McKinsey Quarterly is one of the many resources that I use for keeping current with industry research.

They posted a great article, Demystifying social media, that I wanted to share.

They also have a slide presentation that goes through the journey in more detail.

Below are a few key points.

• Executives certainly know what social media is, but have no idea how to harness social media’s power
• It’s pretty difficult to see where and how to influence social media conversations
• ROI and impact of investments in social media are difficult (but not impossible) to track, because there are short and long term impacts

The article does a good job of trying to distill social media down to some key functions:
“We have identified its four primary functions—to monitor, respond, amplify, and lead consumer behavior—and linked them to the journey consumers undertake when making purchasing decisions.”

I firmly believe that social media programs should be integrated into an overall digital marketing approach that includes search (paid & organic), email, paid display, etc. and mapping out touch points across all communication channels is key to establishing marketing resource investments.

“Marketing’s primary goal is to reach consumers at the moments, or touch points, that influence their purchasing behavior.”

I recently had the opportunity to keynote a Kansas City Media Mix and Social Media Club Kansas City event. My presentation focused on the paid, earned and owned media types made popular by Forrester:

Defining Earned, Owned And Paid Media

I included the presentation below.

Last week I was fortunate to be invited to speak on a panel about the future of advertising and location-based services at MobileBeat 2010.

Location is a hot topic in the industry, with venture capital flowing into this area (Andreessen Horowitz Leads $20 Million Investment in Foursquare)

VentureBeat put together a good recap of each session: Here’s what happened at MobileBeat 2010 including my panel, Location and advertising: A new recipe for monetizing content?

Technorati Tags: mobile, Shopkick, Placecast, Twitter, location-based, mobile social networks

There’s been several great articles recently on location-based marketing that I’d like to share.

The first is a blog post from Soical Fresh: 21 Unique Location Examples from Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl and MyTown

In the article above are some great examples of how brands, large and small, are utilizing the various location-based services out there. While not fully exhaustive, as new campaigns are launching all the time, I think it provides the best compilation of projects to date.

There are a few other projects I’d add to the list, including the Tasti D-Lite loyalty program, Red Bull (Whrrl) and Intercontinental Hotel Group that integrated Gowalla into their loyalty program.

There are some companies that didn’t make the list either that I’d add, like Loopt Star and Brightkite.

There are plenty of active projects by all location-based companies, and in some cases, you’d be better off working with a smaller player to have more influence over the end product. Keep in mind that several of the companies are growing so fast that they’ve had some growing pains along the way, including downtime, but don’t let that turn you away.

Yelp is another organization that I think needs more attention. They’ve got the scale, both on mobile devices and the web that puts them towards the top of the list for restaurants and retail, at least.

• 32 million unique website visitors in May 2010 (top 100 website)
• 1.4 million unique iPhone users
• 27% of all Yelp searches come from the iPhone app
• 500,000 phone calls
• 1 million point-to-point directions

Pepsi, which ran one of the first branded campaigns on Foursquare and the exclusive non-alcoholic beverage partner, has launched their own location-based checkin service called Pepsi Loot, which allows users to find locations where Pepsi can be purchased and rewarding users for checking in.

Launching a private location-based network is not a small undertaking, but for Pepsi, I can see it as a viable project, especially considering the value of the consumer data they will collect.

One thing I’ll point out is that there has been low recall (but high response) for location-based services (eMarketer), but it’s still an emerging area, so I think that will evolve with time.

There was also an article from eMarketer (Privacy Concerns Fail to Slow Social Activity) that shows while privacy is still a concern, it hasn’t slowed down users from being active in social media.

There are rumors of a significant venture capital investment in Foursquare (with a $100 million valuation by some), but there have also been rumors about buyouts as well.

Mashable had another great article with tips on location-based marketing:

• learn the platforms
• determine goals
• establish your presence
• customize & implement compelling promotions
• engage, track & adapt

Lastly, there was a great article from ReadWriteWeb Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location-Based Social Networks – another must read for those trying to understand location-based marketing.

They grouped the venues into food, travel, parks, education & nightlife.

