Here is why:

• Email
• Intimacy
• Darwin
• Emotion
• Influencers
• Social
• Network Effect
• iPad and Flipboard and Zite

Email
Your un-subscribe rate will more than double if you do not use sniffer code to format your emails for mobile devices. I’ve been on the wrong side of this equation and it hurt two years ago. Today sending poorly formatted emails to mobile is a killer. The real killer is you won’t know when or who chooses to receive THIS email or THAT email on their iPad or BlackBerry. Life and not knowing who needs mobile formatting is a test. Fail it and watch 3% of your most influential valued customers walk away from your highest margin marketing (email).

Intimacy
Mobile phones are friends, the new time keepers, wallets (the new picture keepers) and an always on connection most never break (believe me I’ve tried). If such an intimate connection is grudgingly true for my generation it is axiomatic for the next and a forgone conclusion for the one after that. Watch your children’s behaviors or try to take their cells and please film reactions. Mobile marketing is more intimate than email or social network marketing. Increased intimacy means different stories, graphics and navigation (at least). Can your company, no matter what business you inhibit, afford to miss another marketing tsunami? How well did that work with Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or social network marketing? I prefer to THINK and create advantage as often as humanly possible. Playing from behind is more expensive, requires twice the creativity and generally stinks. Would rather HAVE than STEAL what about you?

Darwin
This is a TOUGH marketing concept to grasp especially for “secure” growth companies (as if those still existed . I’ve looked LARGE and IN CHARGE CMO (chief marketing officers) and CEO (chief executives) in the eyes telling them they are vulnerable and weak. This is NOT a fun conversation since shoot the messenger is the next game we play. I always ask a question. I ask how much money they spent at their last trade show and it is invariable more than $50,000. Next I ask if they could have gotten by with less. “Yes but that would hurt our brand,” is the reply I get and the one I’m looking for so I typically just say, “exactly” and shut up. Nothing like silence to get powerful people to lean forward and pay attention (and very hard to actually do during a sales meeting LOL), but they get it. They realize the coming mobile marketing tsunami is something they can’t afford to miss just like they can’t go cheap on trade show spending. They get in line to pay our client The Godfrey Group for their biggest, baddest display to say, “We are here, we matter”. Doing anything less is suicide.

Emotion
Our cell phone is winged Mercury. Cell phones deliver babies, archive our lives and notify our loved ones of momentous and sometimes unexpected change. Clearly mobile marketing rules are different and as yet largely unknown, but how do you NOT want to answer the riddle of such a platform? We’ve figured out Google’s math, Social’s connections and we will understand Mobile’s emotion one day soon. We need to act Jobsian, to see the future before it is here and work backwards as fast as possible. This is another way of saying we are late, tardy to our most important and longest lasting marketing class. Figure out nothing in 2012 but your mobile marketing strategy and you will live off of it for the rest of your marketing career. Figure out how your company’s mobile strategy fits consistently into your audience segments and personas and assure your company’s future. That is the size of the bet you, we and ever Internet marketer is making on mobile marketing whether we know it or not. The opposite is also true. Seed high ground on mobile marketing here and now and regret it forever. Recovery may not be possible in this lifetime and you will be known as the one who passed on the NEXT BIG THING. I’m not that guy? Are you? Is your company?

Influencers
Looking at your metrics you probably think mobile doesn’t matter. I can’t tell you how familiar such logic sounds to social network marketing a mere two years ago. Mobile matters and mobile matters now if only because every major salesperson, connector and maven (to quote Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point) is tied to their cells like Linus to his blanket. Excel at mobile marketing and the message goes around the globe fast to all the right people. Fail or decide not to play and the damage is incalculable. One hard concept I’ve had to adjust to once I became an “Internet Marketer” (around 1999) was doing stuff because my gut told me so without really understanding the WHY and ROI of it. I bat well above .300 on this “bet the future” poker having hit many unseen curve balls out of the park (fiction contest blows up and helps SEO, buzz team makes reviews 2x as valuable, video creates 4x conversion on product pages). Trust a better than .300 hitter when I say mobile marketing matters now. We are on the beach, the water has strangely withdrawn and a large wave is forming. Surf or die.

Social Media Marketing
Continuing to watch your daughter’s mobile behavior what is she doing? Texting? Facebooking? Tumblr? These and other stuff we parents don’t need to know at least not fully. Mobile and social are so close in the future they will be one thing. You’ve missed the social media marketing explosion. Want to miss it again?

Network Effect
You can’t catch a speeding train. Mobile is chugging its way out of the station picking up seed from applications like Paper.li,  FourSquare, FlipBoard and Zite. If you don’t know these applications hire someone who does. They are changing your Internet marketing world. In the future we move from large centralized sites built to create HUB status in Google to tagged snippets spinning in infinite networked space. The closest thing I’ve ever seen to demonstrating our snippet, tagged and free form data future is Siftables from MIT’s Media Lab.  Noticed how stuff on one side of your fire walls impacts things on the other? Predicting the path of weather is easier than knowing technology’s true path. Better to surf than drown no matter what.

