One of the big issues with mobile marketing is the viral marketing component which is considered in the article Mobile Word-of-Mouth – A Grounded Theory of Mobile Viral Marketing. The article brings up the issue of viral marketing as it pertains to the mobile marketplace. In considering this issue myself I came to the conclusion that viral marketing could be almost as important as the messages that marketers send out themselves. As mentioned in the Yaniv article the consumer has four different ways in which to communicate with his or her contacts and can use any combination of the four to communicate his or her likes or dislikes. In the age of mobile marketing consumers can communicate good or bad experiences with products almost instantly. This is a force to be reckoned with that marketers should keep a very close eye on.

Seth Godin puts forward a very interesting argument when he asks the question “Why hasn’t the whole cell phone industry exploded?” This question was asked in 2006 and his point then was that for years the mobile marketing industry had been the “next big thing” and it still had not really caught on. I know personally most of my friends only recently switched to smart phones from regular cell phones. I had thought that perhaps marketers were waiting for consumers to switch over however Godin had a different view. he stated that the problem was that the marketers were looking at the problem from the wrong direction. I think that marketers need to stop themselves every now and then and ask themselves one of the fundamental questions in marketing. What do the consumers need and how do I give it to them?

When thinking about these virtual worlds I begin to wonder about internet piracy and what issues there are around intellectual property rights in the virtual worlds. An article by Carolyn Bonifield and Amy Tomas addresses some of these issues. There are in fact issues related to this area in virtual worlds. Some of the obvious issues are copyright and trademark protection. There are a few unique issues as well such as personality protection and potential abuses of a user’s character. I found this to be quite interesting, how can you protect your virtual personality? This is something that marketers can take advantage of, it shows that in the virtual world enough people are concerned about being unique in the virtual world. Marketers have to be sure to market to the individual as opposed to the group.

All this talk of virtual worlds made me thing of where they are going in the not so distant future. I found an article by Jon Brodkin that talked about the 3D web. The 3D web is said to be the next step in online interactions and will be used to power virtual worlds such as Second Life. This interested me because I think that it would take significant technological development to put into place. I think that this technology is still a few years off however marketers should be looking at it now in order to be ready when it comes.

From thinking of working together I started to consider how other online firms are starting to use this concept of Geo-Tartgeting to focus their advertising on local areas. As I was researching this I came across an article about Facebook. The article outlines how Facebook is looking to generate income by introducing a program where marketers can use people’s information about their interests and hobbies to post ads into the news feeds of the users they want to target. Since people have to put information about the basic area they live in on their profiles the marketers must be conducting some form of Geo-Targeting. This struck me as somewhat amusing because social networking sites such as Facebook are meant to bring people from far apart together, and now they can be used to Geo-Target marketing into their news feeds.

Thinking about the conflicting purposes of Facebook between the social networking side and the marketing side brought me back to thinking about Google and if it has produced anything that has not sat well with its users. While researching this I came across an article by Chris Dillabough which chronicled a situation where advertisers who used AdWords were angered by an upgrade to the AdWords program which related key phrases to ads instead of just the keywords themselves. The advertisers found that the program just brought up a lot of unrelated ads which resulted in less traffic for each of the advertisers because their ads were lost in the clutter. The expanded matching program can be switched off however advertisers were having a hard time measuring the impact on certain key words. It seems that even Google can make mistakes sometimes, this one might have been avoided if Google had communicated more with its AdWords users and brought them into the development process.

This brings us to the concept of customer feedback and turning that into a valuable conversation between the marketer and the customer. Customer feedback can be incredibly valuable; take the case of Microsoft’s Windows 7. Ina Fried’s article touches on this subject and explains that Microsoft developed the new Windows 7 in order to address several problems with Windows Vista that were brought up through customer feedback. Microsoft did a very good job in communicating with these customers to find out what the specific problems were; they discovered that many of the problems had stemmed from the Windows developers not communicating with the main computer hardware developers. This feedback prompted them to change the way they developed their software by bringing the big hardware developers in to consult throughout the software developing process. The result is the new Windows 7 which is supposed to be a massive improvement on the older Windows Vista and has people talking about it all over the web.

Getting people talking is one of the biggest goals of online marketers, if people are talking about your product than you are bound to get more interest in it that will hopefully translate into increased sales. One issue with this however is how marketers and PR people are contacting popular bloggers. Seth Godin talks about this in his blog when he states that he is receiving huge volumes of PR materials that are supposed to get him to talk about the marketer’s product on his blog. Godin states that he receives press releases about topics that he has never expressed an interest in writing about, this just creates marketing clutter that he will just ignore. It seems to me that throwing a bunch of clutter at someone who is considered an expert in the field will just give them a low opinion of your skill as a marketer, if he would read the material at all.

