Welcome to our series of interviews with local (and sometimes national) leaders in the social media and technology industry that will be featured on Social Mediarology. Today’s interview is with Douglas Karr of  DK New Media, an Indianapolis-based, globally-focused new media agency.

Douglas Karr – DK New Media

Below is Part 1 of the interview. See Part 2 at the bottom of the post.

Author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies, Chief Blogger/Founder of the Marketing Technology Blog and CEO of DK New Media. Douglas and his team specialize in performing due diligence analysis of marketing technology companies for venture capital and investment firms. DK New Media also consults on an ongoing basis with large companies who wish to leverage online strategies to build inbound marketing efforts using search and social media.

Can you tell me a little about yourself and DK New Media?

I’m Douglas Karr, author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies, and I helped start up Compendium (Indianapolis-based corporate blogging company). I’ve been blogging for a long time on the Marketing Technology Blog – I think I’ve been blogging for about six years now – and have a tremendous following on the blog. We get around 40,000 unique visitors a month on the blog and it’s a very centered demographic. The core of the visitors are CMOs and directors of marketing.

DK New Media is the agency that I built up. I had done email work at ExactTarget and blogging work at Compendium  and started doing a lot with SEO and pay-per-click and all of these other vehicles and what we saw was there was a gap in the industry as far as people who understood how to put all the pieces together and conduct what Forrester calls an omni-channel approach to marketing. DK New Media does a lot of “outsourced CMO” work, where we’ll be your CMO-for-hire for companies that may not have many resources. For other companies like ChaCha, we’re a trusted advisor and for folks like Webtrends it’s a hybrid where we do a lot of the work, but they also have some incredible internal marketing minds.

Our job is basically to prove ROI to our clients. So what we do, more than anything else, is inbound marketing – setting up analytics properly, getting a wholesale approach and adding a piece at a time – and then always showing clients their return on investment and how to measure it. I think that’s a differentiator in the industry because a lot of people, social media consultants especially, don’t actually go for the ROI for their clients.

Most companies now realize they need to use social media – what do you feel is the most effective medium for reaching consumers?

That’s a good question. We tend to stray away from that question and instead find out where the audience is. For some of our clients, the audience is on Facebook, so that’s where we want to meet them. But there are advantages and disadvantages to that platform. Maybe your audience is there, but are they really ready to buy? Are they really ready to engage with your business?

I think we tend to back up and go a different route and actually test the mediums. We’ll test Twitter, test LinkedIn, test Facebook, test blogging, test all these things and start to measure the reaction. Over time, we can then hone in and say “We’re getting more out of this, so let’s start investing more here”.

B2B clients sometimes gravitate toward LinkedIn, our smaller businesses tend to do really well on Twitter, large businesses that have a large following sometimes can get traction in Facebook, so it all depends on the company.

How important are blogs to a company’s digital strategy?

Well, you know blogging is dead! We hear that all the time. I think there are people from outside the industry that think blogging is dead because they can’t even recognize what a blog is anymore. A typical website that has a blog just looks like a standard website now.

Blogging is the engine to the car. Blogging is doing for marketing what the production line did for Henry Ford.

Now, we’re able to put out content easily and as often as we want, and represent it well in social, in search, maybe integrate it on other platforms or even syndicate it out via other mediums, even in email, and do it really effectively and with minimal effort.

I tend to look at blogging, when clients are culturally able to blog – when they have the resources, when they have the time and the patience – as a real centerpiece to their strategy where, for example, people are coming from Twitter, to the blog, to a call to action, to a landing page and then converting. It ends up being that blog – the unique post that’s relevant to the right person at the right time – that ends up drawing them in, so it’s a centerpiece for DK New Media. The Marketing Tech Blog is the center of the universe for everything we’re doing.

What are some things that you wish organizations knew about social media metrics?

I’ve always thought about social media as an amplifier. When you look at what PR accomplishes – and I’m a proponent of having a PR strategy, we have one for ourselves – PR amplifies the message. You do something special and PR helps you get the word out. With social media, that’s exactly what I see too. Companies that have a great foundation and have information that people what to know about, when they use social media, it just amplifies their message and gets it into the right hands. I think a lot of people are thinking that there’s social media, then there’s email then there’s something else – all these silos.

Social media isn’t something where you just hire an intern to retweet for you, social media is something that has to be integrated into everything you’re doing.

When we put out a press release for one of our clients, we have an integrated social media campaign to measure results. When we do email, we’re promoting social media in our email and we’re also promoting our email on social media. It’s a cog in a whole machine and too many people think of it as an isolated piece – I’m just going to blast out through social media and not monitor, not react, not measure – and they look at it and think it was a big waste of time and they’re not getting any results…of course you’re not getting any results.

What do you see as new on the horizon for social and digital media? Is it location based networks, which was the big thing last year, is it QR codes, which are becoming bigger now, or is it something else entirely?

I’ve got a unique view on QR codes because I think we’re already getting to the point of logo recognition for smartphones. Look at [AR app] Layar, where you can look through your phone’s lens and the app can identify landmarks and provide data on that, so I think QR codes are kind of a short-lived thing. I think you’ll eventually just be able to point at a logo on someone’s shirt and be able to find out all the information, website and anything you want instead of having to scan a QR code.

Geolocation of course is huge. My hope as a sophisticated marketer is that we stop just looking for eyeballs. With one of our clients, we actually dropped traffic to their site, but they’re getting greater conversions. It’s because they were getting a lot of bad visitors. The analytics field is finally catching up and they’re getting to the point where they’re able to look at what’s going on off-site that’s leading to onsite conversions and leading to actual business.

So, to me, the next big thing is finally the ability for marketers to not have to code and do all this technical stuff. We’re finally going to have true plug and play systems that work well at communicating with one another. Facebook has opened their back door with WebTrends to get analytics into their platform. Bit.ly has mobile SDKs so whether you’re on an iPhone app or visiting the Facebook page, they’re going to be able to show what your interaction is and target and present different material.

