This is an excerpt from my live blogging of a SMX Melbourne presentation by Gillian Muessig, President of SEOmoz.
Mobile is here to stay. If you haven’t already investigated how to use mobile marketing, you are already way behind.
Why do you want a community platform? Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce. Gillian mentioned LivingSocial.com – already in Sydney, very big in the US. It’s a way to get deals / coupons for things in your community. Also Groupon.com is a similar thing. These ideas are similar to @square, which is a way to pay for things using your cell phone, popular in the US and hopefully coming to Australia and New Zealand soon.
You can make your own QR code at www.qrcode.kaywa.com – download the QR code to your mobile for coupon / discount / offer / invitations / news. Mobile coupons are about levels of offers therefore all about social status.
You can also play games with QR codes. Send hints / clues / instructions etc. Data has come full circle and now gone offline. You can get your codes offline now, from billboards, physical stores etc.
Should you or shouldn’t you jump on the .mobi bandwagon? Gillian says no. It was always a stop gap measure. But DO create mobile-friendly pages. Search engines will use transcoding to auto show your page on mobile devices. Make sure your pages provide value and are designed for mobile and put them in folders on your site.
Cindy Krum is a mobile marketing evangelist and the world’s foremost authority on the subject. Gillian suggests looking at Cindy’s mobile directory list.
If you can blog, you can build an app. You don’t need a huge audience, you can make a mobile app just for your biz or your few customers.
For application building, try AppBreeder. Also, Hunch.com launches tonight – it’s a mobile community builder that allows you to build your own mobile local app on the fly. It’s a brand new service that Gillian thinks will take off after launch.
Mobile is easy, it’s out there and now is your chance to grab the opportunities in mobile marketing before your competitors do.
As I’ve pointed out to Cindy Krum and many others in regards to mobile SEO, using a .mobi domain makes a significant, positive difference in results. (Google and Microsoft were two of dotMobi’s founders for a reason.)
In North America alone, search engine marketing last year was at $12.2 billion and is forecast to grow to $25 billion by 2011. Those numbers show that search engine performance has become crucial to the success of any business. Because every .mobi domain registered gets its own entry in the Internet Zone File — the files that search engines use to start their crawls — your site will automatically perform better than any other naming convention. Additionally, search engines detect when searches are being made from mobile devices and prioritize their results accordingly. Because .mobi sites are high quality and made for mobile, they are automatically brought to the top of the mobile search results.
Also, sites using a .mobi domain are whitelisted by network level transcoders. Designing great mobile sites takes time and effort to get the most out of the limited screen resolution and navigation mechanisms of mobile phones. Having invested money and time in creating your mobile presence, you don’t want a third-party transcoder modifying your site … but this is exactly what happens when you use a non-standard name for your mobile Web site. As a rule, .mobi sites are automatically whitelisted by all network-level transcoders, so you can be sure your site will render as you intended on all mobile devices.
You can read more abou this — as well as other reason to use a .mobi domain — at http://dotmobi.mobi/resource/top-5-reasons-why-you-need-a-mobi-name.
Hi Kalena,
It was really great way to explore the new era of online marketing and i am excited to see the stats about smartphone users around the world.
Mobile application marketing will definitely capture large market shares in next few years.
I have tried to access AppBreeder facilities but it seems under constructions.