Posted by: Micah Pratt, director of social networking R&D
Jennings Social Media Marketing (JSMM) has incorporated QR codes and text messaging into its services. The company’s official announcement was included in a new Web video, featuring Frank Ancona Honda, KickaNotch Mobile and CEO of JSMM Valerie Jennings.
Jennings said that with the increase of smartphone users and the recent estimate on engagement with those who are using social media and scanning QR codes, the company found it imperative to add mobile to its services. “With the success of leveraging monetization with QR codes and text messaging through offers and the promotions through our channels we are hoping for some amazing results and we are looking forward to seeing this new technology as it improves and the usage goes up,” said Jennings.
Posted by: Micah Pratt, director of social networking R&D
Jennings Social Media Marketing (JSMM) announced their most recent Facebook contest, following a small poll the company posted on Facebook over the summer. Enter for a chance to win social media marketing services by JSMM just in time for the holidays by “Liking” us on Facebook and signing up via the sweeps tab.
The winner of the contest will receive a boutique style campaign which may include a social media evaluation, channel branding and designs, channel updates to social media sites and organic search engine optimization analysis.
Valerie Jennings, CEO of JSMM, said they polled their Facebook fans and asked which grand prize they would most like to receive: an iPad, Mac computer, iPod or two free months of social media services from JSMM. The two free months from JSMM won with an overall majority. “We are excited to reward our fans in time for the holidays and hope the grand prize winner really takes advantage of this opportunity,” said Jennings.
Jennings Social Media Marketing is a full service company that utilizes the art of online storytelling with the science of measuring quantifiable results. JSMM creates comprehensive social media marketing, mobile, Web videos and website design and development strategies. The company represents publicly traded to medium-sized businesses across the U.S. and overseas including technology, sports, sustainability, entertainment, travel, financial, health care and real estate (www.jenningssocialmedia.com).
By Valerie Jennings, CEO of Jennings Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is something we have been doing for more than six years at JSMM. Although, I started the company more than eight years ago in June 2003, we have been analyzing data across marketing channels during that time and into social media for roughly six years. We have valued strong organic search engine optimization (SEO) as part of our social media marketing strategy since we first began this system, but I know we have also reviewed other types of metrics such as engagement, brand awareness, monetization and other forms of successes such as cross-promoting our social media with e-newsletters, Marketwire press releases, media outreach, print pieces and websites.
Our successes at JSMM include tripling targeted website traffic, growing Facebook fans by the thousands, generating hundreds of new emails for prospecting via Facebook contests, downloading whitepapers and converting website traffic into revenue. I have a case studies page on the website which is broken down by industry that may be helpful to review specific information.
This article, written by Ron Joes at Clickz, does an outstanding job breaking down the different ways to measure social media:
As you know, the ability to measure the effectiveness of marketing activities is imperative to any company’s marketing strategy. Measuring social media marketing isn’t as easy as other marketing channels, but it can be done with the right tools and mindset.
As you consider your social media monitoring strategy, it will help to group your efforts into a progression where awareness and exposure lead to desired action from your target audience. As you do so, it will help to place each type of measurement into the proper context and will help you visualize how each one leads you closer to desired results.
Posted by: Micah Pratt, director of social networking R&D
The holidays are just around the corner, and businesses are finalizing their marketing campaigns to optimize the shopping rush. Here is an article from InformationWeek.com, written by Kevin Casey, about how companies can prepare their social networking sites in time for the holidays.
Will your company’s Facebook page help you take advantage of the holiday shopping rush? Consider these tips for SMBs and fine-tune your strategy.
Small and midsize businesses (SMBs), like Santa Claus, should be making a list and checking it twice. But rather than sorting out who’s naughty or nice, consumer-focused concerns should fine-tune their Facebook presence in advance of the holiday shopping rush.
Among the reasons: The bevy of market research showing shoppers increasingly turning to social sites before they make purchase decisions. Consider this recent study, which found 51% of consumers are more likely to buy something from a company after becoming their fan on Facebook. With the annual flurry of capitalism known as holiday shopping looming large, it’s time for retailers and other consumer-focused SMBs to make sure they’re ready to reap the rewards.
