Tonight we finished up the conversation around location and then reviewed mobile commerce. We covered Foursquare and how to claim your location and create deals last class, so this time we finished up with Google Places and Facebook Places. The Google Places process is clear and self explanatory while the Facebook process is somewhat of a challenge. For Facebook places you need to complete the following steps.
- Claim it
- Merge it with your business page
- Put deals in it
- Drive revenue
A couple of good examples of businesses using Facebook Places are MasterCard and  “Sneak and Destroy“.
We then moved on to review some recent stats on smartphone usage.
- 34% have use smartphone to research a product
- 15% bought directly
- 19% compared prices while in-store
- 34% accessed the companies site while they were in the store
- 24% accessed a competitors site while in the store
As I’ve stated before, brick and mortar businesses have a distinct advantage when it comes to mobile marketing and this will continue to evolve.
After that we reviewed mobile marketings biggest hurdle, outside of people still having those silly little feature phone things; security. Not the technical side of security, mind you. The consumer perception of mobile security. The numbers in the Harris Interactive and TRUSTe survey provide surprising numbers and some numbers that aren’t so surprising. The stat that shocked me what that 52% of people don’t like using Facebook or Twitter credentials, to login to an application. Of course this is an older group of users but it was still surprising. I guess they miss the 20 questions and providing an email. Ah yes . . .the good OLD days.
From there I recommended using Usablenet as a mobile commerce provider, not only because they’ve won all sorts of awards, but because they cover many types of eCommerce and therefore the data, that one can collect for each user is incredibly valuable. There are, of course others, and I’m sure they do great work; but I’ll stick with my Usablenet for now.
We finished up with the user experience in mind. Square’s Card Case is a cool little tool that allows me to pay for products/services with my cell phone. Google Wallet also has to be taken into consideration and I’m sure American Express and Visa are working on their own solutions. This is going to happen and I can’t wait until my wallet is gone and replaced with my mobile phone. Can’t happen soon enough and I have to wonder if iTunes is really the answer. Apple has ~200 million credit card numbers on file. How easy would it be to create a merchant program and charge less than Square @2.75%. I’d be up for that as well.
Next class, we’re going to talk about Mobile’s fit in the marketing mix!