To me, all of the silos we have right now – that’s the problem in the industry. As a marketer, you know you have to make a decision about where you’re going to spend your time every day and we keep adding things to marketer’s plates: mobile apps, twitter, QR codes, etc. It’s unmanageable and finally we’re getting to a point where we have app platforms where you can (for example) build your own polling app for Facebook – you don’t have to code anything, you just drag and drop, build it and publish it. We’re finally getting the tools to allow us to not have to hire third party developers and invest hundreds of thousands of dollars. We’re getting the technology that allows us to bridge the gap. The goal is that we’re not fighting for social dollars or SEO dollars or email dollars; it’s that we can now finally invest in a package that does dozens of things for me, does it well, measures the results and gives me what I need. That’s the exciting thing that I see on the horizon.

That’s really interesting – I think you’re the first person I’ve talked to who has said that the democratization of code is the next big thing. There are more and more applications that enable you to create what you need without having to know HTML, CSS, PHP and other programming languages.

Yeah and we need to be there. We’re moving so fast now. I was talking to a company who hired 45 developers to develop their mobile app platform and within a year they backed it down to five people and the mobile app wasn’t even used very much. Everyone said “We need a mobile app”, you know, the CEO got an iPhone, so they made this massive investment and it was all for naught. The exciting thing to me is that we can go out and buy a platform license for five or ten thousand dollars and we get all these pieces. That, to me, is the next wave and that’s where we see companies like ExactTarget churning and burning. They have CoTweet and email, now they’re working on their Interactive Marketing Hub and enabling one place to monitor everything.

Making it easier for the marketer to do their job…

Right. I think we (as marketers) tend to work in our area of expertise. If you’ve been doing email for ten years and you need more prospects, you’ll tend to send more emails. We now finally have these tools where we have the options of what we want to do and you can test to see what performs better. I think it’s the next wave for us.

Any final thoughts? How should readers get in touch with you?

Well, of course, DKNewMedia.com and the Marketing Tech Blog. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter, we’re giving away a ton of stuff, including a new iPad 2. The Marketing Tech Blog has really evolved. We’ve got videos, a radio show (every Friday at 3:00), the newsletter is unique content that goes out weekly and if you’re a marketer and have a great story you want to get out, pitch it and we’ll put it up there on the Marketing Tech Blog. We have about 60 bloggers on there now. I still do the majority of the blogging on the site, but it’s becoming quite a centerpiece for marketers to get inspiration and assistance.

Below is Part 2 of the interview. See Part 1 at the top of the post.

Douglas Karr, is the author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies, Chief Blogger/Founder of the Marketing Technology Blog and CEO of DK New Media. Douglas and his team specialize in performing due diligence analysis of marketing technology companies for venture capital and investment firms. DK New Media also consults on an ongoing basis with large companies who wish to leverage online strategies to build inbound marketing efforts using search and social media.. You can follow DK New Media on Twitter (@DKNewMedia).

Welcome to our series of interviews with local (and sometimes national) leaders in the social media and technology industry that will be featured on Social Mediarology. Today’s interview is with Troy Thompson of Travel 2.0, a Denver-based blog and digital consulting company focused on the travel and tourism industry

Troy Thompson – Travel 2.0

Troy has been involved in interactive marketing for the past 13 years. After starting his career at NASCAR in Florida, he was integral in launching their interactive department in the late ’90s. After nearly a decade with NASCAR, Troy moved to Arizona to become the Advertising Manager for the Arizona Office of Tourism. During his time at AOT, Troy headed up the social media division and recently moved to Denver to manage Visit Denver‘s interactive marketing department, including social media, mobile, SEO and more. Earlier this year he decided to break out on his own and dive into tourism technology consulting.

The Travel 2.0 blog started while Troy worked for Arizona Tourism as regular email updates about interactive marketing to the AOT staff and quickly evolved into a blog that could reach people far beyond the Arizona Office of Tourism. Now, thousands of people throughout the world read the Travel 2.0 blog each week and Troy is considered a thought leader in the interactive travel and tourism community.

The consulting arm of Travel 2.0 launched in June, 2010 and focuses on social media strategy/social media audits, mobile strategy including iPhone applications, statistical analysis, training and tourism marketing plan development.

What are some current and upcoming trends in the travel industry as it relates to technology?

The two trends we’re in right now that are still progressing are mobile and location based services (LBS). They certainly go hand in hand, but mobile feels a lot like it did in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when everyone realized the web wasn’t going away so they started to shift more budget and create functional websites. I see this a lot within the mobile space. It’s following a very similar pattern where people are saying "I think this mobile thing is going to stick around, I think the iPhone is going to be a solid platform to build on" and they’re shifting some dollars over to address that need. The challenge is that you don’t want to fall into the same trap we all did when we built our first websites – looking for the cheaper option, just doing the basics and not thinking long term. I think a lot of us built a website in 10 years ago and have had to rebuild the site every couple of years, and I think we’re now getting to the point where people are thinking more long term and more strategically about what the site is and what it needs to be. I’m hopeful that we’ll start to take that same approach with mobile – thinking long term rather than short term. While I think there will be a lot of transition within the mobile space in the next decade or so, building a good base at the beginning will help set you up for success in the long run.

As far as location-based services go, Foursquare seems to be the media darling of LBS.

If 2009 was Twitter’s year, it’s fair to say that 2010 is shaping up to be the year of Foursquare. I think with the recent launch of Facebook Places, LBS’s will just become more important, particularly for the travel industry.

The fact that you’ll be able to have geographic information about your visitor while they’re in your area becomes very powerful. Right now, while the tools aren’t there to completely take advantage of that, those tools will surely come about soon. Taking advantage of a one-on-one communication with someone visiting your local Art Museum will be just as easy as setting up an email campaign or a Google Adwords campaign.

The final trend I’m seeing is tracking. It’s been the big demand of everyone, not just within the travel industry, but everyone who’s been involved in the mobile or social media field. How do we track all of these these things and connect the dots between websites, SEO, mobile marketing, social media marketing, and how do we get the accurate tracking to be able to quantify the ROI that we’re putting into these new spaces. I feel like that’s coming along. It depends on how much information the consumer wants to give out about themselves, but I think that’s an area where we’ll see some more big strides over the next two or three years.

