Digital & Social Media Consulting in Tampa Florida

It's no doubt that smartphones are taking over our lives and we are gladly accepting.  Personally, I am glued to my iPhone at all times throughout the day.  It is often the first device I pick up in the morning and the last that I use before bed.  They provide the perfect combination of connectivity, entertainment, information, and organization.  With all of this packed into a device that easily fits in your back pocket and goes wherever you go, it's obvious why advertisers want desperately to enter that space. 

So where does mobile marketing stand as of 2010 and where is it heading?  Sparxoo.com says there are currently 42 million smartphone users in America compared to 270 million mobile subscribers.  The growth potential is outstanding considering that more and more of the 80 million baby boomers are starting to join the smartphone revolution.

The iPhone has dominated mobile marketing for the past few years simply by being the first of its kind.  With its superb web browsing capabilities and application platform it quickly became a must have for techie consumers and mobile developers.  It is most certainly a tough act to follow for Google's Android, but Sparxoo says that "Google’s ad targeting technology and Android growth positions the search giant to jump in the drivers seat and take the lead in what is projected to be a $3.3 billion dollar market by 2013."  Check out more on Sparxoo's  2010 Mobile Trend Report here.

Over the course of the last ten years, Corporate America began to realize that sustainable business practices were not only better for our environment, but were better for profit margins as well.  The urge to splurge and the idea that bigger is better eventually became a thing of the past as CEOs saw dollar signs in the conservation of their own resources.  What no one expected was the broad appeal that sustainability practices would gain over the general public as we began to recognize and even demand environmentally friendly products and services.  This is how sustainability evolved from a simple way to increase revenue into a competitive marketing strategy that emphasized responsibility.  Here are the top ten initiatives that corporations took towards greener business practices over the last decade:

 

1.      Office Recycling Programs – For decades, residential neighborhoods have been recycling aluminum cans and glass bottles, but it took years for offices across the country to catch on.  Today it is commonplace to see plastic, glass, and paper recycling bins in nearly any type of office environment.  Most notably, recycling has become a key marketing effort for Coca-Cola; the world’s largest producer of aluminum, plastic, and glass bottling.    

2.      Waste Reduction – Reducing waste is probably one of the easiest and most efficient ways for a business to cut down costs.  By encouraging employees to use electronic filing instead of printing, offices use less paper, less ink, and less energy.  Companies such as Hasbro have even taken steps to reduce the amount of waste in their packaging.  These efforts not only improve their bottom line, but help clean up our environment as well.

3.      Energy Efficient Lighting – The adaptation of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) have been a long time coming, but pioneers such as Philips have been strong advocates for the elimination of inefficient lighting within corporations. The use of CFLs have now become mainstream in homes and offices alike and are fast becoming one of the largest reducers of energy consumption in the U.S.

4.      The Four-Day Workweek – Most of us would dream of the day when we’d only have to work four days a week.  We never thought it could actually save energy and operating costs, but that’s just what state employees of Utah found out as they experimented with a four day workweek as reported by Time Magazine.

5.      Renewable Resources – As companies began to seek innovative ways to save, they learned that many of the resources they use in their offices could be renewable and reusable for generations.  Not every new office had to have new desks and new chairs.  Why not reuse what another business is getting rid of, like Maryland-based Honest Tea did when it came time for a new office space.

6.      Energy Efficient Appliances – If you’ve gone shopping for a new refrigerator or microwave in the last decade, you’ve noticed most new appliances are “Energy Star Compliant”.  This was an effort set forth in the 1990s by the U.S. Government to make appliances use less energy and meet certain standards.

7.      Water Conservation – Our country uses enormous amounts of energy just to clean and distribute the water that comes out of the tap.  Water bills are directly related to usage, so conserving water is essential for large corporations and institutions that provide water to thousands of people everyday.  Stanford University has found that modern bath fixtures such as efficient sinks, toilets, and shower heads can reduce water usage by 30 to 40 percent.

