X SEO

What are customers saying about your brand?

I recently attended a great presentation by Taylor Pratt (@taylorpratt) of Raven Tools at OMS in San Diego.  He focused on the importance of using content marketing for improved social engagement.

TopRank has been a long time and well-recognized advocate for the notion of customer centric content marketing.  Over the years we have seen SEO, social media, and content marketing industry change and grow at a rapid rate, so now more than ever marketers must create content to meet customer needs in order to execute a successful online strategy.  The social media game is not only evolving but the way that our audience consumes this information is constantly changing.

In fact, a study by NM Incite (a Nielsen/McKinsey Company) found that 2 in 5 social media users are accessing their social platforms from their mobile devices.

As additional devices are released on the market content marketers should be aware of these trends and create optimized content not only for computers, and Internet enabled devices, but for their customers as well.

How Do Your Customers Access Social Media?

Pratt also provided some valuable information on the different cycles that content marketers should go through in order to effectively target new customers.

Discovery

Any time that you launch a new client what is your first step?  I’m going to bet that discovery is typically your first step post sale (or pre-sale).  It is essential that you take a similar approach with your own company when launching a new social media campaign.  Some of the  key items you should be looking for when running your initial discovery might include:

• Brand mentions
• Product mentions
• Keyword mentions
• Competitor mentions
• Influencer mentions

It is also recommended that you begin determining which social sites you should participate in, key influencers you want to get in front of, and topics that are trending or popular.

Listening

After you have discovered what is currently being said about your brand and your industry it’s time to really begin listening.  Attempting to jump head first into the deep end will not produce the results you are looking for.  Begin by tracking how your customers are using social media.  Are they sharing particular pain points or problems?  Are they looking for tips or advice in a certain way?  It is imperative that you interact with your customers in the same way that they interact with everyone else.  You may also want to determine:

• Where are they participating?
• What are they already saying about you?
• What is their activity level on each social network?

Planning

Pratt shared a very insightful formula for the Planning phase of the process.  First you want to identify your business objectives.  This could be anything from improving your customer service to generating more sales.  Other objectives might include:

• Improve brand sentiment
• Generate brand advocates
• Increase your brand reach
• Reduce your sales cycles
• Improve your product reviews or ratings

The second step involves identifying your organization’s value add.  Work to determine what sort of words your customers or potential customers are using when they mention your company.

Finally you need to define your level of commitment.  How often do you plan on interacting?  What steps must you take in order to create an engaging social media strategy?

Execution

When implementing your social media campaign it is very important that you as marketers consider how it will align with your other online marketing strategies.  The convergence of SEO, social media, and content marketing is no longer an option, it is a necessity.

Measurement

When beginning to measure your brand awareness there are four particular KPI’s to keep in mind.

• Brand recognition
• Share of voice
• Engagement
• Reach

A recent report by the Altimeter Group provides specific formulas for calculating each of the KPI’s listed above.

Although there are quite a few steps involved in creating a customer centric social media strategy it is well worth the effort.  Have to fear, there are many reputation management and social media engagement tools at your disposal.  Some require a monthly cost while others are at no charge.  Some of the tools available on the market today include:

• Brands Eye
• Sysomos
• Trackur
• Social Mention
• UberVU (Raven Tools offers monitoring using UberVU)
• Sprout Social
• Radian6

Remember, one of the keys to a successful social media campaign is asking questions.  The more you know about your current and potential customers, the easier it will be to engage them online.

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The Key to Social Media Success is Understanding Your Audience | http://www.toprankblog.com

Though Apple and the late Steve Jobs have been praised (with justification) for improving, streamlining, face-lifting and otherwise revolutionizing the cellphone, it’s only fair to note the one thing Jobs and his company did not do: invent the contraption. That honor belongs to Motorola engineer Martin Cooper, who gave the world its first commercially available cellphone in 1984: the DynaTAC 8000X, yours for only $3,995. This was the phone that would later be dubbed “the brick,” and which became famous when Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko used it in the 1987 film Wall Street.

Meanwhile, Finnish competitor Nokia was working furiously to deliver the counterpunch. It came in 1988 with the P-30, a phone that appeared in the U.S. the same year as the Radio Shack CT-301, shown in the ad at right. This nifty chunk of high tech was close to 19 inches long (including the antenna), weighed nearly two pounds and would only set you back $1,499. Go ahead, laugh.

Given the tectonic changes that have hit the cellphone market since then (2 million Americans owned cellphones back in 1988; today it’s 300 million), it’s hard to find much that’s similar about the two ads on these pages. Nevertheless, if you look past the obvious differences in technology, you might notice something interesting: The marketing psychology at work here is identical.

