TheSocialCMO

Money to Move Through Mobile

A recent study forecasting enormous growth in mobile payments for digital and physical goods comes as no great surprise.

Money transfers via mobile devices are expected to hit $240 billion this year growing to $670 billion within four years, according to research from London-based Juniper Research.

Some of the drivers for the coming increase in mobile transactions are various forms of enabling technologies. One method is known as NFC (Near Field Communications) that allow payments essentially by swiping a phone near a device. About 20 countries are expected to launch NFC services with transactions worth $50 billion within the next two years, according to the Juniper study.

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The science of social media marketing: experiment, experiment, experiment!

There are no true experts or gurus in this social media space – we are ALL still trying to figure this out. When I said that at the 140 Character’s Conference: New York City (#140conf) the audience applauded… because we all assume that someone else has all the answers to social media marketing success.

The truth is that social media is still too new as a serious business tool for any one of us to know all the best social media marketing tactics or even understand best how to leverage every platform.

So why am I (@TedRubin) the #1 followed CMO on Twitter (and been so for close to two years) with over 54,000 followers? Because I don’t assume I know everything about social media marketing, so I focus my time on building relationships. Because I pay attention, respond to, and interact with my followers… and I am not afraid to experiment publicly to see what topics are most relevant to my network(s), and what content is most useful to them.

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10 Commandments of Social Media for Financial Services

Financial Services National Regulatory Authority (FINRA), “the largest independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the United States,” issued Regulatory Notice 10-06, a set of ten social media guidelines for financial firms and their registered representatives, in Question and Answer form, recognizing that “Americans are increasingly using social media.”
More recently, on June 28, 2011, at the IRI Government, Legal and Regulatory Conference, in Washington, D.C., Richard G. Ketchum, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of FINRA, issued a statement that FINRA’s “goal is to provide further guidance on these issues in a Notice to be published later this year.”

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12 Most Important Ways to Build Relationships and Get ROR

If you want to continue to reach your market in this social media age, the marketing focus needs to be on building relationships, and metrics need to expand beyond ROI (Return on Investment) to include ROR: Return on Relationship. So how do you build and strengthen relationships with your audience (as a whole, and as individuals) to increase your ROR? Here are 12 ways to do so:

1. Listen

If you want to be heard above the growing social media “noise,” you need to first listen to your consumers so when you do speak, you get it right.  What are they saying, what are they feeling, what are their pain points, what solutions do they need?

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Dead Man Blogging

“Here it is. I’m dead, and this is my last post to my blog.”

I’ve been haunted since I read those words a few weeks ago.

Jenn Whinnem had hosted a discussion on {grow} about our digital footprint and the implications when we die. Johnny Russo, added a link to a post by Derek K. Miller, who wrote his farewell to his blog community and family in anticipation of his death from a terminal disease.  It is a stunning, poignant, post and it ends perfectly.  “I loved you, I loved you, I loved you.”

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How Do You Handle Social Media While on Vacation?

I was going to talk to you today about goals. After all, we’re now in the second half of the year (can you believe it?!) and it’s a good time to see if you’re on track and consider any adjustments that need to be made.

But, I decided that no one wants to talk about goals when we’re headed into a long weekend. I know I don’t.So, instead we’re going to talk about something far more fun – VACATION! 

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@ is the Universal Sign of Engagement

For decades, companies were very good at pushing messages into markets and talking at people rather than with them. Now companies are embracing the idea of two-way interaction. Monitoring conversations is becoming standard procedure as small and enterprise businesses alike make substantial investments in tools such as Radian6, Sprial16 and Brandtology. And, not only are companies monitoring conversations, they’re adopting social media management systems (SMMS) such as Seesmic and CoTweet to operationalize conversations and platforms such as Objective Marketer, PeopleBrowsr and Buddy Media to automate engagement campaigns.

There’s a difference between monitoring and listening and there’s certainly a difference between conversations and engagement. How social media is employed today promotes monitoring as a reporting function and conversations as a symptom of reaction. In many ways, the state of social media is eerily reminiscent of traditional marketing. We’re fooled into a sense of collaboration and co-creation because people can respond. But programs are not measured by functionality, they are valued by the value customers take away from the experience. It begs the question, is social media in actuality anti-social?

New media philosophies, while rich with good intentions, are confined by the culture of the organization they’re designed to help. Corporate culture is pervasive and planted. It is not anything that will change suddenly because of the popularity of Twitter and Facebook no matter how strong your case. Culture shock takes place because a business is subjected to the harsh reality that customers no longer support the way business is conducted.

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Don’t overlook the Baby Boomers!

If you think that the place to reach Baby Boomers (born between 1946 – 1964) is anywhere that does not include technology, think again!  Boomers in the U.S. are technology-savvy enough to comprise 1/3 of all TV viewers, online users, social media users and Twitter users.

If that’s not enough to make you think twice about where you’re putting your social media marketing dollars, consider that there are 78 million Boomers in the U.S., many who have “shown a willingness to try new brands and products.” In fact, they spend 38.5% of CPG dollars! (source: Nielsen).  You can’t afford to overlook them!

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Are you wow blind?

Kevin asked me: “Do ‘great ideas’ possess universally some sort of Wow Factor?”

The problems with this question: What does ‘great’ mean? And who decides what ‘wow’ is?

The challenge is this: lots of people think they know what both words mean in their area of endeavor, and many of them are wrong.

Consider the case of web 2.0 companies. People like Brad Feld and Fred Wilson are brilliant at understanding what wow means from the point of view of an investor. They have great taste about what’s going to pay off. They have a sense for which teams and which ideas will actually turn into great businesses.

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Social Goes Mobile

Mobile is becoming a dominant vehicle for social networking.

More than 250 million people already access Facebook from their mobile phones and the company points out that the mobile users are twice as active as non-mobile users.

One of the facilitators of the move to more mobile activity is the increase in the number of smartphone owners, now estimated by Nielsen to be 37 percent of US mobile phone owners on the way to half by the end of the year.

And the increase in social interaction via mobile is substantial.

In 2010, 28 percent of social media users used a mobile phone to interact with social media, and that number increased to 40 percent this year, based on new research. That’s an increase from 54 million people last year to 80 million this year.

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