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Apple Poised To Unveil ‘iAd,’ New Mobile Ad Platform Is Jobs’ ‘Next Big Thing’

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Even as the buzz builds toward the April 3rd ship date of the iPad, Apple is preparing to announce its “next big thing” — a new personalized, mobile advertising system that could well be called the “iAd” — Online Media Daily has learned. The new ad platform, which will be officially unveiled to Madison Avenue on April 7th, has been described as “revolutionary” and “our next big thing” by Apple chief Steve Jobs, according to executives familiar with the plan.

Precise details of the system and its features could not be discerned at presstime (and calls to Apple had not been returned), but it is believed to have been built on top of Quattro, the mobile advertising developer Apple acquired in January for nearly $300 million, and it is expected to be the first real battle of a Silicon Valley Holy War between Apple and arch frenemy Google that is shifting its front line to Madison Avenue.

The war has been mounting ever since Google introduced its Android mobile operating system to compete with Apple’s iPhone, and agreed to acquire mobile ad firm AdMob for $750 million, but it is expected to reach ballistic proportions following Apple’s April 7th announcement, which insiders say will be every bit as important as other recent marketplace introductions, including the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad launches.

Aside from the super egos involved — Jobs vs. Google chief and former Apple board member Eric Schmidt — the battle is key to the business imperatives of both companies, which have been racing to develop new revenue streams and models to expand beyond their core: in Apple’s case, consumer gadgets; in Google’s case, search advertising.

Apple appears to have been more successful in its revenue diversification, developing substantial software and service businesses, including iTunes downloads, iPhone wireless subscriptions, and App Store downloads. And while advertising has always loomed as a huge possibility for Apple, it had essentially been unexploited as a business model until Apple acquired Quattro.

Google, on the other hand, has made numerous investments to develop new advertising revenue models beyond its core search business, most of which have failed to yield much if any share of Madison Avenue’s conventional media or online display advertising marketplace.

But the gold rush is on for mobile, which many see as Madison Avenue’s next big frontier, even if it still is relatively miniscule compared to established media. According to the last mobile forecast from Interpublic’s Magna unit, mobile ad spending is only expected to reach $331 million this year and $409 million in 2011. One of the obstacles to mobile’s growth as an ad medium is the fact that there hasn’t been any single organizing principle for agencies and advertisers to rally around. The Magna mobile advertising report describes it as “a highly fragmented group of divergent advertising models collectively organized around portable (and primarily cellular network-based) media, a wide variety of trends” that are converging to create an advertising marketplace.

But Apple has already captivated Madison Avenue’s attention with the advertising possibilities of its App Store, and more recently, with the impending introduction of the iPad, and big agencies and advertisers have been lining up for opportunities to be the first — and in some cases, exclusive — sponsors of some of the earliest “tablet” editions of magazines and newspapers designed for the iPad.

While Apple clearly is accumulating gravitas in the ad community, agencies are generally still in the dark about the new mobile advertising system, though there already is plenty of speculation within the tech community.

Joe Mandese, Mar 26, 2010 05:21 PM

One of popular scenarios is that Apple will offer a hypertargeting capability that would enable advertisers to target ads to consumers based on their geographic proximity, paving the way for a new generation of location-based advertising. But some observers believe that could be trouble for Apple, because Google recently won the patent for systems that serve ads dynamically based on a user’s location, and given the current relationship between the two digital behemoths, such a move by Apple would likely invite litigation from Google.

Another potentially telling patent move is one that Apple registered for in 2008 that potentially could control ads served on virtually any screen connected to an operating system that would turn the content or application off if the user isn’t paying attention to the ads.

Meanwhile, Madison Avenue will be waiting with bated breath to see what Apple actually unveils.

“Everyone will be following this very closely,” says Josh Lovison, the mobile lead at Interpublic’s Emerging Media Lab, adding: “Given the way that Apple is able to package things up, with very slick presentations, it will be interesting to see what they do with advertising.”

Source: MediaPost Online Media Daily – Apple Poised To Unveil ‘iAd,’ New Mobile Ad Platform Is Jobs’ ‘Next Big Thing’

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What is Foursquare?