Several years ago, the largest line item in most DMO’s budget was a printed travel guide. Do you see printed publications going away in the near future?

I don’t think printed guides will ever go away entirely. I know there are some agencies out there who have totally dropped it in favor of a all digital guide, which I think is a workable solution, but at this point a printed guide is still important for the people who want them. What we’re seeing now, is a case where 5, 10 or 15 years ago, there was just the printed guide, which was the primary way for people to get information from us, and now there are so many different communication channels out there. With technology itself, particularly social as well as the iPad and the iPhone, people have a lot more freedom of choice about how they want to receive information. From the DMO (Destination Marketing Organization) side, we need to look at it more as a project around information and the content we have, rather than it being just a printed guide project.

If we were to have a meeting about our guide, I’d start with all the information first, then, on the side, we;d discuss where all the different places are that people could get this information. There’s your printed guide, your website, potentially email, social, then you have the mobile side of things maybe with an iPhone or iPad application. It’s just trying to figure out the best way to get all the information to the appropriate channels so people can find it. The challenge with that since the technology is still so young, is that it takes a lot of time and resources to try and break out of a printed publication cycle and into more of an information dissemination cycle.

The iPad is pretty exciting in terms of its potential for digital visitors guides and the interaction we can have with the visitor through it. I think it’s the best example so far that non-technical people within the industry have seen that opens their eyes to the possibilities.

The challenge for a lot of us in the DMO space is that the printed guide is a huge KPI (key performance indicator) for us, and a huge indicator of our success throughout the year, so it’s difficult for us to make that transition and all of a sudden, you’re sending a report to your board that while you printed 1,000,000 guides last year, you’ve only printed 200,000 this year, but here are the reasons why. Without really accurate tracking/education about website visits, social hits and mobile/iPad applications it’s difficult to show people that the number went down so significantly and not have them raise questions.

For a lot of us, it’s still an issue of reporting back to our board and to make sure it still looks like we’re doing a good job. I think it will be interesting in the next few years. I think the iPad is a fantastic device and if you walk by any apple store in the mall, it’s absolutely packed – it doesn’t matter what time of day you go. The interaction that all age groups and demographics have, it ‘s just fascinating. Apple has done a great job with their interface design and have made it easy for anyone to use, not just someone who’s technically inclined. That’s why so many people are talking about iPhone apps and iPad apps all the time because it’s such a successful platform for communicating with people. I’m really interested to see which DMO comes out with their travel guide as a fully-designed iPad app first.

What are your recommendations on first steps in social media?

My first recommendation for a DMO in social, is to get started with either Twitter or a blog. Twitter is a very easy interface and program to learn and understand once you get started. It also gives you a good look into the social world and how people communicate and how people engage in that world. Whether or not Twitter works for every destination is still to be determined. Some destinations tend ot be more successful with Twitter than others, but I think a lot of that has to do with content.

I still really like the idea of a blog. It’s probably not as sexy as Twtter, Facebook and others now, but I like the communication channel of blogs. I think it works really well for the destination model. There are a lot of things going on in a destination – a lot of things we don’t typically get to talk about on the homepage of the website. The rodeo may not be large enough to go on to the official state tourism website, but that’s a great topic for a blog post.

My third suggestion would have to be YouTube because of the engagement you can get on YouTube. I wouldn’t recommend it first, only because it can be a challenge for DMOs to come up with the video content. That’s always the challenge – you have to have good video content to put up on youtube.

You didn’t mention Facebook at all, does Facebook have a place in DMO marketing?

I’ve been a slow adopter to Facebook. I wrote several posts a few years ago that outlined why I didn’t think Facebook was right for the destination industry and I’m still not 100% convinced that it’s right for us in the industry.

There are obviously a lot of people on Facebook – 500 million people are sure to garner some attention – but I have yet to see anyone feel that their Facebook campaign has been really successful.

I don’t know if it’s simply because ther isn’t enough research around it, but I feel that a lot of DMOs are on Facebook because they’ve seen other DMOs on there.

I also think a lot of the fans of the individual organizations (like fans of Visit Indiana, or Florida, or Atlanta) are just “bumper-sticker fans”; of the state. it’s like when you see a car full of bumper stickers. They’re aligning themselves with a particular brand or organization, but that doesn’t make they’re going out and giving money to or financially supporting that organization. I think its similar on Facebook – people want to say I’m from Florida, I’m a fan of Florida, I’m just not necessarily going to do anything with the state. I get the feeling there’s a little bit of that. I struggle with whether or not its a good place for marketers to be.

There’s been a lot of conversation about how some marketing teams are pushing a lot of things to Facebook. Facebook has almost replaced the call to action in TV commercials. Like when people’s commercials would say “find us at AOL keyword: travel” or 4-5 years ago when organizations would say “visit our website at myspace.com/OrganizationName“. I still have a issue with putting a majority of my marketing influence on someone else’s website

I’m a huge proponent of protecting your brand on Facebook. I think there should be a Visit whatever page, a Visit Indiana Page on Facebook. I think you should own it and use some service that lets you update Twitter and Facebook at the same time. There are a lot of good things you can do with Facebook, but I’d definitately diversify my campaigns so not everything‘s focused on Facebook. I’d even spend some time on TripAdvisor or WikiTravel, the sites that tend to get left out of the Big Three conversations (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). I think the forums on Trip Advisor alone, you could build an entire social campaign around those.

How does blogging fit in to a digital strategy?

I think blogging is a great opportunity to give your destination a personality and to give an actual voice to the people who make up your community. A lot of us have made it a bit difficult for consumers to find the people behind the DMOs and attractions – primarily because of spam and email concerns, more than anything else. Blogs allow consumers to see that there are real people behind the organization, people who are passionate about the destination and they’re they local experts.

I think that in the next 5-10 years, that’s how DMOs will remain relevant. by highlighting and focusing in on that local knowledge. By saying, “here’s Jeremy. He lives in Indianapolis, he goes to these restaurants and attractions, he knows all about them.” Who better to ask when you’re looking to travel than someone who actually lives in the area and talks about these things for a living? The blog is an excellent way to show personality and to show off some of the charm of the destination. a website homepage tends to do very few things – promoting a big event coming up or specific hotels – but if you have space on your homepage carved out for a blog, it helps bring out the smaller things, more of the niche things that are going on. More of the local info and local knowledge that people really want to find out about. It can be a real differentiator between your destination and another destination.

