We’ve heard for a year or two now that mobile marketing is next. Friends, mobile marketing is now. And brands are struggling to get their heads wrapped around it. From QR codes to Near Field Communications to SMS to location-based services, there’s an almost unlimited world of possibility out there for brands to go mobile, but little understanding from brands as to how.

That’s precisely why Tim Hayden of 44 Doors will be speaking at Explore Dallas-Fort Worth on Feb. 17 and why I also caught up with him recently to share some insights with all of you on the world of mobile marketing, engagement and how social media plays into it all.

You won’t want to miss the business insights Tim has to give at Explore Dallas-Fort Worth. He’ll be speaking there, along with an all-star lineup that includes Copyblogger’s Brian Clark, Zena Weist of Edelman Digital, Tom Webster of Edison Research, Aaron Strout from WCG, Nichole Kelly of Full Frontal ROI, DJ Waldow from Waldow Social and more. The event will also feature a number of excellent software providers and companies to help you navigate the waters of digital marketing. They’ll bring their knowledge to share as well as their products. This is a must-attend event, so register now!

The first 100 registrants get the full day’s content, breakfast, lunch (by Wolfgang Puck Catering) and a cocktail reception for just $250! The full price of the event is $400, so save $150 now and reserve your spot.

Explore is a five-city conference event series from Social Media Explorer and presented by Expion and Raven Internet Marketing Tools. Learn more and sign up for email updates for the city nearest you at socialmediaexplorer.com/product/events.

The concept of Zaarly, a not-yet-year-old startup, is pretty cool and simple. You login and either post, “I’m looking for X product and will pay Y price,” or you post, “I have X product and will sell it for Y price.” The system then helps you match up a peer-to-peer purchase and sales opportunity with people in your local area. It’s kind of a cross between the old radio swap shops and eBay.

The idea is catching on around the U.S. with about 230 cities having active posts and several dozen with large user bases posting everything from items they want to sell, to those they’d like to borrow. The hypotheticals mentioned by Zaarly staffers include opportunities like posting, “I’ll pay $20 for someone to deliver a Big Mac to my office for lunch,” or “I need a pickup truck for the weekend to move furniture and will pay $100 for it.” So it can serve as a convenience shopping service or an ad-hoc barter system, too.

The site doesn’t make money on transactions if you pay outside the website, CEO Bo Fishback told me last week. If you pay through Zaarly, a fee of roughly 10 percent is charged, but the site insures both parties are satisfied with the transaction and will even refund money if the buyer isn’t.

But the unexpected shift for Zaarly just caught on recently. Small businesses are discovering they can get in on the action and get new customers without having to really do anything. Since there’s no charge to list what you have to sell, a plumber can login, post they they’ll do plumbing work in a certain geographic area for $50 per hour and make their settings notify them should anyone in that area post a need that matches certain keywords.

“We learned that small businesses were like, ‘Oh, my goodness!’ and wanted to know how they could harness the demand we were creating. Many of them have a very unfair advantage because they have track records in this stuff,” Fishback said, referring to the fact an independent moving company that is bonded and insured is more trustworthy than some random user with a truck who will move your stuff for you.

The small business bonanza Zaarly is seeing has caused the company to pivot a bit with their product. New features coming in quarter one of 2012 include allowing sellers to identify themselves to build trust and be recognized as participants in the community. As of right now, all users are mostly anonymous unless or until you reach out to them with a transaction. Fishback says the original peer-to-peer model (which isn’t going away) dictated that anonymity be included. He said, “Commerce is a weird thing to attach identity to. You can verify your account, but we don’t reveal the identity.”

The new addition will allow a seller to reveal themselves if they choose. Otherwise, the site will function as it always has.

Fishback told me Zaarly will also invest time and energy into helping small businesses understand what it means to go mobile with their business. While Zaarly isn’t exclusively a mobile platform, it’s certainly powerful for the person on the go who’s just looking for a little help from someone nearby who can solve their problem.

Fishback is on his fifth startup and has backers like Ashton Kutcher and Ron Conway. They also have a round of funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. So the business has some legs.

More importantly, though, with this shift toward making it easier for small businesses to get customers without having to spend thousands on websites and SEO and digital marketing, Zaarly might just give them legs. And that could be a game-changer.