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What is Foursquare?

Foursquare is a social networking application for your cell phone that relies on your location to provide information relevant to where you are located at any given time.

Foursquare works on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or Palm. If you have another phone with a web browser, you can use their mobile website. If you have a phone that doesn’t have a web browser, you can use our SMS. The system works in the US only for now.

Check-in to places

People use foursquare to “check-in”, which is a way of telling Foursquare your whereabouts. When you check-in someplace, Foursquare tells your friends where they can find you, and recommend places to go & things to do nearby. People check-in at all kind of places – cafes, bars, restaurants, parks, homes, offices.  As your friends use foursquare to check-in, you’ll start learning more about the places they frequent. You’ll also start to learn about their favorite spots and the new places they discover. Foursquare makes lists of your favorite things to do and lets you share your experiences with friends, and even suggest new experiences to seek out. As you check-in around the city, you’ll start finding tips that other users have left behind. After checking-in at a restaurant, it’s not uncommon to unlock a tip suggesting the best thing on the menu. Checking-in at a bar will often offer advice on what your next stop should be. Every tip you create is discoverable by other users just by checking in.

Earn points and unlock badges!

Every foursquare check in earns you points. Find a new place in your neighborhood? +5 points. Making multiple stops in a night? +2 points. Dragging friends along with you? +1. And as you start checking-in to more interesting places with different people, you’ll start unlocking badges. There are badges for discovering new places and for traveling to far away places. Spending too much time singing karaoke or been hitting the gym consistently? Yes, there are badges for those too.

Become the mayor! Unlock some freebies!

We all have our local hangouts. Foursquare keeps tabs on who’s the most loyal of all the regulars. If you’ve been to a place more than anyone else, you’ll become “the mayor”… until someone else comes along and steals your title. Foursquare provides a list of places that are offering freebies to “mayors” – free coffees, free ice-cream, free hotel stays, etc.

So that’s about it – ready to sign up?

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Social Media Will Finally Make Local Marketing Work

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Joe Marchese, Mar 09, 2010 03:00 PM
A great local Web experience has long been promised by the Internet, but very rarely delivered. However, with the rise of services like Yelp and Foursquare, and continued improvements in geo-filtering tools, it appears that local will finally live up to its potential.

How big a deal is figuring out local? Think of it this way: Google was built on local advertisers, through use of what was called the longtail. The struggle for local marketing and user experience has always been a question of content. Local merchants rarely have the resources to develop a quality digital presence; even when they could, the information would be out of date very quickly. Enter social media local sites like Yelp and Foursquare, which have turned tagging and reviewing local merchants into a game. Getting hundreds of thousands of people to do the work to create up-to-date local content has always been the missing link. And the fact that services like Foursquare make it not only easy, but fun, to use your GPS-enabled phone is the final piece of the puzzle.

Why is this important to national marketers? Because, like politics, all marketing is local. Papa John’s advertisements during various national sporting events had me thinking pizza. So my next step was to find the local Papa John’s. While I was going through the online ordering experience (which is fantastic), I decided to check out this Papa John’s Yelp rating, and was very disappointed to find that after seven reviews, my local Papa John’s only had one star and a number of customer complaints. That would usually have led me to pick someplace else to order from, but I wanted to see if the delivery service was as bad as Yelp said.

So I ordered. After an hour with no pizza, I decided to call the Papa John’s that I’d ordered from, but no one picked up the phone. I called multiple times; still no answer. An hour and a half after ordering, my cold order arrived — or at least, part of my order.

We all know that customer service is always important, but what I learned from Yelp was that my experience was not an isolated incident for my local Papa John’s. I also developed an even deeper trust for Yelp reviews when it comes to making service decisions. For Papa John’s, Yelp offers an opportunity to keep up with what people are saying about its stores locally, so the company can best capitalize on the money it spends to advertise nationally. In short, blending local reputation and national advertising will be key to digital marketing success.

Source: Mediapost Online Spin – Social Media Will Finally Make Local Marketing Work
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SWYN Vs. FTF: Does Social Sharing Remove Too Much Friction?

