Why e mail Marketing Should Be Part of Your Digital Strategy Mix Today

Reblogged from Resource for Social Media - Peter Sabbagh's Digital Strategy Perspective:

e mail marketing as part of good digital B2B and B2C strategy

With over 294 billion e mails sent each day, it’s not surprising that e-mail marketing is growing. Social media sites such as Facebook have over 750 million accounts, and approximately 8 % are active.  Search on the largest engines (Google, Bing & Yahoo) = approximately 3.56 million (combined), this includes tweets each day.

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Crowd Sourcing A Pictorial Essay:The Political and Cultural Events of 2011

Do the following images show the effects of successful crowd-sourcing events? Yes, by relying on a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call to create and build a rich human interaction. Crowd sourcing can be ignited by political or cultural cause, emotional trigger, social media, public stage, and user control to share personal feelings with the world. These public demonstrations also display social experiment and work of art.

By engaging with your audience at a unique place, creating a two-way conversation, and not exclusively relying on digital technology, your social media efforts have a better chance of succeeding.

Social Media and The KeystoneXL Pipeline: Has It become a Social Strategy?

A multi-billion dollar controversial oil pipeline, and a little social media lobbying, that is what we saw in August of 2011.  Some fake Twitter accounts and tweets with fake links to materials in support of the project.

Brant Olson, a campaign director with the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) noticed the tweets. Olson discovered that the Twitter accounts traced back to Keith Brockmann, a paralegal in a law firm run by a registered lobbyist for the Nebraska Energy Forum.

Three months later, social media forces are growing, with environmental groups suggesting that this one issue will decide if they support Obama in his run for a second term.

Here is a look at the social media activity as of December 21, 2011, surrounding the KeystoneXL pipeline. I down loaded these KeystoneXL conversations from a social monitoring tool earlier today.

KeystoneXL Pipeline Social Media Activity

KeystoneXL Pipeline Social Media Activity

According to NPR, Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman said it would create “more than 100,000 American jobs.”

And earlier Wednesday on the Senate floor, Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas said the project “promises 20,000 immediate jobs and 118,000 spin-off jobs.” They all seem to be getting their numbers from the same source: TransCanada Corporation, the company behind the project.

One of several environmentalists concerns is that the pipeline could spill into Nebraska’s aquifer that supplies it with water.

If you follow these digital conversations going forward, you will likely find that social media and the presidential election will play an important part in shaping Obama’s and other presidential candidates decisions about the KeystoneXL project.

Have You Ever Wanted to Know What Everyone Has Been Searching For On Google? Now You Can!

Everything Google -the  annual Google  Zeitgeist report,  a look at how the world searched in 2011.

Digital Strategy and Social Media

PSFK Image
The fastest rising search trends list is as follows:

1. Rebecca Black

2. Google +

3. Ryan Dunn

4. Casey Anthony

5. Battlefield Three

6. iPhone 5

7. Adele

8. 東京 電力 (TEPCO)

9. Steve Jobs

10. iPad 2

Where Are People Getting Information About Restaurants and Other Local Businesses?

People looking for information about local restaurants and other businesses say they rely on the internet, especially search engines, ahead of any other source.

Newspapers, both printed copies and the websites of newspaper companies, run second behind the internet as the source that people rely on for news and information about local businesses, including restaurants and bars.

And word of mouth, particularly among non-internet users, is also an important source of information about local businesses. – Pew Internet

Mobile Communications and the World’s Most Vulnerable – Part 2

Article first published as Mobile Communications and the World’s Most Vulnerable – Part 2 on Blogcritics.

In Part 1, I discussed the positive role mobile devices are playing in emerging countries around the world. In Part 2 I will explore where telecommunications companies believe their next greatest mobile marketing opportunity is the world.

Mobile markets have become saturated in many areas of the world so mobile manufactures are now looking for new services and locations to market their technology. Emerging areas such as China, India and Latin America have all been explored, so where is the next big mobile frontier?

Africa, is now considered one of the last important and untapped locations for mobile companies to penetration in the world. While there are still opportunities in developed countries to market data and content delivery services, mobile industry experts believe Africa is currently less risky from a business perspective. Africa is also easier to penetrate from a marketing perspective because the demand is so large.

Africa also has a very large population with a low mobile saturation level, which provides for large minute-usage profits. And mobile companies view Africa as a future success story because of its unique cultural and economic conditions, and as a location for innovation and new product introduction such as M-Banking.

In the telecommunications space, voice traffic has traditionally been the revenue generator, although in 2010, emerging markets like Africa have seen data transmission (including voice over IP) exceed voice traffic. Mobile companies are also exploring ways to develop new business opportunities through data traffic use; this is because the margins are typically smaller than voice usage profits.

So what are the new opportunities in mobile within emerging nations?

