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According to a recent Forrester Research survey of internet marketers, 2009 is going to be a big year for social media and mobile marketing. The chart below explains it all (via Marketing Pilgrim):

Forrester Marketing Survey Results

My only concern with these results is that it skews heavily towards more savvy internet marketers and does not reflect the larger business landscape. I base that on the fact that I don’t see any evidence that 80% of all marketers are currently using SEO and Pay Per Click advertising.

Based on that assumption, can we hypothesize that the growth in social and mobile marketing won’t be as strong as Forrester predicts?

An article in Mediapost quotes a Google study finding that smart phone users are entering longer queries into mobile search engines than their non-smart (dumb?) phone counterparts.

The results suggest that iPhone searches mimic computer-based search behavior in terms of query length — about three words per query for computer and iPhone queries, as opposed to 2.5 words per query for conventional cell phones.

I am a Blackberry Storm user, so I can relate to the iPhone crowd’s enthusiasm for mobile searching. However, my newest fascination is 1-800-GOOG-411, a free 411 service offered by Google. It is much safer while driving and the results have been accurate and reliable.

As a 411 service, it only powers business searches. It’s great for finding a pizza place or a nearby hotel while traveling, but I would like to see a general web search equivalent so that I can request search results for a person, place, or company without having to take my eyes off the road while driving.

Tips for Advertisers and Businesses

Do your customers or prospective customers fit the profile for smart phone users? If so, you should consider the following ways to improve your mobile visibility:

1. Create a mobile version of your website (or at least your company/product/service info and contact details) for mobile web users.
2. Claim and update your listings in the search engines’ local search properties: Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, MSN/Live Search Maps.
3. Include your business address in your website template. Include a local phone number and a zip code to maximize your site’s relevance to a particular location.

A short dispatch from today’s Wall Street Journal highlights “old media’s” misconceptions about the fundamental change taking place in the information markets.

According to the article, News Corp. is investing in a new e-reader akin to the Amazon Kindle. CEO Rupert Murdoch seems to think that he can reverse the surge towards free content on the web.

“People are used to reading everything on the net for free, and that’s going to have to change.”

Going even further, Murdoch “questioned whether the newspaper industry should continue to allow online news aggregators, such as Google Inc., to aggregate newspaper content without being compensated for it.”

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Put yourself in his shoes for a minute. Of course News Corp. is entitled to profit from its business operations. And yes, most of their information products are worth a premium (case in point, I gladly subscribe to the online WSJ for $99 a year). Unfortunately for the newspaper industry, they are swimming upstream against a tidal wave of free information and reduced advertising revenue.

I totally agree with his first point. In order to benefit from the access and perspective that traditional media provides, consumers will have to pony up a few bucks. Whether that’s a subscription model or a cost per article (iTunes model) remains to be seen. Given Amazon’s recent move to create an iPhone Kindle application, I would think that yet another e-reader device would be redundant. If I were News Corp., I would create applications to utilize existing devices that are more than powerful enough and wouldn’t require a separate consumer purchase.

Unfortunately for the mobile ad market, advertising revenues are abysmally low. But there is hope. Early studies are showing that mobile ads may be useful to consumers as evidenced by higher response rates and recall.

Empty Threats

However, I’m not sure his comment about disallowing Google News is anything more than saber-rattling. I’m sure Mr. Murdoch knows that he can make that a reality with one simple line of code in the WSJ’s robots.txt file. But he won’t, unless he can get every single newspaper publisher to go along with him.

Imagine, if you will, the day that the WSJ blocks Google News crawlers from accessing and indexing their content. Do you really think this will prevent regular people from using Google News? Will they realize what they are missing and phone in their subscription to the WSJ?

No, of course not. All of the traffic that would have gone to WSJ.com will go to other news sites. News Corp. will lose a lot of online advertising impressions and revenue. It’s a lose/lose for News Corp.

An Unenviable Position

So what is a newspaper publisher to do when faced with this conundrum? I wish I knew. I’d be phoning in this blog post from my yacht in the Mediterranean. What is your opinion? Will yet another e-reader save News Corp.? Or will it simply distract them from their primary objective of figuring out how to maximize revenue in a new operating environment?

One thing that becomes readily apparent to those of us that follow the mobile search engine marketing industry is that there is a significant lack of usage information as compared to the “traditional” web. Given the fact that the mobile phone manufacturers, service providers, and mobile browser developers are still battling it out over their proprietary technologies and systems, it’s no wonder that companies like Quantcast, Hitwise, and Compete.com haven’t sprung up to service the mobile advertising industry.

However, the folks at Opera Software publish an annual report entitled “State of the Mobile Web” based on the quantity and types of pages transcoded by their mobile browser. Not surprisingly, mobile web usage is increasing dramatically as measured by the number of unique users, page views, and data transferred.

This chart shows the rate of growth in pageviews is increasing almost exponentially.

Monthly Mobile Web Pageviews

Additionally, the most visited mobile web destinations continue to be major search and information properties. The most popular mobile websites in July 2008 as measured by unique users are:

1. google.com
2. myspace.com
3. facebook.com
4. wikipedia.org
5. yahoo.com
6. nytimes.com
7. gamejump.com
8. youtube.com
9. accuweather.com
10. my.opera.com

Does your company have a mobile web presence? Just because you have a website doesn’t mean it is optimized for mobile search engines which rank results differently than their web counterparts. Not to mention that mobile usability standards are much different than the traditional web. Smaller screens and limited input capabilities require a streamlined, organized mobile website.

If you are the type of person that sits around after a major marketing trend passes you by and thinks, “Man, if only I had been out in front of this Internet thing…” Well, now is the time to start thinking about the mobile web.

There’s an informative series of articles over at Shawn Smith’s blog on NewMediaBytes.com about Quick Response (QR) codes. For the unfamiliar, QR codes are 2-dimensional barcodes that contain information about a product or service, similar to (but better than) the barcodes you are used to seeing on everyday products.

QR codes are already popular in Asia, where consumers snap photos of them with their cell phones in newspapers, billboards, and other un-wired media. Special software takes the image and converts it to data such as a URL that can be accessed on the phone’s browser or downloaded to a computer. It remains to be seen how popular these items will become outside of the Asian market, but Shawn’s series of posts paint a very rosy picture of QR codes’ future in the U.S.

I am sure that QR codes will play a role in the mobile web of the future because the technology is too powerful to ignore. However, I don’t think the U.S. market is ready for them just yet and adoption rates will be slowed by the expense and low penetration of broadband-enabled phones with data plans. Case in point, a ZDNet article about an initial trial at Case Western University shows that students are slow to adopt the new technology for a few primary reasons:

• Cell phone carriers charge for data usage. The price for each transaction varies by carrier and by whether the phone owner has an unlimited data plan or pays by the megabyte.
• The software does not come pre-loaded on cell phones.
• There is no standard technology in the U.S. that spans multiple wireless carriers, handset manufacturers, and software developers.
• QR codes are currently only deployed in a few locations around campus: bus shelters, campus newspapers, and a few promotional handouts.

In my opinion, the market will mature when consumers get free (or ad-supported) access to these programs and the wireless industry implements and promotes a common set of standards. The technology has to be built in, work on any device and with any carrier, and should be as idiot-proof as taking a picture with the phone’s camera.