Based on the “2008 Mobile Attitude & Usage Study” conducted by Synovate for the Mobile Marketing Association, U.S. consumers’ interest in mobile marketing is the same as it was last year.

In fact, the percentage of consumers interested in mobile marketing has remained even for the past four years of the study:

• 6 percent of those surveyed are ‘highly interested’ in mobile marketing;
• 20 percent are ‘moderately interested’; and
• 75 percent are not interested.

Of course that’s what people say. What they do is another matter. It appears that in 2008 mobile commerce participation rates were higher than in the past three years. Overall, 6 percent of consumers participate in mobile marketing efforts.

According to the research, the top mobile marketing categories were:

• Text-to-win or voting campaigns: 48 percent
• Ringtone downloads: 28 percent
• Status alerts: 25 percent
• Sales alerts: 24 percent
• Mobile coupons: 22 percent
• Product information: 21 percent
• Mobile customer care: 13 percent
• Location-based information: 6 percent

The 2008 Mobile Attitude & Usage Study study involved Synovate conducting 1,405 online interviews using a nationally representative consumer online panel of over 1.5 million households.

Source: Enid Burns, “Mobile Marketing Interest Unchanged Since Last Year”, The ClickZ Network, November 18, 2008

A study by Rubicon Consulting indicates that 80 to 90 percent of user-generated content on social media sites is produced by less than approximately 10 percent of users.

At the same time, Rubicon has found that online reviews are second only to personal advice in terms of influencing people’s purchase decisions. They are more persuasive than newspaper articles, reviews by website editors, or advice from store employees.

On that basis, Rubicon deems that the small number of online content producers - more precisely, reviewers - are actually highly influential in terms of driving the buying decisions of much larger groups.

Something to think about when targeting your marketing efforts…

Source: Rubicon Consulting, “Online Communities and Their Impact on Business: Ignore at Your Peril”, Rubicon Consulting, October 22, 2008

Writing in Clayton Makepeace’s Total Package blog, Bob Bly offers a simple way to assess whether you’re emailing your list too frequently.

According to Bob Bly, an objective and accurate way to determine the optimal e-mail frequency of your emails is to check how many people opt out after each mailing. If your opt-out rate (the number of people who unsubscribe divided by how many people received your email) is 0.1 percent or less… you’re NOT sending out too many emails. But if your opt-out rate is 0.2-0.4 percent, you are losing too many subscribers.

Of course it’s not just how frequently you mail that may cause people to unsubscribe. Bob suggests varying email frequency, the ratio of promotional to non-promotional content, message length and topics, until your opt-out rate is around 0.1 to 0.2 percent or less.

On the other hand, you may find that you’re not emailing your list frequently enough. And, if email is integral to your marketing efforts, fewer emails means fewer sales. On that basis, you may wish to email more often to test the reaction from your list. Sure, some people may unsubscribe, but if your unsubscribe rate is still 0.2 percent or less, you’ve probably reached a more optimal frequency.

Source: Bob Bly, “How Much E-mail Is Too Much?” The Total Package, October 7, 2008

According to Adgooroo, U.S. Presidential candidate Barack Obama is more than five times more popular on the Internet than his rival, John McCain… if web traffic is anything to go by.

Adgooroo’s analysis reveals that more than five times the amount of traffic is being driven each month to websites relating to Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign. compared with those relating to John McCain’s campaign.

Meanwhile, the bulk of all this traffic is going to the main Obama and McCain websites. Nearly 93 percent of Obama-related web traffic is going directly to the Obama website, while 73 percent of McCain traffic is going to the main McCain website.

Interestingly, while there are 3.5 times more pro-Obama websites than pro-McCain websites on the Internet, McCain’s ‘grassroots supporter’ sites are receiving 11 percent more traffic than Obama’s grassroots sites.

Adgooroo’s evaluation of Obama’s and McCain’s respective search marketing efforts reveals that both campaigns are fairly equal in the level of sophistication of their paid search programs. The McCain campaign is apparently better at keyword selection, while the Obama campaign seems to be better at targeting topical keywords.

Obama’s campaign, meanwhile, is evidently winning in organic search. While McCain’s website ranks on the first page of Google search results for 67 keywords, Obama ranks on the first page for 117 keywords.

The big question is… what bearing does such Internet activity have on how the American public will vote?

Source: Adgooroo, “Searching for the Next President: the Internet’s impact on McCain vs. Obama”, Press Release

On Tuesday I discussed what I believe to be one of the most critical - yet often overlooked - skills needed to build a successful Internet business: business management.

Kind of obvious, isn’t it? Yet, not necessarily easy to implement when you realize what effective management involves.

