It’s published weekly and I thought a section titled “Where’s the Good News?” was worth passing along here.

Let’s face it. Running a small business is never easy. I am a serial entrepreneur. I have started and run a lot of very different businesses. Some have been very, very good and some went down in spectacular flames. I can remember some near-death experiences when the economy was booming. I have watched a million-dollar income stream dwindle to zero and there was not a damn thing I could do about it, except enjoy the money while it was there and use it to buy the next income stream. I have had to rebuild several times from scratch as markets shifted drastically underneath my feet. And I’ve changed directions as new opportunities revealed themselves.

In all this I’m like every other small-business entrepreneur out there. It is never easy. But that is what we do. We get up in the morning and figure it out. Some 80% of startups die within ten years. But we pick ourselves up and start over.

I know unemployment is 10%. But that means almost 90% are employed. Consumers are saving more. So adjust. Figure out what your New Normal looks like.

The ’70s were a bitch. I woke up many times in the middle of the night with real pains in my stomach wondering whether to pay the rent or make payroll. So did a lot of people. But look at all the new companies that came out of that era and changed everything: Microsoft, Apple, Intel, etc. Cell phones. The internet. The list is long.

Yes, we have to make our way in this Muddle Through World. It will be challenging, but I can almost guarantee you that when we do get through there will be other challenges. If it was easy everybody could do it and there would be no money in it. Embrace the challenge!

I asked one of my really close (36 years) friends and business associates last year how his business was doing. “We are doing great!” he said. That was not the answer I was expecting. “Why? How?” I asked.

“Well, most of our competitors have folded. We survived and got the business.”

Ultimately, that is how we get out of this. A hundred million families and millions of businesses figuring it out, learning how to adapt to the New Normal. Sadly, some of them won’t make it. But most of us will!

As I said, I am a serial entrepreneur. I have a friend who designs and oversees large teams of programmers of really robust analytic software, very cutting-edge stuff. She is a winner, and I am backing her (I know nothing about software but the rule is, invest in people!). We’ll see how it goes, but my bet is that in a few years there will be a lot of people getting jobs because we take on some risk now.

We are adapting our own business here. We will soon have new websites. I will be doing (at first) an audio podcast called the Mauldin Minute and then (hopefully) by the end of the year morphing into video. That’s the wave of the future and I need to keep up.

I am addicted to information and reading . We are going to try and make some money from my addiction. What would you pay to look over my shoulder and read the 5-10 most important things I find in a week? I will become your personal reader. Will that be a life-style changer? No, but it will provide some income diversification.

When Tiffani made her presentation to her Vistage group about our business, she had a lot of charts and graphs. I was surprised how our sources of income have varied over time. Some previously large (at least on my scale) sources literally dried up within a few years, completely askew from our original optimistic expectations. It was very apparent that we cannot sit and assume things will be the same year to year. So we adapt.

I have been presented with a very different opportunity in a non-finance field that is right in my wheelhouse, as they say. Tiffani and Ryan and I are going to pursue it. Will it thrive? Be a real business in five years? We will see, but I have the ability to take that risk and I am going to do so.

And so will hundreds of thousands of other visionaries and dreamers. That is how we get through this. We work through the ugly and then we get to the 2020s, and I think we will once again be talking about the Roaring 20s! Whole new industries will come into existence. Pay attention to the advancements in robotics. Biotech will be HUGE this decade, but we need to change the rules so we don’t lose the intellectual property and the jobs. Electric cars will boom as we replace our fleet all over the world. Nanotech later in the ’20s. Green energy and nuclear. Artificial intelligence (finally!). Really cheap (I mean really cheap!) wireless high-speed broadband all over the world will open the door to all kinds of possibilities. I met last night with very credible scientists who have developed a way to filter water very cheaply. A desalinization module that fits in a cargo container. Yes, they need a lot of money to finish, but they will figure it out. And on and on. The opportunities are going to be huge. Trillions will be made.

So, we get through this. We Muddle Through. We figure it out, one business and family at a time. And as a culture, a world, we get to a better place. My bet is that in 2020 no one is going to want to go back to the good old days of 2010. We will be excited about the future and all the cool stuff that is happening.

Recessions and tough times are God’s way of telling you that you need to adjust a few things, both on a personal and business level – also nationally and globally. I am an optimist. I believe we will adjust and grow, not just in the US but as an emerging world. There are just so many opportunities.

So, don’t let the problems I write about in this letter make you crawl into a cave. Just be realistic and figure out where your opportunities are. And then go make them happen! You are responsible for creating your own future. And I hope it is a good one. I plan on making mine one.

Familiarity
Consumers have also grown accustomed to using email as a way of engaging with brands.  Consumers most frequently use email for two types of brand interaction: obtaining promotions and deals and customer communications.

