Staying Power

I just responded to a media query about how mobile marketing and social media will come together. As many of you know, I am an advertising professor who teaches graduate students at Seton Hall University where most of the media queries come from.

Now to answer the question! It is inevitable that these two forms of marketing will eventually converge. One reason has to do with what I believe will happen to communications in general in the future. I believe that iPads and the wannabe's will replace PCs and cell phones because they are already mobile and offer larger screens. The apps are already in the thousands. Marketers are just starting to learn how to use social media in ways in which a return on the investment can be measured. That is not an easy thing to do right now. It requires using a lot of traditional direct response techniques.

It will be a lot easier to measure interactivity (click throughs, time spent, where the respondent actually received the call, who that person is without having to optin, etc.) when social media is used on a mobile (iPad) basis. It is my opinion, for example, that Coke is getting more measurement from its mobile marketing (Coke Rewards) than it is from social media. That does not mean, however, that social media is not being used to promote the mobile campaign. At the present time, that is precisely the way social media is being used with regard to mobile marketing campaigns from the same company.

When the convergence to iPads takes place, the interaction will be much easier to measure and will provide more forecastable data.