I think going back to your last question about where to get started with social media, and for a lot of small marketing teams, with one or two people, that’s what makes Twitter such a good place to get started. Twitter is, after all, microblogging. I think that gives you a nice intro into what you’ll see and the impact you might have. That gives you the confidences to see that it’s actually worth your time to spend a couple hours a week writing a good blog post and then posting it on the blog. That’s a great way to intro from Twitter, to Blogs then to YouTube and Facebook.

What are some DMOs that come to mind who are doing a great job with social media and digital strategy?

There are a few of them out there. I love what Portland, Oregon is doing a great job communicating with their actual visitor. Not specifically the technical things they’re doing, but they do a great job actually listening and communicating with the visitor – forming the relationship that is the basis of social media.

I like what Columbus, Ohio does – their team does a great job on their blog and Twitter streams. From a state level, not to stroke your ego too much, but I think Indiana does a great job. You guys do a good job with your social presence and the way you go about it. I like what Oregon is doing as well. As much trouble as Florida has had, I really like the way they’ve tackled the oil spill via social media. They’ve really confronted it head-on an haven’t tried to say “don’t tell people there’s oil on this beach”. They’ve actually posted maps that show people where the oil is and I think that’s important to be open and transparent in the social space.

I think that how organizations respond in a time of crisis shows a lot more about their organizational strength than how they do when things are fine.

The oil spill is a great example of that. The volcano from Iceland earlier this year is another example. When we have natural disasters like that, it’s fascinating to look at the Air France Facebook page, which they weren’t really updating at the time – that gives consumers the message of: “Hey, we’re not updating this – go away!” That was their message to people. You can’t really start communicating with people when you want to, then shut things down when a disaster (natural or a PR disaster) occurs. I think a lot of people have overlooked crisis communications as part of their social media strategy. Hopefully, with the example of Florida and the volcano in Iceland people will start to incorporate crisis communications.

Another example is the recent incident with JetBlue where an employee yelled a plane full of passengers, pulled the emergency slide and ran away – JetBlue received a lot of criticism for their slow response to that.

JetBlue (along with Southwest Air) are the two stars of social media in the airline industry. They respond to everything and it was very strange to see something happen to them and they didn’t immediately acknowledge it. Two hours is the maximum amount of time you have to respond to something that has happened. You no longer have a couple days to craft your message. People expect you to respond immediately.

I think a lot of business are struggling with that. For so long you had a corporate communications department and everything went through there, and now you have different communication channels and the public is okay with the transparency. When something bad happens, most consumers realize that people are working at the company and they just want to know what’s going on. For the JetBlue incident, they could have said: “hey, we know there was an incident, our team in New York is investigating it”. That’s okay to say at this point because it’s part of open communication back and forth with consumers.

Any final thoughts?

It’s a very exciting time to be in the tourism industry in general. We’ve always been very passionate about the tourism industry, but it’s even more exciting now with the technology that’s coming into it an they ability for consumers to communicate with us while they’re actually in the destination. It’s really interesting to see how people are using social tools to connect with like minded travelers while they’re on vacation. They’ll take recommendations from a stranger or a local about what restaurant to eat at. The more adoption we see in social, mobile, geolocation and the like, it really becomes a benefit to our travel, and not a detriment.

Troy Thompson, a self-described technopologist, is a respected blogger, consultant and thought-leader in the Tourism / Travel industry. Owner and consultant at Travel 2.0 Consulting, Troy has been providing unique interactive and marketing solutions to a variety of clients for more than a decade. Be sure to check out Travel 2.0. You can even follow Troy on Twitter (@Travel2dot0).

This is the third in a series of interviews with local leaders in the social media and technology industry that will be featured on Social Mediarology. Today’s interview is with Scotty Wise of Scotty’s Brewhouse, an Indiana-based restaurant with 6 locations throughout the Hoosier State.

Scotty Wise – Scotty’s Brewhouse

We opened out first restaurant in 1996 in Muncie. Not long after that, we tore down the existing building and rebuilt from the ground up. In 1998 I opened a fine dining restaurant, where I lost nearly a million dollars, but I learned more over the next three years at the fine dining restaurant than I’ve learned in the 14 years of Scotty’s existence.  When we closed that restaurant down, we opened our Bloomington location in 2001. West Lafayette opened in 2004 and the northside Indianapolis (96^th Street) location opened in 2007. We opened our downtown Indianapolis location (at Virginia & Pennsylvania Streets) in 2009. Scotty’s Lakehouse opened in 2010 and we’ll be opening our Brewpub, Three Wise Men Brewing Company in Broad Ripple in late 2010. We’ve also got a project we’re planning to launch in 2011 in Fort Wayne.  We’re looking to locate in left field of Parkview Field, home of the Minor League Fort Wayne TinCaps.

When I was looking to expand to Indianapolis, all the banks told me that the 96^th street location wouldn’t work because we were a college town bar and there was too much competition, but it’s the most successful restaurant in our portfolio right now.

How has social media affected your bottom line?

The best way to apply social media to our bottom line is that we’ve eliminated every single piece of outside advertising, no print, no radio, no other types of traditional media, whereas in the past, we would spend about $250,000 each year in football ads, newspaper, and radio during Christmastime to promote gift cards. We eliminated all of that. The original reason we eliminated that was because of the economy. A year and a half ago, when the economy crashed, that was the one part of the budget we could eliminate without having to lay employees off.

At the time, I was personally using social media, but not for business purposes, and I realized that without a marketing budget, my use of social media was the only way to get our message out. You can’t walk into a business and say, “If you spend $500 on this ad, I can promise you that you’ll generate X amount of dollars back”, that’s why marketers rely on impressions and views and all of those similar metrics. The reason that social media was so successful and the reason I jumped on board was not just because I had to, I felt that the world had already shifted over to social media. I just gave a talk to a young professionals group in Muncie about social media and I asked the attendees to raise their hand if they subscribed to the newspaper. Of the 50 people I was talking to, only 2 raised their hand. Then I asked them to raise their hands if they had a Facebook account. Every single person raised their hand. I said “You guys just made the point for me – I could leave right now and this would be a successful talk”. The world changes and you have to change along with it. I don’t get the printed newspaper because I get the latest stories from the Indy Star sent to my inbox three times a day. That’s where I read my news.

