Category: Speakers Corner

The other day, a colleague and I were defending our thoughts on the most influential and disruptive technologies of the last 20 years.  The usual suspects came and went very quickly and with little debate.  TIVO … duh.  Touch screens … well it was actually invented in 1965 but it really became a staple of consumer devices in this century so maybe.  IPhone… well revolutionary yes, however, it was derivative of many personal data assistants that came before it.  It laid the foundation for the next generation of telephony and basically killed the non-Smartphone market.  Ask Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia, if they think it was disruptive.

If the Smartphone killed the mobile phone, then what will kill the Smartphone?  What is the next round of disruption to this industry?  Why exactly is the Smartphone dead?

To develop disruption, the first step is to identify the pain points within the existing process.  For telephony it’s actually pretty easy.

1. Smartphones need to have big screen sizes.  Practically, there is only so far a screen can grow and still be portable.  Current phone sizes can range up past 5 inches; however, no one thinks a 7 inch screen is practical for daily communication purposes.  However, increasingly the gap between tablet, Smartphone and computer is shrinking.  We must find a way to execute more with less space or fundamentally change the equation.
2. Touch screens aren’t that practical.  Finger prints drive us all crazy.  Screen protectors are just painful and steal the vibrancy away from today’s high res screens.  Cursor positioning on a Smartphone is a labor in futility and don’t get me started on why iOS won’t add the cursor arrows to their keyboards.  Touch screens also require you to be looking down or at them to engage.  How many times have you almost walked into a pole, while texting or surfing on your phone?
3. Does anyone like earpieces?  Both Bluetooth and wired have fundamental issues and limitations.  Tangled cords, poor sound transmission, poor amplification, noise cancellation that baffles both the user and party on the other line.  Do you walk around all day with an ear piece on or put it in your pocket until needed.  You need to charge it with a separate charger than your phone (generally) and how often does either your phone or earpiece run out of power when you need it most?  The underlying problem is that flat, rectangular phones are a flawed shape for telephony.  Great for data, poor for conducting a conversation.
4. Where do you put your phone when you aren’t using it?  Nomophobia is the fear of losing your phone.  We can all agree that it is a well founded fear and most of us have misplaced, lost or dropped a phone.  With phone prices rising, it’s easy to understand how this has become a condition.  The bigger phones get, coupled with the more power needed to support the larger and higher resolution screens, the harder it is to comfortably walk around with a phone in your pocket.  Form and function are again at odds.

So what does my crystal ball say as to the future evolution of personal computing, communication and telephony.  It actually takes a page directly out of Apple’s own playbook.  Identify a form factor that can be stylish, trendsetting and leverages existing capabilities in a way that provides a differential experience.  Take technologies that are already there and combine them in a way that hasn’t been thought of yet.

Welcome to, iGlasses 2018.  Not the currently interpreted view of what Google’s Project Glass and Apple’s existing iGlasses initiative represent but the real world and disruptive application of that vision.  Imagine a set of eye glasses, with thousands of frame choices for you to make, that integrates hard-wired earbuds (think of a better version of what Oakley makes) and battery and charging systems to make them a completely integrated system.  Utilize induction to charge and slim connectors, Bluetooth or wireless to upload and download data.

These transparent, head mounted, displays would permit the wearer to view and interact with content through a much, much larger perspective.  Imagine how you would interact with a 50 inch screen in front of you?  Don’t worry about walking into a pole because you can see right through the data and you have your head up all the time.

Now how would you interact with the data?  On a Smartphone you touch, tap and drag.  Using iGlasses, you could use four different data input methods.

1. Voice.  Clearly Siri and voice technology is only improving.  It won’t be long for you to be able to guide your experience through voice alone.  Siri, pull up today’s calendar.  Siri, call my brother.  That works already, however it would become cumbersome on its own for repetitive navigation commands.
2. Eye tracking.  The frames of the glasses could have sensors that track the movements of your eye to reference where on the virtual screen you are looking at.  Currently, there are dozens of practical applications using eye tracking as a computer interface.  It simply needs to be miniaturized to fit this application.
3. Hand/finger tracking.  Kinect and other gesture control technologies are exploding right now.  Unlike eye tracking, imagine the sensor is on the other side of the rim tracking your hand/finger movements to position the cursor on the virtual screen.  Look anywhere and virtually type in the air to compose your next email.
4. Lastly, and certainly not as far off as you think is mind control.  No really!  Check out this TED video to see how a small number of strategically positioned electrodes can enable anyone to move cursors and 3D renderings with their mind.  Imagine that the rim, temple and earpiece have sensors that detect your unique brainwave pattern.  Instead of reading how to click and swipe in the instruction manual, it’ll teach you how to calibrate the sensors to read your thoughts.

So you may ask… How would you ever fit all the components required by a phone into a slim pair of iGlasses frames?  Great question.  That could be accomplished in at least two ways.