“We could wind up building a company that changes the way the economy works,” Fishback told me. “That’s a neat opportunity.”

Ambitious goal, that. But certainly not clearly out of the realm of possibility.

Have You Registered For Explore Dallas-Fort Worth?

Don’t miss a day of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Copyblogger’s Brian Clark, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Edelman Digital’s Zena Weist and more headline one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, February 17 in Dallas, Texas! DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! The first 100 to do so get an incredible discount! Reserve your seat today!

If there’s one specific area of digital marketing that raises nearly every eyebrow when the topic pops up these days, it has to be mobile. From QR codes to Near Field Communications to mobile applications and mobile-optimized websites, (Check out SME on your mobile device — we’ve even gotten on board!), everyone has begun to come around to the fact that consumers are glued to their mobile device. That means your business needs to be there, too.

But, like many, you may be struggling to find time to understand more about mobile marketing. You want to know how it can be used for your business, but haven’t found the right resource, event or website to help you tackle it, right?

I recently attended Social Fresh in Baltimore where an entire day was devoted to mobile marketing. What better way to fill an assignment for Social Media Explorer than to just simply share the expert advice and tips from that day?

The marketing checklist for getting into mobile

Jeanne Hopkins from Hubspot

1.  Lay the foundation. Review the company’s business, or build your own professional digital footprint. Figure out how many people are actually accessing your site via mobile. What role does mobile play in your company and does it make sense?
2. Competitor review. Their strengths, their weaknesses. Look carefully and learn.
3. Set yourself up for success. SMART. Specific measurable actionable realistic and timebound. Give yourself a goal and test in 90 days.
4. Measure your success. What are you trying to achieve? How can you test it? If you can create regular reports on ROI, it will help you a ton.
5. GSD, get *stuff* done. Take action now before it’s behind you. Jump in and try something

4 Reasons why you should have a texting strategy

Justin Mastrangelo of JA.TXT

1. Open rates on emails average 20-30%.
2. Open rates on text messages average 90-95%. Many times withing the first 15 mins. REAL TIME. LAST MINUTE.
3. 99% of phones are SMS capable. QR codes are getting a lot of press but only 6% of mobile users actually use this. People have love affairs w/ text messaging.
4. How? Use mobile as a call to action in traditional ads like TV, Radio and Print.

How to Optimize Email For A Newly Mobile Audience

Justine Jordan of Litmus

Know Your Audience
Consider context: Where do people check email?

• In bed
• At the gym
• In the bathroom
• While drunk
• At their desk
• To kill time

By the way, C.C. Chapman thinks people should STOP checking email in the bathroom. Ha!

The “aware” approach
Being mobile aware involves email designs that consider the mobile experience but aren’t specially constructed for it.

• Single column primary content
• Big images
• Big text
• Big buttons
• Skinny layout

Think about mobile first:
Design for the mobile experience first. Designing for a mobile experience makes your desktop experience better too.

What You Need to Know about The Mobile Web

Tim Hayden from 44 Doors

By 2014, mobile internet usage will likely overtake desktop internet usage. Mobile traffic originates from search. The number one thing we’re doing on the mobile web is searching, not surfing.

9 Tips to Make Content Friendly for the Mobile Web

1. Content must be condensed. You have four to ten times reduction of the content on your desktop site
2. Navigation should be limited to 2-3 actions beyond landing page
3. You must have quick load times (you have less than 30 seconds before the user jumps elsewhere)
4. Mobile and desktop are very different beasts
5. Brevity rules. Connect fast, and call to action quickly
6. Capitalize on natural, current behavior
7. Be pragmatic with new technology
8. Offer multiple channels to pull from offline to online (QR, URL, SMS)
9. Relevancy improves immediate conversion and creates word of mouth

Key Considerations for Building a Mobile App

Simon Salt of IncSlingers
Why? The numbers speak for themselves.

• There are 4 billion cell phones and 1 billion smart phones in the world, right now.
• There are 60 million apple products in the world, right now.
• There are 160,000 android products are there registered every single day.

Recognize that mobile is not just phones — it’s also tablets and lots of other non-tethered devices.

Mobile apps is not a mobile strategy

25% of app are downloaded once and discarded. It doesn’t do what it says it will do. If you’re building an app you have to build it for the user, not for you. What can you do for the user?

