The prevalence of social media has given rise to a new form of mobile marketing called “push technology.” NorthBay biz explains what this technological advancement means for local businesses.
What is push technology?
Some forms are already familiar. You may get a daily email from a news website. Or you may get blasts from retailers or organizations you know. They’re “pushed” directly from the originator through your mail delivery agent and on to your computer screen for you to open when you get your mail, or to your mobile phone, where it shows up automatically.
Push, not pushy
“The whole idea of push technology is that it’s all opt-in,” says Tony Levitan, who co-founded Lexy in San Francisco with Fred Campbell. Lexy pushes “snack-sized audio for bite-sized moments” to an ever-growing audience. As he describes it, it’s simple. You choose your interest category, then a text message will alert you to the latest “Lexycast.” (The company expects to launch smartphone apps in the coming months.)
Lexy’s “beachhead” is sports. For example, say the NCAA tournament is going on. Coach John Calipari of Kentucky has 1.1 million people following him on Twitter and 130,000 fans on Facebook. Coach “Cal” periodically calls in to Lexy and delivers 90-second audio updates that go out to tens of thousands of fans on Twitter, Facebook, the website or right into their mobile phones. “We embrace a philosophy we call the ‘everywhereness’ of Lexy,” says Levitan. So you can get “Lexycasts” of Coach Cal—or any of your other interests—on your mobile phone or the Lexy website or Twitter or Facebook or through widgets that might show up anywhere on the Internet. “It’s a really fun environment,” he says. “People feel like they’re engaging with him.”
It’s engaging
When people talk about push technology, the word that keeps popping up is “engage,” as in, “It’s a new advertising medium, but unlike the others that came before mobile, it’s able to engage its audience.” So says Tomas Kaplan, vice president of business development at Dizgo, Inc., a Boulder, Colorado-based mobile marketing and technology company whose name stands for “discounts on the go.” He’s also co-founder, along with Orlando-based travel marketing agency Ypartnership, of a mobile marketing company called VisitMobile, which is about to transform the way Napa Valley does business.
Kaplan explains, “In recent years, push technology has really taken off, enabling businesses to engage a specific target audience by sending [pushing out] promotional messages or informational alerts to the mobile devices of consumers who’ve requested or agreed to receive them.”
Lest you be wondering, is this not spam? Kaplan points out there’s a Mobile Marketing Association (www.mmaglobal.com) that works closely with the carriers and sets up guidelines for mobile marketers to follow. “It’s such a personal media, spam is simply not allowed.”
Push-driven mobile messages are different from traditional messaging in several key ways. Whereas traditional media is passive—the ad is in the newspaper, whether you read it or not; or on the TV, whether you watch it or not; and the website sits there, whether you visit it or not—but push is active. It goes right to you. It lets a business or marketer deliver timely, targeted, geographically savvy messages right to a consumer’s mobile device—by the consumer’s invitation, and until the consumer opts out.
By downloading the app or agreeing to receive the information, the consumer is engaged. “Now you’re building up a user base of potential consumers who are interested in your product,” says Kaplan. “They fit your demographic, and now you can send very targeted messages.”
Napa Valley revolutionary
“Napa is very exciting,” says Kaplan. “It can be difficult for some of the smaller wineries to differentiate themselves or stand out when they’re competing with much larger ones. Our app, VisitNapaValley, which was scheduled to debut in May, levels the playing field by letting all Napa Valley businesses have a mobile presence. Visitors can search for their specific interests and quickly be connected to the most relevant business offering that product or service.”
Napa Valley already has a website specifically for visitors (www.LegendaryNapaValley.com), but VisitNapaValley is an application designed to give smartphone users a “real-time virtual experience of the Napa Valley,” says Clay Gregory, CEO of the Napa Valley Destination Council (NVDC), which is sponsoring the app. Gregory imagines a potential visitor’s experience: “If you’re in Ohio and want to plan your trip, you can put the app into virtual mode and it’ll look like you’re in the Napa Valley. So you can search for events, lodging, restaurants or wineries featuring a particular varietal of wine.”
