This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of The Mobile Enterprise: Engaging Where Your Customers Are. We assembled an all-star panel consisting of: Lon Safko, the president and CEO at Innovative Thinking, Carrie Layne, the Founder and CEO at Best Buzz, and Matt Byrd, the Senior Email Marketing Manager at Litmus. This webinar was sponsored by Act-On Software, which was recently named a Leader in Marketing Automation by Forrester Research.
Lon set the stage with a list of the top 50 mobile stats assembled from hours of scouring the web for the most interesting data sources. Some of the stats that really resonated with the audience were: 91% of American adults own a cell phone and 61% of American adults own a smartphone. Another stat on the mix of platforms got a few questions for Lon: 53% of smartphones are Android, 40% are iPhone and 3% are Blackberry. You should really visit the slides to review some of these stats if you are looking to start a mobile project or just get more support for your current projects. There is something there for everyone.
Matt took over after Lon and talked about the role of email in mobile. Perhaps the most widely used "application" on mobile is email, yet as Matt pointed out 80% of subscribers delete emails that don't look good on their phones, while 31% of marketers are not sending "mobile friendly" emails. Matt made the case that it's never been more important to make sure your emails look good on all devices and screen sizes.
After that, Carrie took us through some examples of great mobile experiences. One such campaign was Tortuga Rum Cakes; Cariie showed us how the mobile site, Facebook reviews and the Google search all worked on a mobile phone. She also showed us a case study of a recently released book called "The Doodle Revolution" and how the marketing team used visual recognition to allow potential customer to take a snapshot of the cover and get exclusive content and rewards from the author.
Now, if you have ever been on a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very "participant-driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Some of the questions we covered were: Why are QR Codes so ugly and why are leading brands using them? Is it easy to track mobile data? Can you integrate it with other analytics tools? Are B2B companies really doing mobile?
If that piqued your interest, you will want to hear the replay of this webinar or review the slides from this webinar. Otherwise we hope you will join us on another Social Media Today webinar! The next webinar is on Advocate Marketing Decoded: 5 Proven Steps to Powering Advocates in Retail, sign up for it or you can view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.