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by Mike May, Wednesday, March 10, 2010

A lot of ESPs are now offering share-with-your-network (SWYN) functionality, and I can attest first-hand that inside the email industry we’re pretty excited about the email-social media integration that SWYN affords. “It’s like forward-to-a-friend on steroids,” we (collectively) say. Instead of subscribers passing your message on to a friend or a handful of department colleagues, they can now push it out to their 350 Facebook friends or 1200 Twitter followers. What a huge lift for your readership and ROI metrics, right?

Maybe — for now, anyway. Social sharing is appealing for marketers (email and otherwise) because it removes a lot of the friction from word-of-mouth marketing, and can amplify an audience exponentially. We’re all suddenly very organized about learning now to build campaigns optimized for SWYN functionality, tapping into the huge viral lift social media affords.

I was an analyst with Jupiter Research from 1999 to 2001, and if I had a nickel for every startup that brought in a PPT deck with the word “viral” at the top of the marketing section, I certainly wouldn’t have as many regrets about where my stock options ended up. Then viral went out of vogue for a stretch, when it became pretty clear that for most companies it wasn’t usually a marketing tactic, but a marketing substitute.

Now viral is back, made more appealing (and seemingly achievable) than ever through social networks. Let’s play it forward a few years. What if it actually works? What if a sizable chunk of your Facebook and Twitter subscribers start passing along your messages? If you crack the code, so have your competitors, so your subscribers will be passing along other messages as well. And the hundreds of millions of other social media denizens will also be dumping the contents of their inboxes into the socialsphere. If all your Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn friends pushed just 1% of their inbox into your news feed every day, on top of what they’re already sharing, how long before your preferred social network would be too cluttered to be of use?

If that happens, we’ll have on our hands a success disaster not seen since the heyday of spam. At the height of the spam epidemic, email itself was threatened with obsolescence. The channel was so easy — and frictionless — to penetrate that the legitimate messages from disciplined marketers were either buried, or wrongly lumped into the same offending category. As email marketers — legitimate and shady alike — clambered to reach the top, they caused an avalanche that blocked the high road.

We may be in danger of causing a similar avalanche in social channels today. Last month Edelman’s Trust Barometer Survey was released, and the findings were troubling for marketers lined up at the frontier of social media as if it were the Oklahoma border in 1889. “The number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company has dropped from 45% to 25% since 2008.” CEO Richard Edelman believes that social media “absolutely” contributed to the decline.

So what are we as email marketers to do?

1. Keep the long view. Let’s keep pushing forward and carving out our own best practices in social networks, while at the same time being mindful of the big picture and the state of the channel.

2. Look ahead, remember behind. Even though we’re not the only ones interested in marketing in social networks, I believe we’re uniquely qualified — through our experience in handling the spam crisis — to take a leadership position in social marketing as well. Let’s not forget what we’ve been through. Our experience may be called on again.

3. Don’t abandon the one who brought you to the dance. SWYN may be FTF on steroids, but FTF is pretty awesome even without the steroids. Don’t stop writing messages that are arresting and targeted enough to compel some action. Sometimes the extra effort required to share individually makes all the difference to credibility and ROI.

Source: MediaPost Publications -  SWYN Vs. FTF: Does Social Sharing Remove Too Much Friction?

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10 Top Tips for a Foolproof B2B Webinar

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Looking for ways to improve brand recognition, demonstrate expertise and attract new business leads? If you have compelling content to share, hosting a webinar is a relatively quick, easy and inexpensive option…if you know what you’re doing.

Follow these 10 tips for the path to a foolproof webinar.

Tip #1 – Clearly Define Your Target Audience and Webinar Goals

Looking to educate new clients? Trying to establish thought leadership on a particular topic or with a specific audience? Focused on generating new sales leads?

Knowing the answers to these questions and clearly outlining your webinar goals will help to craft the content and prove essential when it comes time to select your webinar conferencing software/service provider.

Tip #2 – Use Tip #1 to Drive Selection of the Right Webinar Software/Service Provider

Selecting the right webinar provider  will make or break your webinar. A few webinar providers worth considering are On24, Citrix gotoWebinar, and Cisco WebEx, just to name a few.