That means doing a bit more than putting up a page and hoping it connects with customers, according to Laura O’Shaughnessy, CEO of SocialCode, a social agency that emphasizes a quantitative approach to performance advertising, with a particular focus on Facebook. The firm recently added LinkedIn to its mix, and is considering the likes of Twitter and Google+.
Socialcode itself has an interesting SMB story. The 50-person agency was born as an internal department of The Washington Post Company, which owns–in addition to the flagship newspaper of the same name–a number of media, education, and other businesses. O’Shaughnessy said that the results of Facebook programs for the company’s various brands were so strong that it began shifting money away from its Google adverting and spending more on social. Later, Socialcode was spun out as an independent subsidiary and began signing on external customers.
In an interview, O’Shaughnessy shared these four tips for optimizing your Facebook activities in the coming weeks.
1. Set goals. The businesses that get the most out of their Facebook presence are the ones that have goals behind it. “Step one is deciding: Is my goal to drive people into my restaurant, is it to drive people into my store, is it to introduce a new product, is it to get people to buy my product?” O’Shaughnessy said. Without a clear sense of what they want to accomplish, SMBs, can’t make efficient use of their resources.
2. Design a campaign with a “viral accelerant.” O’Shaughnessy said the most powerful, effective Facebook campaigns place heavy emphasis on sharing. That often means developing an application, game, or a related microsite to encourage people to spread the word–no matter what the word is. “You want to make sure you’re taking advantage of the sharing activities that are going on,” O’Shaughnessy said.
While a development-intensive application might require a bigger budget, O’Shaughnessy noted that there are sharing-oriented things marketers can do on a smaller scale. She gave as an example a nonprofit client that found strong results simply using a light application aimed at sharing badges on Facebook walls.
“The most important thing about Facebook is really perpetuating that social sharing–getting one friend to spread, in this case, a badge to another friend,” O’Shaughnessy said. “Then all of that person’s friends see that action, so you get this immediate lift.”
Posted by: Micah Pratt, Director of Social Networking R&D
The 2012 presidential election will be like one never experienced before. Social networking sites are playing a role in these elections that wasn’t imaginable four years ago by hosting debates, facilitating the political conversation and connecting candidates with voters in the digital world. Here is an article from CMO.com, written by Kim Soth, senior vice president of business development & marketing at Jennings Social Media Marketing, on how to get Facebook ads to work in your favor.
There is much talk in social-media circles about how to build your audience organically and that, for the most part, it is the best way to build an audience. It is certainly a good way, but it shouldn’t be your only strategy. We suggest that if you are a new company or are launching a product, you can do a great job of building fans with Facebook ads, which offer a great alternative to your marketing strategy. What’s more, Facebook ads are not nearly as complex as Google AdWords—but don’t let the simplicity fool you. For our campaigns we’ve found that Facebook ads, on average, deliver a higher click-through rate than Google AdWords.
For example, we were brought in to help promote a senatorial race. After a month of struggling to gain fans on Facebook, we eventually doubled the candidate’s fans in a week by running ads: We picked up 1,500 fans for a total cost of around $1,000.
So if you think this strategy might be for you, here are five tips that will help you make Facebook ads work for your campaigns.
1. It’s about testing. Always run multiple ads targeting the same “Likes and Interests,” and keep your Likes and Interests the same while testing different ad copy, headlines, or images. What needs to remain the same as your control for a general test is your Likes and Interests keywords. You can test many controls, but the simplest is Likes and Interests. Facebook targets audiences off of two variables: Users and Likes and Interests: If you change these in two different ads, then you don’t have an apples-to-apples test.
2. Likes and Interests matter. Likes and Interests are essentially keywords you are targeting for your campaign based on what shows up for a user. You don’t want to use random Likes and Interests keywords. To make Likes and Interests work for you, it’s important to target based on what is associated with that individual in some way—associations they belong to, things they like, where they work, what they are fans of, or what they’ve written on their walls.