8.      Sustainability Management – As with any corporate overhaul projects, success is no easy task without proper management.  More and more colleges and universities now offer degrees in Sustainability Management.

9.      Doing Business Locally – Buying locally and selling locally has one huge impact on your bottom line; little or no shipping costs!  Plus, you give the environment a break when you eliminate the energy used to ship long distances.

10.  Employee Education – True sustainability takes a team effort and a team can’t be successful without education.  Many large corporations, such as Samsung have already established employee education programs aimed at providing sustainability knowledge to all employees.  

Do you remember the last time you uploaded a video to YouTube?  How long would you say the process took?  If your video was of any length, it probably took about 20 min or more to upload and you probably spent about 5 minutes filling in the title, description, and tags.  Now if you wanted to upload your videos to more sites than just YouTube, you’d have to repeat that process for each video venue.  This could be a pretty daunting task for video bloggers or online video producers that want to upload a new video everyday across ten different outlets.  Hours would be wasted just watching the upload progress bar on your screen. In today’s “live by the minute” world, if there is something that is far too time consuming, you can be sure that a new business will be there the following day with a solution to your problem.  Enter TubeMogul.  TubeMogul, an online video analytics and distribution company, has a service called Load & Track.  It allows publishers of all sizes to upload a video one time and publish it to as many as 22 different video portals with one click.  While word of this service took a while to get to me since its debut in July of 2007, I’m sure glad it finally did.  I had a chance to use the service on a recent marketing campaign and it proved to be a gift from the time saving gods.

After entering all of my login credentials for each site, I typed in my video details then published it instantly to YouTube, Metacafe, Revver, DailyMotion, Veoh, Vimeo, and Yahoo.   I let it run its upload process while I got a bite to eat.  When I got back, I checked each video site and sure enough, my video successfully made it to each of the sites I had selected.  Awesome.

If you’re a frequent video publisher you should check them out.  You’ll be joining some familiar faces such as Fred, Hot For Words, Athene Wins, Barely Political, and Philip DeFranco who currently make up TubeMogul’s Top 5 users.  For the more advanced users, they also have some pretty cool analytics features such as graphs and pie charts to help you track performance and compare trends across different sites.

Most of us are beyond frustrated with television these days.  If you’re a cable or satellite subscriber, you’ve probably had it with service outages and expensive monthly rates.  If you still get broadcast TV, you probably only get three channels and are confused about what to do for the switch to digital in 2009 (maybe).  If you’re an online video fanatic like myself, then you’ve been watching video online for some time now.  You’ve probably searched for something comparable to cable television but without the frustration and costs.  You may have come across services that either have tricky downloads and plug-ins or have fees associated with them.  All of the video search sites with streaming video are great, but they don’t simply entertain us like regular TV used to.  You have to work to find the videos you are interested in seeing. I’ve come across an online television service based right here in Baltimore that may be the answer to all of these issues.  Tidal TV, still in Beta, offers free, streaming, online television that entertains you based on the networks that you like.  They are not the first to provide this type of service.  Joost and Hulu are already established in this market, but have differences that I may discuss in a later post.   Tidal currently offers content from networks such as Discovery, National Geographic, CBS, and HGTV.

In their own words: “For the on-the-go and in-control viewer, Tidal TV offers a unique broadband television platform featuring the best in professionally produced, branded programming. There is no application to download, no waiting for videos to load, no fees to pay –Tidal TV provides its audience with a high-quality viewing experience that, like TV, is always “on.”"

I have to say I was pretty impressed.  I was entertained and I actually enjoyed the content.  Now nothing is really “free” so there are short commercials that will interrupt your viewing experience every now and then.  But a 15 second commercial is easy to tolerate when you’re not paying for cable programming. I recommend giving Tidal TV a try and hooking it up to your LCD TV.  You may end up canceling your cable service.