Situational Marketing

Valentine's Day Is Coming

Marketing is a holiday-driven function in the retail world.  This is true of car dealers, furniture stores, restaurants, and even grocery stores.

For e-mail marketers, the options go much further, from product based e-commerce stores to accountants promising tax advice on the cheap if done before Valentine's.

The Vertical Response blog lays out a whole series of Valentine-themed e-mail campaigns.

Jewelry - Pictures work! Make sure you put them prominently in your emails to show off your stuff.

Flowers - This is too obvious, but remember to include email marketing campaigns all the way up to and on the day.

Spas & Salons - Start putting your offerings out on your websites and in your salons now. Gift certificates are THE thing you should be pushing for this holiday.

Wineries/Wine Shops - How about putting together gift baskets of your merchandise? We've seen some nice red gift bags that wineries are giving for free with nice card attached.

Can you come up with any more?  And when you're done, it's time to start working on St. Patty's Day.

Carnival Of The Mobilists 108 Up At Skydeck

Dan at Skydeck hosts this week's Carnival of the Mobilists, a menagerie of posts around the mobile marketing web asking the questions of how we use our cell phones to make money and connect to each other.

The post that taught me the most is from Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless, who discusses the use of mobile browsers in the context of Internet access.  We're so used to PC and laptop marketing, we don't always think of worldwide Internet access as that of the phone. Some useful statistics for global marketers are included.

To join the Carnival, or find out more about it, head on over to http://mobili.st/

iPhone Analysis Hits The Blogs: Has The iPhone Run Its Course?

Three articles in my reader about the iPhone and the gap between supply, inventory, and what Apple is saying about people purchasing that most heavenly of new products.

Apparently, lots of iPhones have been shipped, but many are sitting around in the AT&T Stores.

Taking into account the recent launches of iPhones in other countries (estimated at 350,000 to 400,000 iPhones so far) and a 20% estimate on people buying iPhones solely for unlocking, there are still nearly 700,000 iPhones unaccounted for... suggesting that they're sitting on store shelves, piling up as unsold inventory.

Ewan has his answer, and he doesn't think it bodes well for the iPhone being a long-term player in the phone market.  How is that possible?

Why sad? Well, Kevin is a Mac guy. He’s an Apple consumer — precisely the mainstream target audience that Mr Jobs was no doubt imagining when he chalked up his public ‘10 million iPhones’ target at MacWorld last year. Kevin’s got a PC, but he prefers using his Powerbook. He’s considering upgrading to Leopard. He’s pretty savvy with the internet — and he’s not that content with his current handset. Kevin is grade-A Apple fodder. He’s already converted.

But for the price and service delivery. 

He’s not impressed that the device isn’t 3G. He’s done his research. He’s not an impulsive geek-arse like me. Kevin sat back, looked at the iPhone offering — liked the device — but found the ‘deal’ wanting. 2G (or 2.5g depending on your viewpoint) device, 3G AT&T network = not smart. He’s concerned about buying an iPhone *now* on a stupidly long contract only to find that Apple releases a 3G version soon after.

 

Blast Marketing In Campaigns And Elections Magazine

I visited the Blog World Media Expo last year in Las Vegas, and while there, met some of the fine staff from Campaigns and Election Magazine. In fact, I'm looking at the October issue right now on my desk.

But it's the January issue we're interested in, as this month's issue has TechBytes column referencing Chris Torbit and Blast Companies on page 62. Chris discusses the use of texting during political rallies, and the Blast Software that makes it possible to connect real time with your audience.

It's mob messaging, instead of mobile messaging.  Political Campaigns and Events can utilize services like Voterblast for get out and the vote messages, or they can utilize Consumer Decoder to allow campaign supporters to manage how they are contacted.  An engaged membership means less hassle for them and more buy-in for you.

Carnival Of The Mobilists Up At MobHappy

Carnival of the Mobilists #107 is currently on display over at MobHappy, covering topics ranging from open access to usage stats to geotagging.

Next week's Carnival will be up at Skydeck.

How Dell Can Market A Smart Phone

Rumors have been swirling for some time about an entrant from Dell into the smart phone business.  They started up again in December on Engadget, and  MobilitySite seems to say its a safe bet to say the Dell Smart Phone is coming.  But can a Dell product really compete with the iPhone?

I was thinking about the differences in the brands, and how Dell might actually compete in this market. 