The reasons for checkins were serendipity & connection, to win some kind of prize or reward (mayorship, sweepstakes, etc) and for maintaining a personal history (a “lazy diary”).

I’m excited about where this space is headed – so claim your venue, check in and start learning and sharing with your peers.

Technorati Tags: mobile, Foursquare, Gowalla, location-based, mobile social networks

An introduction to mobile development and the landscape was presented by Mike Craig from Ruxter Mobile.

Barbara Ballard, from Little Springs Design, spoke about discoverablily of mobile apps & web sites as well as designing for a mobile devices.

The last presentation was by me (Dustin Jacobsen, the Director of Social Media & Technology at Barkley) and focused on mobile social networking and sites such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp & others.

All three presentations have been uploaded by the speakers and are available below.

Updated 7/23: Videos now available.

The first two presentations were given by Mike Craig from Ruxter Mobile and Barbara Ballard, from Little Springs Design: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/7832804

The third presentation was given by Dustin Jacobsen, the Director of Social Media & Technology at Barkley: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/7834234

Thanks to @duckmanvideo for streaming and making the videos available.

Technorati Tags: mobile, Social Media Club, Kansas City, Foursquare, Yelp, social

We live our lives in public – at least online. With every move made online indexed and aggregated into individual customer profiles, there is nowhere to hide on the World Wide Web.

Google indexes everything, collecting information from our computers, mobile devices, e-mail and now even through television. Google searches still account for the majority of Google revenue, but that will change over time.

Although commonly known as a leading collector of personal data, Facebook trails behind Google with approximately 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) posted on the site each month.

With so much information floating in cyberspace, there are even emerging services that aggregate information specifically from social media platforms like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Pandora and LinkedIn. Collecting the personal information of others has become a business, making everything you put on the web public domain.

Today, Steve Kraske sits down with “Tech-sperts” Dustin Jacobsen, director of Social Media and Technology at Barkley, and Justin Parlette, support systems administrator at University of Missouri – Kansas City. We’ll review the issue of online privacy.

Jacobsen and Parlette will also discuss the latest technology gadgets and trends, including Google TV, the Sprint HTC EVO, the soundproof stadium built for the World Cup and more.

A few highlights:

• What information exists online? What information is shared and why?
• Is all information online public? If it’s online, it’s public.
• It’s not just information we share, but information others share about us
• The power of aggregations – Netflix and Facebook mashups
• Balancing privacy and costs – ad-based social networks
• Employers are looking at your public information
• Public is the new private – Zuckerberg, Facebook
• Where do we draw the line with information we share?
• Where do people find the time? It’s a shift of communication methods – the new water cooler
• The growth of mobile has enabled engagement on the go
• Google TV sounds interesting, but we won’t learn much more until it’s released this fall
• Will Facebook, Hulu & others offer paid versions that are ad-free?
• Facebook & others offer several advertising options, including the ability to target by demographics
• iPhone 4 vs. Sprint HTC EVO – do we need 4G?
• Battery life for mobile devices still needs to improve

Download the full audio from the broadcast

One of the articles that I wanted to call out was that with all of the complaints about Facebook, they continue to grow: Privacy, Schmivacy: Facebook Is Attracting Near-Record Numbers Of New Visitors

Reclaim Privacy was a site that was referenced by Justin that can help you understand privacy settings and concerns.

If you haven’t already, be sure to follow KCUR Up to Date on Twitter and check out the KCUR site for a list of upcoming shows and links to subscribe to the podcast.

Technorati Tags: mobile, KCUR, Google TV, iPhone, Facebook, privacy

TechCrunch and other technology outlets have provided detailed updates, including a live stream and video updates.

My selections from TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield session are:

UJAM: A web-based toolset for generating music based on a theme, highly customizable by the user. They certainly got the audience choice award, and even persuaded one of the judges to sing a little ditty. They’re planning on doing a freemium model in which the basic tools are free but a more robust version will be for sale.

