The saving grace is that the phone still works. Astonishing. It just looks horrible.

But, insult to injury, I sat on it – the very same day I dropped it. Oops. Now the back is cracked.

All of this naturally got me thinking of a replacement (new) phone. It turns out I’m not the only one who’s ever shattered his iPhone. There is a cottage industry of little repair shops and services for replacing broken iPhone glass. It costs about $90 per side. So, if I replace both sides of my iPhone 4S I’m looking at almost $200. My contract with Verizon is up in 8 weeks. Do I just wait?

Now I’m considering whether to even keep an iPhone. While I like Apple products, I really like the new Samsung running Android. And I do use Google Apps a lot, which work like a charm on Android.

It turns out we keep our mobile phones an average of 14–16 months. That’s not too long. And it’s not good for Mother Nature. But it also means we’re constantly re-evaluating our mobile devices and service plans. It normally leads to fancier and more expensive stuff. That’s what the mobile carriers depend on, at least.

Regardless of how we end up with a new phone – whether it’s shattering it, or peacefully reaching our wireless contract renewal – it’s a queue for taking a closer look at our mobile services and probably upgrading our device and service plan. This is happening every day, with hundreds of thousands of people. Mobile computing will continue to grow.

For marketers, this should be a reminder that we constantly need to turn our attention to mobile. How can we make our website experience better for mobile users? Does our business model lend itself naturally towards building a mobile app? What type of mobile experience can we offer our clients and prospects?

10 Things To Improve Your Approach to Email Marketing Test & Learn…

The following is a list from Marketo, a marketing automation software featuring email marketing at its core. There are some good suggestions. A/B, or so-called multivariate, testing is a good one. Sometimes it’s surprising what works and what doesn’t. The key take-away is keep on testing!

1. Forget “batch and blast” and consider your email campaigns as part of a conversation.
2. Move beyond open and click-through rates. What else are your prospects and customers doing?
3. Combine the “standard” segmentation approaches with behavioral data to create more complex segmentation strategies.
4. An email message is called a “message” for a reason. Tailor your messages according to your prospects’ profile.
5. Automate what you can and leave more time for creativity and strategy. Set up automated campaigns based on event and behavioral triggers.
6. Mix up your campaign styles and methods.
7. Take deliverability seriously. Your strategies are no good if your email can’t get through to your prospect’s inbox.
8. If you’re not testing, you’re guessing. Incorporate A/B testing into your campaigns whenever you can.
9. Dive deeper into your email reports without touching Excel. Reports and dashboards help marketers publish detailed reports without the need to go into Excel.
10. Use “check in” emails to continuously build your relationship with each and every prospect over time and gain useful feedback.

Finally, here’s a summary of some research from CEB Marketing Leadership Council (2012) indicating that 74% of marketers don’t yet consider themselves very effective, or even just effective, at test-and-learn marketing experiments. The good news is that joining the ranks of the effective, and very effective is easy… at least with email marketing.

Wistia Captions also accepts a .WRT file upload, This is a time-coded transcript of the subtitles, including the precise time the subtitle should be displayed in the video. The file format, shown below, is easy to follow and can be provided to you by your professional video production company.

1
00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:24,400
Here is a subtitle at 20 seconds
2
00:00:24,600 --> 00:00:27,800
And here is a subtitle at 24 seconds (and 600 milliseconds)

Free Email Campaign Software

TinyLetter is free email campaign software from the makers of MailChimp. (Read my review)

Free Volunteer List Management

VolunteerSignup is free vounteer sign-up sheet software for private groups. They are super simple to use and make volunteer sign-up list management a breeze.

Affordable Email Lists For Small Groups

For $20 you can get a spam-free group email address called Breeze. You can add up to 50 members in the group. Breeze is from 37 Signals, the developers of a project management software service called Basecamp, which has been tremendously successful. 37 Signals founder, Jason Fried, along with the whole crew over at 37 Signals is a big success story. They’re worth taking a closer look at if you don’t already know about them. Here’s a video they made which better explains their Breeze email list product:

Depending on whose research you read, smartphone adoption is upwards of 70% in the United States. Tablet adoption is skyrocketing, too. It’s all part of this exciting mobile revolution.

This all means, of course, that your website will likely be seen on a smartphone or tablet. How does your website look on that little screen?

One thing you may hear people chattering about is so-called responsive website design. Responsive website design means a website that automatically re-formats based on the size of screen that’s being used to view it. For example, a responsive website will sense that your website is being viewed on an iPhone-sized screen and automatically deliver a skinny version of your site. That may also mean that some graphics are omitted, your menu system may switch, and other elements may be adjusted, all depending on how your responsive website is styled.