For the majority of consumers, they begin their search by checking a particular brand’s corporate website. Seventy-six percent of consumers will initially seek deals and promotions on a brand’s website, and from there, 62% will sign up to receive email, while 54% will use a search engine. Meanwhile, 17% of consumers will also include Facebook as part of their search for ongoing deals, and 3% will search for deals on Twitter. Women are more likely than men to sign up for emails (67% compared to 57%), and older consumers are also more likely to sign up for emails to get ongoing deals. However, the difference based on age is far less than may be expected. In fact, Millennials (aged 15-24) are twice as likely to subscribe to email in their search for ongoing deals (56%) as they are to search for deals on Facebook (28%

Customer Communications

In the age of immediate gratification, the importance of customer service has been magnified. And although social media has given customers a way to publicly air their grievances against a brand, the majority of customers still prefer to deal with customer service issues in private—over the phone, through a company’s website, or through email.

Manageability
More than 93% of U.S. online consumers are subscribers, meaning they receive at least one permission-based commercial email message on a typical day. The average consumer receives 44 daily emails (including commercial and personal), and half of consumers receive fewer than 25 per day. While these numbers aren’t small, most consumers consider the size of their inboxes manageable. So while marketers may be overwhelmed by overflowing inboxes, most of their customers aren’t.

Of those 44 daily emails, about 25% are permission-based commercial messages, with the remaining 75% comprised of personal messages, transactional messages, and spam that’s quickly deleted.

The average teen (aged 15-17) receives less than half the email of the average consumer, and receives only four commercial emails per day. And while marketers often interpret these statistics to mean a large generational shift away from email is occuring, the amount of email teens receive increases significantly when they graduate from high school, suggesting life stage—not age—is a more important factor when considering how much consumers rely on email.

Trust and Privacy
Consumers have two major concerns regarding trust and privacy of promotional emails: whether personal data will be shared and the ease of unsubscribing. Consumers tend to give the benefit of the doubt to big brands, and assume their email addresses will be safe, secure, and unshared.

Relevancy
Consumers know it’s possible for companies to send targeted and personalized messages, meaning relevancy is no longer an option for marketers. And when it comes to email, consumers quickly decide which companies they like to receive messages from, opposed those they don’t, based on whether the email message is relevent or not. ExactTarget research found that half (49%) of consumers “always” open emails from their “favorite” companies, compared to only 16% who say they never open email.

Exclusivity
While only one-third of consumers said they were motivated by the promise of exclusive content when choosing to become a subscriber, email’s exclusivity factor extends beyond content. That said, becoming a subscriber is like becoming a member of an exclusive club. As mentioned earlier, subscribers demonstrate their trust in a brand when they provide a company with their email address. And in return, they expect to be a part of an exclusive club.

More Consumers Use Email than SocNets for Brand Interaction
More online consumers use email than social networks for brand interaction, according to another recent study from ExactTarget and CoTweet. Data from the “Daily Morning” report indicates that 93% of online consumers aged 15 and older receive at least one permission-based email per day, putting them into the category of“subscribers. Broken down by age demographic, 15-to-17-year-olds are subscribers at a significantly lower rate (68%). All other age brackets of online consumers aged 18 and older are subscribers at rates between 93% and 96%.

Meanwhile, 38% of consumers are fans of at least one brand on Facebook, while only 5% are followers of at least one company or brand on Twitter.

The increasing popularity of smartphones will be a key driver in the expected growth of the web 2.0 because it is carried with the user at most times, is ideally placed to capture information user-generated content and social web interaction at its source.

Now is the time to start thinking about mobile marketing in a compelling and interesting way.

Click Here To view a summary of the comScore presentation “The State of Mobile”

Here are five key steps that Promodem can help you with to get your mobile program in front of your consumers at the right time and place.

1. All mobile sites are not created equal
“Soon, the demand will necessitate that all communication must become mobile”

2. Optimize your site for mobile search
“Create a targeted landing page for easy analysis and campaign tuning”

3. Build your SMS dbase with “real time reactive txt response
“Utilize some high-yield mobile marketing tactics with big results”

4. LBS (Location Based Services)
“A personal GPS in your pocket offers up all sorts of localized marketing possibilities”

5. QR Codes
“QR codes will revolutionize the way the world works in the same way the web has morphed the way we live and communicate”

Mobile means “on the go,” and mobile marketing must therefore provide the consumer with something that is useful to them in the field.

Click here to read the pdf for a description of the five steps listed above and to learn more about how Promodem can get your brand or promotion connected with mobile marketing.