It’s is important not to get carried away and add a hundred Likes and Interests keywords just because it’s cool to see the numbers of possible audience continue to rise. It would seem that big numbers of audience is a good idea, but it’s actually counterintuitive. You want to choose highly targeted Likes and Interests keywords that are tightly associated with your ad copy. Don’t choose a keyword just because of its audience reach. You want to make sure it matches everything you know about the ad copy. Just because someone rides a motorcycle doesn’t mean he is interested in a Harley. One person might buy sports bikes, another might buy BMW motorcycles, while another might be really into Harleys. So it does no good to blast all of them with a message about Harley gear.
Posted by: Micah Pratt, director of social networking r&d
Thank you to Chantal Tode at Mobile Commerce Daily for interviewing Valerie Jennings, CEO of Jennings Social Media Marketing, and Jason Heard, Sales Manager at Frank Ancona Honda, about the launch of Frank Ancona Honda’s QR code and SMS campaign.
Car dealership Frank Ancona Honda is adding SMS and QR codes to its social media efforts to enhance customer engagement.
Frank Ancona Honda currently has a mobile site and is active in social media. It will expand these efforts going forward with QR codes and SMS as the traffic to its sites via mobile continues to grow.
“We need to expand into mobile to support our growing customer demand on smartphones,” said Jason Heard, sales manager of Frank Ancona Honda, Olathe, KS.
“We are utilizing mobile sites right now and this is the next step to not only expanding our mobile presence, but also adding more engaging to our social media practices,” he said.
Marketing Insight
Jennings Social Media Marketing is managing the dealership’s mobile marketing rollout.
Jennings Social Media Marketing has been working with Frank Ancona Honda for almost a year managing its social media.
The dealership is also working with KickANotch for mobile tracking.
QR codes and SMS will help Frank Ancona Honda engage with its customers via social media channels and mobile as part of its ongoing marketing activities around local events.
Mobile will also help the dealership track the effectiveness of its marketing.
“We are currently sponsoring several events in the local market and the QR codes will help us understand the impact of having our cars on display at these events,” Mr. Heard said.
As the popularity of smart phones continues to rise, it was only a matter of time before the mobile screen began to catch up to the big screen in terms of usage. A new study conducted by a mobile analytics firm, Flurry, points out that approximately 50 percent of mobile consumers are utilizing mobile apps during TV’s prime time.
Flurry also reports that mobile applications currently reach more than 20 million U.S. consumers per hour and the number of active iOS and Android devices in the U.S. is estimated at 110 million. These numbers reflect a significant impact to prime time viewing habits.
For TV broadcasters, prime time is 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. In radio, programming and advertising are all about morning “drive time.” On the Web, the popularity of social networks like Facebook, instant messaging like Skype and video-on-demand services like Hulu are pushing up usage in the evening.
So what time of day do mobile apps find their biggest audience? A new study by the mobile analytics firm Flurry shows the audience for iPhone and iOS apps rises steadily during the day and peaks at about 9 p.m. That’s when half the U.S. app audience is using apps. “Mobile consumers are using apps either instead of, or along-side prime-time television and the Internet,” stated a Flurry blog post on the study.
The finding contributes to a growing body of research suggesting that two-screen viewing is becoming increasingly common while people are watching TV. The relative size of the TV audience during prime time was larger than that for mobile apps, at more than 60%. But app usage remained higher than TV from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and higher than the Internet almost all day. The Internet’s reach peaked at 7 p.m., when 40% of the audience for that medium was on the Web.
Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development
Over the years, Facebook has been known to make small changes to how users operate on the social networking site. With Google+ becoming a threatening competitor, Mark Zuckerberg made serious changes to Facebook. On September 22, Mark Zuckerberg explained exactly what the 800 million users could expect from the new and improved Facebook at its annual developer conference including:
•Timeline: a stream of information about you
•Facebook Gestures: turning any verb into a button, similar to the “like” button. Example: Reading a book.
