Page 349 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

» Receive the latest coupons and promotional discounts from their favorite stores
» Monitor their fitness, count calories, and record daily running scores
» Play games
» Listen to music and watch movies
» Respond to their favorite brand’s mobile messages

» Participate with and support political candidates
» Donate money to their favorite charities
» Socialize with friends and marketers

» Update friends and family on their locations and activities

This list is just the tip of the iceberg. Every day, consumers are doing more and
more with their mobile phones, and you can create innovative campaigns that fit
in with those uses.

The key to successful consumer engagement, especially in the social media context,
is to combine both information delivery and exchange with entertainment — in
other words, focus on “infotainment” services.

The release and adoption

of smarter phones

If you took the Wayback machine to 1983 (the Wayback was the time-travel machine
in the old The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show), you’d see innovative and/or fashion-
conscious road warriors carrying around a mobile phone shaped like bricks and
weighing a whopping 30 ounces or more. For all its heft, the grandfather of mobile
devices could do only two things: make and receive calls. Today you find thousands
of smartphones that come in all shapes and sizes. True, some phones are still
dedicated to the single purpose of making phone calls, but these devices are smaller
than their ancestors, have longer battery lives, and provide clearer calls.

Here are the categories of devices that currently exist:

» Regular phones: These are lightweight, dedicated devices for making and
receiving phone calls and text messages.
» Smartphones: These are full-featured, multipurpose, high-bandwidth,
networked, multimodal, interactive information, communication,
entertainment, and commerce solutions. Some of the more popular
smartphones include the Apple iPhone and phones running the Google
Android operating system, such as the Samsung Galaxy.

CHAPTER 23 Building an SMM Mobile Campaign 333