In April we were approached by Winners Merchants Intl. to help them develop and online destination and contest entry site for Winners and HomeSense sponsorship and fundraising initiative for the Canadian Women’s Foundation.

Winners and HomeSense customer who made a donation of $2, $5, or $10 in-store were encouraged to go online and enter the PIN Number from their donation card for a chance to instantly win Gift Cards from Winners and HomeSense and enter to win 1 of 3 Grand Prizes. In addition to entering the contest site visitors could also post a message of support for the promotion and those in need.

Winners and HomeSense customers responded to the online destination. The site had over 80,000 unique visits and helped increase donations over last year’s in-store promotion by $70,000. Overall the Canadian Women’s Foundation, in partnership with Winners and HomeSense, BMO Financial Group and Rogers Media, raised an incredible $1.5 million during the sixth annual Shelter from the Storm campaign. Funds raised during the month-long campaign will go to more than 400 shelters for abused women across Canada, and violence prevention programs that are breaking the cycle of abuse.

A January 2010 Morgan Stanley report claims that within five years, more users will connect to the web via mobile devices than desktops. A March 2010 Nielsen study also claims that Smartphone penetration of the US mobile phone market will overtake feature phone penetration by the end of 2011.

The increasing popularity of smartphones will be a key driver in the expected growth of the web 2.0 because it is carried with the user at most times, is ideally placed to capture information user-generated content and social web interaction at its source.

Now is the time to start thinking about mobile marketing in a compelling and interesting way.

Here are five key steps that Promodem can help you with to get your mobile program in front of your consumers at the right time and place.

1. All mobile sites are not created equal
“Soon, the demand will necessitate that all communication must become mobile”

2. Optimize your site for mobile search
“Create a targeted landing page for easy analysis and campaign tuning”

3. Build your SMS dbase with “real time reactive txt response
“Utilize some high-yield mobile marketing tactics with big results”

4. LBS (Location Based Services)
“A personal GPS in your pocket offers up all sorts of localized marketing possibilities”

5. QR Codes
“QR codes will revolutionize the way the world works in the same way the web has morphed the way we live and communicate”

Mobile means “on the go,” and mobile marketing must therefore provide the consumer with something that is useful to them in the field.

Click here to read the pdf for a description of the five steps listed above and to learn more about how Promodem can get your brand or promotion connected with mobile marketing.

Smartphone penetration of the US mobile phone market will overtake feature phone penetration by the end of 2011, according to projections from The Nielsen Company (and they’re a very smart company).

Smartphones are set for rapid growth.

Here’s a re-cap of their latest report.

Although only 21% of American wireless subscribers were using a smartphone as of Q4 2009 compared to 19% in Q3 2009 and 14% at the end of 2008, Nielsen expects smartphones to account for more than half of the US mobile phone market by 2011. Nielsen predicts smartphones will account for 24% of the US mobile phone market in Q1 2010 and rise to about 33% market share by Q4 2010.

Growth will then accelerate in 2011, hitting 40% in Q1 2011 and about 50% by Q3 2011. Based on this rapid increase, smartphones should pass the 50% mark during Q4 2011.

Other Insights

* Fourteen percent of feature phone users only use their phone for voice communications, compared to 3% of smartphone users.
* Five percent of feature phone users have Wi-Fi, compared to 50% of smartphone users.
* Slightly more males (53%) than females (47%) use smartphones.
* Two-thirds of smartphone users are personal users and one-third are business users.
* Hispanic Americans and Asians are slightly more likely to have a smartphone than what their share of population would indicate, which is a trend Nielsen observes in the adoption of other mobile data services.

Smartphones Drive Web 2.0
The increasing popularity of smartphones will be a key driver in the expected growth of the web 2.0 market to almost $19 billion by 2014, according to Juniper Research. Juniper sees the mobile phone as a central catalyst for web 2.0 (which encompasses social web, geolocation and presence), because it is carried with the user at most times, is ideally placed to capture information at its source, and is a key enabled of user-generated content and social web interaction.

Now keep chanting “I need to develop a mobile version of my web site or my next promotion site. I need to call Promodem to help me develop my mobile site. I need to develop a mobile verion of my web site….”

For those who are still sitting on the fence regarding Facebook applications (I hope your legs are getting longer) I offer up the latest research .

New consumer research shows over 50% of Facebook fans and Twitter followers are more likely to buy, recommend than before they were engaged

In a recent study of social media usage it is clear that consumers who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to not only recommend, but they are also more likely to buy from those brands than they were before becoming fans/followers. The study of over 1500 consumers by market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that 60% of Facebook fans and 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower. And an impressive 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of. Considering Facebook’s over 400 million users, the opportunity is great for social media marketers.

