Month: April 2012

The Mobile Playbook

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Mobile marketing manual

Just 4 days ago Google released a guide titled ‘The Mobile Playbook’ to arm businesses and marketers with answers on how to build and invest in the mobile platform to interact with the growing army of smartphone and tablet users.

Reading through it (which shouldn’t take no more than 30-40 minutes) would give all of us a sense of déjà vu. Its release couldn’t be more timely since it covers discussions that we blog and talk about in-depth week after week. Building the case from an infrastructure, organizational and media perspective it covers topics related to the mobile business value proposition, destination optimization, the local nature of mobile, consumer experience, marketing integration and peppered with examples from companies like Chase, Walgreens, Hotels.com, Starbucks, Priceline, Zipcar, 1-800-Flowers.com, Coke, Domino’s and many more.

Even though the examples cited are of multimillion-dollar companies, I would believe that the Playbook is intended to help medium and small enterprises make headway with mobile, and more so with the local and immediate nature of mobile, these businesses stand to benefit. If 97% of mobile searches belong to Google their intent to monetize it further is clear. Their latest quarter earnings (($10.75 bn- Q1 ’12) reported a 12 % drop in CPC (cost per click) over the first quarter of last year though clicks were up by 39%. Confirming that the business has a healthy revenue trend, Nikesh Arora – Google SVP and Chief Business Officer also acknowledged that complex factors which include the growth of mobile and tablets – because mobile doesn’t monetize as well as desktop – in addition, other factors like developing market growth, exchange rate effects and ad network dynamics are responsible for the decline in CPC. While there was no mention of mobile revenue earned this quarter, at the last quarter earnings call of 2011 CEO Larry Page had casually remarked that mobile had grown 2.5 times to over $ 2.5 bn.

Google also acknowledged surprise and success with its Click-to-call mobile search offering last year. I think they realize it’s obviously is not enough and will pull out all stops to ensure a fertile ecosystem that can drive revenue in areas beyond mobile search to include a piece of the pie from the mobile and social shopping impending boom. If more local businesses build a mobile presence the more they could stand to gain as smartphones and tablets continue growing as handy shopping companions that will drive local search traffic.

Girls Around Me – A twisted lesson in App branding

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Check-in service FourSquare has been around for a while Banjo, Glancee, Gowalla etc. have been around for under a year, but it was not until an iOS app called ‘Girls around me’ created a furor earlier this month that these services have begun to consciously bear the ‘creep’ tag. As described on the website, “Girls around me’ scans your surroundings and helps you find out where girls or guys are hanging out. You can also see the ratio of girls to guys in different places”. An article in Cult of Mac which described it as having “potential to be used as a tool for rapists and stalkers” gained disproportionate attention and eventually FourSquare revoked its API access and the company i-Free Innovations pulled it off the app store with a week.

Stepping back if we compare ‘Girls around me’ with Banjo and Glancee, you’ll realize that they don’t differ much in core functionality.

Banjo aggregates updates and check-ins from the services you, your friends, and people around you already use — like Foursquare, Facebook Places, Twitter (via geotagged Tweets), Gowalla, Instagram, and more. You choose to authenticate yourself with either Facebook or Twitter and in a flash, you have access to a stream of tweets, updates, and check-ins from people in close proximity.

Glancee does not showcase as much as Banjo, but it can identify people around you who share common interests with you; the data being pulled from your Facebook profile.

In my opinion, the attention around the app was more to do with its branding and its Agent Provocateuresque design language than it was to do with its function. And while one could use the app to even scan for guys, the company chose to focus on just one clear market winning aspect of the product. Evidently, the company did itself no favor with this approach, but one can’t fault them for not being focused on clear messaging.  Considering the galaxy of apps out there and the rage and excitement among renegade start-ups over social platforms, powerful branding, messaging, and targeting deserves attention, has clear merit, and should not be overlooked.

One of the key questions in branding is: Who are we talking to and what is the one clear message that we want them to takeaway? So, let’s just assume for a moment that the app was called ‘People around me’ – Would the offering seem as powerful and exciting?