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.

With the ever-popular posts kicking around the tech world regarding mobile advertising, I thought it would be appropriate to bring about an interesting case study in which Ace Hardware teamed up with Microsoft Mobile to create a robust mobile advertising campaign that would help increase store foot traffic and brand awareness.

Ace Hardware, one of America’s most historic local maintenance and repair businesses, wanted to help differentiate their business and reach loyal customers with special offers and promotions during the 2009 holiday season.

Ace Hardware decided to target users with 4 different promotions:

• 20% Off Bag Sale – Consumers received 20% off every item in their shopping bag
• Tis The Season – Holiday ramp up for decorations, ladders, etc.
• After Thanksgiving Sale – Storewide black Friday promotion
• Your Holiday Helpful Place – In-store drive to position Ace as the Holiday place

The campaign consisted of running short, high-impact media blitzes over two, six-day time periods. Behavioral targeting was used in conjunction with effective mobile banner ads to drive further engagement with Microsoft Mobile’s targeting capabilities.

So the big question is…did it work?

Some metrics aside, (cost?) I would say the campaign was an overall success. The mobile campaign drove a 60% lift in unaided brand awareness and reached 101% lift in people ages 24-54. The store traffic across the board experienced an 8% increase among the primary target audience, ages 35-54 who saw the mobile ads.

This is an interesting take on the mobile landscape, and is a great window into just how powerful the mobile market is, and will be (exponentially) in the years to come. The great thing about mobile is it’s still so new, so get out there and test!

Landing page with a strong call to action ad:

Here is the mock landing page for Laptops For All:

Here is a little story about a laptop named Lappy…

Lappy the Laptop

This is indeed the end of the music industry as we know it…now she’s on the radio.

The problem here is that the song and horrible lyrics required absolutely no talent whatsoever. This is although, a great example of viral marketing at its finest. Ten years ago, only this girl’s close friends would have found out about this horrible song/video. I believe the fact that many people think it is a joke is what has helped propel her into an Internet sensation. Sure the song sucks and it actually quite humorous, but people want to share it with their friends. I have personally had at least 5 people this week if I have seen that “rebecca black music video” on YouTube.

Viral marketing can be very powerul.

The video I am referring to in this post can be seen here:http://www.viddler.com/explore/carsonified/videos/67/

This video regarding web start-ups is very intriguing and I learned a few things about business revenue models and how they apply to the overall online business strategy. As the video clearly displays, pitching a company to hundreds of people in 60 seconds seems like a very difficult in getting your actual point across. I have learned just from this video that you have to take all facets of a company into consideration when trying to pitch an idea to someone.

When pitching a company to a stage or say, a bank or investors when trying to build up start-up capital, this video really opened my eyes as to how you can just create a functional company from just a simple idea. Much planning has to be taken when considering the overall costs of the idea, as well as the implementation and infrastructure of an idea. It seemed like some of these people had great ideas, but they really didn’t have a place in the business world because cost of implementation or the lack of a strategy was holding the idea back from coming to fruition.

This video actually helped me personally because I have many ideas for businesses floating around in my head all day. I have often thought to myself, “hmm I wonder if I could build a company out of this.”  Most of the time, I immediately answer yes. When I really sit down in my office and start to flesh out exactly how I would go about implementing this plan, there is usually something practical that stops it dead in its tracks. While watching these people pitch their ideas I started to realize just how much planning and consideration needs to be taken when trying to come up with a solid business plan and structure. Sure, something could be a great idea, but if it costs a million dollars per unit to make it, is it really going to be profitable? Or inventing the next great technology for residential land line phones, only to realize the fact that the landline phone market drying up, rapidly being completely taken over by cell phones.

Having a solid business plan needs to be backed by a solid revenue model that is scalable and can be easily implemented at the lowest cost possible to return the highest profit. After watching these people pitch these great ideas, I have realized that there has to be some practicality supporting the overall idea in order to take it from idea to profits.

Blogging is one of the greatest things to happen to business in the last 15 years. I utilize my blog to help build my brand and create relationships with customers, and potential customers. I try to do this by posting relevant and educational data that I believe will actually help people instead of just trying to always sell them something. Trust is a very hard entity to develop in the online world. Despite this difficulty, I believe that it is much more valuable than being able to sell somebody quick and make a quick buck. If I can provide valuable information to people through my social networks and blogs, they will want to repeatedly buy from me again and again instead of just a one-time thing. When you genuinely help people, they think to themselves “wow this guy really knows what he is talking about”, and that rapport will help you get them to send that email or pick up the phone and ask for your help.

I believe that utilizing blogging will help you to build your brand, build trust with potential customers, and create awareness in the community that automatically makes you an expert in your field. When I am the expert in a certain community, people come to me for help. I love to give them advice and help on how they can improve their business through the power of the Internet. (Don’t get me wrong, I also love to make money by giving advice as well, no one works for free). This technology is a great element that business should be taking advantage of.

After watching some videos about our dependence on technology, and after watching The Matrix, I have come to the conclusion that one day, robots will rule us all. My grandfather would be able to relate to this post, as he still does everything “old school” and believes in doing work without a computer in site. Although my new belief is not that severe, I do question our society’s dependence on technology.

I have often asked myself, what would happen right now if all the bank’s computers just crashed all at once? My presumption is that absolute chaos would immediately follow. Our dependence seems like a necessary evil these days. Do not confuse my apprehension with disdain for technology. I take full advantage of our amazing technological advancements everyday. I play music on my iPod, browse the Internet on my iPad, and play video games on my flat screen T.V. almost everyday.

My point is that I question the integrity of this relationship we have with technology. I was at a bar a couple weekends ago, and their credit card processors shut down completely. This bar was in downtown Austin on a Friday night, it was packed. I then saw as the bartenders literally all go into panic mode and began scrambling around looking for a way to manually process the credit cards. The only problem is there wasn’t any way. I guess the owners’ 100% dependency on this certain type of technology wasn’t an issue until that night. With the combination of people’s impatience, and the fact that most of them were intoxicated, led to people just walking out, and I am sure that bar lost thousands of dollars in revenue that night.

This is just a small example, wonder it this type of thing happened on a national or even worldwide scale? What fail safes do we as a society really have in place? I am going to assume that we are not as prepared as we think. This is why I still believe that when the robots that do our laundry and walk the dog begin to rebel, that will be the day that robots will rule us all.

I have come to learn that there are three fundamental requirements to becoming successful. It was only after coming upon this concept did I realize how important they were, and how I was missing at least one. FDA is simple, you need Focus, Drive, and Ambition to really succeed. (Some people have relied on luck but that’s not part of the FDA formula.) Some people have all three, some have only one or two, but when you have all three and sincerely want to be successful, you’ll get there. The one I was lacking most was focus. I had the drive and the ambition ever since highschool. I had all these crazy business ideas but not a way to focus them and help them come to fruition. Once I started focusing my ideas more, things just started fallling into place. It’s like a tripod that needs all three legs in order to stand. Don’t worry about incorporating these principles into your life. If you try hard enough, you’ll know when you have FDA. You’ll have a focused goal, the drive to succeed, and the ambition to see that your plan comes through.