Situational Marketing

Carnival Of The Mobilists #116

Welcome to the Carnival of the Mobilists #116.  We're happy to be the hosts here at Situational Marketing.  Our firm is a provider for mobile and e-mail marketing services, and our blog is a collection of our thoughts and links from around the web.  This week, we have the best and the brightest in mobile marketing and advertising sharing their best posts of the week.

Take a look through the list, pick up some funnel cake, and feel free to leave comments on all the blogs you read today.

We start with the Best Post of the Week.  As always, this is a tough call, and purely subjective.  For me, Barbara Ballard took the prize, with her comparison of the Sanyo and Blackberry phones.  This may not be the high-level strategic posts that many of our guests made, but I felt this post was useful to the consumer - in this case, me.  So congratulations Barbara!

1. Barbara compares her Blackberry on AT&T with her Sanyo phone on the Sprint network, and compares NetFront to the Opera mini browser.  Changes in just the last few months have made the two services and phones far more competitive.  It's made me rethink my cell phones and data plan purchases.

2. Chetan Sharma moderated a couple of panels on Mobile Advertising at Mobile Momentum and TIE. 

The question on everyone's mind is how do we build mobile platforms and how we monetize her.  Cheten recaps his two panels and what they see in the future of Mobile advertising.

3.  Scott Beaumont at the  Mippin blog.  Scott traces steps he took to find out why his application wasn't working as well with some US mobile browsers.  It's a good detective story, easy enough to understand, even for the non-techies.  And if you're launching an application, uh, you should absolutely read this.  It's imperative.

Hosting Carnival Of The Mobilists Monday

We've got the Monday, March 24th Carnival of the Mobilists, so be sure to send in your entries to mobilists@gmail.com before Sunday at 5:00

Integrating Your E-mail Marketing With Blogging

Smart e-mail marketers know that bulky e-mail attachments clog up inboxes and don't get read.  A lightweight HTML newsletter that gives portions of the content but drives readers back to a website is the key to adding traffic and getting read.

It's an old trick, but a good one.  But it usually means you have to create the content for a newsletter and post it in two places - your e-mail marketing piece and your website.  If you're interested in displaying the same amount of information without doing double work, I'd suggest you start using a blog software as a content management system.  Blogposts are published using HTML.  It's very simple to take a blogpost and turn it into an e-mail newsletter.  At the same time, writing and posting just once a week gives you four articles to add to the newsletter.

Some people read content from the newsletter, and some read it online.  If you're looking to save time (and improve your SEO), learn to publish blogs that can be reconstituted as your monthly newsletter.  It's as easy as write, publish, and send.

Using PPC In Your Marketing Plans

I'm not a big fan of PPC for marketing. It's not that I don't think it works - it's that I don't think it works for most people.  I can't tell you the number of clients I've seen who've dropped a grand or two into PPC and had no results.  Or $50 a month with no results, but hey, it's just $50 a month, right?

PPC is a discipline, and as such, it takes someone who knows what they're doing to get it right.  The limited PPC campaigns I run are for branding, so I'm not an expert.  I know just enough to tell you if you're wasting your money or not, but your accountant can do that.

So I turn to people who do know what they're doing. One is RobDogg, a commenter from February who writes about online marketing, and clearly understands the correct way to run PPC campaigns.  In this post, he covers Grouping of Ad Words in a video tutorial on bridal dresses.  It's 15 minutes, but if you're running a campaign, it's 15 minutes well spent. 

Hey RobbDogg - if you want to integrate with us for texting, e-mail, or voice broadcasts, let me know.  You're now on my short list for PPC referrals. 

SMS For Political Donations

The next great feature of the SMS marketing world is waiting to be used.  All you need to do is convince the FEC that donations by text are a function of a free and fair election process.

The big news this year has been microdonations - donations to political campaigns that are less than $100. Barack Obama has set new records for money raised with donations from over a million donors. These donors are not tracked under $100 (which should raise eyebrows but doesn't), but what if you could drop the limit down to $10.

Imagine this.  You're at a rally with 10,000 people.  You ask them to pull out their mobile phones, and in a display of solidarity, donate $10 to the candidates by texting the name of the candidate to a number on a screen.  If half of the people comply, you're just raised $50,000. Well, actually you've raised $50,000 minus the cost of the calls, which would actually be substantial with today's carriers.

But what if you could get the carriers to go down to $1, $1.50 a call - and take the $8.50 for your candidate?  Instant fundraising, tracked through the mobile phone bill.  It's the ultimate in direct democracy, and it's going on in Korea.  Why isn't it going on in the United States?