I always put myself in my consumers shoes in everything I do, whether it’s the food I design, or the atmosphere you walk into, I always think “How would he feel? Would this make her want to come back more?”

The same concept goes into marketing. I knew that was the way I liked getting the news and talking to people. I think I just saw that social media was the way the world was headed and I think I got a head start on everybody and now I call myself the Howard Stern of social media, because I’m not politically correct with the things I do, but it matches my brand. People know it’s me and they know I don’t have a ghost writer or a ghost blogger doing my updates for me, they’re getting the real me telling them what’s going on in my life. One day I might tell them that my kid just crapped his pants then three tweets later I’m reminding people that kids eat free on Sundays. I use the medium in a way that I feel is most effective. I’m not going to blast marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing all the time, because you’ll just turn it off. So I dabble in things I’m interested in. One day you might get an article about a chef that I like, then the next day I might say something about the Colts, then the next day I might say something about the Pacers, or something funny about my kids.

You have to remember you’re not talking AT people. The biggest thing you have to remember about social media is that you’re listening.

I think a lot of people forget that – they’re pushing messages. I think you do still have to push messages, because that helps you gain followers, but at the end of the day, we now use social media for communication.

I’ll tell you another way social media affects our bottom line. We’re getting rid of our secret shopper company that we’ve had in place for probably ten years, because I don’t need them anymore. Sure they give us the secret shopper and they give us all kind of data, but I don’t need that when I’ve got 5,000 people on Facebook or Twitter and they have a bad experience or they have a good experience, and they let me know about it. It’s funny, I find out things about my staff while they’re at work. I’ll get a tweet that says “Hey, your bartender is doing a crappy job” and if I’m checking my Twitter account then, I get on the phone with the manager and say “hey, you’ve got a problem at the bar, go take care of it right now.” We can take care of things instantaneously, whereas before, that person may have left and might never come back to our restaurant.

Where did you get started in social media?

MySpace was where we got started. A lot of people don’t remember that, but Twitter wasn’t around, Facebook was only for college students so MySpace was then what Facebook is now. I knew that,and I got on there and was putting up my designs and stuff. I wasn’t posting like I do now, I mainly put up a lot of our marketing messages on MySpace. Then I started putting up pictures of me on the boat or with my kids. Then when Facebook announced they were opening up to everybody, right away I got on there and started putting our stuff up there. That’s when I started having fun saying and posting funny things. Then Twitter came along and I created my account in November of 2008. When I first joined I didn’t use it very much. I knew it was going to be important, I just didn’t know how. I didn’t quite understand how it was going to be a big thing, but I had a gut feeling about it. So I got onboard and it started to grow like a snowball. I got some help from a friend (@CoxyMoney) and from there I blossomed. What I was doing was working, so I didn’t change my model.

Our use of Twitter also continues to grow. Right now we’re using it in all our restaurants. I’m encouraging my manager and front-line employees to tweet as well. I don’t know if it’s the right avenue to take, but it’s something I’m doing because of a gut reaction. Obviously, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with social media, which is why you’re starting to see more social media contracts that employers are trying to get employees to sign, and we’re no different. We do the same thing. I think you have to be careful, not only about what employees can post, but sometimes the message can get mixed. My employees are a representation of me and if I’m asking them to tweet, “hey, I’m serving tonight, come see me”, that’s great, but then 6 hours later they’re tweeting that they’re in Broad Ripple getting hammered, that sends a mixed message. I think we’re trying to be proactive in how we use it and we’re excited to introduce this to our company and let our employees leverage it. We’re also setting up accounts for all the different restaurants and I know we’ll be able to control those. That way, if you don’t want to follow or know what’s going on in Muncie because you live in Indy, you can just follow that account and they’ll tweet about things going on in town.

We’re encouraging our managers to take pictures of a guest at a table or their employee of the month, or of the cooks making a dish – something people would be intrsted in click on and looking at. So that’s another way we’re using social media.

How did you get started with Foursquare and what successes have you seen?

Foursquare was first introduced to me by another guy on Twitter, who I’ve never met in person, @DrThomasHo. He said “Hey, look into this – I really think you need to be involved”. I guess I’m lucky because I have so many people looking out for me because I started looking at it and I started reading more and kept hearing it being brought up in conversations and

I think it’s [Foursquare] actually one of the purest, easiest forms of social media out there.

It’s today’s version of a loyalty card without having to actually carry  a card in your wallet. Everyone carries their phone with them, many have an iPhone, an Android or Blackberry, that’s your loyalty card right there. All you have to do is check-in. Now, my job as a business owner is to figure out a way to make that an actual loyalty card – make it where you want to choose my place over the guy across the street because you’ll get 10% off just for checking-in. I embraced a special Foursquare Mayor’s-only discount because that means I’ve got somebody who is at my restaurant so often that he’s considered a mayor, now I’m going to offer an other incentive that says, hey if you can dethrone this guy or gal, I’m going to give you something huge. That’s our next approach, turn it into a competition. In the end, the name of the game is loyalty. I want repeat visit, so I think that’s what Foursquare can do for a business whether it’s restaurants, retail, or something else.

I spoke at a banking conference two weeks ago and I said “I can’t tell you how to use social media in your company, that’s for you to decide, I can tell you that it works”. You have to be the createive one that figures out how it works in your industry. I went on Google and searched for “Foursquare Banking Indistury” and I found dozens of articles on there. One example was a bank in Wisconsin. If you check-in at their bank, they give you ¼% off your loan or an initial deposit when you open a check-ing account or something like that. With just the few minutes of research I did, that’s a great example of what other banks can do.