The take-away…

If you’re having your website re-designed (who isn’t?) then you should ask your designer about responsive design, and how your website renders on different devices.

As they say, “The cobbler’s son has no shoes.” I do not currently have a responsive design on my own website.

But is a person’s or brand’s Twitter follower count an accurate indicator of how popular they are?

Social media management tools abound. There are hundreds of apps that facilitate “listening” on Twitter and managing gobs of Twitter feeds. It then becomes easy to automatically troll for possible Twitter relationships. And many times people begin following each other haphazardly. These aren’t deep relationships.

There’s a British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar who has become particularly well known for what is now referred to as Dunbar’s Number. Dunbar’s Number is the idea that there is a limited number of stable social relationships we can expect to maintain based on our brain’s capacity to keep all of these social relationships sorted out. After conducting oodles of research on primates and humans, Dunbar suggests the actual number of stable social relationships we can expect to maintain in the real world is about 150. Beyond that we start to lose track of too many details to make the relationship anything more than superficial.

But Twitter relationships are not like real human relationships. The world of Twitter is a lot looser, right? We can whimsically follow and unfollow people and brands. There’s no careful consideration of who you follow, or who follows you. It’s free love. There are no hard feelings.

My opinion is that Twitter relationships can be loosely categorized into four relationship types. And sometimes the lines are blurred because there’s a growing number of “people as brand.” Think Guy Kawasaki (Guy has almost 1.3 million followers as I write this).

1. People Following People – People are following each other on Twitter for many reasons. It can be a deep-seated relationship, or it may be something as trivial as someone mentioning a keyword or hash tag that triggers a software prompt.
2. People Following Brands (companies) – This, I believe, is the most faithful representation of Twitter “relationship.” I have no research to back this up, but I think that people are probably more fickle when it comes to which companies or brands they follow. They’re probably not following a brand based on a keyword. Rather, they’re following a brand because they want to keep up with a product and may even align themselves with what a brand stands for. This a powerful following.
3. Brands Following People – Brands may follow people for a variety of reasons, but it’s normally a careful decision on the part of the brand.
4. Brands Following Brands – Perhaps it’s a trusted partner. Maybe it’s a non-competitive company in the same space.

My advice is to carefully consider your social media presence. It’s easy to overextend and dilute your presence on social, thereby making it less effective. By the way, Seth Godin made the decision to not use Twitter, but he’s already got a huge tribe of followers.

Finally, if you’re trying to reach the executive suite with your social media presence, good luck. There’s a growing number of execs on Twitter, but they’re mostly using it as a one-way bullhorn, or limiting their relationships to only a few that they follow.

Bottom line for growing businesses: Be active on Twitter, but have a cogent strategy of how and why you’re active. If you’re trying to reach the C-level, you won’t unless you’re on a level playing field with them.

The knee-jerk reaction is to post the video on YouTube. But before you automatically turn to YouTube you’ll want to consider your primary business objectives and whether it makes more sense to have your video hosted by a professional video hosting company. Let me explain.

YouTube

YouTube is the leading source of online video discovery and playback. YouTube hosts a mind-bending volume of video and is renown for being the social video site of choice, along with Vimeo and others. But there are some drawbacks:

• You can’t control the additional “relevant” videos that are displayed at the end of the video. This may cause your viewer to stray away from your site, and potentially get wrapped up in competitors’ videos.
• Sometimes there is excessive buffering on YouTube, making it difficult or impossible for some viewers to watch your video, especially over a marginal WiFi connection of on a smartphone.
• When someone searches for and finds your video they’re going to land on YouTube, and not necessarily your website. This also detracts from your SEO efforts.

Video Hosting

I recommend considering the use of a high performance video hosting company like Wistia or Ooyala or Brightcove Not only will video hosting take care of the painstaking process of compressing and serving your video, you’ll get access to rich video analytics and other customization options that are very difficult or impossible to get from YouTube. What’s more, your video can still be shared on social networks, and all of the SEO juice goes to your website, not YouTube.

There’s more to it. But, fundamentally, most growing businesses should be taking a close look at video hosting versus YouTube. It’s an important decision.

This blog post is about the future – a plausible new checkout experience, and how RFID will transform shopping. I’m going to ask you to imagine.

RFID isn’t new and these visions of the future aren’t unique. It’s just that it’s all unfolding in front of us and we’ll see it happen within the next twenty years, I believe.

