Peter James – WSI Digital Marketing Consultant

As a mobile marketing consultant, I have to be mobile!  This is how I stay online wherever and whenever as well as what I do online and what this means for businesses that want to market to people like me.

How I Keep Mobile

In my job as a digital and mobile marketing consultant I travel a lot.  I always need to be online.  I used to lug around a laptop and a mobile phone nowadays I use an iPad and and iPhone.  The iPad is a lot lighter than a laptop and the batteries last a lot longer so for me it’s ideal. Here’s some tips and tricks that have been really useful to me…

1. Don’t buy a 3G/4G enabled iPad – just get the WiFi version.  I have a separate MiFi modem on a different network to my mobile phone.  I bought an ulocked Huawei E586 which I’m currently using on a ’3′ prepaid sim with 3GB of data for 3 months at £11.  I can also use my iPhone as a wireless hotspot tethered modem (just make sure that this is include in your mobile price plan) if I’m out of ’3′ coverage.  Thus, I have two networks behind me so I very rarely get coverage issues.  I can also put a foreign prepaid sim in the modem when I’m abroad to avoid extortionate roaming costs.  It’s important to note that, as well as putting in the sim card into the modem, you need to set the right profile (APN) into the modem.  This is easy to do and you can find details for most networks here for UK and here for overseas.
2. If you’re going to be out for more than a few hours take a spare battery of some sort.  I have one which can charge up my iPad to about 50% and also has adaptors for charging up my MiFi modem.
3. If you need a keyboard then there are a variety of combination keyboard covers for iPads.  I bought one for £20.
4. Use Dropbox to synchronise all your files so you have access from both iPad and iPhone.

What I Do When I’m Mobile

1. Obviously, I have access to email all the time.
2. I use Kindle and Newspaper apps to read newspapers and books.
3. I use Keynote for client presentations.  When online I can also take a client through SEO and website analysis reports.
4. I use the iPhone for weather and travel information including maps.

How To Market to Mobile People

When I’m looking for something local to me I use Google Places.  If you get business from travellers then you need to be listed on Google Places. A mobile website which is easy to view on an iPhone (or similar) without ‘pan and zoom’ is also a good idea.

Last week, I attended the annual WSI Global Excellence & Innovation conference in Paris.  This is where all we WSI Internet Marketing Consultants get together to exchange ideas and best practice as well as listening to some of the world experts in digital marketing.  As well as talking about the conference I’m also going to talk about some practical aspects of mobile marketing and mobile use in Paris.

Internet Marketing Conference

The keynote speaker was Avinash Kaushik.  There were also presentations on the future of organic search and paid search.  Here are some key take aways…

1. Print newspaper advertising in US rose to $60Bn by 2000 but has collapsed to $20Bn since then.  Although 29% of advertising spend is on print consumers only spend 6% of their media time reading print.  Therefore, it seems like print advertising revenue is going to fall further and digital (both Internet and Mobile) advertising revenue will continue to increase.
2. Successful search engine optimisation is mostly about great content.  Only 10% – 20% of searchers click on paid search adverts and 95% don’t look beyond the 1st page of search results.
3. The perfect landing page loads in less than 2 seconds and fulfills the promise in the ad or search results.
4. Think who are the most important (prospective) visitors to your website, how are they going to find you, what would be valuable to them and what you want them to do.

Mobile Paris with an iPhone and an iPad

I recently bought the new iPad and decided that I’d do the trip without a laptop.  The advantages of an iPad over a laptop are that it’s smaller and lighter as well as having a much longer battery life.  There are disadvantages such as you can’t use PC applications (and most of my applications are delivered as software as a service over the Internet anyway) and there is no easy way of getting files off a USB stick but I was able to live with these over a few days.  As long as I had a decent Internet connection I was fine.  Also, using the iPad for reading books and newspapers as well as surfing the web was great.

The other thing I wanted to do was to be online all the time but to avoid extortionate data roaming charges.  I had bought an unlocked mobile WiFi modem in UK and tried it with a french prepaid SIM card.  Unfortunately, this didn’t work (I now know how to do this and will post on that later) but a local Orange WiFi modem with 400GB of data only cost me €54.  So, I was able to use my iPhone to look at maps, work out metro connections (using the excellent Paris RATP apps) and keep up with email throughout my travels.

Of course, I used Google Places to find reviews on all the restaurants and cafes that we considered and also wrote Google Places reviews on them afterwards.  Google Places is now an essential marketing tool for any business (such as a restaurant or bar) with mobile customers.

