Mobile Local Marketing – or MLM

 

If you thought MLM stood for Multi-Level Marketing, then you are a little behind the times.  It is the next big thing and according to the Kelsey Blog, Mike Boland and Michelle Moore, director of search engine strategies at Metric Voodoo, were together on a panel at SES San Jose this week and no doubt got into how to get Mobile Local Marketing right.

If you are into this hot subject of MLM, then you should follow the Kelsey Blog.  Other recent articles that caught my eye were the following:

Yellix Dials in to Mobile Social Networking 

Yellix is a mobile app that identifies incoming calls with Facebook information of the caller (if they happen to be a Facebook friend).  The idea is that Facebook status updates add contextual “conversation starter” to phone conversations, possibly driving some sort of location based activity.  This will in fact be tied to local business information that is searchable and served when contextually relevant to the content of incoming callers’ status updates.

Pay per Call Moving Into YP Mainstream

There is much chatter in the Yellow Pages business about pay-per-call advertising programs, in print as well as online, moving beyond selective use and into the mainstream. Bill Dinan, president of the call measurement firm Telmetrics, asserts that “Pay for Performance Advertising Shows Dramatic Growth as Local Search Marketers Deal with Economy’s Reduced Budgets.”

YouTube’s ‘News Near You’ Working to Expand Local Media Partners

YouTube’s “News Near You” service has signed deals with 200 local media outlets to post their videos, according to reporting in The New York Times. The Google-owned company will share ad revenue with these outlets, whose numbers are likely to increase. More than 25,000 news sources have been invited to participate.

If you have not yet considered how to tap into this explosive growth for Mobile Local Marketing, then the Kelsey Blog should be on your RSS News Feed reader to get the latest buzz.

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Social Media Is An Oxymoron

An oxymoron means that two words forming part of a phrase represent opposites or are contradictory.  George Carlin popularized Military Intelligence and Jumbo Shrimp as examples of oxymorons.  Other somewhat famous ones are Authentic Reproduction, Cautiously Optimistic, Civil Disobedience, Deafening Silence, Detailed Summary, Friendly Fire, Honest Crook, Humane Slaughter, Metal Wood, Tough Love, White Lie and the list could go on and on.

Social Media is another such oxymoron.  Media most often is assumed to be mass media such as TV or radio.  Social on the other hand implies relationships between individuals.  The masses versus individuals – there is the contradiction

The social media scale

You are perhaps unaware of the social media scale since we are introducing it here.  The scale is defined by that oxymoronic name really.  In a way the two words represent the two extremes of the scale.

At the Media end of the scale, we have the minimally social ones, which merely allow you to vote on items that are classified by the medium. Examples of this are reddit.com and digg.com.

At the other end of the scale, we have social media that are online spaces where you can ‘meet’ and interact with others.  Facebook and LinkedIn are examples of this.  Others will be found to fall between these two extremes.  StumbleUpon for example is closer to reddit but does provide for messages between friends.

Where Is Twitter On the Social Media Scale?

The interesting anomaly in all this is Twitter.  Twitter itself was very much at the social end of the scale in its genesis.  The objective was to let your close  followers know your current status.  Many still use it that way.

However some participants have abandoned that approach. They seek to get the maximum number of followers by following as many other people as they can.  Since some people have arranged that automatically they will follow anyone who follows them, this approach can almost allow you to create your own mass medium.

If you want to check out some data on people using Twitter in this way, check out the TwitterScore website. More specifically check out the Top Users.  There are some very famous names there and also some top agencies such as CNN and the BBC.  Scrolling down you will see some people who clearly have worked hard to create an audience for themselves.  At # 200 at the moment, for example, you have Jonathan Nafarrete, who is “Just some guy. Photographer and social media consultant” and who has 63,553 followers.

The fact that Twitter is both social and a mass media is perhaps why many people are having a difficulty knowing how best to be involved.

Update

For a confirmation that Twitter is hard to classify on the social media scale, you may wish to read: New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets. For suggestions on how to work with social media of whatever type, try ‘With A Little Help From My Friends‘.

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Twitter Chat Rooms

 

I must admit my vision of Twitter is very much like that painted by Kelly Forrister  who sees it as the Twitter river.  She works on David Allen's Getting Things Done Seminars and provides individual Coaching for their clients around the world.

It's an interesting look on how fast the world is moving, or how little our attention spans are willing to absorb, that a quirky little service like Twitter seems to be luring so many of us in.  Have you ever been to one of those Lazy Rivers at a resort hotel? The kind where you hop in and out as you please? And around it goes, whether you're in the river or not. That's the best description I've heard of Twitter.

That's largely the way it goes even if you use some service like Tweetdeck to keep things somewhat organized.  Of course you have Twitter Search and  Hashtags that can allow you to explore just a smaller creek but it is still moving along.

This week I now have a new perspective.  If you want to get together with a few friends just to explore something rapidly, then you can use TinyChat, which are Disposable Chatrooms especially for the Twitter Generation

Sometimes all you need is a simple chatroom for real-time text chats. TinyChat solves this problem by creating simple, disposable chatrooms. Tinychats works exactly as advertised. It's a disposable, no-frills chatroom, with a deliberately limited feature set. There are no accounts to sign up for and whenever you open up a new room, TinyChat will simply create a new URL for you.

If you are looking for more permanence, then I highly recommend TweetChat, which gives you access to more permanent chat rooms.  In fact they are just showing you the tweets for a certain hashtag, but it is very user-friendly.

To get the idea, you might want to check out Brandchat,which is to be found behind the #brandchat hashtag.  This group meets every Wednesday to discuss branding , brand development and customer service. Every Wednesday morning 10 a.m. CST, they tap into their “collective mind” on Twitter and discuss everything branding. Next meeting is April 1st.  If you have a question, you can even join their Facebook group.  Anything on the Facebook wall gets put on the #brandchat agenda.

If up till now, Twitter has been a raging, tumultuous river, pop into a chatroom and enjoy quietly meeting a few people.  Why not try the Google #friendconnect chat room?  It always is very quiet there. :(

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The NOW Web Is Not The Mobile Web

The NOW Web is a new term to describe the cyberspace collection of all the information packages that may be currently flying around “online”.  Some may assume that must be the same as the Mobile Web.  This is not the case.

The Mobile Web is a subset of the World Wide Web.  The World Wide Web is all those online properties that are accessible once you know their Universal Resource Identifier (URI).  The Mobile Web is that section of WWW.that is accessible if you are using a mobile device.  The Mobile Web is thus defined by the hardware used to connect with it.  It is concerned with online properties that have a URI.

The World Wide Web itself is a subset of the NOW Web.  The NOW Web is intended to signify all those information packages or what might be called Instants that are currently available either via the Internet or perhaps via a telephone circuit or a cell phone wireless connection.  It might be an RSS news feed, or a request to get involved in a Google Chat, or even an indication that one of your Facebook friends has come online.

Clearly any Instants that you may be interested in should be accessible to you and ideally you should be made aware of their creation (via alerts) and of their ongoing existence.  The NOW Web is therefore defined by the interests of users or consumers.  It could be seen as a user-centric defined concept.  There are many technical challenges in working with this expanded NOW Web.  However this way of picturing the flux of information flow may suggest creative ways of better fulfilling consumers’ needs.  This NOW Web way of looking at the online scene was suggested by the way in which Twitter has so grabbed people’s attention and interest.

Footnote:  It should be mentioned that this use of the term, NOW Web, is much bigger than that suggested by Vaibhav Domkundwar.  The concepts are very much related, but this bigger use may suggest more interesting technical solutions.

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