•Open Graph: third-party companies can connect their apps and services to Facebook using a one-time permission from the user to share stuff on Facebook
•Subscribe: subscribing to strangers or celebrities to receive posts from them without being Facebook friends
•Ticker: a real-time list of what your friends are posting
•Media: watching TV and movies, listening to music and reading news all within Facebook
Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development
Sharing and finding content over the Internet has become easier then ever, and now social media is changing the ways search engines track quality content. This article from Mashable.com takes a look at how social networks have impacted search engines.
Old school SEO pros cover your ears, or be prepared to adapt your craft: Search engines are changing, and social media is a huge part of that change.
Bing, Google, and an increasing swath of nimble little search engines like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are incorporating social data into their results. This is potentially great news for new businesses trying to achieve visibility in search. It’s less great news for sites that rely heavily on link buying (illegal, but hard to catch), producing huge volumes of borderline-useless content (long-tail, content farm approach), or just really old domains (previously an SEO trump card).
Both Bing and Google admitted in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social signals, such as tweets, Facebook Likes, and +1s.
“As ideas, thoughts, questions and answers are shared more freely and easily than ever, the increased amount of information from social sources provides great benefits to users,” says a Microsoft spokesperson for Bing (who asked to remain anonymous).
“The links that you build through social media, the references, the authority — all can have an impact in various ways on how you are ranked and listed even in ‘regular’ search results,” says Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, in an email interview. “Social media allows for people to provide more trusted signals.”
Search Engines Adapt to SurviveSince the early Internet days of Excite and Webcrawler, the principal goal of search engines has been to help people find what they’re looking for. Google rose to dominate the industry by tracking better indicators of content quality than anyone else. It developed a complex algorithm that measured which websites were “voting” for others by linking to them.
Essentially, it was social media, but for websites rather than people. If your site had lots of links from relevant sites, your Google rank climbed. Plenty of other factors, like putting keywords into headlines and titles, remained in play (and continually evolved), but the game changer of the last decade was links.
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry emerged to help webmasters play the “me rank higher” game with Google. On the one hand, website owners attempt to adhere to Google’s standards and prove they are high quality (creating relevant, high quality content and formatting it to Google’s taste). On the other hand, shadier sites try to trick Google’s secret formula, “pretending” to be good content without having to bother with creating useful stuff.
Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development
Using location-based services to find the closest restaurant or to get directions is becoming the newest trend in mobile technology. Here is an article from The Washington Post on how Americans are using location-based services.
Not many people are “checking in” using services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, but over a quarter of Americans are checking out their surroundings using location-based services.
The latest research from Pew’s Internet and American Life Project found that 28 percent of American adults have used mobile or social location-based services to get recommendations such as the best-rated nearby cafe or directions from their current location.
Only about 5 percent of those surveyed used services that post their current locations, though smartphone users were more than twice as likely to signal their location to their friends. In a similar vein, about 9 percent of all users used the location-tagging options on social media.
As once might expect, younger smartphone users are more likely overall to use check-in services, but there was no clear divide on age when it came to hitching a location-tag to a Facebook or Twitter message.
Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development
According to a recent story on CNN.com, smartphones still do not make up the majority of the U.S. market. However, we cannot ignore the value, power and influence of these mobile devices that are about to change the way we conduct business, review products, make buying decisions, and most importantly, interact with our friends.
Smartphones may attract nearly all of the marketing hype and news coverage, but comScore’s latest statistics show that smartphones still comprise only a minority of the U.S. mobile market — about 35%, as of July 2011.
The other 65% of U.S. mobile handsets in use are “feature phones” — which tend to be much less expensive to buy and own. Often, these phones do not require a pricey two-year wireless service contract with hefty early termination fees.
Even though smartphones cost much more, these devices have been getting popular with U.S. consumers, even in light of the country’s economic recession. After all, a 35% market share is nothing to sneeze at — especially considering that smartphones have only been widely available in the U.S. for about five years.
At some point, a majority of U.S. mobile users will indeed own smartphones. But that shift won’t happen as quickly as early forecasts anticipated.
Back in March 2010, the Nielsen Company proclaimed that smartphones would overtake feature phones by 2011. Specifically, they predicted that by the end of Q3 2011 (about a month from now), most U.S. mobile users would own smartphones.