You may need to educate your consumer on how to use mobile technologies. Macy’s did a series of TV commercials showing consumers how to scan a QR code.

 Choices to make when you’re thinking about an app: 

1. Should you buy or build?
2. Should the app be native or non-native?
3. What is the purpose of your app?

5 Tips to be Smart about your Mobile Content Strategy

CC Chapman of Content Rules

1.  “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln Spend the time up front figuring out the strategy of your program. What can go wrong? What’s going right?
2. Reimagine, don’t recycle. Rethink and reimagine things for a mobile space–that cool flash site may not work in mobile. Even with a Youtube video, can you watch it on a little screen? Text is still really friendly in mobile, so have a transcript of a cool video interview if it doesn’t work in its original channel.
3. Create Wings and Roots. This is the hardest thing with mobile right now. It’s really hard to share, and go “hey check this out.” It’s missing right now. For online content, you can have share buttons, but it’s not always easy to share in mobile or to incentivize the share.
4. Stoke the campfire. Make people welcome and feel happy that they’ve downloaded your apps.
5. Build momentum. With deals, and specials, once you have someone excited, how do you keep building the momentum?

A special thanks and shout out goes to Tracy Gold of Right Now Marketing who took amazing live notes during the conference that were used for most of this post. If you want to view the full document check it out here.

So what do you think? Is that enough to convince you to consider how mobile will fit into your marketing plans? What tips do you have for marketers who are trying to integrate mobile strategies?

Related articles

• Will mobile marketing target new customers? (marketing.yell.com)
• 6 Ways B2B Marketers Should Optimize for Mobile Browsing (hubspot.com)
• Does the mobile market need to be considered in website build? (marketing.yell.com)
• Lack of Mobile Websites Opens Door for Mobile Marketing Entrepreneurs (prweb.com)

Tim Hayden of 44Doors might be the, if not one of the, preeminent experts on mobile marketing in the U.S. I would say he’s unquestionably the one who understands the most about how the mobile and social experiences blend. This is why he’ll be speaking at the Awareness Exploring Social Media Business Summit on Monday in Boston. There are still seats left! Get yours now.

Mobile is the one topic that is always on the list of what’s next. We’ve been talking about mobile being huge for years now, but we’re starting to see not only the technology and its adoption catch up with the audience, but also interesting applications of mobile marketing.

I caught up with Tim at an event in Louisville last month to talk about his ESM Boston talk, but to also dive into QR codes, mobile landing pages and websites and other topics piquing our interest as marketers.

Monday’s event at the Boston Marriott Burlington will feature original research from the Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang. Other speakers include DJ Waldow, Laura Fitton, Todd Defren, Ann Handley, C.C. Chapman, Jason Keath, Mike Schneider, Mike Lewis and lil’ ole’ me. Plus, we’ve got a brand case studies panel that will be certain to give attendees awesome ideas as takeaways.

Some of the topics we’ll dive into that day include building a scalable social business, cross-pollinating email and social marketing, the latest trends and needs for marketers relative to mobile marketing, location-based marketing, content marketing strategy and lots more.

I’m convinced you won’t find a lineup like this at a single-day event for such a ridiculously low price. For the $300 registration fee you get breakfast, lunch and a free month trial of ExploringSocialMedia.com. You get to hear some of the top thinkers in the digital marketing business and network with them and other attendees as well. For $300! SRSLY?!

Get your spot now!

Register here:

And we’ll see you in Boston!

My friends at Lucid Agency in Tempe, Ariz., have been doing a lot of work and thinking around mobile platforms and technology. They’re certainly not alone, but in their activity, they thought it would be useful to put together an interesting infographic to illustrate the use of mobile applications, location-based services and devices to give their clients, and the greater marketing community, a base of information as we think about mobile moving forward.

Mobile is one of those arenas that is critically important to a brand’s success in the coming years, but also still muddy water in terms of understanding. Hopefully, the information in this infographic can help you and your organization know a bit more about the use statistics and applications for mobile marketing you could be considering.

What stands out for me? How far ahead projections have Android as a platform compared to iPhones in the coming years. An almost 300X increase in the mobile advertising through 2013. How ridiculous Groupon looks compared to Facebook Deals (if Facebook can make it as front-and-center as Groupon has become).