“Both ads are talking the exact same way to the exact same person,” said Stuart Leslie, president of design and innovation firm 4sight inc. “The key element is lifestyle. Whether it’s a golf course or a sushi restaurant, they’re nailing your aspirations and dreams.”

Let’s back up a moment. Aside from doing the necessary work of explaining what a cellphone was, the 1988 Radio Shack ad takes the critical step of inviting the reader to imagine himself using the device. The CT-301 “lets a person make or take calls at a job site, in a rental car, on a service call, or even on the golf course.” Leslie said that phrase alone lures the would-be buyer into imagining himself as the Goldfinger of his world: “This phone was the essence of cool at the time. You pull it out and everybody admires it. So you’re the guy, it’s your time, you’ve arrived. It’s brilliant marketing.”

The pitch, in other words, isn’t really about the phone; it’s about the phone as a facilitator of the sophisticated lifestyle that’s yours if you buy the phone. And that, Leslie said, is also what Apple is doing 22 years later with its ad (opposite) for the iPhone 4S.

“Apple’s focus in not on the device; it’s what’s going on in your life,” Leslie said. “It speaks directly to your emotional state: ‘Hey, I feel like sushi.’” Then Siri, the 4S’s “intelligent personal assistant” leads you to that sushi. “We all want to find a great sushi place. It’s a real-world thing,” Leslie said. Take your chums to an awesome restaurant, and you’re the man—just like you’d have been back in 1988 had you pulled our your CT-301 on the fairway. (There was just no Siri back then. Oh, and no Internet either.)

None of which means that 22 years from now, we won’t be laughing at the design of the iPhone 4S. “We absolutely will,” Leslie said. But at least it looks better than a brick.

Click here to view more content from The Mobile Issue.

Who better to capture a day in the mobile life of New York than one of the city’s most individual observers? Best known for his 2009 cover of The New Yorker, the first for a major magazine created with the iPhone, Lisbon-born Jorge Colombo has lived in New York since 1998 and in that time has borne witness to technology’s inexorable influence on all our lives. “Personal devices are now like Swiss Army knives: one simple tool in your pocket that does the jobs a bunch of different ones used to do,” he says. “Networking sites became the town square, the coffeehouse, the front porch.” For all the attention they get, Colombo says his smartphone drawings really aren’t all that different from those he does with a pencil and pad. “It’s not about the tool—it’s about the observation and the quick capture,” he says. But for the artist, whose collection of cityscapes was published by Chronicle Books last year and who teaches a series of workshops at the Museum of Modern Art this month, reportage has its hazards. “Crowds bump into me,” he says, “but everyone thinks I’m just typing a very long email.”
 

Click the image below to view a gallery of Jorge's portraits

Click here to view more content from The Mobile Issue.

There’s an app in the Android Market called Fake iPhone 4S, which is designed to “Trick your friends into thinking you have the new iPhone 4S!”

That’s what the app description says. I guess having idiot friends is a prerequisite.

The description continues:

This app is a full-screen working replica of the iPhone 4 home screen. It even replaces your phone’s status bar, so there’s no hint of Android underneath.
NEW: Swipe down for notifications! Now you can access notifications without having to leave the app.
NEW: Actual network operator shown in status bar – you’re no longer stuck with AT&T!
Most of the icons on the screen will open up the relevant Android app when clicked. If there’s no suitable app, or the app isn’t installed on your device, it’s replaced with a sponsored message. The advertising revenue helps support the future development of this app, so please bear this in mind

It’s apparently been available for a while, but this is the first we’ve heard it (hat tip: Redmond Pie). It looks like a few more obscure Android sites have noticed it before. Over 13,000 people have downloaded. I wonder how many people it’s fooled given that it does not physically change the design of your Android device.

Something tells me this app won’t be around very long as it gains more exposure. At least in the description, it says, “iPhone is a trademark of Apple Computer Inc. This app is not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple.”

A couple weeks ago, we saw a “Siri competitor” make its way to Android.

Check out this map. It shows areas that lack 3G (or better) access. Data comes from the FCC.

The map’s description says:

This map made with data current as of January 2012. This map shows the areas identified as potentially eligible for Mobility Fund Phase 1 support. These areas are US Census blocks that lack 3G or better mobile coverage at the centroid of the block according to January 2012 American Roamer data and contain road miles in any of nine road categories. Counties that contain any of these blocks are shaded light gray, and as you zoom in and mouse over these counties you will see more information on the potentially eligible blocks, including population, road miles (S1100, S1200, and S1400 categories only), and the name and number of the CMA in which the blocks are located. Further zooming in allows you to see the US Census tracts that contain these blocks.

