eROI decided to find out by conducting a study of over 500 marketers to see what their current attitudes were towards mobile marketing and social media trends.

Get a brief on our study from ClickZ

Our study was geared towards learning:

• The interest in mobile marketing to marketers, if any.
• The importance of mobile marketing and social media to the marketer.
• How the marketer is integrating the media and how much research is being done to optimize it.

The study was successful and informative if not a bit surprising. If 91% of the US population uses a mobile device, what are the marketers really doing to access those consumers? Get the full study here…

This notation can be a hard one to embrace. For many, it is the complete opposite of how they are used to managing their brands – a well orchestrated set of controlled messages that consumers experience where, when and how the brand chooses. For many, it feels like giving up all control, and that can be an uneasy feeling. But it need not be.

Sure, this new landscape of consumer empowerment means that there are things a brand can no longer control, but that doesn’t mean a brand can’t have an influence on those things. By fostering dialogue and building strong relationships with your consumers, you  empower them to do more than just complain. By giving them forums in which their voices can be heard, and showing them that their opinions do matter, not only will they be less likely to post unconstructive criticism all over the web, but they will be more likely to share positive feedback and advocate for your brand.

Making this shift isn’t hard, but it’s not something you should dive into blindly. Taking some time to understand the dynamics of this strategy, plan your approach and align resources will be key to success.

Here are a few things for you to consider as you being down this new road…

• Extend beyond market research. Simply trying to predict what consumers want isn’t as effective as having them tell you first hand. And they will tell you. Listen attentively. Ask their opinions. Engage with them.

• Form REAL relationships. Remember that “fake” girl in high school who was really nice to everyone’s face – don’t be her. Everyone saw through her and they will see though you too. You need to have real, meaningful dialogue with your consumers. If they trust that you really care, they will openly share their thoughts and opinions with you, they will want to deepen their personal relationship with your brand and many will become your brand ambassadors.
• Prepare for a long-term commitment. You must develop your marketing and communication strategies around an ongoing effort to listen and engage. This is not a short term initiative; there is no “project completion” date for it. Your consumer’s lives, needs and wants are ever changing and the most successful brands will be those that pick up on those changes as they happen and adapt as need to support them.
• Know what you want to acquire and what you will do once you get it. Before you being creating your new relationships, make sure you have a plan for the information and insights you will receive. Determine the ways in which your consumers can a help to mold your brand. What information and feedback is most valuable to you? What will be your process for aggregating and passing along the information internally? How will your company actually use the information? These are just a few things you should consider in your strategic plan.
• Determine what you want to relay. You can’t control all of messaging around your brand, but you can certainly control some of it. Solidify the main messages you want to put out there. Make sure they are precise, easy to understand, easy to remember and easy to share.
• Create a custom execution strategy. There is not a one-size-fits-all strategy that you can follow. What works best for one brand, may not work at all for another. There are countless channels you can use to build and foster your relationships with your consumers, you just need to determine which of them to use. From LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, to industry blogs, custom online communities, feedback tools, live online support, profile based content delivery, sharable content, polling and surveying and so on, you have many options for customizing an execution strategy. In deciding which channels to use, consider the plan you’ve created for the type of information you want to acquire. Consider the resources (time and budget) you are able to allocate. Consider your primary and alternative target audiences – What are their current online habits? Where are they spending their time online? In what ways do you anticipate they will interact with you most? Are they already talking about your brand? If so, where? And consider what other marketing and communication tactics you will use to support these relationship building efforts.

If this is a completely new approach for you and your company, there is no doubt that it may take  time to make the shift. You will need to start with some discovery and planning before diving in, and as you begin the cycle of listening, discussing, learning and changing, your strategy will likely shift and improve along the way.

There are a lot of great reads out there on adapting your brand to this new landscape, a favorite of mine is “The Open Brand” by Kelly Mooney and Nita Rollins, Ph.D. (http://theopenbrand.resource.com/). I encourage you to do your own research, have your own conversations and do all you can to fully understand this new landscape. Don’t be overwhelmed by it. Embrace it, commit to what you can for now and grow from there.

I encourage you to check out the complete case study to see exactly how we accomplished this. It details each of the eleven emails, as well as the overall results of the holiday campaign.

When: May 5-6, 2010
Where: Oregon Convention Center
Cost: $129 member / $149 non member
Register Today >>
SAO MEMBERS: Use this discount code: EMS20AT

The two-day eMarketing Summit brings together marketers, business owners and internet professionals from throughout the Northwest. This summit focuses on the strategies and concepts of eMarketing while demonstrating the latest tools and techniques used by the Northwest’s top companies. Join us May 6th for a Keynote Luncheon hosted by AMA – Oregon featuring Christy Day, Online Spokesperson & Emerging Media Specialist, Southwest Airlines. Don’t miss the 2010 SoMe Awards/Innotech After Party at the Mac from 7-9.