Soluto: This very fluid and pretty presentation showed off a utility these guys have created that monitors your PC, analyzes when you are “frustrated,” and offers solutions. The cool bit is that the solutions are created by monitoring expert users’ PCs, and when a similar problem comes up, their response is added to a database — kill process, change startup settings, lower process priority, that kind of thing. The UI is very impressive, the best I’ve seen in a while. They’d have the “manual” version free and the “automatic” version (in development) for money (or get fees for pre-installs with vendors).

There are 3 from the second session that I think have great potential as well
Appbistro- think Facebook apps for small businesses.

LiveIntent – social graph on steroids (I recommended a partnership with Buddy Media)

publish2 – launching a new product called Publish2 News Exchange, with the ambitious goal of disrupting the entire reason for being of The Associated Press.

I’m going to miss sessions three & four today (six sessions in total), but I think we’re going to see a solid group of startups that get some attention of investors this week.

I’m at TechCrunch Disrupt the next couple days. I was able to bundle the event with some other meetings in New York, so it worked out well.

Summary so far: the next wave of innovation is about social, mobile & building relationships through engagement across channels – something that we, at Barkley, are attacking head on (and why I’m here at the event).

There are representatives from the majority of technology related companies, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Foursquare, Blippy – you name it, they’re probably here.

I’m not sure of the exact number of attendees, but it’s standing room only. There’s a huge venture capital presence, in addition to startups, press, technologists & executives from around the world.

Will the next Facebook be funded at the event? I haven’t had a chance to walk through Startup Alley, but I think there’s some good potential here to get some ideas off the ground.

More than 1,000 innovators from Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley and abroad convene in New York City to gain market insight and develop new business at Disrupt.

Executives from high-tech and media sectors attend Disrupt to stay abreast of the latest thinking, network in a unique atmosphere of concentrated innovators, and develop new business ideas.

Technologists attend to see what the competition is up to, hear from leaders in the field, and team up with other geeks to go all-out developing during Hack Day or create something new at the Builder Bar.

Startups attend to gain exposure leading venture and angel funders from both coasts and bring their product to market. Our early-stage-only Startup Alley offers your team entrance to the event for less than the cost of two tickets, and it’s front and center in our floorplan. All because we want Disrupt to support your innovation. If you’re already a big fish, look into exhibiting with us — and join sponsors such as Google and Zoosk.

Investors attend to see upcoming trends and products before the competition does and develop new business.

Press, bloggers and policy influencers attend Disrupt to gain crucial insight into market developments. This can’t-miss event will pull back the curtain from typical tech-conference platitudes for real content –and real relationships.

Sponsors ally with us to make an amazing event, integrating their services and gaining access to the creative crowd packed with early adopters and active investors, as well as developing small business, tech titans, and everything in between.

Disrupt is for the disruptors — And everyone else who doesn’t have time to lament broken business models. There’s too much new business to get done.

Andy Huckaba & I presented on social media for Lenexa Chamber of Commerce members today. We had a great turnout and there’s a large amount of interest about social media for small businesses. Thanks to everyone that attended and to the Lenexa Chamber of Commerce for organizing & hosting the event.

Andy Huckaba is the President of the management consulting firm Huckaba & Associates. Andy works as a facilitator, speaker, social media expert, and strategic consultant for companies and organizations in telecommunications, architecture, finance, banking, manufacturing, publishing, Internet development, advertising, healthcare and government. Past clients include Sprint, Hallmark, Yellow Freight, H&R Block, First USA and Bank of America. In his role as a City Councilman for the City of Lenexa, Kansas, Andy serves as the Vice-Chair of the National League of Cities, Information Technology & Communications Committee dealing with national technology policies that affect cities.

Dustin Jacobsen, Director of Social Media & Technology at Barkley, leads the agency on interactive, mobile, social and emerging technology projects. He works on a variety of clients including Sonic Drive-In, Build-A-Bear Workshop, 24 Hour Fitness and Blue Bunny Ice Cream. Barkley is one of the top-ten independent advertising agencies in the US.

Dustin holds a BS from Iowa State University and an MBA, magna cum laude, from Baker University. He blogs about all things marketing and technology at shakegently.com and is on Twitter at twitter.com/dustinj.