Here is how our current HUB conten network marketing world gives way to a free form snippet infinite universe where summing the parts, brining dissparate and seemingly random parts together to mashup a new whole, will exceed the value of a simple part summary:

Mobile marketing is here now. The tipping point fades in our rear view. The train is picking up momentum (love mixing metaphors). Set aside 5% of your 2012 marketing budget to lose money in mobile, to play and see if you, your agency or your marketing team can win the mobile marketing lottery. We have serious bets riding on the mobile marketing table and so should you. If we compete with you, please feel free to ignore this post, continue to harp lack of mobile marketing ROI and believe an empty beach is just a strange day. The water will come back and our boards are waxed and ready to surf the NEXT BIG THING.

David Merrill of MIT demonstrating Siftables, the closet representation of our snippet,tagged free form database future:

Nancy Jin, a co-worker of mine, and I attended the Start Up Weekend.  Over the weekend, participants met the challenge created by the Start Up Weekend committee and outputted prototype Facebook applications, Mobile applications and websites that encapsulated an idea that was created and pitched by a participant.

Here is a quick summarization of Nancy Jin’s experience at Start Up Weekend:

Friday night, out of over 100 participants (evangelists and hackers – basically marketing specialists and developers), 54 people each had 60 seconds to pitch an idea. We then voted and picked which ones we wanted to work on. I landed a team of 2 other designers, two ruby developers, and three marketing specialists, with an idea of urban farming. We were then up till midnight figuring out what our plan was the next day.

8:30am – 12pm Saturday was spent surveying real people, defining problems, coming up with a solution and a base model for the business. Wireframing started at 2:00pm. By 4:00pm we had a logo and by 6:00pm we had a homepage. By 8:00pm we had a working site where people could log in and sign up, and by 11:00pm the rest of the pages were designed, functioning, and the homepage sliced out. Then I went and got some sleep.

The website was completed at 1:00pm the next day, and we had 5 minutes to pitch the idea against 17 other teams in front of everyone including a panel of judges.

We won.

Here’s the site: yardsprout.heroku.com

We addressed that local food is important for economic, environmental, and health reasons. Urban farming is important because we are utilizing fertile spaces that are otherwisewasted. People can grow their own gardens but for most people the toughest part is getting started. We wanted to first establish a business model where novices can seek master farmers to help them plant something,  to eventually have the company provide people with gardening kits, which is where yardsprout could team up with brands like Lowes and Home Depot.

Some other cool stuff I got to do was working with github, some ruby on rails (it was like what? I think where I’m sticking my HTML makes sense), and a lot of SASS (my first time).

Here is a quick summarization of my experience at Start Up Weekend:

Friday – I did not plan on making a pitch but one of the hosts came by everyone’s tables and urged us to make a pitch, so I motivated myself to bounce ideas off of random people around me.  I decided to pow wow with two random students from NCSU about business concepts.  First one that we came up with was struck down by our very own Nancy Jin who saved me the embarassment of pitching a product that pretty much existed in the wild.

I considered the 5-10 minute pow wow over a great idea and being shown the thriving product by my coworker next to me my first “failure” of the night.

I considered the pitch my second “failure” of the night.

“Pivoting” is when you change a fundamental part of the business model. It can be as simple as recognizing that your product was priced incorrectly. It can be more complex if you find the your target customer or users need to change or the feature set is wrong or you need to “repackage” a monolithic product into a family of products or you chose the wrong sales channel or your customer acquisition programs were ineffective.

(source: http://venturebeat.com/2010/04/14/business-plan-not-working-time-to-pivot/)

Therefore, I considered not winning my third “failure” of the night.

What I learned and did over the weekend:

• Deals along the way (think Groupon deals for long point to point trips)
• Concert and Sporting Events (which led to more focused growth strategies by my teammates)

• Work with TicketMaster, StubHub & Political Campaign managers to push individuals to Carpool to events.

This most recent study comes on the back of an earlier survey E&Y carried out between between August and October 2010 found that 76 per cent of UK businesses questioned believe urgent and decisive action is needed or the UK will fall behind other countries that are prioritising cleantech as a sector of national strategic importance.

(source: http://www.newenergyworldnetwork.com/alternative-energy-analysis/by-technology-kb/energy-efficiency-kb/confidence-in-uk-cleantech-policy-ebbs.html)

The survey I created was this:

It was definitely a memorable weekend and I plan on attending this event again next year.

That’s because these platforms allow companies to achieve something they’ve been striving to reach for decades: interactivity. When users log onto sites like Facebook, it’s not just to see; they want to participate, give feedback, and share with their friends. The result is that it’s easier than ever to create a campaign that goes “viral,” in a big or small sense, because customers can pass along their impressions with a simple click of the mouse. They no longer have to search through their e-mail addresses or use bulky attachments – everyone they want to connect to is in one place.

