This session took place October 1st and promised to teach those in attendance how marketers can reach very specific groups of users via behavioral targeting, niche social sites, campaigns at specific demographics, hyper targeting and more.  The panel consisted of:

• Chris Saad, Founder and CEO, DataPortability.org
• Will Moss, CEO, ConnectPlatform.com
• Ian Swanson, Founder and CEO, Sometrics

To be honest I didn’t like the unorganized nature the panelists took, but there were some decent take-home notes to be had from the session.

Bullet Point Review!

• Methods to find a niche are Google Search and Twitter Search.
• Don’t just observe, participate.
• Lots of people started with apps and then moved to a main web property.
• Find your audience – use demographics, psychographics, behavioral marketing – find them and partner up.
• Partner with fast growing niche networks or create one if it doesn’t exist yet in the niche you’re interested in.
• Experiment with creative ads with the owners of these networks.
• Advertising is yelling, marketing is having a conversation.
• Learn the social contract and participate accordingly.
• Have a process in place on how to respond and join the conversation.
• Put your money where your mouth is and allocate resources to monitor and respond in social media settings.
• There is a need for a new metric.  Keywords used to tell people, not so much anymore.
• Need for interests to be measured (APML).
• How do you target?  Try – do sample buys, experiment, do lots of little buys.
• Social networks are still cheap to advertise on because they don’t yet perform like traditional ad buys in terms of CPM.
• See what keywords people associate with your brand (quality, sucks, etc).
• Use social networking for lead generation.
• No one’s talking about your product, they’re talking about your brand – so collaborate and build a product that they’ll want to talk about.
• Use social media to saturate a niche market; brainstorm about communities of interest and participate and show your subject matter expertise.
• Use search engines to find individuals and follow them back to their communities.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• You might want to go local before going national – not all products and services scale effectively to a national audience.
• Widgets are the bumper sticker of the web.
• Develop content and specific tags (zip codes, city names, etc.) in targeting.
• Get analytics to see where your traffic is coming from.
• Keyword ads like AdWords, Facebook, MySpace are great for segmentation.
• Hyper targeting is growing in adoption.
• Open Social – create widgets that will work across multiple social networks.
• If you’re going to buy advertising on a social network, you should also participate in that network.
• Be part of that eco system in as many ways as possible.
• Using engagement to see how well ads work can also be used to see what a particular segment is interested in (e.g. how many people mouse over, click, etc.)
• Data portability will break down barriers to entry.
• Using a 3rd party metric contrasts vs. internal and lends credibility and gives you a comparison of you vs. your competitors.

Even the Q&A portion was just an extension of the session, so it was hard to really distinguish what people were asking.  It was a decent session but could have been perked up with a bit more empirical data and maybe some real-world experiences.

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The topic set forth is mobile marketing and social media’s impact.  Unfortunately, through no fault of the organizers, the panelists fell way short of linking mobile marketing to social media at all.  My laptop battery died at the beginning of this last session, so I was unable to post it right away like all of the other panels today.

• Amielle Lake, Co-Founder & CEO, Tagga.com
• Ben Bajarin, Director of Consumer Technology Practice, Creative Strategies.

One of the first things that Amielle said is that neither of them have very much experience with mobile marketing, and she tried to use this as an example of how new a medium this is.  Sorry, that just discredits you right away as not knowing what you’re talking about.  There were a few points, but I was less than impressed.

They were very clearly unprepared and ended what they were talking about (which had nothing to do with social media) rather quickly and opened up for audience questions and anecdotes.  Some of the audience members even seemed just as qualified to speak about mobile marketing as the panelists, and the panelists looked like the questions confused them at times.  To their credit, some of the questions were incredibly detailed and long winded, so perhaps they just didn’t know how to approach them right away.

Bullet Point Review!

• Advertising industry as a whole has been looking to just re-purpose current content for mobile instead of doing something innovative.
• There’s been a rise in the number of people who own smart phones.
• Smart phone advertising needs to be contextual.
• Devices are using the web as a common feature.
• We are very far behind globally in mobile technology in general – Asia is in the lead, and Europe is even significantly more advanced than the US.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Does the 45+ crowd just not get it?  They’re learning; there’s definitely a slower adoption process.
• How do you serve ads with any quality?  Amielle answered with a plug for her company.
• What are the challenges in dealing with various carriers?  They will eventually want a piece of the action, but right now the biggest hurdles are technology – you need to use an SMS aggregator who’ll set you up with the short code and do the wheeling and dealing with the carrier for you.  They cost a lot of money up front, take 4-6 months to get set up, and then charge a monthly fee on top of that.
• Mobile marketing has incredible potential to be highly targeted and sophistically geotargeted.
• US carrier structure is very different from Europe and Asia’s.
• SMS content is definitely more appreciated by consumers, so you have to give good content for any kind of advertising along side it to be acceptable.
• Hard to satisfy broad interests – some interfaces will be more appreciated than others by various groups and individuals.  Can’t please everyone.
• Is there a tool that will aggregate campaigns and marketing across different channels like mobile, social media, email, and possibly integrate them? Nope, but that would be great (thank you for that stunning report, Cpt. Obvious).
• Are there standard tools to filter the incredible amount of user data?  Actually, data being collected now is limited to carrier, type of phone, time of interaction, click-through if there’s a mobile site, very basic stuff.  There are ad platforms that can assist in targeting your ads to the right audience.
• It will get better, but more precise data with demographics and geographics isn’t there yet.

Ultimately this session turned from a panel into more of a loose discussion and plug fest, and really, aside from a throw away mention of a Facebook app on phones, had nothing to do with social media.  Had they introduced it like a “clinic” type open forum discussion, it wouldn’t have been so awkward but the expectation of panel experts was already set.  It was a disappointing end to an otherwise good conference, although through no fault of mThink.  I hope for these speakers’ sakes that they brush up their power point skills and general professionalism and come a bit more prepared for their next speaking gig.

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Visitor Segmentation:

• Differentiating of users to site by categories such as age, sex, etc.

Being able to segment your visitors helps to target the ads best.  You can look at what pages different segments are spending the most time at and offer up the most relevant ads to that segment on that page.

Having ads more targeted to your audience helps to boost conversion rates.  For example, if you see that more women are reading a particular page than men, you can serve ads about clothing, shoes or jewelry instead of ads more commonly associated with men like home improvement stores, sports or video games.

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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine

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