Hat tip to Discovery News.

More on Mobility Fund Phase I

Got FOMO? (That’s “fear of missing out” for those of you who don’t do slang.) There will soon be an app for that, or so says the $3.4 million in angel funding the stealthy D.C.-area startup called timeRAZOR has raised. In its pre-launch state, the curious company is already lining up brand partnerships with big names like Marriott and L’Oreal in preparation for its March debut.

But what the heck is a timeRAZOR?

According to CEO and co-founder, Jeff White (formerly the founder of govWin), timeRAZOR is a mobile application that will help people discover interesting and relevant things to do close to where they are.

“We’re an app that keeps you connected with what’s going on so you don’t miss out on the things you want to do while juggling the things you need to do,” he tells us.

Oh, so it’s like calendar 2.0 then? Well sort of. Maybe. The app is also using some sort of smart, patent-pending technology to offer serendipitous discovery of those “things going on” nearby the places you’re planning to be. This is where the brand partnerships come in, apparently.

“TimeRAZOR includes a predictive marketing element [brands] find enticing. Our ability to allow brands to be inserted in the highly intimate, welcomed, non-invasive engagement with our users is very enticing,” White explains. Companies currently working with the startup include L’Oreal’s Active Cosmetics Division, Marriott Renaissance Hotels, World Adult Kickboxing Association (WAKA), Vail Valley Foundation, JetSet Studios, several local retail properties (The Shops at Dos Lagos, The Village at Leesburg and West 7th), and Boston-area HWS Group’s four minor league baseball teams.

Additional details are being kept close to the chest, though. And frankly, none of this is much to go on. White says the company will announce exactly how the partners are working with timeRAZOR in the next few weeks.

Also interesting is timeRAZOR’s board of advisors, which include comScore co-founder Linda Abraham, former Microsoft exec Eddie Amos and Gene Riechers, co-founder and senior advisor at Valhalla Partners.

White and timeRAZAR co-founder Victoria Clark, also formerly of govWin, began work on the product back in June 2011. It looks like the funding actually closed in the fall, but the company is just now making the announcement as they ramp up to launch. It’s kind of intriguing to see that a few name brands (and other smaller brands) have signed on to participate in timeRAZOR when the service hasn’t even launched yet. However, without knowing the details it’s hard to say whether the brands were just having a case of FOMO themselves, or if there’s really something here.

Japanese mobile gaming giant DeNA bought mobile app developer Ngmoco last year for $400 million. Since then, the company has acquired a range of other outfits and worked to tie the San Francisco startup in with everything else it does.

In general, things seem to be improving. The conglomerate just posted a strong third quarter, with net sales up 16%, which in turn boosted the stock price by more than 8% for a valuation of $4.8 billion. However, net income declined versus the same period the previous year, from $106 million to $79.2 million.

And maybe cost savings had something to do with a rumor we heard last week and have since confirmed: Ngmoco recently had a round of layoffs — maybe somewhere above 30 people, according to one source. The number isn’t huge, but among the departed are senior leaders including a director of platform tech and the chief marketing officer, this person tells me. One game has apparently been shut down, while another has been pared down, with some engineers remaining to see it to launch.

Here’s the company’s response today, from the normally pithy Ngmoco chief executive Neil Young: “Armed with the insights we’ve gained from both the Western and Japanese markets and after completing the integration of a series of key acquisitions, we’ve organized our global operations to best support and deliver on our mission to build the leading Global Social Mobile Game Platform company.”

“We’re incredibly proud of our company and our products,” he added. “We thank everyone that has helped us get to where we are today.”

All in all, it seems that Ngmoco went on a big hiring spree, then had to figure out what was working in coordination with everything else that was happening at DeNA. These types of organizational changes happen in business. The good news for those laid off is that there are lots of other mobile app developers who are hiring (including Ngmoco, it appears).

Editor’s note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of newly funded just.me. He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. Just.me is a stealth company in the mobile space and as such Keith’s opinions on this issue are likely to reflect his product focus.

Addressgate seems like an appropriate name for what is dominating Silicon Valley headlines: Path’s mobile app uploading all of your contacts. Today Michael Arrington suggested that Path delete the data gathered and start over, and now Path CEO and founder Dave Morin has decided to do just that, and apologized.

The past 24 hours of discussion has mainly been characterized by shock, horror or forgiveness. Although all well-intentioned none of these get to the heart of a very significant issue that will only get more important as the mobile and cloud architecture of consumer apps replaces the desktop and cloud combination that has characterized the past 10 years of web services. Beneath the drama there are some big issues. Here I want to try and surface them.