Of course, as with any new marketing technique, it takes some skill to get your message out in an effective way. If you are new to social network marketing, or have considered integrating it into your online sales strategy, here are a few tips to get you started:

Geico Gecko

Get personal. There’s a reason that huge corporations use talking animals and other gimmicks online and off. Buyers like to get a sense of personality, even from Fortune 500 firms that they trust. Whether your company is traded on the stock exchange or operating from a spare room, try to make a connection with your customers and prospects by letting them see you are more than a collection of products.

Avoid the silly. It’s one thing to let your clients see behind the curtain, and another one to seem completely unprofessional. Never forget that anything you post online could not only be seen by all of your customers and colleagues, but also archived or passed along. You can’t afford to have something offensive associated with your business, so always think twice before writing or showing anything that could come back to haunt you later.

Advertise creatively. Don’t settle for simply broadcasting whatever is on sale for the week – you could do that on your home page, or in a newsletter. Instead, try to draw in visitors and fans by offering tips on better ways to use what you sell, or sharing some insight on how a specific product or employee came to your attention. Remember, social networking sites are places for very soft selling; you can have a sales message, but it needs to be wrapped in something funny or sweet.

Organize events. Perhaps one of the most underutilized features of social networking sites is the ability to create groups and forums that can move from cyberspace and into your physical location. Are you having an event that would be of interest to the general public, or a free workshop that shows how to solve a common problem? These are ideal business uses for Twitter and Facebook, so be sure to spread the word.

Think beyond text and photos. While there’s nothing wrong with filling out your profile, or your company’s, with the standard corporate images and descriptions, why not integrate video and links into the mix? Social networking sites are no place to post clips filled with industry jargon or insider information, but if you have something that’s fun, interesting, or just offbeat to use… then by all means use it! Remember, the goal isn’t to treat sites like Facebook as simply one more way to drub a marketing message into your clients, but to make your business a bit more accessible in a human way. If you can accomplish that, the bump in sales will follow.

Social networking represents a revolution for marketers, not because of the technology behind it, but because of its intent. By allowing customers to use and share what they like about your company on their own terms, it encourages them to feel involved in the process. In other words, marketing becomes something they do with you, instead of you having to do it to them. Treated the right way, that makes it easier on both ends of the connection.

Create a Marketing Timeline

Have a plan.  Start by laying out a detailed strategy for at least the first two quarters of the year.  This way you can begin to budget and allocate internal resources needed to make the strategy successful.

Keep What Has Been Working

If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.  Keep doing what has been working in the past.  You may be able to make a few minor adjustments to make those marketing tactics even better.

Test a Different Marketing Approach

If every year you decide to do the exact same marketing, you will never really know if other types of marketing are more successful.  Marketing tactics have changed drastically compared to 30 years ago…even 5 years ago.  Don’t be afraid to try different things.  Even if your marketing budget is small, do the research, understand where your target market is communicating, and find a new way to reach out to them.

Here are a few things you can try:

• Sponsor an industry newsletter
• Write a guest blog post for a well respected, high traffic blog
• Host/Sponsor a local meet-up in your area
• Invite clients and potential clients to your office for a Free Seminar
• Create a great piece of content that you can give away on your site (white papers, free tools, etc.)
• Test different discounts, special offers, promotions

Monitor, Analyze, Adjust…Repeat

In any marketing campaign it is important to be able to measure its success.  In order to do that, you need to define what you consider a conversion.  Is it a download? A contact form submission? A phone call?  For traditional media it can be a bit harder, especially for radio, TV, and billboard advertising.  But for the Internet everything is trackable!

Make sure you have a good analytics program to track what people are doing on your site.  You may want to invest in a phone tracking solution, so you can track calls that originate from your website.

Once you have a significant amount of data, it is important to analyze it by seeing which campaigns were more successful.  If certain marketing programs are generating more business and a better ROI, start allocating more budget towards those campaigns.  For the campaigns that did not return a positive ROI, you could try tweaking things like messaging, offers, keywords, etc.  Sometimes a simple tweak can bring back a big return.

Marketing Trends for the Upcoming Year

Forrester Research reported that Internet Marketing spending will increase another 13% in 2010.  More and more companies are starting to shift their advertising dollars from traditional media methods to things like search engine optimization, pay-per-click, social media, video creation, e-mail marketing and mobile marketing.

We are really starting to see a major shift in how companies are marketing their products and services.  With social communication tools like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube; companies are able to track and monitor the progress of their Internet marketing campaigns unlike traditional marketing.  In this down economy, business owners are being smarter with their advertising dollars.  Make sure you do the same and invest is marketing programs that are well-researched, targeted and measurable.

So…have you planned your 2010 marketing strategy?