Technorati Tags: social media, Lenexa, business

Every few months I select a few emerging trends to dig into. I’ve discussed geo streams in a previous post and this is a further extension of that idea and many other ideas I’ve talked about recently.

One of the trends I identified a while ago is starting to become a reality: REAL location targeting. This is why I have been so excited about the growth of companies like Foursquare and their competitors and companies such as Placecast, one of our technology partners that provides location-based marketing solutions.

We’re seeing growth in brand driven campaigns (Placecast), whereby brands can interact directly with consumers, as well as platform / network based companies (Foursquare), whereby brands interact with consumers through an existing network. The difference? Who owns the customer relationship and controls the messaging.

Sure, the ability to target consumers based on zip code, household, general demographic profiles, etc. has been available for a long time. But geo-location targeting is different – it adds location and time to the equation that no other medium or channel can match.

From a media consumption perspective, mobile devices are with consumers 24/7. What does this mean from a targeting perspective? Mobile is a way to target consumers regardless of location (work, home, travel) and time (workday, weekend, day, night). And messaging can be triggered through a variety of means.

Layer on social (what your friends are doing, friend recommendations), along with purchase history and demographic / psychographic profiling (what people similar to you liked), comparison shopping and reviews (prices and general consumer reviews) and you have true hyper-local targeting focused on products and services with the best potential fit for the consumer.

How can location be transformational?

Let me introduce Context-Based Marketing.
(Note: I’d like to establish context-based marketing as a new term. I haven’t heard anyone else define this, so I’d like to claim it as my own. Heard about it before? Send me a link. I’m interested and will gladly add them as a reference.)

Brands want to be where consumers (and eyeballs) are to influence buying decisions. No secret sauce there.

Consumers, for the most part, are anti-advertising except for when they determine the advertising to be of value, usually we they can save money, whether that be through purchase incentives (acquisition) or rewarding loyalty (retention).

Context-based marketing can play a key role in this. Through the utilization of strict privacy and security controls, consumers can feel safe sharing personal information in return for value (discounts, rewards, recommendations, relevant offers, VIP only programs, etc).

Partnerships are essential as mobile is a complex ecosystem consisting of application and technology providers, carriers, location providers, handset providers, content providers and various other players. Oh yeah. And regulations all over the place.

Want to hear how this would play out?

I’m in Times Square and I want to find the best place to grab coffee.

• I search for a location nearby (ordered by distance, with directions from current location).
• I want to know the ratings of the location (good to bad), what my friends on various social networks think of the location, what people in general think, and a product recommendation based on my past purchase history.
• I’m presented with a tip to ask for a specific barasita by name, as they make the best sugar free skinny latte in New York and they took first place in a barista competition last week.
• I’m offered a dollar off since this would be my first visit to this location and I can save another dollar if I sign up for their loyalty program, as it’s a chain store with locations around my home as well as my frequent travel destinations.
• I earn points for posting a status update of my visit and earn additional points for posting a review of my visit.
• I earn referral points as one of my contacts connects to the loyalty program after seeing my status update.
• While I’m here, I’m thinking about sticking around for an hour to catch up on work and use their free Wi-Fi.
• One of my friends hears that I’m at the location and would like to join me for the live music later tonight, starting in an hour.
• I get a message from another friend that wants to meet for dinner at a nearby restaurant that has a great wine list and tonight they’re serving one of my favorite salmon dishes. Included is a link to a reservation (which I accept).

Think Yelp with Google’s Near Me Now mixed with Amazon & Netflix reviews & recommendations, Red Laser’s price comparison engine, Paypal transaction history, Google Maps, Foursquare, OpenTable, Facebook & Twitter – all in one nice little package that works across mobile carriers and devices. And then make the targeting available through a bidding engine like Google Adwords allowing companies to track acquisition costs and allow national brands to scale down to a targeting level never before possible.

Transformational? I’d like to believe so. Possible? Definitely. Easy? Not for the fainthearted. But the company that achieves context-based marketing will have a consumer base that advocates their brand while minimizing add spend in a non-invasive, opt in nature.

While many companies will fail, there will be an ecosystem (think many players) that join together to make this a reality.

Technorati Tags: mobile, social, innovation