Well the 2nd critical skill is also fairly obvious… yet, still quite challenging to do well.

It is… marketing!

Yes, the ability to plan, and most importantly, IMPLEMENT, a comprehensive, multi-pronged Internet marketing effort.

Marketing really is the lifeblood of your business. However, here at Kikabink we define “marketing” a little differently to some of the definitions you’ve probably come across.

By our definition, marketing involves:

1. Generating leads (”traffic” in Internet parlance);
2. Converting those leads into customers;
3. Satisfying those customers;
4. Keeping those customers - which implies getting them to buy more, and more often, from you.

Although a lot of attention is often given to generating and converting traffic (elements 1 and 2)… the ongoing growth and prosperity of your business really depends on doing 3 and 4 exceptionally well.

In any case, when you think of YOUR marketing efforts… are you doing everything you can in each of these areas of marketing?

This doesn’t mean you should be doing everything yourself - as a provider of Internet marketing services we definitely believe you should hire experts to do what they do best.

However, you still need to plan and manage your overall marketing strategy and be aware of what is - and what should be - going on. Next time we’ll talk about the 3rd critical skill you need for a thriving Internet business. And this really is unique to the online world.

Thought this topic was timely, given the opening of the XXIX Olympic Games in Beijing, China today. Go Aussies!

Now… being a direct response marketer I tend to view any kind of marketing that cannot be precisely tested, tracked and measured with suspicion.

So while, conceptually, I can see the benefit of sponsorship marketing… given the choice between spending a few hundred thousand or more on sponsoring a person, event, sports team or whatever… and spending the same on a direct mail or a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign, I’m way more inclined to go with the direct mail / PPC campaign.

A while ago I had the opportunity to review the commercial terms of a sponsorship deal between a major corporate and a prominent sports team.

Thinking that this would involve the company spending a few hundred thousand dollars in return for branding rights and a few player appearances, I was skeptical about the value of the deal.

However, I was impressed to discover that the company had obtained a wide range of solid benefits in return for its money.

In addition to the expected branding opportunities and player appearances, the company had negotiated a range of sales and marketing opportunities that leveraged off the sports team’s network - from the team’s corporate contacts… to its fan base… to its media contacts… to its own marketing efforts. On top of that, the team had also committed to assisting the company with various internal company initiatives.

None of these were huge impositions on the sports team either - what they could offer at little or no cost to them, offered huge value to the company. And, to my delight, many of these offerings could be tested, tracked and measured!

So…

Welcome to Sponsorship Marketing 2.0! It’s not just about branding anymore… it’s about leveraging a range of sales, marketing, promotional and other opportunities that the individual, team, event or other such property can provide.

And don’t forget, sponsorship marketing is not just for “off-line” marketers - it’s huge (though probably nowhere near its potential) online too.

Marketing - the conscious effort to sell you stuff - is more prevalent than ever. You’d think, by now, it would be more sophisticated too.

Yes, in some cases, it is. But when I consider how many small businesses and large corporations pour their marketing dollars into vague campaigns that lack any real understanding of the needs of their target market… lack a specific call to action… are never properly tracked or tested… and are chosen based on their “creativity” rather than their effectiveness… I can only think that millions of dollars are being wasted.

And let me reiterate - we’re not just talking about “inexperienced” small businesses investing in weak, ineffective marketing efforts. You might be shocked, for example, at how many large, prominent corporations invest enormous sums of money in campaigns they never bother to split-test. Split-testing is simply testing two executions of a campaign in order to find out which is the most effective. Ideally, you should always be split-testing, in order to continually improve your results (e.g. response rates, sales, etc).

Why don’t more companies split-test or apply more rigor to their marketing? It’s because they’re lazy. Not lazy in the sense that the average marketing department doesn’t work hard. Of course they do. But lazy in how much effort they put into continuously improving their marketing in order to achieve optimal results. It’s so much easier to choose one execution… rather than test and improve, test and improve, test and improve.

Many marketers and ad agencies also want to be “right” or be “creative”. After all, if you “just know” that a given campaign will work… or opt for a campaign because it’s the “most creative”… you don’t have to put any effort into testing, tracking, innovating, improving , etc. And you get to be the expert too.

But any marketer or advertising executive who thinks they’re “right” or is the “expert”… is deluding themselves and the company or client they work for.

The only person who is “right” every time… is the customer.

And any company that doesn’t test its marketing properly is leaving money on the table. No joke - lazy marketing is costing companies millions.

Jupiter Research has just released a study that confirms what many of us have known for some time: viral marketing is not as easy as it looks. In fact, most viral marketing efforts don’t even work!

So, for all the “viral marketing” strategies, tactics, tools and scripts around… wanna guess how successful everyone’s viral marketing efforts are?

