American companies are continually adopting, testing, and optimizing new marketing trends in the mobile market to further increase customer acquisition and retention. These thoughts are in relation to two specific articles related to the market found at: http://bit.ly/p0oyxI & http://bit.ly/op9aJE.

I think these changes are positive for overall business growth. Companies are gaining more valuable data regarding their potential customers. This is allowing them to deploy very effective, cheap, mobile campaigns to drive potential customer engagement. No other device, including laptops, provide such valuable data as where people are going, what their favorite local places are, and where they even intend to go. The obvious flaw here that can be drawn is that people’s privacy is at risk.

There are some good points in the articles, although comments like, “Companies pay Google to have their sites pop up at the top of the list for selected searches.” make me question the validity of the author’s expertise. As anyone in the industry can tell you, this statement is just straight up false. No one pays Google to have their sites “pop-up” (as if its arbitrary?) at the top for selected searches. As we all know, companies work diligently (some blackhats cheat) to build up very valuable content and get ranked high organically for certain keywords.

Privacy has been a big ongoing issue, and I believe that the key to solving this problem is just going to be plain transparency. If companies are upfront about what information they are tracking, and they allow people to have to opt-in to such tracking technology, then people will be more open to allowing companies to use their valuable data to further drive business growth.

The industry is evolving and adapting at such an exponential rate, it will be interesting to see how it changes over the next few years.