The truth: there is no right or wrong webinar provider. The best webinar provider for your needs will depend on what you’ve already defined as your webinar goals in Tip #1.

When considering each provider, openly share your webinar goals with the provider. The provider can then help steer you toward the appropriate product for you and address key considerations like adding a toll-free conference bridge (so webinar participants won’t be charged to attend the webinar), your anticipated number of attendees (some providers cap at 1,000 or less), how interactive you’d like the webinar to be (e.g., polls, surveys, etc.) and whether or not you will want an on-demand, recorded version post-event.

Tip #3 – Don’t Rush Through Creating Your Webinar Registration Form

You’ve got the date, time and webinar provider selected and are ready to get the word out. Although it’s tempting to rush through webinar registration form set-up so you can start sharing the news, it’s important to take a strategic approach to building your form.

Again, back to Tip #1 – if you’re looking at this as a potential lead gen effort, you’ll want to select the form fields that will capture all relevant information. Consider your long-term goals – do you anticipate issuing additional research on this topic? Hoping to make this webinar a series? Consider adding a checkbox for registrants to opt-in to future research and webinar invitations.

Finally, treat your registration page like… a registration form page. The same optimization tactics apply like using minimal form fields and keeping form visibility above the fold.

Tip #4 – Make a ‘To Do’ Timeline & Send it to Everyone

Now that your registration form is up, it’s countdown to Webinar Day. To stay organized, create a master to-do list including everything from marketing pushes to technical tasks.  Date and assign these items. The sooner everyone knows what’s required of him/her, the more time you have to gauge pre-webinar marketing efforts and troubleshoot forgotten items.

Create a separate Excel tab or document for the day of the webinar. Outline a play-by-play of everything to be done prior to hitting the ‘Live’ button so there’s zero confusion as to when and who is supposed to hit record, mute, etc.

Tip #5 – Get the Word Out!

With the to-do timeline you’ve created in Tip #4, you should already know the how and when of spreading the word.

Don’t be shy about promoting your webinar – send an E-mail to your existing subscriber base if you have one or consider renting an E-mail list or running an ad. Mention the webinar on your Web site. Tweet, blog and spread the world in your online communities and forums like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Tip #6 – Friend Your Webinar Provider Account Rep

As the webinar draws near, make friends with your account rep – the more they know about your webinar, the better they’ll be able to help make your webinar a success. And, knowing someone is a phone call or E-mail away should anything go wrong provides invaluable comfort the day of the webinar.

Tip #7 – Practice, Practice, Practice

The week leading up to the webinar, set aside a daily one-hour window for practice. Begin with practicing the basics of giving controls, recording and launching interactive features like questions and polls. Later in the week, invite attendees (coworkers) to mimic the webinar experience for both the presenter and the audience. Your presenter also gets extra practice, which is always a plus.

Tip #8 – Designate at Least One Person as Day-Of Tech Support

Technology + People = Problems. During the webinar, make sure to have someone monitoring the questions box for anyone who is expressing difficulty with audio or visual. Although many issues will be relative to the user’s own device, it can still alert you to larger issues and will send a positive, professional message to attendees.

Also check the E-mail address used as the default address to send the registration confirmations. Many attendees experiencing trouble will try and E-mail this address the day of the event for some last-minute help.

Tip#9 – Thank Attendees for Attending & Share with all Registrants the On-Demand Version within 48 Hours

Whether or not a person attended the webinar, it’s good practice to send a link to your on-demand version to all attendees and registrants within 48 hours, when the presentation is still fresh in their minds. You may also consider sharing the presentation slides using SlideShare or another online presentation sharing site.

Tip #10 – Get Your On-Demand Version and Additional Webinar Questions on your Web Site

Want to continue the webinar buzz after it’s over? Consider posting answers to all webinar questions you weren’t able to attend on either your company blog or Web site. Hoping to continue to use your webinar to show thought leadership and gain additional leads? Make sure to post your on-demand version to your site with a registration component.

Source: Business.com – 10 Top Tips for a Foolproof B2B Webinar

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