For a visitor who’s physically in the valley, the convenience factor escalates. “It’s a really good tool,” says Gregory, “and a lot more convenient than carrying around paper or a book. Plus, users get real-time access to valley-wide information and exclusive special offers. From our partners’ point of view, too, this tool, with its direct reach into the visitors’ iPhones (or other mobile phones with texting capability), makes marketing to the consumer personal and efficient for them.”
Here’s how it works: Participating Napa Valley Destination Council marketing partners can buy in at a variety of membership levels to enjoy a range of marketing and public relations opportunities and advantages, including the VisitNapaValley mobile platform; they’ll then be able to push out special offers through the app that can be time-sensitive and targeted to people they know will be in Napa at the time.
“My favorite example is, say, if Brix restaurant is having a winemaker dinner on Thursday night, and still has 10 seats available, it can push out an offer to people it knows are in Napa Valley…and the first 10 people to respond get a free glass of Chardonnay, or whatever.” The application “knows” the visitor is in Napa Valley because the GPS system in the iPhone phone tells them so. But it’s polite. VisitNapaValley will always ask your permission to ask you where you are. And if you don’t want to give permission, you simply decline.
“It’s cool, and it really is leading-edge destination marketing technology,” says Gregory, “because it’s much more powerful and effective to send out a targeted message about something that’s happening that night in the valley to someone who’s already here, rather than someone who’s halfway around the world, on the Internet.”
The app is free on iTunes and the one-to-one offers it can send out are unlimited. “We’ll monitor and plan how many of these offers go out,” says Gregory. “We have to make sure we’re not overdoing it.”
So, how does it work?
K. Scott Myers, partner and CIO of Ypartnership, explains the way push notification works on the iPhone. “Any of these one-to-one press releases are sitting in a system that we host, called VisitMobile. This system will talk to the Apple server that literally pushes the technology out to the end user.”
What’s unique is that Apple has innovated a way of notifying users by sending three different alert forms: sound, text and a “numbered badge.”
“That’s when you’re looking at an app icon and you see a little number in the upper corner. The number indicates there’s one, two or three new things for you to see,” he says.” You can look at them or not, as you choose, and you don’t have to be running the application to get the notification. Nor does the application need to have a background application running to check for new content.
“There’s only one service running,” he says, “which is the Apple ‘push notification service.’ It’s literally looking at Apple’s server service for anything new to be pushed to the phone.”
And the cost?
“The cost for our partner businesses to participate is very affordable,” says Gregory. “We want to make sure as many businesses as possible can participate.”
Currently “lean on the budget front,” Gregory sees the project as an investment in the health of the destination. Once the development of the app is paid for, he says, the project will be self-funding from partners through their offers and advertising. But that doesn’t mean it’ll become intrusive and obnoxious. “We aren’t going to let it turn into a vehicle that’s primarily used for advertising. It has to be a great guide to the destination, first and foremost.”
So far, he’s delighted with the design and aesthetics and convinced it will get a lot of attention. “It puts information about Napa Valley at people’s fingertips so they can access it when they want. It’s simple and alerts people to things they might not be aware of. Now, you can hear about it before it happens. Plus, it’s free. We couldn’t be more excited about it.”
Then there’s iVisit
While the Marin Convention and Visitors Bureau messages through its website and established social media, Sonoma is now using a new mobile media application that, though it won’t push messages out to users, will let iPhone users access all the up-to-date information, specials and directions they’ll need for a great visit to the valley. Keri Hanson, public relations and marketing manager for the Sonoma County Tourism Bureau (SCTB), describes the iVisitSonomaCounty app for the iPhone, which people can download free and operate very simply.
“So you can post a message back to a winery’s Facebook fan page, like, ‘Hey, I was just at your winery. Had a great time.’ Or, to get feedback right away, you can also tweet that you’re at the business and the business can track who’s coming to it. If that customer is already in the tasting room, they can engage the customer, knowing they’re already part of a tech-savvy crowd.”