It’s now important to know how to maximise the effectiveness of mobile technology both as a consumer and as a marketer – to find and to be found!

Although August is traditionally the ‘silly season’, there have been some significant events in the mobile marketplace.  Here’s a summary of them with the implications for mobile marketing.

Google Buys Motorola’s Mobile Phone Division

This puts Google into a similar position as Apple whereby it can control both the hardware (from Motorola) and software (Android) on its mobile devices (both phones and tablets).  This will result in Google branded devices with better user experience as the hardware and software will be managed as a whole rather than Android being spread out over many different devices.  There will also be a solid Google Android focus for the competition against Apple.  It’s worth noting that the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3GS both outsell any other smartphone and that no other tablet has come even close to the iPAD (I reckon that Amazon have the best chance with a Kindle tablet).  The implications will be a better controlled platform for Android App development and lower prices as there will be a clear competitor to the iPhone.  However, HTC and Samsung (who make Android based devices) must be getting nervous.  RIM (Blackberry) have been losing market share to Android and this will accelerate.

HP Withdraw From The Mobile Device Marketplace

HP are giving up on WebOs and will be withdrawing from making smartphones and tablets.  Their much touted tablet offering failed to gain any traction at all (until its price was slashed to less than £100).  Generally, the problem faced by Apple competitors is that people don’t want a tablet – they want an iPad!  Again, this will focus competition.  One wonders now what will happen to RIM (under heavy competitive pressure) and the train crash that is Nokia.

Apple Announces iCloud

iCloud is Apple’s cloud based service for music/file storage and email/calendar/contact synchronisation.  It replaces the (somewhat unreliable) Mobile Me (which incredibly was more expensive than Google Apps).  The immediate benefit will be that you do not have to sync your iPad/iPhone/iPod with your computer – all your music etc will be held in the cloud and kept in sync automatically.  There will be a file storage service along the lines of Dropbox although I have my worries about reliability (I had a lot of problems with Mobile Me) and convenience (Dropbox has ‘normal’ folders in your directory structure that are kept automatically synced and backed up).   I expect we will see similar offerings from Amazon and Google.

Sony Playstation Network Hack

In an earlier post I said that privacy would be driven by consumer concerns and libertarian pressure groups.  The Sony Playstation network hack may have impacted 100 Million people.  Imagine their concerns.  Imagine the damage to Sony’s reputation.  Imagine the impact to their finances if they had to make a payout (even a small one) to many of those affected – we are looking at Billions and any regulatory penalty will fade into insignificance.  Look at what Big Brother Watch is saying about this.  Companies are now going to be more concerned about security and privacy because of the potential reputation and financial consequences than regulataory pressure.

Skype and Facebook (or Google)

There are rumours that both Facebook and Google are looking at either buying Skype or forming a joint venture.  For Facebook, acquiring Skype would make perfect sense as it would enhance Facebook’s position as a personal communications and interaction tool.  I’ve posted some thoughts before on this here, here and here.

Kindle and iPad Rumours

There are rumours flying around that Amazon is going to bring out a touchscreen tablet version of the Kindle in the second part of the year.  In my view, the Kindle is the iPad’s main rival.  The Kindle is a simple, lightweight and cost effective device with a great range of content.  Imagine how competitive a colour touchscreen version would be.  There are also rumours (perhaps less credible) that the next iPad will have a 3D screen.

I’m writing this blog post on my desktop PC.  I can’t use my laptop.  Why not?  Because, I upgraded to IE9 on my laptop and Word Press doesn’t get on well with IE9.  Yes, yes, I know I should use Firefox.

Actually, I do use Firefox.  I have to use it because Lyris HQ (my excellent email marketing tool) doesn’t like Internet Explorer.  Lyris HQ also doesn’t like Firefox 4 so I had to revert back to 3.6.

Don’t even start me off on Flash not working for iPhones and iPads.  A lot of Apple stuff is really slow and clinky on IE as well.

Try using the diffeent QR Code writers and readers and see the different results you get.

So, the big problem is interoperability and it’s getting worse.

It’s even more difficult with devices that have embedded software that may not ever get updated.  For example, my iPhone works with my car on a Bluetooth connection for making and receiving calls.  Will it play music over my car audio by Bluetooth?  No way!

When I’m driving to a meeting I have to enter the postcode for the location into my car satnav.  What I’d really like to do is to be able to wirelessly transmit the postcode from the calendar entry on my iPhone to my car satnav.  Dream on!

Imagine how much time we all waste because of poor interoperability.