That ambitious prediction doesn’t seem to be panning out.
For over a year, comScore has been publishing monthly mobile-market-share statistics that show the percentage of U.S. smartphones. I’ve been tracking these figures. Based on this data, it looks like it’ll be roughly October 2012 before smartphones actually take over as a majority of U.S. handsets.
Posted by Micah Pratt: social networking research and development
The convergence of social media with mobile applications has led to cross promotional marketing, and if done correctly, can lead to major success. Here is an article by Krishna Subramanian from Mashable.com about eight ways to make sure your mobile application gets noticed.
Developing a mobile app is the easy part. Getting that app noticed is difficult. And getting the app to go viral is like winning the lottery. Yet many developers get millions of downloads time after time. How?
It’s all about app store SEO, and some developers have mastered it. Here are a few tips and tricks of the trade to help get your app to the top of heap.
Time Is of The Essence
The first two weeks of an app’s life are critical and will likely determine its future visibility in the app store. Top applications develop popularity within two weeks of release, and most applications have a tendency to drop in chart position over time. Remember, whatever you do — marketing campaigns, cross distribution and so on — the quicker you do it, the bigger the impact.
Posted by: Micah Pratt, social networking research & development
Today, more and more marketers are turning to online marketing programs because of the noticeable role that peers play in consumers’ purchasing desicions. What many of these interactive marketers are failing to realize is the volume of social data created by the influence of peers in purchase decisions. Here is an article by Nate Elliott, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, about how to effective utilize social data.
Last year, American consumers posted more than a billion opinions about products and services online, according to data collected by my company. With peer influence playing such a prominent role in consumers’ purchase decisions, it’s no surprise many interactive marketers are tapping into that influence via viral marketing programs and influencer outreach.
However, the vast majority of marketers ignore the staggering volume of social data all this influence creates. And those who do study social data typically use it for the wrong reason: to measure the brand impact of their marketing campaigns.
Social Data Is Often Based On Small Sample Sizes
With so many opinions posted online, you might assume it would be easy to find a reliable sample of data to analyze for brand impact. But even popular consumer brands often find it difficult to collect usable social data.
For instance, I recently reviewed a listening report for a global sporting goods brand — one that sponsors leading teams and athletes around the world and has strong brand awareness. I was surprised to see that the brand was mentioned in social media only a few hundred times each week in the U.S., and less than 100 times each week in other key markets around the world.
To make matters worse, the low quality of many social sentiment analysis tools reduces sample sizes further. When listening tools can’t decide whether comments are positive or negative, they’re usually labeled as having “no sentiment.” Three-quarters of the mentions for this brand were tagged as such, leaving less than two-dozen weekly usable posts in some markets.
If you asked your market insights team or your survey provider to analyze 25 consumer survey responses, they’d tell you it’s impossible to find statistical significance in such a small sample. The same standards must be applied to social data as well.
The Royal Wedding has already taken over trending topics across the web, and we can now report that it has broken at least one record: concurrent viewers on Livestream.
The company says that its livestream of William and Kate’s wedding topped 300,000 concurrent viewers at 6 a.m. ET on Friday morning. CEO Max Haot tells us that he expects “at least 2 million” unique viewers by the time the broadcast is done. Livestream partnered with the Associated Press, UK Press Association, CBS and Entertainment Tonight for its coverage.
Akamai reports that the event broke broader live streaming records as well. A representative for the company — whose network hosts some of the web’s largest news sites — reports that “concurrent live streams of Royal Wedding on Akamai surpassed the 1.6M peak set by World Cup in June of 2010.”
However, the event does not appear to be the biggest news event in web history. While the 4.6 million page views per minute reported on the news sites Akamai delivers content for this morning surpass the total for Barack Obama’s presidential election victory, they fall well short of the 10.3 million page views per minute record set last June when a World Cup qualifying match and the longest Wimbledon match in history took place simultaneously.
Recently, we uploaded some pictures of the Jennings office and staff on CNN iReport.
Here was our message to iReport
iReport —
Hi CNN,
Thank you for this great opportunity to share our office with your viewers.