Sonoma’s first experiment with iVisitSonomaCounty, the Wine Road’s annual Barrel Tasting event, was a huge success, says Hanson. “During the weekend, they’d get so many calls for directions they’d just say, ‘Hey, does someone in the car have an iPhone?’ With that, you could get directions to anywhere you wanted to go, find out about participating wineries and what specials they had. So you could plan your trip day-by-day.”
Beth Costa, executive director of the Wine Road, says she paid the developer “the price of an ad” to put her event on the app, and said the result was astounding. “Oh my gosh, it was fantastic! We had more than 1,000 people use it. It’s just so convenient. If you have the iPhone, all the information is there, and it’s so searchable.”
The iVisitSonomaCounty app started with the iPhone, but the SCTB has been working with its developer to release a parallel Android app in time for the summer season; applications for other smartphones are in the works as well. “We want people to know this is a tool that will be ever-evolving, like a website,” says Hanson. “We at Sonoma County Tourism Bureau are really trying to embrace technology and engage the huge blogging community in a way that hasn’t been done before. My hope is we’ll have both iPhone and android apps later this year. And as technology evolves, we can embrace new ways to speak to the consumer, who will hopefully come and visit Sonoma Wine Country.”
Does this obviate traditional messaging?
On the contrary, says Kaplan, “Traditional advertising media will never be obsolete. Mobile marketing lets traditional media become interactive.” For example: You see an ad in the paper for Macy’s. At the bottom, it may invite you to send a text message to some short code to receive more information about its great specials. The minute you send the text, you’re engaged. “The messages you receive from Macy’s after your initial opt-in message,” says Kaplan, “are push campaigns.”
VisitMobile has another way of initiating the relationship. “We’ve created a number of marketing materials for the NVDC. One of those is a key packet insert,” says Kaplan. “When you check in to your hotel and get your room card, we include an insert that says, ‘Hey, if you have an iPhone or if you use text messaging, by downloading an app or sending a text message to our short code, you can find out about great specials while you’re here.’ It’s a way of letting them know there’s a mobile marketing solution out there.”
“We see mobile coming on really strong for destinations,” says Scott Myers. “Mobile means we walk into a destination with our little laptops, which also happen to be our phones, so they’re available to us everywhere we go. If we’re sitting in a restaurant or a hotel, we have access to real-time information that we’ve never been able to tap into before. It’s a new world.”
To Keri Hanson, whether on or off the job, the mobile media world is becoming a way of life. “I’m a big Foursquare user,” she says. She explains that Foursquare is a geo-located game, which you download free to your iPhone then attach to your Twitter or Facebook account. When you get to a café, hotel or restaurant, you “check in” and Foursquare will know where you are from the iPhone’s GPS function. It can then send you a message like, “Congratulations, you’ve unlocked a special!”
“So when you go to your place in Foursquare, it’ll find all the businesses near you. You can become a ‘mayor’ of certain places that you frequent more than anyone else. In some places, you’ll get certain deals for being a mayor. So it’s a reward for being a good customer. This is like the tech savvy version of a punch card.”
The mobile marketing evolution
The concept of push technology isn’t new. In the late 1990s, there was a flurry of excitement over push, but even then, says Kaplan, the problem was that the cost of text messaging was prohibitive. “Networks weren’t set up to handle the volume,” he says. “Text messaging wasn’t popular. Cell phones weren’t as ubiquitous.” Back then, everybody had TV and radio but were just getting used to personal computers and the Internet. Nobody had time to think of anything else. Now, with the explosion of social media and the cell phone as an almost required personal accoutrement, mobile media is a business as well as social result.
“Today,” says Kaplan, “most people have almost unlimited plans for talk or for text.” And today’s media is being driven by the evolving technology and the unified consumer desire, which Kaplan sums up as, “I always have to be connected!”
