Apple has recently told developers for its popular iPhone devices that they cannot make use of the built-in GPS antenna and location-based services to serve ads to users. A lot of people have been predicting for quite some time that this is going to be a hot spot in mobile advertising: while out shopping, for instance, people could see coupons on their phone based on the stores around them.

But this doesn’t mean iPhone users will never see geography-based advertisements. Apple purchased mobile advertising company Quattro Wireless a bit ago and could be planning to use geo-based ads for itself. This could be more of a sign of things to come for the upcoming iPad, which has far more screen real estate but also a GPS antenna, on which to display ads, and less change to annoy users. That is if everyone carried them around whenever they went out, they don’t exactly fit in your pocket.

As a user, I understand the desire for privacy and the need to protect advertisers from knowing where I am physically. I also wouldn’t want my battery hit up constantly by draining activity such as using the GPS antenna to serve me ads. We’ll have to see how this pans out but as a marketer I am intrigued by the possibilities, especially if this were to be a purely opt-in service.

If you are interested in getting current and potential customers to engage with your social media efforts, then it’s critical to provide them with what they are looking for and are truly interested in …

And, actually, it’s really not very difficult to figure out because it is no different than our expectations!  What the majority of people expect are good deals, which includes information about specials and sales.  But keep in mind that coming in second to that information is they are also looking for a deeper engagement with your company – learning about new products, features or services.

We all remember the good old days when companies advertised new products and sales through traditional means (magazines, newspapers, etc.) hoping that their message “connected” to their customer.  Now, thanks to social media, a company has the opportunity to immediately connect, inform, provide and also receive valuable feedback from their public.

It’s now more critical than ever to  have an understanding as to what customers want (you don’t want to  make any assumptions in the social media landscape)  in order to put  the right communication building blocks in place – remember, it’s all about creating an atmosphere for a long-term relationship with your customers.

As posted in a lot of other places, Google has very publicly announced that it is no longer censoring Google searches in China and is prepared to leave the country if the Chinese government doesn’t like it. Most people in the US seem to be hailing the move as a victory in human rights in a country that has a bad history of denying them.

TechCrunch is arguing that it’s as much a business move as a humanitarian one, but I’m not buying it. The same 3 reasons they provide for why this is true could be argued as reasons for them not to do this. Either way, it’s a win for progress in an area lacking some basic civil liberties.

DARPA placed 10 red balloons randomly throughout the US and issued a challenge: find them using the Internet. A team of MIT researchers used a custom-built social media platform that integrated info from Facebook and Twitter to find them. How long did it take? Only 8 hours.

Here’s an interview with one of the MIT researchers:

Great timing … eMarketer’s CEO, Geoff Ramsey, just came out with some predictions for 2010 trends that are worth repeating:

1.  VIDEO – We’ve been talking about this for over a year now and it looks like online video advertising, streams and ad networks are continuing to be embraced by marketers due to the positive reception by online audiences.  Of course, viewers are now expecting more professional video content.

2.  USAGE - Internet user penetration of the US population is reaching 66% (205.3 million people), and this is expected to stabilize a bit as it reaches 70% in the next four years. 

3.  SOCIAL MEDIA – Online searches are expected to get “more social” – real time content from posts on Twitter, for example, will be included in the search results and relevance will improve as search engines use collective information from Web users.

4.  CONVERGENCE – It will be interesting to see what comes out of the Consumer Electronics Show  (January 7-10, 2010) in Las Vegas as they will be introducing televisions with direct Internet connectivity.

5.  MOBILE – Mobile ad spending will increase almost 30% to $593 million in 2010 as mobile and social will converge as consumers and brands will increase their engagement in apps.

6.  SOCIAL COMMERCE – This is the use of social media within various social networks for an e-commerce purpose.  The social aspect is to socialize (with live chat) with your customer from start to finish.  Athough most marketers using social media are focused more on measurement, retailers as well are challenged with how a fan base actually translates into sales and/or brand loyalty. 

As a side note regarding engagement, there was an interesting study conducted by WetPaint and Altimeter Group in Jul 2009 on the top 100 global brands that are engaged in social media channels and if higher engagement can be correlated with financial performance – take a look at the key findings.

You can decide for yourself if you think “engagement” in social media is right for your organization!

There were an incredible amount of electronic paper devices – or ebook Readers – in 2009 although you probably wouldn’t realize it. You’ve probably heard of Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader and perhaps seen the new nook device in Barnes & Noble stores, and maybe you’ve seen the Sony ebook readers at Borders and Best Buys across the country. But also released, somewhat quietly, were at least 10 other similar devices from all sorts of different companies. There are even more in development that will be released next year.

All of these devices have some big things in common: 1 – they only display black and white print and are very poor at rendering graphics; 2 – they’re intended to use almost strictly for books (and some newspapers). As everyone is scrambling to create the killer device to read books on, no one has focused specifically on creating a device for displaying magazine content digitally. Well this has changed as Time Inc. magazine and Bonnier Corporation, publishers of many publications including Popular Science, Field & Stream and the TransWorld sports series, are developing devices geared specifically to reproducing print magazines on dedicated electronic devices.