We are located in the Kansas City metro area. Here are the names of the individuals in the pictures, who work at Jennings Social Media Marketing (www.jenningssocialmedia.com).
Valerie Jennings; CEO and founder Jamie Sutera; VP of R&D Jared Cook: VP of marketing Ben Parks: senior VP of Web design and development Micah Pratt: social networking R&D Mikimoto: office dog
Twitter has recently been in talks to buy TweetDeck, a third-party client of Twitter that allows users to connect with contacts across a variety of social networking sites including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more. According to an article by Chris Taylor on mashable.com, Twitter does not know the exact number of TweetDeck users, but believes it includes the most obsessive power users in social media.
Twitter is in talks to purchase TweetDeck Inc. for $50 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
TweetDeck is one of the most popular third-party Twitter clients, available in desktop, iPad, iPhone and Android versions. It displays your Twitter news feed, @mentions and direct messages, along with your Facebook feeds — all on the same screen, all updating in real time. TweetDeck can also support updates from MySpace, LinkedIn and Foursquare.
The 15-person company, based in the U.K., has never revealed how many users TweetDeck has. The number may be small — but it is also likely to include the most obsessive power users in social media.
At the Social Good Summit held by Mashable and 92Y, Chris Hughes commented on the upcoming release of a new social network designed for non-profit organizations. Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, explained his passion for Jumo, the new network. Jumo will primarily exist to build relationships between people and non-profit organizations. He believes that giving begins with a relationship, and Jumo will help create these connections. Watch this video to learn more about the innovative social network that Hughes has planned.
Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week is in full swing. While you may not be there, new websites and social networking opportunities allow you to be a part of the New York Fashion event. Thanks to social media, Fashion Week just got hotter! Check out this article from Stephanie Marcus at mashable.com, which offers a variety of links to experience it.
New York Fashion Week kicked off Thursday, September 9, with more than 90 of the world’s best known and up-and-coming designers ready to display their Spring 2011 Collections.
It’s an exciting time for industry heavyweights and fashion lovers alike, as there have been some big changes to this year’s event. For the first time since 1993, Bryant Park will not be home to the glamorous white tents, as the runways are now located at Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. What’s more, Fashion Week, now branded as Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, is embracing technology — keeping the event as innovative as the clothes gracing the runway.
The chaos and drama associated with fashion shows may be mitigated this year by Fashion GPS, a 6-year-old startup that is managing 184 shows during the event’s week long run. The company provides a hi-tech approach to managing registration, credentials, and seating systems and also offers real-time online invitations and RSVPs.
The digital checkin system means it’s going to be a lot harder bypass security if you’re not on the list. And while Fashion Week was moved to its new location to accommodate its expansion and grant access to more press, you, the fashion-minded civilian probably didn’t score an invite.
Social media campaigns are evolving as advertisers learn which techniques work and which are not as beneficial. As advertisers become more interested in social media marketing, they are willing to pay more. Facebook still leads the way in money spent for advertisements, while Twitter and location-based programs are in the experimental phase. This article from Adam Ostrow at mashable.com shows where the money is in this expanding industry.
This post originally appeared on Forbes.com, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about social media, business and technology.
Citing a recovering economy and increasing marketer interest in the space, research company eMarketer recently raised its 2010 spending forecast for advertising on social networks by nearly 30% to $1.68 billion domestically.
Within the social media world, however, a number of trends are dictating how, why and where money gets spent — trends that will push the industry past the $2 billion mark in 2011, according to eMarketer’s projections.
With New York Fashion Week upon us, many of us are becoming more excited about our personal style. We know that social media is beneficial for networking, marketing, and many other activities. However, if you are looking to improve your wardrobe and save money while doing it, look to social networking. Mollie Vandor, from mashable.com, shows you how to use online resources that appeal to your fashion sense in this article filled with tips and links.
Just because the economy is still depressed doesn’t mean you have to be. In fact, there are plenty of ways to live it up without seeing your bank balance plummet — especially if you know how to use social media to live the good life on tight budget.