Background to address book issues

It helps to understand what is happening at a macro level in order to grasp why Path was hammered while Google Plus and Facebook largely get a free pass when it comes to the question – “who owns the address book?”

The past 10 years of web apps and services created a set of assumptions about where one’s address book should sit. In the early days of Web 2.0, when Plaxo built an early cloud-based synchronization platform, it was full of controversy. In January 2006 our own Michael Arrington, writing on Crunchnotes, entitled his piece “The Plaxo Virus”, and asked:

“Plaxo, can you please find a way to run your business but never, ever email me again?.”

Subsequent TechCrunch pieces were notably reluctant to endorse the service to say the least.

This was the dawn of cloud-based address book management.

The rise of Web 2.0 and the normalization of the cloud based address book.

Since then Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others have normalized the notion that the right place for your contact list, or “friends,” is in the cloud. Indeed, given the cloud-centric architecture of web 2.0, that is the only place they can be. Almost all of the functionality of these services derives from being able to host the address book and to make comparisons between the address book of person ‘A’ and other people.

Facebook even goes so far as to restrict an individual’s access to the records in the address book. It considers that details like a friend’s phone number or email address are private to the friend, and thus blocks the ability of the address book owner to download the address book from Facebook to their mobile phone or other device. A user has to log into Facebook and look up those details on its web service if he or she wants to check on an email address or phone number. In this scenario Facebook is not hosting your address book, it owns it and merely gives you permission to look it up.

From Web Services to Mobile Apps

Now that we are moving out of the era of web services and into a mobile era, decentralization of one’s address book becomes the norm. Your phone contacts become the center of gravity for your relationships. In this world, mobile-first applications have to make a decision about how to think about the address book.

Now we are mobile, where should the address book sit?

Answer 1: In the Cloud

They can, as Path has done, choose to still host the address book and perform algorithmic queries on it in order to provide a set of services—like friend suggestions—based off of it.

It is worth noting that this decision does not require the download of a person’s address book. That was simply Path’s method of doing it. There are many other ways the goal could have been accomplished. Indeed Path’s decision to host the address book seems old-fashioned and harks back to a pre-mobile era, but it is also normal in that context.

The only real crime, if one was committed, was failure to alert the user.

In a mobile context this becomes an issue because it is taking something from the user. In the web era the user was putting this data onto a service via an explicit upload process.

Answer 2: On the Phone

A second way of thinking about the mobile address book is that its inherently distributed characteristic is a good thing, and the services that utilize it should sit on the device and be under the control of the user. In this distributed model it is still possible to provide services like friend suggestions, but without needing to host the data from the address book in the cloud. The data could remain on the device and accessed through the cloud by other devices instead. That way, nothing is stored in the cloud, it just passes messages back and forth. Clearly this architecture is more mobile centric, more under the control of the user, and not vulnerable to service providers mismanaging a person’s contact lists. In theory such an architecture reverses the web 2.0 power relationship between a merchant and a user but does not reduce the functionality that a user can expect.

This set of issues reinforces once again that privacy is a product issue, not merely a policy issue. Products that empower the user to act on their address book without taking the content of it and hosting it will likely find favor in a decentralized mobile world as it emerges. Those who want to persist with hosting the address book will need to ask for explicit permission again, or face the “Plaxo is a virus” style of reaction.

Facebook is huge on mobile — as an application developer. But questions have circled for years around how it can be a real mobile platform on top of operating systems controlled by Apple and Google. But we got a little more data on what it’s already accomplishing on the platform front, today at the Inside Social Apps conference here in San Francisco.

Facebook product director Carl Sjogreen said on stage that out of the 425 million monthly mobile users that it currently counts, 60 million are going to third party apps. And this isn’t just once a month apiece — this is 320 million times total per month, which means an average of five times per user.

I couldn’t get more details on how these numbers break down, except that they do not include Facebook’s own native or web apps. Rather, they seem to mean any mobile app that has somehow integrated Facebook. So, like what Zynga has done with the mobile version of FarmVille, or how you can find Facebook friends to add to Path, or any number of other implementations out there.

Facebook’s goal as a company is to create a social layer on top of everything, everywhere. For mobile, it already offers a variety of platform-style options including login identity, social channels including requests, the news feed, bookmarks, search, social plugins and email. Many of these features only became available in October. The numbers today mean that this stuff is getting some traction. Mobile app developers, maybe it’s time to look closer at how to use Facebook for your next update.