Ten years ago, I was giving a lot of presentations on the topic of mobile commerce1
As I envisioned it, cell towers would be used to locate our phones and we would receive something similar to a text message when we neared an establishment with an offer to make like a special or time-limited discount.
That’s pretty much come true, although so far there aren’t any truly “push” marketing messages out there — the kind that show up on your phone suddenly, like a text message does.
Apps like Foursquare and Gowalla are pull-based — you have to be in the app and ask to see any nearby specials if they’re available. Clearly, a much better solution.
Still, though, I’m beginning to see what can only be called location spam appear on our phones.
Take, for instance, the deal Starbucks made recently with Foursquare. Any time you’re within walking distance of a Starbucks outlet, a special offer appears to give the mayor2 a discount.
I live in Vancouver. There are more Starbucks in this city than stop lights. One intersection even3 has two Starbucks! That means that pretty much any time you use Foursquare in Vancouver, you’re going to get an offer from Starbucks.
Problem is, the Starbucks offer is lousy. It’s only for the person who has checked in the most — and even then, it’s a cheap offer: $1 off a limited number of their cold beverages.
I’ve stopped touching the “Special Nearby” banner because I know it’s just going to be a Starbucks promotion I can’t take advantage of.
I can only imagine this getting worse.
The real problem is that Starbucks — and other places that offer Mayor deals — aren’t being particularly strategic about their Foursquare placements.
Foursquare lets you offer a special to people who’ve checked in x number of times — a far more rewarding offer to your loyal customers. Or for a new store, offer a discount if it’s the first time someone’s checked in.
These cheap and prolific Mayor deals will be piling on top of each other soon and, if that happens, the whole concept will become pretty much unusable.
UPDATE: Rob Cottingham has some excellent thoughts on this here.
I’ve just started booking my new presentation Using Location-Based Marketing to Drive More Revenue: Six Key Strategies for Mobile Commerce. If you’re interested in booking it, please inquire about a date.
I used to own the domain mobilecommerce.org; I really should have kept that. [↩]
the person who has checked into that location the most [↩]
While helping a friend determine which stores had iPads in stock (here’s a hint: None!), I ran across this graphic on London Drugs‘ web site. It was in a block of rotating graphic.
It got me thinking how absolutely out of date the phrase “See in-store for details” is.
Print or broadcast ads, of course, don’t have enough space or time to list all the details like technical specifications, so this phrase was necessary. But is there really any need for it in the age of the web? Why didn’t London Drugs just put those “details” on a hyperlinked web page? It’s not like they were trying to get people to call for the price and rope them into coming in — Apple’s retailers aren’t allowed to discount.
It got me wondering — are there any other retail practices that are obsolete?
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Okay, folks, it’s time to interject a little honesty into the social media dialogue.
Despite grand platitudes of how Twitter is ‘shepherding a new era of corporate transparency and a spirit of engaging with customers,’ the fact remains that even the best corporate examples of such engagement on Twitter remain trivial at best.
Just because a company launches a Twitter page and assigns a marketing intern to tweet replies back to anyone who tweets them does not mean they have engaged in any kind of conversation or dialogue. They most certainly haven’t changed any paradigms, shifted any culture, or launched any new eras.
An @Reply Is Not a Conversation
Social media “evangelists” frequently fall into the mistake of trumping up this kind of direct contact as more than it is.
A conversation is not an answered question nor a thrown kudos. An example:
This friendly response to someone’s tweet is, to be sure, a nice little gesture on Rescuetime‘s part. But it’s just that. A nice gesture. Good customer service. Put down that pipe, Shaggy; it’s too early to spark that bad-boy.
As you probably know, you can only tell if someone has opened your email if they are using HTML email and have images enabled. (Each email is sent with a uniquely identifying tiny, transparent image. But if images are disabled on the receipient’s side, you won’t be able to tell if someone opened the email.)
So, you need to convince people to turn on images. Of course you could always ASK them to, but you’ve not offering any real incentive to do that.
That’s where the ALT tag comes in.
Create an image and put in its ALT tag something like “To tell if you won the contest, turn on images!” or “Turn on images to see this photo of our CEO drunk at our last Christmas party.” (Okay, maybe not that last one.) Your “sell” has to be something that your email target would really want to see, and something that you can deliver only in text, like the URL of a special web site that only your subscribers would get access to.
That way, they’ll only see the information if they turn on images. And up go your visible open rates!
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Take, for instance, the deal Starbucks made recently with Foursquare. Any time you’re within walking distance of a Starbucks outlet, a special offer appears to give the mayor2 a discount.