There’s a lot to chew on here. What stands out for you? Drop a note in the comments. Then head over to Lucid to thank them for the work!

Feel free to download or embed the infographic in your own site! Here’s some code to make it easier for you:

<a href="http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/phone-os-infographic.jpg"><img title="Mobile Platform Infographic – iPhone vs. Android" src="http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/phone-os-infographic.jpg" alt="Mobile Marketing Infographic" width="600" height="3746" />

Editor’s Note: Today’s offering is a guest post from my friend and author Eric Schwartzman. He is a long-time, well-respected public relations pro, entrepreneur and thinker and is the co-author of Social Marketing To The Business Customer with Paul Gillin.

Is mobile important to B2B social media marketers? Take this quick, down and dirty assessment to find out what opportunity, if any, the mobile web presents to your company.

You’ve heard that the marketing wars of tomorrow will be fought on the small screen. Smart phone usage and mobile search continue to grow, with analysts predicting nearly 3.5 billion mobile searches per month by next year.

And already, 80% of smart phone users research purchasing decisions within a 10 to 20 mile radius of their location, which certainly makes sense if you’re shopping for pizza or tires.

But what if you’re a B2B buyer of highly specialized products and services? What role does or will mobile play in B2B sales cycles?

As mobile web usage grows, here’s a litmus test B2B marketers can use to assess the importance of mobile:

1. Is Face-to-Face Important? - If the in-person pitch is an important component of your sales process, you can use geodata to get squeeze more value out of your travel budget. Check out Hoover’s Near Hear app for iPhone, which lets you search companies not just by annual revenues or type, but by proximity as well. Use that intelligence to schedule more new business meetings per square mile with qualified prospects when your sales reps hit a given market.

2. Is Your Product Heavy? - With the price of crude at more than $100 a barrel and shipping rates climbing, imagine the incentives B2Bs suppliers of heavy, raw materials like plastic resin or steel alloy, or even bulky materials like plastic containers or packaging supplies, could pass along to their customers if they knew where their closest ones were? Hoover’s announced plans to integrate Linkedin into their database in January, which means marketers will have the chance to open doors through proximity and relationships, rather than just cold calls.

3. Is Your Product an Impulse Purchase? - If you’re selling something that doesn’t require the sign-off of a committee, like office or lunch room supplies, then customers are searching for your products on the mobile web already. Optimize your website for local search by registering with Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo! Local, as well as paid services like Universal Business Listings and LocalEZE. And add a geotag to the landing pages you’d like to steer mobile browsers to.

4. Are You a Local Service? – Yelp connects people with local businesses via web and mobile search. Using their smart phone app, you can search for local couriers, notaries, printers, and shipping services by their distance to you, customer rating, price or hours of operation. For these companies, proximity and positive customer feedback are critical to the success of their mobile marketing efforts,. For service providers, mobile is local, and mobile is social. Service providers who take walk-in customers might also consider extending their hours of operation to get found beyond 9 to 5. You can register on Yelp yourself.

Today, B2B social media marketing isn’t typically thought of as a mobile endeavor. But that’s because it’s still new, and most B2B marketers are still overwhelmed by all the social media options out there. In my book Social Marketing to the Business Customer with Paul Gillin, we outline a step-by-step approach to finding and engaging business customers through social media. Our process starts with listening to discover where the opportunities are, so you can strike where the iron is hot.

Check your mobile web traffic in Google Analytics to see if they’re find you already, and if they’re sticking around. If you’ve upgraded your dashboard to the newest version, you’ll find your mobile stats under Visitors > Technology > Mobile.

According to Christopher S. Penn, here’s how to interpret the importance of your mobile site traffic:

• 1 percent: You need to start thinking about a mobile strategy.
• 10 percent: You need to be turning on your mobile strategy.
• 25 percent: If your mobile strategy isn’t in full swing, you are losing business to people who don’t want to navigate an unfriendly site on their mobile devices.

Mobile marketing strategy involves optimizing your website for mobile browsers and for mobile search. For companies that want to do it themselves, Rich Devine, a mobile web design and search optimization specialist suggests starting with a good WordPress theme like Thesis or Themedy.

Ann Marie van der Hurk (@amvandenhurk) who advises clients on mobile, uses the WPTouch plugin for her WordPress and recommends MoFuse, a CMS for mobile sites and Mippin for converting your website into a mobile app.