A 2009 World Bank report ‘Information and Communications for Development 2009, found the mobile platform as the “single most powerful way to reach and deliver public and private services to hundreds of millions of people in remote and rural areas across the developing world”.

Considering the large populations of emerging countries, their recent exposure through the internet and wireless mobile services to news, trends, and cultures worldwide, content developers of the future will focus on the development of educational content via mobile and wireless communications.

Fixed lines to the internet are limited in emerging areas around the world. For example, in 2010 there are approximately 4.3 million fixed broadband lines in South Africa; that number is down from 5.5 million, and the trend is continuing in favor of wireless broadband. What this means is that mobile devices are going to have to support the demand of the growing wireless population. Content, application, and social media development will be at the forefront of this trend, and mobile phone manufactures are addressing this demand by creating more robust and less expensive hand-held devices targeted at emerging markets.

For example, Nokia has introduced the E 63 mobile phone, which is almost Identical to their E 73, but costs them less to manufacture and sell in emerging areas because the body is made of plastic.

E63 with plastic case                      E73 with Steel case

In South Africa, the demand for mobile devices and wireless connectivity is on the increase, and this demand has been fueled in part by mobile manufacturers in Asia. These manufacturers have targeted emerging countries through the introduction of  sophisticated mobile devices, including ones that can broadcast television content. Mobile devices like these are not commonly seen in developed regions of the world. This is a classic situation where environmental conditions dictate; the cost of a television is much higher than that of a mobile device that can display a TV broadcast signal, and providing a steady flow of electricity in many emerging communities is challenging due to poor infrastructure, while broadband is too costly for many to afford.

In the future we may learn about the latest mobile technology from locations in Africa such as SWETO (an urban area of the city of Johannesburg)

rather than Silicon Valley, California.

Online Information Collection Will Mature and Become More Viral –

Social networks such as Linkedin, Facebook, and others have created software platforms allowing people to build communities of friends and professional contacts, and share information through status updates. Users can also post professional credentials, interests, and hobbies. What’s missing? Social networks have ignored the power of socially networked deep knowledge, and the storage of knowledge for current or long term retrieval. What is socially networked knowledge? It is information gathered by people that can be shared throughout the internet, in groups or kept private.

It’s increasingly difficult to access [relevant] knowledge online because of the massive growth in information resources. When doing online research, we need to manage professional or personal information more effectively, this can be accomplished in a group environment (which are naturally viral), so that more relevant information can be accumulated by people with similar interests. This collaborative process (brainstorming), encourages higher quality knowledge gathering, and also develops a social network of like-minded friends.

Smartphones and related  applications will soon take the lead in promoting knowledge collect remotely. Functionalities such as note taking, research and collaboration, will affect how users share information when they not in the office. By 2013, mobile phones could easily surpass PCs as the way most people connect to the Web. Gartner’s statistics show that the total number of PCs will reach 1.78 billion in three years, while the number of smartphones and Web-enabled phones will shoot past 1.82 billion units and continue to climb after that. This trend will force more Web sites to revamp their pages to make them easier to surf on a mobile gadget. Although the predictions target Gartner’s corporate clients, most will certainly affect smaller businesses and consumers too.

Mobile Communication Has New Targets – building further inroads into developing areas of the world

Recently, Comviva Technologies, an Indian vendor of technology introduced a new mobile service where up to six users can concurrently subscribe to mobile services from the same handset. This business model will be very effective in developing (emerging countries) for several reasons, but most importantly the last one.

In 2008, Indian’s were establishing mobile phone accounts at a rate of 6 million per month, and this figure does not take into account extended family members using each mobile phone. Now several members in each family can be part of one mobile phone account.  Mobile phone companies will stand to dramatically increase their user base,  increase their revenues by reaching more customers, and add to advertising sales power with larger user numbers to promote to advertising clients.

More importantly, lower income communities in India now have an efficient way to communicate for personal and business use. As I noted in my posting titled, What the f… is disruptive technology, and why is it changing the world today? “This explosive growth in mobile services, will affect societies where some of the poorest and wealthiest people live”.  Also in blog posting titled South Indian Backwaters, “recent changes to the local fishing industry have been traced to the mobile phone use by fisherman.”  According to the Economist, “since 1997, the mobile phone has revolutionized the fishing industry in Kerala, by providing up to date pricing information and inventory requirements, making it more efficient for local fishermen selling their daily catch”.  Brough Turner, a telecom and internet specialist, has also documented recent studies about how mobile phone use by fishermen in Kerala has, “reduced price volatility in the fish markets.”

As rural mobile markets mature, and if the  multi user account trend expands to similar socioeconomic parts of the globe,  basic cell and smart phones, and related applications will play a part in transforming emerging nations. These communication devises will affect the way people learn, do business, and are influenced by other cultures. Are we moving toward global homogeneity?