go to plus.google.com to get started. If you need an invite, let me know and I’ll send you one.

3. Add +1 to you website. It will make it easier for people to share your content and improve your SEO results. Not sure how to do it? Click here for details from Google.

So what is your take on Google+? Will it be the next big thing? Is it just another social network to manage? Did they actually get this one right?

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

3 things marketers should do next week about Google+

Any marketer who is trying to drive business through a local venue is challenged with the increasing array of ways to engage consumers. Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of local store marketing has never been more daunting or more critical. The historical methods of Sunday circulars and television ads are losing steam while new approaches like search marketing, digital coupons, social media and mobile apps are growing in impact.

This is because consumers’ use of technology is altering the way they live and shop. One good example of this is how location-based services on smart phones make life easier for users, whether it is finding directions, getting other people’s opinions or finding special deals.

Use of location-based services

Marketers who already have a full day’s work often find it difficult to stay on top of all the digital techniques that could help them drive more traffic within their budget limitations. To help them with this problem, our agency just released a white paper that simplifies 10 top activities that they should be looking at more closely. The paper is free, so if you are interested, download it here.

How has your buying behavior changed in the past year? What has impacted you the most? Deals from Groupon? Reviews on Yelp? Likes on Facebook? Apps on iPhones? I’m curious which of the digital and social media options have been most useful to you.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

10 digital ways to activate local store traffic

We just celebrated nFusion’s 10th anniversary as an integrated marketing agency, so I thought it was time for some quick reflection on the past decade and some pontification on what the next 10 years may hold.

When we started in 2001 the dot.com bubble had not yet burst. The twin towers were still standing in New York. Real estate was thought to be a sound investment. And General Motors was public company. From an economic perspective, the last 10 years were a disaster. Trillions of dollars of wealth was lost.

Magazines and local newspapers were highly profitable businesses. E-mail addresses, if you had one, often ended with .aol. Google AdWords had just launched with 350 customers. And YouTube, Facebook and the iPhone were still years away from being invented. From a marketing perspective, the decade created more dramatic changes in a shorter time than any period in history.

So what can a marketing leader learn from the past decade to be prepared for the next? My favorite prognosticator is Bob Johansen, author of Leaders Make the Future. He identifies a leader’s key challenge as dealing with Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity by providing Vision, Understanding, Clarity and Agility. The former four attributes certainly typify the past decade and those attributes will be even more pronounced in the next decade.

So what key trends do I believe will be impacting marketing the most in the years ahead? I believe there will be at least these four:

1. Mobile access to any content, anytime, anywhere: Smarter smart phones. Lighter tablets. Smarter, more connected cars. Intelligent eye wear. Jewelery that is as functional as it is stylish. On-demand information will fundamentally change how consumers shop and make local decisions.

2. New content interaction devices: The iPad will look archaic in 10 years. And we haven’t figured out how to fully leverage it yet. Message exchange, photo sharing, game playing and TV watching will have platforms that raise users’ expectations about what a great experience means. Will marketing communications evolve at the rate that technology enables?

3. Faster networks: More complex content will be able to move around the world instantaneously. Video chats from your phone are here now. Are interactive holograms around the corner? Download 3D content in seconds. Check out that vacation property before you book it. See what the custom paint job on you new car looks like in advance. The demand for video content is only going to accelerate.

4. “Information overload” filters: The production of content that can inform and entertain consumers will grow exponentially. To deal with the deluge, users will filter facts, opinions and other content based on their own criteria. Trusted opinions. Known networks. Efficacy ratings. The challenge for marketing will not be breaking through the clutter but getting through the filters.

We believe that the future of marketing is inherently a digital future. We are excited about the possibilities and will be building our next decade on a digital foundation. How about you?

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Celebrating the past decade. So what’s next?

Have you ever been faced with a decision and you didn’t know where to turn for advice? Increasingly, I’m finding that I am one of millions who is turning to the wisdom of crowds for help. Wisdom of crowds is based on the concept that if two heads are better than one, millions of heads are better than two. By using the collective experiences of others, my odds of weeding out the bad experiences and selecting a good experience improve significantly. It beats throwing a dart or depending on blind luck.

SXSW, a major interactive, music and film conference, is using this approach in an innovative way. By using a panel picker application that asks the “crowd” to render an opinion on proposed presentation topics, the organizers are improving the chance that the panels ultimately selected for the conference will be appealing. To see how it works, click here and you can give my submission a thumbs up.

I find myself going to many different sites that either incorporate the wisdom of crowds into their functionality, or sites built specifically around this concept. Here are some of my favorites:

• Yelp.com: This gives good summaries of restaurants with ratings and comments. It includes a location-based service in the mobile version for finding places when I’m traveling. Other similar apps are Zagat.com and Around Me.
• TripAdvisor.com: I’ve used this site for planning where to stay in places I’ve never been to before. The reader comments and ratings are useful, especially when picking a vacation spot that won’t disappoint the family.
• Amazon.com: One of the pioneers in using purchase behavior to drive a recommendation engine. It suggests books that others have read who like the same books I do.
• Angie’s List: This site takes the mystery out of hiring a local service provider, whether it’s someone to fix your back or your back porch. Driven entirely by user reviews, the recommendations are candid and useful, and sure beat a random pick from the Yellow Pages (remember them?).

What are you favorite sites? Please add them to the the list above.