Additionally, in today’s Portland Business Journal article on the momentum behind Oregon’s technology community, journalist Erik Siemers writes, “As the word continues to spread [about Oregon's technology success stories], that desert between Silicon Valley and Seattle is going to look a lot more like fertile ground with success stories popping off like fireworks. ‘Portland is going to start hearing these pops going off over time,’ Nees said.”

As an involved leader in the Software Association of Oregon, I couldn’t be happier about seeing the palpable momentum recognized by others. Experience the technology movement at Innotech next week!

The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps from Carsonified on Vimeo.

To simplify the article into a straight list, here it is:
1. Speed
2. Instant Utility
3. Software is Media
4. Less is More
5. Make it Programmable
6. Make it Personal
7. RESTful
8. Discoverability
9. Clean
10. Playful

Here are the things I really like from what Fred Wilson had to say: Sometimes, words or expressions are so key to getting your point across.  I’ve really been struggling with the over-use and broad nature of the term “intuitive” as in our interface is intuitive. Most companies tout this, but very few actually pull it off (Mint.com and iPhone interface are notable exceptions).  Wilson’s expression “instant utility” means that you log in and you immediately get what to do end to end – the service is instantly useful to you. It’s critical to usability.  His other 2 Golden Rules that fall in this category are “Less is More” and “Clean”. Our newest web app to launch in 6-8 weeks is following the design principles of progressive disclosure whereby the user is guided towards completing the ONE main action for that page or interface.  By utilizing progressive disclosure, it reduces the confusion and clutter from a page or task – reducing the amount of time it takes for users to do their job while improving accuracy.

Additionally, I’m a big fan of Wilson’s Rule “Make it Programmable”. Web apps of old often kept silos of information in their app and the API was not really meant to push or pull a ton of info to other web apps.  We are really putting a lot of energy into building web apps on an entire API platform so that the very premise of the web app is to have a community of other web apps built around it and for it.

Again, if you haven’t seen Fred Wilson’s full blog post, please check it out >>

1. Social media integration – share with your network becomes a key component in every email (and email marketers can segment lists to optimize for Gmail (Google Buzz) or Facebook’s Titan)

2. Mobile – SMS and Email converging has great benefits for things like mobile couponing for retailers

3. Video Lite – animated gifs to appear as a video – see eROI’s Dylan Boyd blog post on “VIV Blows it out with Animated GIFs”

4. Email Browsing – example of Sears using Gmail’s Enhanced Email: browsing module is decided and displayed at the time of open, not the time of send, which allows the information to be as current as possible. An email sent last month pulled today’s best-sellers from Sears.com.

5. Transactions -Email certification of a known trusted sender is especially important for e-commerce clients.

6. Email Management / Sentiment – ExactTarget’s Morgan Stewart wrote in a separate EmailInsider article about a “thumbs-up” button in the inbox to re-inforce positive sentiment in email instead of sledge-hammering the negative world of reporting spam as the only option.

If you dig a little deeper, there is a whole lot more innovation coming to the Future Inbox.  Social tools are available to scrape profile info (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and dozens of other social media sites) and append that to your email lists to allow better personalization and segmenting.  OpenID frameworks will allow information to be passed more freely between email and any online community through a single username/password that will inherently recognize you from your inbox.  The future is near and email is innovating as fast or faster than most other industries.  Get ready.

As usual, I learned a ton from the other speakers:
Kimberly Barta, VP of Marketing, Dr. Martens Shoes
Dayn Wilberding, Dir of Technology, Grady Britton
Kent Lewis, President, Anvil Media

Enjoy this eROI presentation!

I also included a few of my tweets below as well:
@kentjlewis nice. “remember your marketing budget is unlimited” 11:41 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Top paid placement is based on Quality Score, not just on highest price. 11:32 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Google updates to add report a problem link, “near me now” link – using augmented reality 11:27 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Google maps. Create a dedicated page on maps. Sentiment analysis help sort reviews. 11:25 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Google onebox: local business. Manage coupons, reviews 11:23 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Customer reviews have a big impact on local search 11:19 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

@kentjlewis speaking about local search #forge. Entertaining as always. 11:16 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

@dayn great personal local example of discount tire giving him a rebate after the fact through Twitter conversation 9:51 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Intel has a good set of social media rules. Check em out 9:38 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

2010 will be the year of consumers switching over from evite to facebook events 9:31 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Not hiring a blogger. Hiring a head of consumer conversations. 8:40 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Doc martens Kimberly says invest in engaging content #forge. It still is all about the idea, but the requirements are much higher 8:38 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

Key is focusing on a few marketing channels of disproportionate influence. For doc martens, it’s product seeding to influencers 8:33 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie

For B2B companies like eROI, our mobile web analytics show that mobile web users on our site almost entirely use it for knowing how to get to our office – ContactUs page, however for the 3 mobile sites below, users are drawn into 3 or 4 distinct areas that are easy to find product information (Wacom), or quickly search a database of the closest pet hospital (Banfield), or interact with a web application through mobile version of Facebook Connect (Moonit).  Please check out these 3 creative examples below:

www.banfield.net/mobile

http://touch.wacom.com/m

www.moonit.com

So, here are some of my rough thoughts:

• Make marketers even better. Partnering with our clients, we come up with the creative idea, the strategy, the implementation, and the software tools to take a company’s digital marketing program to the next level.
• Obviously, the above could use better wording – remember these are rough thoughts. Make marketers better or Empower marketers or something else entirely? It should be something that clearly articulates who are client is and an aspirational goal that we can collectively reach with our client.
• Keywords: Make marketers better, creative, software, digital marketing
• When I founded the company in Nov’02, we started as a full-service email marketing company (software and services), then through online campaigns, added web design and development, and now there are so many marketing channels within digital marketing – it would take a paragraph to list them all out – email marketing, search engine marketing, web design and development, e-commerce, event registration, social media integration, mobile website, application development for web, mobile, building online communities, blog design and development, and then getting specific within each category with iPhone apps, Facebook apps, and the list continues.

Pyramid (in priority order below)

Our clients: marketers

Our employees: creative, innovative, awesome culture, makes life so much better when you have a team like we have that acts like a team and treats each other like family.

Our company: sustainable growth (revenue and profit) to keep doing what we love doing for the long-term.

So, why am I even jotting all these ideas down? A bunch of reasons: it re-affirms what I’m passionate about and helps me put a framework around where we are now.  Next step is to keep a completely open mind as I get input from the team.

While you may still have the title as Email Marketing Manager, you are likely expected to have some expertise and drive inbound marketing, marketing automation programs, coordinate integration with social media and potentially be the online community manager for your company, closely tie into your search engine marketing program, and all of this is on top of the strategy and implementation of your marketing plan for the year.  It’s exhausting and the pressure is on – 2010 is about action and results – and the tension between marketing and sales is going to increase with the demand for quality leads that convert into real sales.

So, let’s cut to the chase and dig into what will happen in 2010.  Here are my 11 Web + Email Marketing Predictions:

1. Email, Search, AND Social (the 3rd staple of online marketing)
In an online marketing survey study that we did with eM+C in December’09 on 2009 trends (which will be published in mid-January 2010), we asked online marketers which online marketing channels they used.  By far, email, search, and social were clearly the 3 most used channels.  Within the social media channel, Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs were the areas that marketers spend the most time and energy into building.  This trend will only increase in 2010 to the point where Email Marketing and Search Marketing will be joined by Social Marketing as the 3 pillars that make up the backbone of online marketing.

2. Location, Geo-Based Apps
Mobile, mobile, mobile. Yes, mobile has reached critical mass. Marketers have noticed. At eROI, we’re being asked to launch mobile-friendly websites and for our client’s primary site, integrate feeds for location-based social media tools.  Additionally, there are several apps that take advantage of broadcasting your location to friends -  like Foursquare, BrightKite, and even a little Portland start-up named Shizzow that are basically like Geography-based Twitter.  The purpose is to get your friends or business associates to meet up through happy accidents of learning you are nearby and stumbling upon a quick informal meetup.  In our voyeuristic times, these apps take transparency and over-sharing to the next level.  And, of course, email alerts are the backbone of this channel so you know when your friends are nearby.  With smart phones automatically detecting your location, this new channel of geo-based mobile apps is incredibly intuitive and its uses will take off in 2010 (pet companies rolling out mobile apps to find nearest dog park or doggie daycare; coffee shops and retailers promoting mobile coupons when you are within 100 feet of the store; the uses are endless and our addiction to our mobile devices and their community of apps grows deeper).

3. Real-time web
Twitter started this trend (and Facebook and Friendfeed quickly caught on) and now the demand is there from consumers to constantly want to know what the collective human consciousness is around any and every topic.  People want to know what is happening NOW and what people are thinking/feeling/perceiving/eating/breathing/doing NOW.  Marketers will adapt and drive this trend even stronger in 2010 by creating ways for people to rate, review, and comment through their mobile phone or laptop on what they are thinking/feeling/perceiving/eating/breathing/doing and those apps will be searchable and able to be filtered so others can gain insight from what’s happening now.

