Fortune Global 100 companies received 5,596,998 mentions in a single month on Twitter, making the social networking platform number one in driving conversation (The Nation). Continue reading
Rule 40: Not in Favor of Olympic Athletes
As the summer 2012 Olympics quickly approaches, an estimated 4 billion people will tune in to watch their country’s top athletes compete (NPR). This is an enormous opportunity for any company to drive marketing efforts and reach a massive audience, however, due to Rule 40 it is an opportunity that only official sponsors of the London games can truly take advantage of. Continue reading
Google+ the Driving Force Behind Social Search
If your business is not on Google+, NOW is the time to do so. Google’s still relatively new search engine feature, Google Search Plus your World, uses information from your Google+ account to deliver results. This feature allows more personalized results that present the content you or your contacts have shared or searched in the top most coveted spots on Google (ReadWriteWeb).
Meet Kara! Baltimore’s Best Marketing Consultant
The newest addition to the MOS team in the role of Marketing Consultant and Project Manager, Kara came to us after spending over a year in Brazil where she taught English as a second language!
Investors Realize the Facebook Dilemma
As Facebook emerges as a publically traded company, CEO Mark Zuckerberg will need to learn how to balance the expectations of not only its users and advertisers but that of investors. Continue reading
5 Mobile Fails You Should Learn From
As smartphone sales continue to grow like crazy, especially as we enter the jolly holiday season, it’s no surprise that mobile is the new dot.com bubble. And many companies are paving highly effective ways to engage. Actually we’re all just now figuring it out and grasping the question – how do consumers interact with their mobile devices, what roles do they play in their lives, and how can we tap into that?
So as the learning curve goes, and marketing trial and error takes its course, there are bound to be some fails and missteps. Let’s take a look at five of the mobile fails we can all take a lesson from as we plan our strategies for 2012.
- The dying trend, check-in apps. Daily deal offering sites like Groupon and Living Social met the same fate earlier this year. It was enticing at first, and then consumers get bored with it. Oldest story in the book. Gowalla and Foursquare were cool a year ago, but as retailers started to catch on to the trend and created their own shopping apps with check-in incentives, the enthusiasm began to ween.
- Forgetting that mobile is a whole different animal. In case anyone out there still questions it, you CANNOT just take your web stuff and throw it on a mobile site. No no no. Mobile is a whole new opportunity to interact. There are benefits, challenges and strategies completely separate from your PC web tools. If you avoid the copy and paste trap in re-purposing the web, you can take advantage new capabilities, such as HTML5.
- If you’re doing mobile, do it right. A lot of you are experimenting with mobile tools, such as QR codes and social media, without creating a mobile-optimized destination for visitors. So just when you get them right where you want them, your mobile visitors land on your PC site. Ew! I can promise most of these visitors are not coming back. That’s a lot of lost conversions and sales.
- Agencies aren’t focusing on the big picture. Mobile web and mobile strategies can’t just be an afterthought in your bigger plan. But for this fail we blame your marketing agency. We can’t emphasize enough the significance of the mobile experience in the focus of your brand, and in driving further mobile growth. A lot of brands are still just missing the boat on this one.
- Manufacturers are still playing catch up. RIP feature phones. I can still remember the simple days, when my phone’s buzz alert could only mean a text message. Now it could be an email, Facebook message, tweet, status update, check-in or any of the thousands of other connections. It was a sudden and unexpectedly rapid death that manufacturers were not ready to capitalize on.
(Thanks to our friends at Mobile Marketer, see their original article.)
The 4 Things You Need to Know Before Getting a Mobile Web Site
If you haven’t jumped on the mobile bandwagon yet, don’t fret. It’s not too late for you to join the party.
But do be picky when you hop on board!! There are sooooo many companies out there offering mobile services, and they are NOT all created the same.
Some services will “mobilize” your existing site for you, which means they just put all your current content into a narrower screen. This is the quick way to go mobile, but not the smart way. Think about it, mobile surfers are looking for something specific. A lot of the text and information on your full site may not be relevant for people on the go. Why get your viewers lost and confused in pages of stuff they don’t need?
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What it takes to be Steve Jobs
“Why join the navy when you can be a pirate?” Wiser words never uttered by a man more influential and responsible for single-handedly transforming the computing and mobile landscape.
Steve Jobs told us to be crazy. He told us he wanted to put a ding in the universe. He didn’t put a ding, but he sure left an Apple.
A single glance at the non-stop media coverage, and you’d think America’s greatest superhero finally befell to his kryptonite. #SteveJobs, #iSad and #ThankYouSteve rotate Twitter’s trending topics, and pictures of our generation’s Thomas Edison continue to flood Facebook’s news feeds.
But in no jest, he was a hero to millions, probably billions, of people he never met. He changed the way we think about and interact with the world. Every time you have to ask your kid a computer question, remember, he’s the reason.
Meet Shawn: Baltimore’s #1 Business Man
Almost two months into his stint at MOS Creative, and Shawn’s hanging with the big dogs as our VP of Business Development, capturing the attention of some major clients!
First thing he does in the AM: Make coffee! This caffeine addict can smell a good pot before it even touches his lips.
Guiltiest pleasure: How I met Your Mother - he’s definitely a Ted.
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