1. Miniaturization.  If Moore’s Law holds then it won’t take more than 5 or 6 years for the circuitry in a standard Smartphone to fit within a modestly sized frame.  Batteries are also shrinking and smaller circuits require less power to execute the same functions.
2. Key fob.  Imagine that instead of having the phone within the glasses, the actual telephony hardware, computer and main battery are shrunk into a key fob that pares with the iGlasses to do the heavy processing.  The key fob would still be very small but can be shaped in a form that allows for the components to fit better together.  Now you have another reason to fear losing your keys!

Am I serious?  Absolutely!  Is it a disruptive idea?  You tell me.  While you think about, it, I’m placing my advanced order.

Master Mobile Marketing to Generate Demand

Why?  Because if you generate the right demand, you’ll generate the right leads.

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The following is a guest post from Forrest Knighton, Senior Director of Account Mgmt and support for mobileStorm.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a half human car? You know, it could sense what kind of mood you’re in as soon as you got in and fastened your seatbelt; it would instinctively know what kind of music to put on the radio, know which route to your destination you’d want to take- the scenic or the efficient one.  It would be able to tell what exact temperature you’d like the cockpit to be without you having to adjust the controls.  Sweet, huh?  Maybe someday in the future that will be a reality but for now you have to select your own music, decide what streets you want to take and manually adjust the climate control.

But there is a type of machine out there that is half human, blending bleeding edge technology with real live human emotion, decision making, thought processes, and actions: The Marketing Machine. Sure, a  platform like mobileStorm gives you all the tools you need to send SMS and email campaigns to your audience, but adding the Human Element a.k.a Customer Service/Dedicated Account Management can help make your marketing efforts more effective, help guide you in making better decisions,  give you insight into your core audience, inform you what type of messaging medium will be most effective for your product, and even let you know what time of day you should send which type of message.  That’s what the Human Element can give you – empathy, compassion, insight, instinct and real world firsthand knowledge.  Machines are cold, impersonal, and generally quite stupid because they can only do exactly what you tell them to do based on information that a human had to create in the first place.  There’s a difference between Information and Wisdom and computers and machines have the former not the latter.

Go ask your Constant Contact account (yes, the actual control panel interface) what the expected retention rate for a highly incentivized re-confirmation email campaign to 5000 six-month old dormant email addresses will be.  Let me save you some time and embarrassment… the machine itself, the control panel,  can’t tell you squat.  Ask the same question to a mobileStorm Dedicated Account Manager and they’ll provide you with a number range based on real life experience while factoring in your audience, offer, weather, and current political climate.  That’s valuable stuff!  Here’s an example albeit a colorful, strange, not super realistic, dark humored example:

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We didn’t invent the term multi-channel marketing, but I can assure you mobileStorm was a first mover in this space. I can say for certain we were the first company in the U.S. to launch a self-service platform that provided six ways to communicate through the same interface (email, sms, video, voice, fax, and rss). We still provide six ways, but you need our mobileStorm Pro service.  At one time we even had a partnership with the now-defunct Mailersclub.com and offered the ability to create postcards, so you could say we went to seven. I would ask my developers if we could go to 11, but I guess they haven’t done a Hindu translation of Spinal Tap yet. That joke will make this a hard segue to the next section, but if you laughed you might as well keep reading.

Communication has grown over the years. First there was the carrier pigeon, then the telegraph, then mail, then the telephone, then email, then bulletin boards, then sms, then IM, and now social and mobile apps. Think about this evolution of communication, and ask yourself one question:  “Have you ever witnessed more modes of communication available to people than you have in the last ten years?” I think there is a resounding “no” (and yes, I purposely left off Blackberry Messenger and cave paintings).

A flood of new technology, compliments of the interwebs (for those still using IE6, that’s slang for “Internet”) made it happen.  I saw this coming when I was working for a decent-sized interactive video game start-up in Santa Monica in 1998. I was making more money in one week day trading ebay with my Datek account than my entire month’s salary (big apology to the CEO for wasting company time). I just knew the Internet was going to change the world and even more so become mobile, which is why I started mobileStorm in October of 1999. We first got into the mobile business, but we were too far ahead of the curve. Nobody wanted to pay us to send SMS messages because the consumer adoption was just not there yet. However, at some point email took off and we decided to integrate an email and sms marketing platform that you could sign up right on the spot as long as you had a credit card. Long story short, as new technologies came out, I made it our mission to create a communication platform that allowed businesses to reach consumers in as many ways as possible. Why? Because people are different and different channels have different adoption rates depending upon age, ethnicity, geography, and savviness. I figured if we covered the spectrum of communication, then companies would flock to our services. Well, I was right and I was wrong.

Yes, mobileStorm has seen killer growth over the last few years, but initially the way we sold multi-channel marketing was confusing. On top of that, we had no money to make a splash in the industry; we built the company with no VC backing. It’s great to see how many larger email service providers (ESPs) are starting to add channel after channel, because it tells us we were right all along. However, it sucks that our competitors are adding channel after channel because now we need to truly compete and differentiate ourselves.  And, we are still without the millions of dollars our competitors have raised in venture funding.