Even the most reclusive social media shut-ins need to leave the house for some in-person networking at some point. And when you do, you don’t want to look like the poor slob who just threw on whichever pants were closest to the computer screen. Nor do you want to be the designer diva who can’t afford cab fare because she blew all her bucks on a brand name bag. Fortunately, thanks to a few online tips and tricks, high fashion doesn’t have to come with a high price tag.
What do you use your smart phone for most? Is it to find the nearest bakery, or get directions to the airport, or is it to check the latest scores of the Royals vs. Angeles game while at work? Whatever it is you use your phone for the fact is life is made a lot easier with it. Here is an article from mashable.com about the top five mobile commerce trends in 2010.
The mobile trends series is supported by Samsung. Read more about the Samsung Galaxy here.
Considering that most people would rather lose their wallet than misplace their cell phone, it’s fitting that the mobile world is quickly becoming a new hub for business. For many of us, our cell phone never leaves our side. It holds a place at the dinner table, is easily accessible in your bag’s front pocket, and often, somehow it even manages to end up sharing your pillow at night. Busy schedules mean people are often on the move and when marketers and companies can’t reach consumers at their computers, on TV, before the previews at the movies, with billboards, or magazine and newspaper ads, they must feel assured that they can still reach them on their cell phones.
Mobile commerce, or m-commerce, is simply the ability to conduct business transactions through a mobile device. With smartphone sales rising 49% in the first quarter of 2010, never before has it been so easy to shop, anywhere, anytime from the palm of your hand. There is an enormous amount of ongoing market research, and though there has been a variety of numbers estimated and reported, they all conclude that mobile commerce is a profitable and rapidly growing market.
By 2015, it’s estimated that shoppers from around the world will spend about $119 billion on goods and services bought via their mobile phones, according to a study by ABI Research released this past February. In the United States alone, mobile shopping rose from $396 million in 2008 to $1.2 billion in 2009, and mobile campaign spending also increased by 25 to 30% over the past year, with companies shelling out just under $313 million according to the same study. Senior Analyst Mark Beccue, said that he’s forecasting U.S. sales to reach about $2.2 billion in 2010.
Here are five mobile commerce trends to keep an eye on for the remainder of 2010.
1. Bargain Hunting
It would seem that mobile purchasing often lends itself to an impulse buy. Maybe you just have to suddenly download that song from the iTunes Store or really want to make sure you have tickets to that hot concert. In this case, it’s the savvy shopper that has taken note of mobile commerce. Beccue said that in the fourth quarter of 2009, he started to notice something unexpected and a bit “weird.”
Bargain hunting has become extremely popular with apps like RedLaser that allow users to scan product bar codes and discover it’s various prices at different retailers. Shoppers are melding the two worlds of online/mobile shopping with actual physical shopping to make sure they get the best prices.
Will your company’s Facebook page help you take advantage of the holiday shopping rush? Consider these tips for SMBs and fine-tune your strategy. 
There is much talk in social-media circles about how to build your audience organically and that, for the most part, it is the best way to build an audience. It is certainly a good way, but it shouldn’t be your only strategy. We suggest that if you are a new company or are launching a product, you can do a great job of building fans with Facebook ads, which offer a great alternative to your marketing strategy. What’s more, Facebook ads are not nearly as complex as Google AdWords—but don’t let the simplicity fool you. For our campaigns we’ve found that Facebook ads, on average, deliver a higher click-through rate than Google AdWords.
Old school SEO pros cover your ears, or be prepared to adapt your craft: Search engines are changing, and social media is a huge part of that change.
Not many people are “checking in” using services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, but over a quarter of Americans are checking out their surroundings using location-based services.
Smartphones may attract nearly all of the marketing hype and news coverage, but comScore’s latest statistics show that smartphones still comprise only a minority of the U.S. mobile market — about 35%, as of July 2011.
Last year, American consumers posted more than a billion opinions about products and services online, according to data collected by my company. With peer influence playing such a prominent role in consumers’ purchase decisions, it’s no surprise many interactive marketers are tapping into that influence via viral marketing programs and influencer outreach. 
Twitter is in talks to purchase TweetDeck Inc. for $50 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