I think location-based social media sites are the next big thing. If somebody’s following me and they live in California, that’s great, but it doesn’t really do anything for me. At the end of the day all the stuff I do, the goal is to get you in the doors of Scotty’s Brewhouse. The beauty of location-based social media is that I’ve got people that are near my locations. They’re the closest ones to getting in my doors so you have to embrace the medium. I think that Foursquare’s badges are brilliant. It just gives people another incentive to keep checking-in, just to get these silly little badges. From a retail point. Your goal is to give customers something unique. One of the badges that I think can apply for any organization is a swarm badge. If you get 50 people to check-in at one location during the day, everyone earns the Swarm Badge. So we had a Swarm Badge Party. What does that do for my business? 50 people that are all checking-in on Foursquare are all drinking a beer or two, they’re all having an appetizer…I’ve just increased my sales with people who might not have been there otherwise.

Creativity is your only limitation with a service like Foursquare.

American Eagle is now giving you a 15% discount for checking-in at their stores and Chili’s will give you a free order of chips and salsa for checking-in. Those are two national brands that are now using Foursquare as a way to drive engagement, traffic and revenue to their locations.

Are you constantly looking for new ways to utilize services like Foursquare?

Absolutely. I recently got in touch with a guy in Wisconsin who owns a bar called AJ Bombers (@AJBombers). He’s been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and CNN and he’s become the poster child for social media usage in restaurants. For example, he has free Wi-Fi available and the name of his Wi-Fi account is “Don’t Forget To Check-in On Foursquare”. He gave me the idea of offering the special for dethroning the current Mayor.  When we originally set it up we were giving discounts for every 3^rd visit or every 5^th visit, but Foursquare’s GPS was notoriously bad and people were checking-in from two miles away just to increase their check-in count, so we changed it to a smaller discount (10%) for every check-in.

What is over the horizon for social media? What will be the next big thing?

I definitely keep an eye out for new technologies. Just like when Google Buzz came out, I tried it out. I’ll usually start an account and then just wait and see how it goes. The more I hear about it, the more I see that this new site or technology has something to it. Some of it might not apply to my business, but it might – it just depends. For example – everyone wants to create an iPhone app. A while ago, I decided I didn’t want to just create one just to have one. I wasn’t going to make one that would just let you get to our menu, you can do that on our website, that’s not an app. You have to give the user something of value. So we’ve been kicking around an idea where you can open up the app, and it will tell you about all the coupons that restaurants are offering within two miles of where you are. Then, whichever of those coupons you want to use at our restaurant, we’ll let you use. That’s just an idea, but who wouldn’t want to open up an app, find the best coupon in the area then use it at Scotty’s?

I’m not really a good predictor about what’s next. When some of the technologies have come out, I haven’t really been able to see how they could be applicable, but I’m not so naïve to think that they can’t be used at all. I keep an eye out, but I don’t know exactly what’s next. I’ve actually just hired on a Director of Technology and Digital Media. I created the snowball that has become a huge avalanche, but I can’t continue to grow the company and try to monitor all of our social media initiatives. Since social media has grown so quickly, I need him to help with Facebook, Foursquare Twitter and whatever new mediums we get into.

Any closing thoughts about Scotty’s or social media in general?

All of these social mediums can help you with marketing, but one of the most important things you can do, both for your business and personally, is listen. You know the people you see at a party and you can tell they just like to hear themselves talk? I think the successful people just zip their mouths and let somebody else talk and sit back and listen. I think that same thing can apply to social media. One of the biggest benefits for Scotty’s is being able to listen to our customers through social media. Creating a personal connection is one of the best things that Twitter has allowed me to do. One of the reasons I got into the restaurant business is because I’m a people person. I like talking to people, I like bartending, I like waiting tables. As we’ve grown I realized that I created for myself a desk job. I got into the restaurant business because I didn’t want a desk job, I wanted to be behind a bar. The beauty of Twitter is that it’s allowed me to electronically table-touch and bartend again. In our industry we have our managers table-touch – which means going around to the tables and seeing how the customers are doing and taking care of issues. If the customer isn’t happy, they can take care of the issue right away. Now, Twitter has allowed me to do an electronic table-touch in front of 4,500 followers. That’s the best thing in the world! It doesn’t bother me that someone complains about cold food in front of all my followers, we’re not perfect; we’re going to make mistakes. The best part is that I listen to them and reply to them and 4,500 people saw that I took care of the issue and gave them a gift card and made the situation right. That’s the beauty of social media – it’s about making personal connections with my customers.

Be sure to check out Scotty’s Brewhouse, at one of there many locations throughout Indiana. you can even follow Scotty on Twitter (@Brewhouse) or “like” Scotty’s on Facebook.

This is the second in a new series of interviews with local leaders in the social media and technology industry that will be featured on Social Mediarology. Today’s interview is with Kyle Lacy of Brandswag, a social media training company based in Indianapolis and Oklahoma City.

Kyle Lacy – Brandswag

Kyle Lacy started Brandswag in June, 2007 with his college roommate. They started out as an identity design firm for website development and as of November, 2009, they moved into corporate training and development for social media. They work with companies with between 100 and 2,000 employees and train HR, Marketing, Sales, IT, Upper Management and other departments on the importance of social media as well as why and how to use social media. In short, they teach mid-to large sized companies how to use and implement social media.

Kyle recently published Twitter Marketing for Dummies and maintains a social media-focused blog at KyleLacy.com.

Why social media?

One, we’ve been using it for a long time. Facebook started while we were in college. We also saw a niche that we could brand in terms of being young, and we took advantage of it. I like how social media gives a voice to the consumer instead of the other way around, but we also saw a great opportunity and we jumped headfirst into it. Initially it was difficult, because people didn’t understand the concept, they didn’t understand why it mattered, but it’s getting better now and more and more people are wanting to learn about everything.

What are some next steps for DMOs in social media?

It’s not about creating profiles, it’s about figuring out where your customers are. I’ve had conversations with people where I’ve told them, “Don’t you dare go and create a [Facebook] fan page, there’s no reason for you to do it”. I think the biggest problem that we have right now is that organizations look at social and think it’s a completely separate entity from everything else. They have their marketing meeting and then they have their social media meeting, which is stupid because social is just another arm of marketing. It’s a communications platform. There’s no difference between it and direct mail, email marketing, they should all coexist with social and vice-versa.