Nevertheless, please don’t take this the wrong way. I am not trying to gain your sympathy; I am just relating the facts. Here is the part where a big smile comes across my face: we have been doing this for so long and with so many different types of businesses that patterns have emerged. We have gathered a major pool of intelligence about what businesses need when trying to promote and sell their products and services in a digital world, and we have had enough time to get inside the mind of the consumer and understand how he would like to be communicated with. We are already arming our clients with this knowledge and, from a product perspective, are working on the next big thing.

Having a multi-channel marketing platform is one thing, but having an integrated communication platform is another. This is where we see the market going, and this is where we are headed. Let me explain:

Usually digital marketing service providers focus on one channel and if they do decide to adopt another, they develop it out separately and say, “Here you go; start using this way to reach your audience.” As new ways to communicate like email, sms, and social are adopted by consumers, service providers (like mobileStorm) create products to allow businesses to take advantage of these new communication mediums. Historically, these platforms only allow channels to be managed in a single silo. Single silos mean multiple locations for campaign management, separate reporting, and even different lists (example: one list for email addresses and another for cell phone numbers). Integrated multi-channel marketing means truly integrating channels of communication so that they work in unison, seamlessly forming a powerful conversation with customers. To me, the word “integrated” means we can stop saying “multi-channel” because not only does it mean multi-channel, but it means getting rid of these silos and truly combining the channels. It’s one stone, two birds. I am going to take this a bit further and get rid of the word “marketing” and turn marketing into “communication.” Why? Because to me, marketing is a one -way conversation, like advertising. But marketing is morphing into a two-way conversation; it’s truly becoming more about communication than anything else. Besides, do consumers want to be marketed to or communicated with?

Integrated communication means one location to manage the channels, timing, and actions of campaigns, as well as one interface for reporting on the effectiveness of a customer’s integrated communication. If I were to tell you any more than this (and get into the features), then I would have to kill you so I am going to stop here because I would be really popular at Pelican Bay.

If there is one take-away from my column, it is that the world is changing quickly and businesses need communication tools to grow their businesses. Consumers don’t want to be marketed to–they want to be communicated with. There are a lot of choices out there when it comes to digital marketing platforms, but most are stuck in single silo purgatory (mobileStorm included). On the other hand, that is changing, and I imagine the smarter organizations will get this and do something about it.

Cheers,

Jared Reitzin

The following is a guest post from M.H. (Mac) McIntosh, a business-to-business lead generation and marketing consultant who specializes in helping companies create demand, generate leads, and close more sales using the latest B2B marketing strategies, tactics, technology, and media. Please visit www.sales-lead-experts.com for more information.

As effective as e-mail already is for B2B marketing, there is a way to get exponentially better results. How? By integrating e-mail into your marketing campaigns instead of using it as a stand-alone tactic.

When it comes to B2B marketing tactics, e-mail is clearly a winner. Not only does it cost little to send, it generates responses, such as leads and sales, virtually immediately.

However, as effective as e-mail already is for B2B marketers, there is a way to get exponentially better results: By integrating e-mail into your marketing campaigns instead of using it as a stand-alone tactic.  Here’s how . . .

Start by asking for your prospects’ e-mail addresses, and opt-in permission, during every interaction with them.

To increase the likelihood they will give you their e-mail addresses, offer them something valuable in return (e.g., white papers, articles, how-to guides, self-assessments, case studies, e-newsletters, and updates about upcoming events).

Whenever possible, also assure them that you won’t share their e-mail addresses with anyone, and remind them that they can opt out at any time in the future.

Use e-mail as an “outbound” or “push” marketing tactic to follow up to your “inbound” or “pull” marketing-generated inquiries.

E-mail is an ideal way to follow up with prospects that downloaded your white paper, signed up to attend your webinar, or joined your LinkedIn group.

Even the authors of the best-selling book on inbound marketing admit to using e-mail as an outbound tactic for following up, nurturing, and qualifying the inquiries they generate from their inbound marketing efforts.

Use e-mail to nurture your longer-term prospects.

Unfortunately, not every response or inquiry represents a qualified, sales-ready opportunity.  Our research shows that only one out of four sales opportunities come from those with immediate needs.

In other words, three out of four of your sales opportunities come from prospects with longer-term needs. To increase your chances of getting your share or more of those sales, give some thought to the steps in your prospects’ buying process as they move from consideration to purchase. Then create content you can offer via e-mail (e.g., white papers, how-to guides, self-assessments, and webinars) which address their information needs at each step.

Use e-mail to lead prospects to your social media content.

Your social media presence means little if nobody knows it’s there. So be sure to include signatures in your e-mails which feature links to your blog, your tweets, your LinkedIn profile, your YouTube videos, and even to the current issue of your e-newsletter.

Use social media to extend the reach of your e-mail.

Encourage your e-mail recipients to pass your information along by Twittering or blogging about it, or by forwarding it to their friends and colleagues.  Make it easy by including buttons or links to do so in the body of your e-mails.

Open up an e-mail communications channel with the prospects who find you via other marketing media.

Prime the pump by allowing your prospective customers to respond by e-mail to all your marketing communications.

The bottom line? You’ll get better results.

Whenever you are planning new or additional marketing, ask yourself how you can integrate e-mail. Why? Because when it comes to results, integrating e-mail into your other marketing campaigns and materials is like 1+1=3.