Carnival Of The Mobilists #114

Carnival of the Mobilists #114 Is up at Always on Real Time Access.

Russell Buckley discusses the uniqueness of the mobile channel as multi-medium.   

But where I think mobile is different, is that it can be a medium which people use, while consuming other media simultaneously. For instance, you might use the mobile while watching TV, or as you read the newspaper. While not entirely unique in old media (perhaps people did read the paper while idly keeping an eye on the TV screen), we can say that it probably wasn’t normal behaviour and certainly no one would have been fully engaged in more than one medium simultaneously.

It reminds me of those television commercials urging viewers to log-on while watching television.  There's a there there, but we don't quite yet know how to hit it.

WebClip2Go suggests a free service that allows you to take partial content from a website and drop it into a mobile browser.  I see this as a fantastic tool for an enterprising mobile blogger who wants to be the first mobile phone aggregator for his or her locality.

FasterFuture points to Twitter as a better application for awareness than Facebook.

SituationalMarketing will be hosting the Carnival in two weeks.  To sign up as a host, go the mobilists page.

Small Business Made Easier

The Amazon blog has 5 very cool softwares they recommend.

An automatic expenser software.

A to do list that reminds you when something needs to be done.

and a free file converter.

Three free softwares that make your life easier.  Man I love blogging.  How did we learn before this came along?

hattip: Instapundit.

Automating Your Small Business Marketing

Pop Quiz time.  What's the single most important resource a business needs to succeed?  (ed. Cash!!!)

Okay, what's the second most important resource, closely related to Cash, that a business need to succeed.  That's right, it's Time.  Business owners are used to wearing many hats, and they're used to tapping many resources, but the one resources that is finite is Time.  We all get 24 hours of it a day, and that's it.

So when trying to determine what the best use of your time is, the promise of technology is a big lure.  The problem, is that it takes time to learn technology - to adopt it, and sometimes to use it.  What entrepreneurs is technology that is simple to learn, that cuts the amount of time we use on a task, and that doesn't cost more for us to use than to pay someone to do.

For taxes - we think about Quicken, until Quicken isn't big enough.
For e-mail, we use gmail, until gmail isn't big enough.

So what do you use for mobile marketing?  For e-mail messaging?  For voice broadcast?  John Jantsch gives a list of automated software pieces that he suggests on Duct Tape Marketing. We like the list, but want to add to it.

We're talking about the store of course.  Blast Companies self-service e-mail, text, and voice broadcast store.  If you're stuck sending out e-mails in large batches to clients, it's time to automate. If you want to run your own text club, it's time to automate.

Starts at $35/month for e-mail.

On Carnivals and Insight Communities

Carnival of the Mobilists #113 is up at ubiquitous thoughts.  They are looking for more hosts, so if you're interested, be sure to go here and register. You have to participate in 3 carnivals to host.

A good post on Native mobile Apps versus web Mobile apps from mobhappy (how did I miss that one), as well as a round up on the mobile price wars (the unlimited version).  This was actually great insight, and I used my thoughts over at the Techdirt Insight Community on what to expect from the unlimited plans and how it will affect mobile marketing.

If you consider yourself an expert, you should consider signing up for the Insight Community.  You get paid to share your ideas (if your submission is ranked as one of the best), and more important, you get to compare yourself against other experts.

Remember - if you're not involved in a community, you're just a lone voice in the wilderness.

Learning Business From Other Smart People

Blast Companies is an entrepreneurial company.  We're constantly looking for ways to grow our business, build a better product, position ourselves in the market, invest in ourselves wisely, and save every penny for rainy days.

What's the key to our success?  We surround ourselves, both online and offline, with people who like to learn.  We learned a long time ago that success can always be achieved as long as you don't give up.  That doesn't mean that your business will succeed, but it does mean that you personally can find a business that makes you proud to get up in the morning, keeps you working late into the night, and ultimately fulfills your financial goals.

That's why we like reading people like Rob May, formerly, and kind of currently at the Business Pundit.  Rob gives the lowdown on entrepreneurship in the best blogpost I've read all year.  Top 10 Changes In My Business Thinking.  Rob really gets it, and he got it the old-fashioned way - he worked through his challenges. 

Chief among his findings are the importance of luck, the importance of economics, and the importance of looking forward, not back.  What I like best is Rob's understanding that success is fluid.  We wish him well at his new blog, coconut headsets.