What I would tell people is if you make a Facebook fan page, you’d better figure out if it’s making you revenue. If, after six months, it’s not making you revenue, you’re either not doing it right or you need to get rid of it. It’s cool to have the social media hype, but we’re not going to get to the past the point of just hype until people make sure this is a viable marketing platform for them. It will be a whole lot easier for everyone if they start measuring their social media initiatives.

What are your thoughts on measuring social media?

You have to measure it. I think the problem is that the metrics to measure social are completely different than a direct mail campaign. I think that’s where people are getting stuck. They’ll look and say: “we should be measuring because we’re spending company time on it, but how do we place a value on all these different initiatives?” “How do we value brand awareness?”, “How do we value customer engagement?”, “How do we value when Christina, who went to visit a state park, put photos on her Facebook page and you got brand engagement out of that?”

You can put a number to those things in terms of coupon redemption rates or the number of people attending an event that you promoted through Facebook, but we have a big issue with the measurement of social being a viable marketing tool. It’s the exact same issue we had with email. Email was new and many people didn’t like it. Then Hotmail came out, a free product, mass consumption happened, Microsoft bought them and now we have firms like ExactTarget that measures email to a tee. Right now, social is in that Hotmail build-out phase. It’s hitting mass consumption. Software as a service (SaaS) companies are trying to create tools to measure that effectiveness, but right now, we haven’t gotten to the point where corporate America has decided that we need to invest a ton of money to make social into a viable marketing tool. It won’t be a completely viable marketing tool until corporate America invests money in it, like when Microsoft bought Hotmail.

If you sit down and measure how your use of email on a daily basis to your ROI, then we can have conversations about how you measure social ROI. It’s the exact same thing. The problem I have is when people say “What’s the ROI for social media?”, then I ask them what their ROI is on email, or the billboard they’re spending $2,000 a month on and they have no idea. You can’t complain about the lack of metrics with social when you don’t measure it on everything else and the only thing that’s keeping you from moving forward is the fear of change.

Social media actually feels a lot like traditional media (print, radio, TV) in the sense that you can easily measure direct calls to action, but it’s still nearly impossible to measure brand awareness or engagement.

Absolutely, and it’s because social is still too new. You either make the decision to invest and try it out or you take the risk of being left behind. Blockbuster is a great example. Anyone who thinks that Blockbuster didn’t see the opportunity of streaming media is wrong. Blockbuster saw it, but what did they do? They made the decision to hold off because they didn’t know the viability of streaming, and Netflix is destroying them now. Even in terms of Redbox, they’re killing Blockbuster because they adapted to the way consumers thought and felt. We actually work with a local restaurant and they’re getting rid of their mystery shopper company because they get all of it on Twitter anyway. I think that 5 years from now, we’re going to look back and laugh that we thought social was for lead generation. It’s more for PR and customer engagement and getting the voice of the consumer so you know how to market to them effectively.

Who “owns” social media, PR or Marketing?

It’s communications. Whatever communications means to each individual organization, that’s where social media should be housed. In my opinion, PR and Marketing should be the same anyway. It’s all spin and it’s all about how to get consumers to talk about you. That’s the whole crux with social. How do you get people to talk about you and what you’re doing? That’s the same as a PR firm that wants to get their client in a magazine. They want to do that because the magazine has readership. I don’t think there should be Vice Presidents of Social Media, I think it should be housed under communications.

What are some new and emerging trends in social media?

Social is going to turn more corporate. SharePoint 2010 comes out this month and it has a lot of social tools. In the next year and a half to two years, I think we’ll see the social media bubble burst. It had to happen for email and the internet in general as well. There’s a lot of Venture Capital (VC) money going into social and as of now, there’s no real income stream. Twitter is probably the best example of that. You can’t have a viable business model if you have $240 million in VC, but you haven’t made any money yet. I think in the next two to three years we’ll see an evening out, but in the next year, I think we’ll see a lot of corporate tools come out to help utilize social media. Like ExactTarget purchasing CoTweet, you’ll see a lot of stuff coming out of Omniture and Google and you’ll probably see more analytics and metrics coming out because that’s what people want. We need measurement. I can’t spend 4-5 hours a day piecing together metrics from several different sources. You’ll see Radian6 coming out with some great stuff. We’ll see a lot of mergers and acquisitions.

How do you think the tourism industry can benefit from social media?

The biggest way tourism can capitalize on social media is by getting people to talk about you. I still think that we’re lacking in terms of storytelling online. We need to get platforms together that allows people to tell their stories. If there’s anything that tourism can be doing it’s sending out emails whenever people visit asking them to take a survey: tell us about your time, let us know what your favorite thing was about hte park, then we’ll create a blog post about it. We’re allowing the consumer to be the voice of the brand and that’s been the conversation for the last several years, but I don’t think it’s come to fruition yet.

What industries or organizations are doing a great job with social media?

There’s a non-profit called Charity Water that’s some of the best I’ve ever seen and they’re great at telling a story. That’s no different than marketing from 60 years ago, It’s all about telling the brand’s story. The difference now is that there’s multiple people that can tell the story instead of one centralized campaign. I think Charity Water is some of the best I’ve ever seen. Locally, Scotty’s Brewhouse is unbelievable with social now. The reason is because their owner, Scotty Wise, decided to take advantage of Twitter and use it as a medium to communicate personally and he’s creating a brand for himself as well.

How can people stay on top of social media?

Convince and Convert from Jay Baer. Jason Falls’ blog (SocialMediaExplorer) is a good one as well as Tech Crunch and Seth Godin’s blog. I don’t really read Mashable because it has to be marketing as well, you can’t just read about social media because you can’t separate the two, they’re one and the same. And of course, KyleLacy.com

Any final thoughts or comments?

Be sure to put a strategy together before you do anything and make sure it syncs with your mission statement and marketing plan. You should not be creating anything unless it has some kind of system or strategy, unless you have a plan for what it will look like six months from now.

Be sure to check out KyleLacy.com, you can contact Kyle from the blog, or through Twitter or Facebook.

James Burnes – Mobiltopia

James Burnes has been working in the digital space for more than 13 years at various companies, including publicly-traded newspaper and television companies as well as private firms specializing in digital communications and development.