The stage of the B2B sales cycle where mobile becomes a factor depends largely on the cost of sale. The higher the price, the more considered the purchase and the greater the number of stakeholders involved. Generally, the more considered the purchase, the more important relationships are. In that case, mobile is a way to build awareness and get considered. But the actual sale will be driven by other factors.

But as organizations wake up to value of proximity, I expect to see mobile play an increasingly important role in the B2B marketing space.

About the Author

Eric Schwartzman (@ericschwartzman) provides social marketing research, social marketing services and social marketing training to businesses, government agencies and nonprofits. His book Social Marketing to the Business Customer with Paul Gillin is the first book devoted exclusively to B2B social media marketing.

In late 2010, at Web 2.0 Summit Google VP of Product Management Susan Wojcicki spent just under 15 minutes presenting new services that Google had recently released (video here) to make the upcoming holiday experience a more enjoyable experience both for shoppers and advertisers. Although much of what she demoed was very interesting, the most telling bit of information was what she shared to set the stage.

According to her research, 42% of in-store sales are influenced by online shopping searches. I think you would agree that’s a pretty significant number, but even more surprising was what followed. Susan shared that 7% of purchasing is currently done online while 93% is still done at physical store locations. That number is quite staggering. Considering the billions of dollars spent online each year, there is still plenty of pie left for brick and mortar businesses to have their fill. That is why Google, Facebook, Apple, Paypal and others are lining their crosshairs on not just one target, but three!

The worlds of mobile, social, and location based technology is on course to converge into a powerhouse platform for businesses to use online to drive consumers to local businesses. Last year, Google alone says they say a 30 x increase in mobile shopping queries. As Susan subtly mentions, internet enabled phones enable shoppers to be both online and offline at the same time. This is why, in October 2010, Google made an important move by moving one of their savviest executives, Marissa Mayer, into the lead role as the Vice President of Location and Local Services. With Google since 1999, she filled the important role of Vice President of Search Product and User Experience. That move alone shows how important Google sees that 93% of the pie.

Last January Facebook, the name probably most closely associated with social, made a statement that mobile would be their focus for their platform during 2011. This of course ins’t to make it easier for us to update our status on the go. It is because they understand that, with such a strong social presence, their vulnerability lies in their ability to quickly enhance the location based services. This can only be done by making a rockin’ mobile platform that goes way beyond simply mimicking what the website does.

There are a number of influence points that the previously mentioned companies are trying to become your go-to resource for:

• Availability: Is the product available in the store right now?
• Proximity: How close is the desired product/service?
• Price: Which store around me has the best price?
• Transaction: Which option provides me the easiest, quickest shopping experience?

Social will play an ever increasing role in how guyers spend their money within that 93%. The influence that friend and families have to sway purchasing decisions is immense and grows proportionately as social media penetrates into mainstream society.

Here is a taste of what social can add to the equation:

• Social Recommendations: What do my friends have to say about this business, product or service.
• Social Reviews: What does the crowd have to say about the product or service I am interested in.
• Social Incentives: Get perks and discounts for social interactions like checking in, becoming the mayor, etc.
• Social Discovery: The experiences of my connections and others with similar interests become visible when I interact with things around me.

Much of what social can do to influence buying decisions has been happening for at least a couple years, but on your desktop/laptop computer. Always connected, location aware, mobile devices open the playing field in ways that marketers are only recently starting to understand.

Learning to be “Social-Loco”

So what’s next? Well I would like to invite you to join me on May 5th to attend “Social-Loco: the convergence of the social web, mobile and local-business“. Some of the best and brightest in the industry will be speaking including the previously mentioned Marissa Mayer from Google as well as executives from Groupon, Facebook, Microsoft, Foursquare and more. I am also happy to be participating as a panelist during the session titled “Back to the Future: reinventing brand loyalty”.

Want to win a free ticket to Social-Loco?

I have 1 FREE ticket that I would like to giveaway to our Social Media Explorer readers. In order to win, visit the sessions page at socialloco.net, find a session that sounds interesting to you and share the name of it in the comments on this post along with why the session topic interests you. On Friday I will choose a winner at random and provide you details on how to claim your ticket.

You can also skip the fun and get 20% off the “Social-Loco” conference registration price if you register using this link or enter the discount code “adam20”