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.

1. I used to own the domain mobilecommerce.org; I really should have kept that.
2. the person who has checked into that location the most
3. Robson and Haro

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?

DRIVE! The Busy Realtor’s Guide to Profitable Social Media Marketing is a quick 60+ page handbook for any realtor who wants to get started in social media marketing.

You’ll get an instantly downloadable PDF file, formatted just like a real book, that you can read or print out to take with you to read during those slow time in an open house. All you need to read it is the free Adobe Acrobat reader. There is no copy protection or digital rights management. It’s a simple, regular PDF file.

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100% No Questions Asked
Money-Back Guarantee

Read Drive! and if you’re not completely satisfied, just let me know and I’ll refund your money — no questions asked. You won’t find a better return policy than that anywhere.

Inside DRIVE!

The ASSURED ROI™ Model
You’ll learn how to deploy Tod’s system for launching a profitable social media campaign: Assume Nothing… Set SMART… Soft-Launch… Understand… Record and Measure… Engage Audience… Deliver Next Round.

Making a Better Online You
In this chapter, you’ll find out how to present yourself and your brand most effectively online — from the selection of a username to how to pick (and stick with) the perfect avatar.

The Tactics
This is the meat of the book — covering how to market yourself and your listings in social media spaces like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. It also covers why you shouldn’t overthink your web site, how to set up online focus groups, and how to launch an email marketing campaign.

BONUS: Tame Your Life
In this extra, you’ll learn how to set up your voicemail so that messages left for you are delivered directly to your blackberry (or any email address), and how to use an online ‘productivity tracker’ to get more done in the day.

About Tod Maffin

Tod Maffin speaks to thousands of realtors each year about how to make get new leads and sell properties faster using social media like Facebook, Twitter, and more. He has spoken to:

• Association of Real Estate Licence Law Officials, Florida
• RE/MAX Edmonton
• CIR Realty
• Maxwell Realty
• Ontario Real Estate Association
• Banff Western Connection Conference
• Ottawa Real Estate Board
• Association of Nova Scotia Realtors
• Toronto Real Estate Board
• Canadian Real Estate Association
• …and many more

What Audiences Say About Tod’s Presentations

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.

What do you think?

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!

If you’re a small business trying to find your way around social media, a very solid resource has hit the bookstores. Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook was written for marketers looking to find new effective ways to sell products and services through social media channels like blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

Julie Szabo and Darren Barefoot of Capulet Communications co-authored the book and I interviewed them about their ideas. You can listen here.

Listen: Tod Maffin interviews Darren and Julie

(This is an except from a radio show pilot I did for the MediaOnTap Conversation Radio Network. If you’d like your company to be heard on the show in a sponsorship capacity, contact Allan at info@mediaontap.com)

The new book Trust Agents has been generating a lot of buzz. Written by two social media veterans, they show readers how to tap into the power of social networks to build brands’ influence, reputation, and, of course, profits. [buy the book]

I had the chance to interview co-author Julien Smith for about 20 minutes about his ideas. The interview is in this post. (Chris Brogan is Julien’s co-author.)

Listen: Tod Maffin interviews Julien Smith about being a \”trust agent.\”

(This is an except from a radio show pilot I did for the MediaOnTap Conversation Radio Network. If you’d like your company to be heard on the show in a sponsorship capacity, contact Allan at info@mediaontap.com)