As a marketer, knowing that decisions to buy from you are increasingly being made based on opinions shared on these sites is critical. Refocusing your company to deliver a great customer experience consistently is a must. And developing the organizational capability to listen to, respond to and improve based on comments will be a core competency required for the 21st century.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

A boomer CEO’s journey through social media, part 4: wisdom of crowds

Like almost everyone else using Twitter, I follow some celebrities. I find out more about who they are by reading about what they do every day, as shared via their tweets. It is interesting to me to know what it is like to be inside the locker room at the Masters, or what it is like recovering from a ride in the Tour de France, or what little things make a celebrity happy. Knowing where they eat, which bands they listen to or what it feels like to play to an exuberant crowd makes me feel like an insider.

But I also follow several marketing leaders and subject matter experts. And I really don’t care where they eat, which bands they like and how their big presentation made them feel. That’s not why I follow them. I want to learn from them professionally. I want their insights and lessons learned.

What is your Twitter personality? There isn’t a right one or a wrong one, but you have one. Is it the one you want? Is it consistent with why you tweet? Twitter is another medium to express your personal brand so give some thought to what you want your brand to stand for.

Here are some of my favorite marketing folks to follow:

• BrandDigital
• MarketingProfs
• Jennifer Aaker
• George Dearing
• Sam Decker

Who are your favorite people that you like to follow? Why?

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

Are you tweeting like a rock star?

Today’s New York Times article written at SXSW covers one of the hottest trends in social media – the use of mobile location-based services (LBS). The story, Telling Friends Where You Are (or Not), highlights the emergence of Foursquare as one of the fastest-growing social platforms and covers other platforms, such as Facebook, Google and Yelp, which also use LBS.

The combination of social networks with GPS-enabled smart phones brings both immediacy and relevancy to consumers. Whether using the capabilities to hook up with friends or to get suggestions for a great place to eat, consumers can derive a great deal of benefit.

As a marketer, recognizing the importance of location-based services is step one. Subsequent steps should then be taken. Barnes and Noble does a great job of integrating book searches with the nearest location that has the book in stock. Starbucks’ iPhone app makes it easy to find the closest spot for a caffeine fix. Several venues are creating special offers just for Foursquare users. Ask yourself the question, “When is my customer’s location relevant to my brand?” and you may be surprised by the number of occasions.

Have you had a positive experience recently with an LBS-enable brand? If so, I’d love to hear about it.

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Why mobile + social is a powerful intersection

I saw this post on Social Media Today and thought it was worth sharing. While I’m not the most active person on Twitter, I have been successful in avoiding 9 of the 10 mistakes that Mike Johansson lists. Which one do you think I make? How does your Twitter use rate on Johansson’s list?

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

10 newbie Twitter mistakes made by businesses

I ran across this article on PCMag.com recently: 10 Corporate Twitter Accounts Worth Following. It features companies that include Dell, JetBlue and Whole Foods. If you want to benchmark your company’s Twitter activity, these 10 firms would be a good place to start.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

10 corporate Twitter accounts worth following

Twitter is all the rage. But it took me a while to figure out why. I’m beginning to understand. Twitter is described on Wikipedia as “a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.”

By looking at the fundamentals of the medium it is easier to see the value and how to improve its usefulness.

1. Messages are sent only to people who choose to follow you and you allow to follow you. You receive tweets only from people you choose to follow. This self-selecting mechanism is key to its usefulness. If you like what people are sharing on Twitter, keep following them. If you don’t, stop. I was initially overwhelmed with tweets from people who chose to share things I didn’t really care about. I complained about Twitter as a tool for sharing irrelevant personal activities. But some people like to exchange that kind of information. My problem should not have been with Twitter, but with whom I chose to follow. Once I realized that and changed who I followed, Twitter became much more interesting.
2. It is a good micro-blogging tool for sharing short ideas quickly. While I finding blogging to be my preferred medium of expression, our chief digital officer prefers to share his thoughts in short bursts as they arise. Twitter is a great medium for that. Often the ideas shared via Twitter are tied to additional material posted elsewhere on the Web. Good blog posts. Interesting videos. Thought-provoking articles. Lists of new data. Books worth reading. If you find something that interests you, odds are it is interesting to your followers. My first use of Twitter was to share my new blog postings with followers who wanted the alert.
3. Twitter is real-time and mobile. This makes for a great way to facilitate impromptu “meet-ups” among people with a common interest. Whether it’s riding your bike with Lance or having a drink at a conference, Twitter can advance face-to-face connections among a network as no other platform. It can also be a real-time way of updating loved ones. One of our art directors used Twitter to update anxious family members during the birth of his first baby. Doctors are using it more routinely in similar ways. My wife keeps in touch with our son via Twitter while he tours the country with a band. Being real-time and mobile also makes Twitter a great broadcast updating system for time-sensitive calls to action. Fare deals on limited sets. Reservations for just-released concert tickets. Alerts about special shipments of fresh produce. The marketing applications are growing daily.
4. Twitter is a place to share real-time experiences, good or bad. Because it is often used this way, many companies are beginning to monitor how their brands are being discussed in real time. This has led to several positive examples of how a bad customer experience turned positive because the brand was paying attention. It is also leading to proactive customer service applications from many companies that share real-time information with their followers.

I’ll acknowledge I’m not the role model to follow when it comes to Twitter. For better ones, check out this list of Top CMOs on Twitter.

This is a post from Marketing Has Changed by John Ellett. Subscribe to my feed.

A boomer CEO’s journey through social media, part 3: Twitter