First, let's just be honest.  They're not going to get iPhone users to switch.  That boat has sailed and unless the Dell Phone enables you to walk on water, people aren't making the switch.  Second, the iPhone is going to look better, and be cooler, than anything Dell puts out.  Add to this the problem that the early adopters of technology already have an iPhone.  Who is left to buy a new product?  Certainly not enough numbers to make it worthwhile to go head to head.

But Dell does have an advantage.

More On Mobile Blogging

The convenience of sending text, pictures, and video to a blogsite sounds like a real winner.  The advent of citizen journalists and the belief in an Army of Davids gives rise to a culture where instant communication is  an exciting frontier for news media and social media.

Ewan of SMS Text News says that it's not working out how he liked.

Daniel’s been taking a look at mobile blogging — that is, blogging via your handset — and found nearly every offering to be substandard or in many cases, non existing. Most services rely on you using an email gateway — i.e. you email from your Blackberry or handset, that email is then converted into a blog post. I used this regularly when I was with Typepad.

What I really want is a symbian native wordpress client. Then I’ll be happy. Or a Blackberry wordpress client. Or a WINDOWS wordpress client. ANYTHING. I tried offering paying people to make some software for me but alas, no one wanted to know.

The original idea came from Dan over at Dan's blog 2.0. 

So I’ve been doing some research on mobile blogging, trying to find the best solutions out there. The situation is pretty dire. So far, it looks like the best solution out there is actually from Windows Live (née MSN) Spaces. Windows Live actually lets you register, create a blog and start publishing it all through the mobile browser.

In contrast, Blogger has some information on mobile blogging that involves a convoluted “email to post” (which only works with U.S. carriers by the way — HELLO PEOPLE - THE WEB IS GLOBAL). TypePad claims “industry leading” mobile features but doesn’t seem to have any way to sing up or create a blog from the mobile and it’s also e-mail based. You can use Nokia Lifeblog with Typepad but you need to have a Nokia phone to do this. Wordpress is likewise a wash. Vox doesn’t have obvious mobile support either.

The comment sections of both sites are must reads for those involved.  I'm dying for a solution as well, but I thought it was because I hadn't upgraded my cell phone as of yet.  My interest is more than elementary - clients want the newest and greatest, and one of those services I sell is instant marketing.  Video and audio and pictures, and yes, live posts sent from the cell.

In addition to finding a service, I'd like to know which handset/PDA would most help facilitate my blogging.  Do I go with the IPhone, or is there a better answer?

Carnival of the Mobilists #106

We've joined the Carnival of the Mobilists, a traveling menagerie of mobile marketing posts from around the blogosphere, and this week's carnival is hosted over at Xellular Identity.  Xellular Identity is written by Israeli Xen Mendelsohn, a New Media Marketing Manager for a company called Flixwagon, a site that lets you broadcast and store mobile video.

The posts cover everything from Headsets to Hindsight to Generation Gap (yes, it's the millennials).

Next week, the carnival will be up at MobHappy.

Mobile Firefox Is On The Way

I'm a big fan of Mozilla, and its exciting to see that they're working on a mobile version of Firefox.  A list of reasons to begin developing for the Firefox Mobile Browser over at Schrep's blog.

The original reason I started using Firefox was to have access to tabbed browsing and a more secure browser.  With IE7, tabbed browsing is available, and now it's really just a stylistic preference.  The difference seems to be in the open source nature of the Firefox Mobile project.  They want companies to invest in the new browser, and as their money is ad-based, can afford not to lock it down.

• A large portion of the world accesses the Internet from mobile devices, and this will become increasingly true over time (mobile devices outsell computers 20-1). Each Firefox install is an individual choice by a person to download something that didn't ship by default on their computer. Why not offer that option for mobile devices?
• Firefox the most popular open-source browser on the planet with > 100 million active users. Bringing Firefox add-ons, the Mozilla platform (including XUL), open source, and a large and passionate community to the closed and fragmented mobile platform will do the world some serious good.
• Firefox and Mozilla give device manufacturers the best of both worlds: shared investment in the core open-source project plus the flexibility they need to customize the browser for their devices.

hat-tip:  D-Mobile Marketing

MobileMarketer.com Reports On Rehabcare

It's always nice to get press attention.  Our project with Rehabcare got picked up by Giselle Abramovich of the MobileMarketer.com.  The money quote.

“[We are trying] to build a database of qualified individuals who are not only interested in a position with RehabCare, but also meet RehabCare’s requirements for employment,” he said.

The text messaging application allows RehabCare to gather information from candidates that includes their mobile phone number, email address, name, graduation date and specialty.

It's always nice to be noticed.  Thank you, Giselle.  And thank you, Rehabacare.