Imagine a much faster checkout experience at point of sale (POS). Imagine filling up your shopping cart and simply confirming your total shopping receipt at POS, without unloading your shopping cart. Imagine all merchandise tagged with labels that contain an ultra-thin embedded RFID chip. Imagine no more dirty little conveyor belts. Imagine fascinating inventory tracking. You’re imagining the future and how RFID could transform the in-store retail shopping experience.

It’s my opinion that we’re already headed this way. Like many technology advancements, we’re already taking steps towards realizing this future.

Retailers like Wal-Mart have begun using self check-out software that allows shoppers to use a smartphone app to scan their own merchandise and avoid the normal POS experience at the checkout lines. Moreover, Wal-Mart’s Senior Vice President of mobile and digital, Gibu Thomas, commented that customers enjoy bagging their own groceries and merchandise. (source: Internet Retailer)

I don’t think the in-store shopping experience is going away. Rather, I think it’s going to improve. We’re already seeing how mobile payment technology is creating waves at checkout. According to the leading mobile market research think tank Yankee Group, nearly 70% of companies plan to deploy mobile payments.

In the future, I think we’re going to see it taken a step further. We’ll not only use mobile payment at POS, we’ll use mobile apps, like Wal-Mart’s Scan & Go app, to aid in the in-store shopping experience. Embedded RFID chips will mean no more loading and unloading of merchandise while in the store. Just shop. Put it in your basket once, confirm your purchase, then roll it out the exit door.

Also, RFID helps stores more accurately manage high volumes of incoming inventory and logistics. Imagine pallets laden with boxes containing small pieces of inventory. RFID transmits data that tracks inventory as soon as it comes off the back of the truck and is stocked the warehouse.

RFID chips are getting smaller and more flexible.

Imagine using RFID chips in food packaging. It’s already being tested. Imagine being able to use your smartphone to get specific and unique information (e.g., harvest date, expiration date) about the product displayed on your smartphone. This is the in-store shopping experience of the future – a more informed and empowered shopper.

The retailer of the future will have to be more transparent. Detailed product information and comparison shopping is already available. In the future, shoppers will demand instant high quality product information and a hassle-free checkout experience. RFID will make this affordable and a reality.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this whimsical pontification of the future. Let me know your thoughts.

Over the course of the last few years, and arguably even now, marketers have dismissed mobile… or at at least put it on the back burner. In a sense, we’ve been cheating on mobile. We’ve been reaching for the easier-to-grasp campaigns. We’ve been putting mobile off, especially when it comes to Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

The importance of mobile SEM has now walked up and sternly slapped us in the face. Mobile is tired of being treated like a heel, and it’s just not going to take it anymore.

So what’s our punishment if we’ve been ignoring mobile SEM? Consider screen sizes and how they affect the appearance of search results. The following graphic was shared during a recent L2 Research webinar discussing the importance of mobile SEM, especially with prestige brand retailers:

It’s obvious that you see more results on a big desktop screen, and only a few results on a smartphone. But what are the implications? If you’re gunning for page one on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) you’re going to have to wiggle into the top three in order to get noticed on a smartphone. And chances are becoming greater that the top 2 SERP results appearing on a smartphone are going to be paid results, only showing one organic listing.

Many companies still don’t have a real mobile strategy, especially retailers. I kind of realized this. The anecdotal evidence is around us, but a recent research report from prestige retail marketing analyst firm, L2, provided some evidence to back up my (our) suspicions. If you’re interested in learning more about the impact of mobile on SEM, and other facets of marketing, check out L2′s research: Mobile 2013. Here’s their trailer:

Mobile 2013 from L2 Think Tank on Vimeo.

Today, The Altimeter Group published a report entitled The Evolution of Social Business, Six Stages of Social Media Transformation. Despite the report’s focus on large organizations, there are insights that can be gleaned for mid-sized, and even small companies.

One of the key discussions I think all companies need to have is how they’re going to approach social media. It’s no longer whether you’re going to participate, it’s how.

The report addresses a key challenge that many business face when it comes to addressing social media:

The crux of the problem is that many so-called social strategies are not innately linked to business goals. They are instead often guided by a peer- or competitive-driven “social for social’s sake” philosophy. And even where clear goals do exist, social initiatives face challenges in the form of a lack of defined strategy, governance, and funding.

One client I was working with a couple of years ago was investigating whether to put more resources into developing a formalized company approach to social media. As it turns out, after some cursory research, it was discovered that very few or none of their prospects were using social media. Using social media to reach any of their prospects would, therefore, fall on deaf ears. Social media efforts were tabled until they made more sense in the future. Individual employees, however, were encouraged to continue their social media participation, fostering relationships in their own tangential peer groups.