If 2008-2009 represented the arrival of social media in force at least in terms of mainstream acceptance, you might say that 2010 and beyond represents the same for location. Services like Foursquare and Gowalla, which allow users to broadcast their current locations by “checking-in” with their mobile phones, have grown by leaps and bounds in recent months; Foursquare has, for instance, around 725,000 users, as well as 22 million total check-ins. Those numbers might seem like small potatoes, but they have bigger social networks on notice: Facebook will roll out a location feature within the coming weeks.

For those who aren’t familiar, here’s how these services typically work: Users access the service via their mobile phones (Foursquare has iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps) and are presented with a list of their friends locations. They can then “check in”, or add their own location, which works with the phone’s location features to determine where the user is. Since those features have a margin of error, a short list of places in the vicinity is presented to the user; he or she can pick from the list and share the correct location with their friends via Twitter or Facebook. Read More »

Arriving in South Africa yesterday, I was reminded of what British heritage leaves around – driving on the left, spelling key as quay, and televising every world cricket match. One day I’ll understand that sport. You also can’t escape the reality of global branding from the moment you exit the plane – the ubiquitous HSBC jet bridges, Visa adverts plastering baggage claim, and a Coca-Cola vending machine in every corner.

There’s also this large sporting event coming up (in case you haven’t heard): the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Or rather, “the-every-fourth-year-global-football-tournament-to-determine-a-single-country-champion,” as FIFA would like me to refer to it in this space.

FIFA is playing brand police here in South Africa, and a ruthless outfit at that. You can find just a taste of their efforts in this article. My personal favorite – their request of Kalula, one of South Africa’s low-cost airlines, to withdraw its slogan “Unofficial National Carrier of the You-Know-What.” While fully understanding that FIFA and its corporate partners paid truckloads of money for brand exclusivity at the tournament, the brand management tenacity at play here seems to far exceed rational boundaries. Read More »

Continuing a very episodic series on how some things might be bottle-necked, my next observation is around the number of key accounts that a company manages at any point in time.

This observation comes from a study of key account managers in 2006 that surveyed key account managers from 53 large companies.  The study found that, while all companies tier customers, they also tend to limit the number of accounts that fit the description: “a customer relationship that is deemed significant to your company’s long-term growth because of that customer’s current and/or expected financial, learning or strategic value”.  Specifically, the number of true key accounts tends to cluster around the 15- to 20-mark, irrespective of the company’s industry segment. That was a surprise, since we expected certain firms (like the delivery industry) to engage with a much larger number of accounts given their routine interactions with 100,000s of customers. Read More »

You’ve probably already noticed this, but new features from Twitter and Facebook have come nearly tit for tat over the past few weeks. Twitter announced its intention to consolidate product offerings across platforms; Facebook, in turn, announced that it will plant its seeds all over the web and become an even more integral aspect of the link economy.

The arms race that has begun to heat up between these social networks means that marketers need to constantly pressure test their strategy as new features emerge.

Here are the basics of what you should know:

Read More »

Marketers are awash in data.  Digital, social and (increasingly) mobile marketing are spinning off data streams faster than we can humanly manage.  Analysis-paralysis ensues, and for some of us, data drowning shortly thereafter.

Few marketing organizations today have the analytical chops and creativity to squeeze gamebreaking insight from these increasingly rich data streams (see this prior post on coping with information richness).   Most marketing leaders will settle for a life preserver—they’ll outsource analytics to vendors or shunt it off to an analytics team buried inside of market research.

By contrast, sage marketing leaders will build surfboards to ride the data waves.  How? Read More »