4. Advanced collaboration, online community
To many companies, collaboration tools for internal communication or to create branded online communities for customers were expensive and time-intensive to get off the ground.  Now, Google steps in with a free tool Google Wave that isn’t perfect by any stretch, but is a great start to prove the value of collaboration and idea-sharing within companies.  As far as external communities where customers share insights, tips+tricks, examples, and resources with other customers, there will always be some extra effort put into strategy and user-design to make sure this is thought-out and customized to your brand.  There are some great open source tools like BuddyPress and other enterprise tools like Kickapps, Jive Software, and Microsoft’s Sharepoint.

5. Integration of database apps (OpenID standard)
Email Marketers have seen the advantage of smart integrations between their email marketing application and their CRM (Salesforce.com is most common), social tools (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and publishing RSS to Email), ecommerce apps, and other database apps. This is a big push for us at eROI in 2010.

From a web user perspective, open platforms like Facebook Connect and Twitter allow me to seemlessly scrape my profile info and my friends profiles and connections into new applications (cool client examples to check out are Moonit and Wacom).  In 2010, you’ll see more web applications and online communities really start using OpenID as a standard to port your profile information and have 1 single username/password across the web.  There is such information overload that users are going to demand standards like OpenID to keep it as simple as possible.

6. Email Campaigns: Doing the Unexpected
Email design best practices are great – they tell us all the components we need in a successful campaign – subject line, email pre-header, header, main body, footer, call to action, offer, concise copy with relevant messaging, landing page, lead capture, optimized auto-responders based on subscriber behavior, and the list continues.  However, following the book on everything, including a prescripted design, can make your email predictable and email recipients take notice.  eROI’s Dylan Boyd points out a few unexpected email design strategies and tactics:
Animated GIFs? You Bet.
The Test: Vertical vs. Horizontal Email

7. Analytics: Measure Everything Every Second
Marketers have always dreamed of one marketing dashboard that pulls tracking from all marketing channels (email, search, social, events, referrals, etc) and systems (CRM, marketing automation, POS, financials) into one screen – never going to happen – there is just too much to measure and specialized tools for each medium do a much better job than all-in-one dashboards.  The clear emerging leader in tracking and analyzing social media metrics is Radian6.  It will be fascinating to see how marketers will tie all their tracking data together from these many disparate applications.

8. Information Overload: Content Filters
Based on human behavior since the dawn of time, we’ve always been most influenced with our activities, our buying decisions, and our own worldview by what our friends and family suggest.  In today’s world, this is more tangible than ever – our friends become our filter for most content we consume on the web (Facebook Connect integrated into more and more web services is a perfect example of this).  News aggregators like Google News and MyYahoo will need to integrate friend content filters like Facebook Connect to stay relevant.

9. Augmented Reality
“Beam me up, Scotty.” As Kevin Arthur points out in his iMedia Connection article ‘Techie Toy or Targeted Tool’: “Augmented reality is essentially combining the real world with digitally created images. The technology gives users the ability to control their environment using sound and compelling visuals.  AR brings “tactile” imaginary element to the interactive experience.”  Augmented reality (AR) is really cool technology – it allows brands like Topps bring its physical playing cards alive in 3D interactivity with users. AR allows people to project 3D presentations from their smart phones. AR allows physical products come to life in retail stores increasing sales conversions at point of sale.  It’s the stuff of the future, which is why I think it’s going to take a couple years for people to adopt this technology.  It has a whole lot more value and user scenarios beyond the limited value of Second Life’s virtual world, and AR will be the talk of marketing conferences in 2010 (it just won’t be widely adopted until later).

10. Keep your monitor, Recycle your TV box
What’s the point of your TV box when you can watch most of your favorite TV programs, sports, and films online on Hulu, ESPN, Netflix, and others.  Simply, hook up your laptop or old computer with a wireless Internet connection to a killer flat-screen monitor and you’ve now got a Smart TV to go along with your Smart phone all the while taking advantage of the kinda-smart, real-time web where online video is becoming standard and more engaging then ever before.

11. Anti-ADD; Deep Thinking App
All of us have done some planning (business plan, marketing plan, 2010 marketing calendar) for 2010 over the past couple months, and it makes you very aware of all the distractions that we have throughout the course of the day, the hour, the minute, the second.  Our most effective planning sessions were out of the office, without laptops, in a simple room with a whiteboard and marker.  Even as I write this article, I have new emails pop-up in the bottom right-corner of my screen, tweets from Tweetdeck in the top right of my screen, and I turned my Google Chat off for a little focus.  Fortunately, I have an outline to work from that I actually wrote with pen on paper – so old-school.  For managers and executives (and everyone really), there must be an application that shuts out all other applications, emits soothing white-noise and allows us to really think so we aren’t constantly distracted and reacting.  More of us place a greater value on this “thinking time” for parts of our day as we live and thrive in this increasingly ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) world that we are perpetuating.  Thank you Deep-Thinking App of 2010 – you are my friend.