Well, according to Jupiter Research, while 24 percent of marketers run viral marketing campaigns… only 15 percent of such viral campaigns actually prompt consumers to promote the relevant marketing message to others.

So why all the buzz about viral marketing being so powerful? Probably because we can all reel off examples where viral marketing has been extremely successful. Thinking back over the last decade (and in no particular order)… Hotmail, Google, Firefox, MySpace and Facebook all come to mind as enormously successful examples of viral marketing.

Without hard evidence (as opposed to self-congratulation) it’s hard to point to examples of viral marketing success stories within the Internet marketing niche or other small niches. Research I did a couple of years ago indicates that The Interview With God movie is one such success. That actually prompted me to create A Bit Of Inspiration which has been a minor success and continues to generate referrals for our business. I’m told that Mike Filsaime achieved a lot of his pre-Butterfly Marketing success with… butterfly (or viral) marketing. And there are other examples, I’m sure.

But for all these high profile success stories… there are likely to be many, many more viral marketing campaigns that have failed to hit the mark.

I’ll put my hand up. While A Bit of Inspiration has been successful, some of our other attempts at viral marketing have been absolute fizzers.

Fortunately, the stakes haven’t been particularly high for us. But the same can’t be said for all those companies that not only waste thousands upon thousands of dollars on elaborate “viral” games and the like, but also waste money on “seeding” their campaigns (i.e. launching their viral campaign by, ideally, exposing as many people as possible to the viral game, movie or whatever).

All in all, viral marketing is not as sure-fire as some make it out to be. In fact, it’s probably one of the least sure-fire marketing tactics available to you. Of course, when it works… it can work well. Really well. But while I am a big fan of viral marketing (mainly ’cause it’s fun - I’m often thinking up crazy ideas for movies, quizzes and widgets for generating traffic and list-building) I would never stake my business on viral marketing.

Sources: Phyllis Korkki, “For Marketers, Viruses Just Won’t Cooperate”, The New York Times, July 6, 2008, , Michael Greene, David Card, Ina Mitskaviets, “Viral Marketing: Leveraging Social Media Sites”, JupiterResearch, May 23, 2008, Press Release, “JupiterResearch Finds Viral Marketing Missteps Reach Epidemic Proportions”, JupiterResearch, September 4, 2007

No question, knowledge is power - with greater understanding you can make better decisions and therefore achieve better results.

But knowledge is only powerful to the extent that it’s actually used. Just like any other form of power - electricity, gas, etc - it lies dormant unless someone pushes the “power” button or turns on the ignition. Which means, of course, that the “switch” needed to transform that knowledge into results is… taking action.

When it comes to Internet marketing, there is plenty of information available on how to improve the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts. When you digest and understand that information it becomes knowledge. But it’s not until you take action that you see the results of all that knowledge.

Unfortunately, we can often end up, not just in information overload, but in knowledge overload - where we know what needs to be done… but just can’t act on it. This may be because of fear… because we can’t find the time to do it… because we’re under-resourced… because we’re too busy acquiring more knowledge… or a combination of all of these.

Unless you can delegate or outsource (in which case you may well be able to do everything!) I say: do one thing at a time. Narrow your focus to what is the most important thing you can do right now to move your business forward. Do that, and only that, before moving on to the next thing. By no means stop learning - a major objective of this newsletter is to be your eyes and ears for the latest Internet marketing news - but your priority should always be on taking action.

You’re better off acting on one thing you know… than knowing 10 things you never act on.

Welcome to our new look, new name email newsletter. Now before we go any further I’d like to suggest you don’t read any further… unless you’re genuinely passionate about Internet marketing!

That’s because our aim is to publish THE Internet marketing newsletter for Internet marketers. You know, where we actually tell you about breaking news… give you our take on topical issues… and provide you with helpful research findings, tips and more for improving the effectiveness of your Internet marketing efforts.

This ain’t gonna be your regular thinly veiled promotion for some self-styled Internet marketing guru’s latest home study course on how to get rich from the Internet! Boy, that was a mouthful.

So what’s our motivation? (Like, what’s our plan to extract money from you?) It’s simple really. The business model underlying Kikabink News is to generate revenue from advertising sales, affiliate promotions, and promotions for our own products and services.

But what may distinguish Kikabink News from some other so-called Internet marketing newsletters is that (a) we’ll actually publish news (as opposed to just tips on how to do this or that) and (b) there will be a clear distinction between news articles and advertisements or promotions. Hey, it works for The New York Times doesn’t it? Imagine that… providing a clear distinction between news and promotions.

Hopefully, you’ll like the new look Kikabink News, and if you have any suggestions for improvement or other feedback, drop me a line.