Bonnier is working with European design consultancy Berg who just released some photos and a video of the planned device in action. You can see the still photos and read more about the device on their blog, but here it is in action:

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Pretty amazing stuff, and it will be equally impressive if they actually pull this off without the device costing $1,000+

What the heck does this have to do with internet marketing? Well, as they describe in the video, advertising will also be present on the device and because it’s electronic, it’s trackable. In the not-too-distant future we could track and report on the effectiveness of magazine and other print ads like never before – similar to how we track online campaigns. We could know exactly how many people viewed an ad, whether they shared it with a friend and maybe even if they made a purchase as a result. This kind of tracking is unprecedented in the print world and could do a great deal to prop up sagging advertising revenue in this industry. Although that may never recover to the levels it has been in the dead-tree world, it’s an exciting prospect nonetheless.

Email marketing, a re-marketing tool, can be a very effective means to build loyalty and drive new business from existing clientele. Using it to generate new business from prospective customers who have no idea who you are, however, is a sketchy proposition. Purchased or rented lists typically do not provide as good a response or return. This is due to everyone’s extra sensitivity to spam and also to the differences in mindsets between the offline (print) world and online engagement. But it’s also due to the way email providers, and especially Internet Service Providers (ISPs), identify and filter emails that are marketing-oriented.

ISPs use one or more of several methods to identify unsolicited email but none of them are perfect. Unsolicited email still makes it through and requested marketing (e.g. email newsletters) sometimes get wrongly dumped into the junk folder. Even if you send mass email pieces through only trusted sources, it can be tough to ensure those messages make it to someone’s inbox. And it’s going to get tougher.

A new(er) method, called “Domain Reputation,” is being implemented by some of the major ISPs with more likely to follow. This method looks at the actual website name that the email came from to determine whether it should be spared from the spam folder. In the past this hasn’t been the case so it was easy for really malicious marketers to keep sending email from the same website by moving that website to different servers. Now your website domain, as displayed in your email marketing pieces, will be evaluated on its reputation for sending emails. If you’ve sent emails before that have gone into a user’s junk folder, that counts against you. If someone hits the “Mark as Spam” button on one of your emails, that counts against you. More specifically, it all gets totaled up and counted against your domain.

It can be tough keeping up with all of the new ways that email marketing is filtered. However, the fact is that double-opt-in emails, those delivered only to people who have requested it (and confirmed their request, hence the “double” part), are still safe and will be for the foreseeable future. In fact they’re not only safe, they are still an excellent way to keep yourself in front of customers and provide a valuable service (such as an email newsletter with really great advice). If you’re providing something that people have proven they want, you shouldn’t be too concerned about the rise in use of Domain Reputation filtering by ISPs and email providers.

This is an interesting bit of information coming out of a report from eMarketer – by the year 2013, 43% of global mobile Internet users (607.5 million people worldwide) will be accessing social networks from their mobile devices!

“In the US, mobile social networkers will total 56.2 million by 2013 and will account for nearly half (45%) of the mobile Internet population,” says eMarketer.

This is exciting and impressive, however, the real question will be how can marketers use the social networks to reach and engage their target audience?  Who are the mobile social networkers and do they include the right consumers that are interacting with your brand through this medium?

Well if you’re interested in finding out the answers to these questions, you’ll need to come up with $695 in order to access the report  - no doubt, depending upon your product/service it might be a worthwhile exercise.

Be sure and let us know what you find out

Earlier this year we commented on an upcoming update to Google’s rules for ranking websites codenamed “Caffeine.” This update actually changes how Google analyzes web pages significantly but current rankings, for the most part, should remain stable per our tests in the Developer Preview. Google is now launching Caffeine starting with 1 data center by the end of this year, and then a full rollout next year.

We’ve also discussed Google’s increasing emphasis on web page load times. We knew it was a factor for Google’s Pay-Per-Click ads (slower sites will be penalized, requiring more money to show up higher) and hinted that it will probably become a factor for every website in Google’s “natural” or regular (non-paid) search results. Well as you can see from this interview with Matt Cutts, that’s probably going to become a reality sometime soon. Google has launched a place with tools for testing your site’s load time at code.google.com/speed. These tools are free to use and we strongly recommend you find out exactly how long it takes your web pages to load so you can start streamlining them asap for the impending update to protect against any penalties against your website.

If you’re a tweeter you should be interested in this news.  It’s official – Google has reached an agreement with Twitter to show tweets in their search results! 

How do you accomplish this?  Unfortunately because this agreement was just recently announced between Google and Twitter, there isn’t much data from a search engine optimization standpoint.  As always, trial and error seems to be the key and, more importantly, relevancy and a website’s ‘authority’ are critical components as well to Google. 

How do you gain relevancy and authority within your Twitter profile and your tweets?  The same guidelines apply in your tweets as apply in optimizing copy on your website.  Use your desired keywords throughout your Twitter profile page and tweet content; build up followers (in-bound links); generate in-bound links via other sources to improve the authority of your profile; and, encourage others to share your Twitter content.