The study also uncovered perceptions among consumers that those brands not engaging in social media are out of touch.

When asked the question “What does it say about a brand if they are not involved with sites like Facebook or Twitter?” they said the following:

• “It’s EXPECTED that a company have some digital face – whether it’s on FB or Twitter I don’t know – but they need a strong electronic presence or you doubt their relevance in today’s marketplace.” Female 50-54*

• “Either they are not interested in the demographic that frequents Facebook and Twitter or they are unaware of the opportunity to get more exposure in a more interactive method.” Male 35-39

• “It shows they are not really with it or in tune with the new ways to communicate with customers.” Female 18-24.

• “If they’re not on Facebook or Twitter, then they aren’t in touch with the “electronic” people.” Female 55-59

Recent statistics from Facebook show they have 400 million active users and more than 20 million people become fans each day. Twitter users post over 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.

Whether you have embraced social media or not, it’s hard not to recognize that it is an extremely important and relatively low cost touch point that has a direct impact on sales and positive word of mouth and those who companies or brands that do not engage social media are missing a huge opportunity and are saying to consumers that they are unwilling to engage with their consumers on their terms.

About the Study
Data was collected from 1,504 adults (aged 18 and over) via a nationally representative online survey questionnaire within the United States by Chadwick Martin Bailey between February 8, 2010 and February 9, 2010. In addition iModerate Research Technologies conducted one-on-one discussions to more fully contextualize their social media behaviors.

Repo Men, which opens March 19, is using barcode technology in its promotion. The movie is set in a future where people can buy artificial organs called “Artiforgs” from a company named The Union.  They are very expensive and can be bought on credit, but if a recipient misses a payment a Repo Man, who keeps track of payments by bar code scanners, removes the organ.

The promotion for the film includes a movie poster with a traditional barcode. Users scan these codes with a mobile scanning application, decode them and link to an organ catalogue, video clips, a guerilla web site supposedly representing a movement to resist The Union and a contest where players follow clues to find and catch one of four “runners” to win $7,500.

The Repo Men campaign joins a growing number of examples in which barcode technology used in print ads.  Magazines such as Esquire and InStyle are adding interactive graphics that require barcode readers to see complementary content. As more consumers install barcode reading apps to their smartphones, this will become a viable and complimentary mobile extension strategy particularly with a younger target audience that is more SMS inclined .

The Promodem Content Management Dashboard can be used to manage and deploy rich, user generated content in a timely manner. Our Dashboard permits you to customize the look and feel of the content and to use social media to extend your message anywhere.

This new Dashboard Features:

Simple Submission Process

Flexible User Registration and Login

Administrator Moderation and Control

Leverage Engagement and Involvement with Feedback Options

Push Contest Content Social Networks

Easy to Use Design Integration

Click here to open and view the PDF that explains how our Content Management Dashboard can be used to collect, monitor and display user generated content submissions here.

Contact Promodem for additional information, free consultation, and to arrange a demonstration of our Content Management Dashboard at 905 852 2615.

According to a recent survey from Performics and ROI Research, consumers are more willing to engage with – and buy from – brands on social networking sites than previously thought, especially if the ads and marketing messages they receive include offers for discounts, specials, deals, freebies, points or sweepstakes,

The joint study was undertaken to learn how various segments of consumers use social networks in their daily lives, specifically with regard to the purchase process for different types of products, and in relation to other media channels.

More than one-third (34%) of online social networkers say they have used a search engine to find information on a product, service or brand after seeing an ad on a social networking site, and 30% of respondents have learned about a new product, service or brand from a social networking site, the study found.

Moreover, the messages that resonate best with social networkers are the ones that make them feel as if they are getting preferential treatment, money-saving deals, or building points toward bigger rewards. Some 32% say messages about printable coupons on social sites resonate with them, and 28% say messages about sales or special deal notifications resonate with them.

The study results also indicate that consumers frequently talk about, recommend or review products on social networks:

• 46% say they would talk about or recommend a product on Facebook.
• 44% of Twitter users have recommended a product.
• 36% of YouTube users have gone to an online retailer or ecommerce site after learning about a brand on a social network site.

Social networks are creating a monumental shift in how people communicate with each other and with brands. One in four respondents have four or more active social network accounts and more than one quarter access their Facebook or Twitter accounts at least once a day via their mobile phone. Performics and ROI also asked the 30% (about 1,000 respondents) who didn’t qualify to take the full survey why they choose not to use social networks. More than three-fourths (77%) cite a lack of interest,  28% note privacy concerns and 27%  just don’t have the time. Only 13% say they don’t “want all the connections.”

The Performics and ROI study provide a compelling reason for marketers to keep better tabs on consumer behavior as social networks continue to gain steam.