To get on the mobile marketing bandwagon early and beat your competition to the punch, you will need to prepare yourself for a bumpy road ahead in the short term. You will need to communicate with the many different devices in use today from different manufacturers as well as different carriers and their specifications and competing protocols.

Naming is integral to branding and to your overall strategy and mission, and this is no easy task. With a financial crisis looming, doing it right is critical to your success. 

Before you name your business, products or services, it’s wise to have the answers to many questions – most of which you have already dealt with if you’ve written a business and/or marketing plan.

You’ll need to have all your major stakeholders in mind: customers, the public, investors, etc.

With all the programs and conferences about social media, social networking and new media for business, one thing I almost missed, and perhaps you did too, was that on June 26, 2008, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), overseer of domain naming, announced a relaxation of its policies.

A friend and colleague, Steven Slater, has been focusing on the importance of embracing Web 2.0 and helping PR executives understand and take advantage of Web 2.0 services and capabilities.  His focus here is on “Taking the Mystery Out of Web 2.0” for the uninitiated.

The media link is a given. After all, what is politics without an audience?

People running for political office depend primarily on various forms of media to draw attention to their candidacy, sign up volunteers, poll opinions, solicit requests for funding, solidify their base and sway the undecided to (a) vote, and (b) vote for them or their cause.

Just as entrepreneurs with a new idea or product must break through the clutter of the massive numbers of messages everyone sees, reads or hears daily, drawing attention to your candidacy is an uphill battle for those new to politics who want to enter into public life and serve their region’s constituents.

The Theory:  There are several marketing industry gurus who champion the approach of marketing to ‘influencers’ to build a brand or ignite an idea through social marketing or business networking. The premise is that some individuals in our society have more power than others. This we can all agree on. And, yes, there are those with strong networks who are activists in one way or another (e.g., in the community, in business, politically, socially). Opinion leaders, another way to refer to them, are generally respected by the people in their network and often emulated. Among those championing the influencers are Malcolm Gladwell, the well-known author of The Tipping Point, Blink and other widely read books about business and society, and Ed Keller and Jon Berry, who co-authored the best-selling book, The Influentials.

As a service to our readers, here’s a good compendium of solid and legitimate organizations you can go to for a variety of marketing-related information, including articles, white papers, terminology, etc.

These organizations vary from pure marketing to functions and specialties such as research, advertising or public relations; from US-based to internationally-based; from brick and mortar to web-only; from open-to-all to level-specific such as executives; from well-known to specialized and less well-known; and from all industries to industry-specific organizatons. You’ll also notice some Washington, DC-centric organizations among these.

Perhaps it’s befitting that this is Abraham Lincoln’s official birthday.  He was certainly a proponent of freedom, and the social networks that have bloomed in cyberspace are all about freedom (the citizen journalist, self-pronounced experts in numerous fields, getting information from many sources, etc.).

While social networking has more going for it than not, and I wrote about it here on April 11, 2007, there are some downsides to using these networks.  Several of these are discussed below.

Have you heard of surveymonkey or boomerang?  Most likely you have received more than one email message asking you to take a survey and providing you with a link to it. 

There are many options available today for conducting your own research—either for free or at a very low cost.  There are examples below this article of survey software readily available online. The first list includes products to help you create and conduct your own brief survey for no charge. All these companies also offer more enhanced survey software capability for modest fees. The second list links to survey software products with relatively low cost options. You can even add a single question to your own website for a simple poll you’d like to offer visitors. Most have varying degrees of support for the user based upon pricing packages you can select.

The American Marketing Association (DC)

As the 2006-2007 President of the DC Chapter of theAmerican Marketing Association, I’d like to share some information about the organization of over 900 professionals and some of the ways this past year that the organization has embraced new technology and its capabilities for marketing campaigns and projects. For my readers who are looking at learning how marketing can help you with your initiatives and start-ups, I encourage you to join the AMA (International headquarters: www.marketingpower.com, 800-AMA-1150; DC chapter: www.amadc.org, 703-683-4883, info@amadc.org).  

Beyond Web 2.0, Mobility

This past week we had a full house at our Inside Track speakers’ program. The presentations focused on how the latest surge in the digital revolution and the new internet will impact Marketing. Our dynamic speakers and moderator provided a rich fabric of new mobile solutions that will enhance future connectivity and dramatically change how Marketing relates to its customers and prospects and how well it functions in the marketplace.  Our moderator, Limor Schafman, President of Keystone TechGroup, LLC, deftly set the stage for the speakers and provided the transition between them.