Another issue with Facebook involves those who use it to network for business reasons, Richard Moran has a few rules for how these people should conduct themselves on Facebook. One of his first rules is that you can never have too many friends however you should be careful about who your friends are because people will judge you based on your friends. Moran also states that your profile picture is very important and users should be careful to portray the right image. Drunken party pictures will give the wrong impression of you, as hilarious as they are. If you are planning on conducting business online, and especially on Facebook than you need to look at your profile as a form of personal marketing.

The comparison between online and offline service got me thinking, do you get better service online or offline. The traditional view is that the best customer service takes place when there is a physical person to talk to. I know that I prefer to talk to a person face to face rather than on the phone or by email. I found an article called Customer satisfaction and loyalty in online and offline environments that talked about this comparison. The authors conducted a survey to test whether customers had a better experience in an online or offline purchasing situation. The results of the survey were counter intuitive when they stated that while satisfaction was the same when a service was chosen online as offline customer loyalty was greater among online customers. I found this to be a strange idea, however, lately, I have had far better purchasing experiences online than in person. I think that this shows a trend of companies focusing more on their websites than in the past.

In fact one of the best examples of better service online than offline is banking. I have been using online banking for around 10 years now and I find that I like it a lot better than banking in person. I find that the customer service can be sometimes poor at the bank and for the kind of banking I do (mainly seeing if I have enough money left in my account to buy beer) online banking is perfect. Herington and Weaven have conducted a study of the implications of online service quality on banking customers. They found that an easy to use interface is the best way to serve customers online.

I found an interesting article by Graham Llewellyn-Berry on how banks and lending firms should use customer profiling to decide who to lend to and who to deny loans to. Berry suggests that the banks and lenders put together an industry customer information pool that could be accessed to get information on customers applying for loans. I would have thought that banks and lenders would have been some one of the first industries to participate in customer profiling. Of all of the companies that I deal with I am sure that my bank has the most information about me. In fact the bank probably has more information about my spending/saving habits than anyone else legally could, and it is way more spending than saving you can be sure. In fact it seems to me that if the bankers and lenders had been profiling their customers then they may have avoided sparking the recession that we find ourselves in today.

Another article I found highlights the problems some companies still have with putting all the pieces together. John Ruddy’s article about an Irish company called Experian which specializes in helping companies put together all of the information that they already have to create customer profiles. The company’s executives talk about how too many companies still seem to have a “silo” mentality and have trouble communicating customer information between the different parts of the organization. Experian essentially opens the lines of communication between the different parts of the organization in order to create customer profiles to help discover what customers want and how to serve them better.

There are many different views on customer profiling, the two I have looked at so far are from the perspective of the companies and talk about how the organizations are affected by the practice. However I came across an abstract by Russell Lacey and Julie Sneath that takes the view of the customer and questions whether profiling is fair to the consumers. I feel as though the answer to that question depends on how the information is used. I think that if the information is gathered by the company for the sole use of the company then customer profiling is a very positive and effective marketing tool. However I believe that companies who engage in the sale of personal profiling data without the express permission of the customer involved is a little scary, who knows who has purchased my name from a grocery store chain on a list of people who enjoy frozen pizza?

Godin states that real permission means that “if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went.” This got me thinking about some of the different marketing materials I have received and a good example of this is a weekly email that I get from Spy, a brand of sunglasses/snowboard goggles
which outlines a sale that they have on a different one of their products each week. Even though I have not bought anything since the original purchase where I gave permission for them to contact me, I still end up at their website every week and if I do not receive the email I notice and often go to the website to look for myself. One of the reasons that I still pay attention to the communications from Spy is related to Seth Godin’s concept of Friction. Friction is what slows marketers from sending as many emails to you as they can think of once you give your permission. If they send you anything but what you specifically asked for then they may train you to ignore their emails and will probably drive you to unsubscribe. Since Spy has only ever sent me the specific weekly email about their “unreal deal of the week” I continue to open the emails and go to their website. If Spy were to start sending me emails about anything else or more than once a week I would probably stop opening the emails and possibly unsubscribe, they would not have my real permission and I would leave.

My attitudes towards marketing have changed since I have started using the internet. I now do not have any interest in mass marketing materials, especially those that I receive online. The relatively cheap access to an incredible amount of consumers has tempted marketers to flood the internet with so many ads that consumers have been trained to ignore them. This is where the concept of tribes is relevant. If a marketer can identify what interest group I am a part of and get my permission to contact me with marketing materials. This allows marketers to almost personalize their message to me increasing their chance of success.