James recently launched Project Brilliant – a strategy and business incubator focused in digital space. Project Brilliant assists organizations in developing and planning strategies for utilizing internet technology to grow their business. The goal is to work with companies who need help and assistance putting digital plans in place and, in some cases, help launch those initiatives.

Mobiltopia is a venture launched by Project Brilliant that focuses on Mobile technology, websites, and apps for iPhone, Blackberry, Android and other smartphones.

Why Mobile?

For the last two years I’ve been watching very carefully as the digital space has evolved. We’ve seen a major shift to social media and a focus of businesses of all types to[ward] look[ing] at social media as a core marketing strategy. I identified fairly early on in my career that things change too quickly to just be focused on what everybody’s talking about right now, and to always spend a lot of time looking to what’s next; and mobile has been on my radar for the past two years.

About a year and a half ago, the focus on mobile really started coming to my attention, because I realized it was where social media had to go to be effective. Within the past six months I’ve watched the sale of smartphones grow at a rate that show that we will soon live in a world of screens. There was a definite need within the marketplace for there to be a company focused on specializing in mobile devices.

What are some specific trends within mobile?

Most importantly, the number of smartphones in the marketplace is growing by leaps and bounds. There is no doubt that mobile will continue to push the limits of how consumers utilize and access the internet and information from the internet versus how consumers access the internet from a desktop or even laptop computer. I see mobile as the natural progression of where the technology is taking us.

In 2009, smartphones accounted for about 18% of all cell phones, and should grow to 33% by the end of 2010 and should be over 50% by the end of 2011. Also, the number of consumers who are now paying for data plans have skyrocketed. This has gone from the businessperson to teenagers and moms. We’ve seen a shift in consumer behavior that now a whole different audience is using these devices, not just business professionals, which means that business of all types need to decide how they’re going to interact with consumers who have these powerful computers in their pockets.

What has brought about this tremendous rise in popularity of mobile devices in the past two years?

First, is affordability. Secondly, the iPhone’s attraction to a mass audience versus other smartphones, like the Windows Mobile phones and Blackberrys, were very focused on the business market. Third, there are simply more smart devices available today. Fourth, mobile carriers are seeing a lot of profitability through these devices and they want to continue to market those.

The profitability for the wireless networks comes as a combination of the data plans they sell, the revenue they generate by people buying apps – everyone who has an iPhone is generating money for Apple which inherently generates money for AT&T. Some of the profits come from increased growth in terms of new subscriber base, it can almost be directly tied to them having the exclusive rights to the iPhone.

In some capacity, even texting is a revenue generator for these mobile carriers and will continue to be for some time. They’re going to start seeing the pricing structure for texts diminish as they as more and more carriers have to compete for business by offering low- or no-costs texting plans versus what they offer today. So, they’re looking at smartphones being the next generation of revenue tools as texting revenue diminishes.

What are some obstacles for consumers or businesses that want to be involved in mobile?

On the consumer side, as you get less sophisticated users of technology, they’ll be less convinced they need to spend the money on the data plans. What I find today is there are consumers who say “I don’t need a smartphone”. It’s not that that’s an incorrect statement, but they don’t recognize the benefits of having this data in their hands until they’ve tried it. It’s a parallel to the challenge [mobile providers] had for some time with a lot of people saying “I don’t need a cell phone”. We’ve gotten to a point today where [the vast majority of] consumers have a cell phone for a reason – because they have the perception that they need it. Even though they don’t really need it, they’ve chosen to have it.

From a business perspective, businesses are failing to…operate mobile-optimized websites that adequately sense the screen size and information functions that consumers seek when consumers use a mobile device to visit their website. Nine out of ten websites today do not have a mobile-optimized version and there are  huge abandon rates from consumers, nearly 50%, that takes place the moment they realize the site they’re going to on their mobile device doesn’t look good on their phone. So there’s a missed opportunity for businesses who don’t reach this growing audience who access their website through mobile devices.

Will true-web rendering mobile devices like the iPhone change the need for organizations to create mobile-versions of their website?

I have no doubt in my mind that businesses for many years to come are going to need a mobile optimized version of their site. The…size of the screen and the ease of use that consumers expect when they’re on their mobile device are very different than when they’re at a computer. The way you browse a website when you’re using a phone is significantly different that the way you browse a website when you’re on a computer. That’s not going to change by virtue of the devices’ screen size.

How can the tourism industry in Indiana benefit from mobile websites and applications? Where’s the real benefit for Tourism?

I think tourism is one of the prime candidates for mobile focus. You’re reaching an audience that’s typically away from their office and home. Their only [traditional options] are either the brochures or ads they have on-hand when they’re driving around looking for things to do. Plus, the mobile phone is becoming their primary tool to find where to go and what to do when they’re in locations. This is particularly valuable for consumers who are out of market who don’t normally come to your location. They have specific needs as it relates to [attraction] hours, coupons, benefits, deals, ratings, etc. and these mobile devices are becoming a primary tool for discovering where to spend their time and their money.

I believe strongly that tourism, as an industry, must be one of the first industries in Indiana, and nationally, to activate these mobile devices because their consumer base is absolutely in a mobile situation. They’re out and about looking for things to do. There is a huge opportunity to drive revenue when you’re site is accessible through mobile devices. There’s no doubt that as younger generations travel they use these tools as primary decision-making devices. And as a tech-savvy consumer myself, traveling a week or more a month to locations throughout the country, my devices figure out where I should eat, where to stay, were to sleep, what to do; it all comes from my mobile phone because that’s the thing I have in my pocket no matter where I am to help me figure out where I’m going next. And that’s only going to increase as consumers of all ages, demographics, technical skills, etc. begin to have these phones as their device. In some capacity, some consumers consider their phone to be their primary computing device. I think that’s a pretty substantial statement for people to say. We’re going to continue to see more of that as the technology continues to increase and the cost continues to drop. The cost is what’s dropping faster than anything else right now.

This summer tens of thousands of tourists will be all around our state and the only decision platform to help them decide where to go and what to do will be their phone. That’s millions of dollars available to be captured by the businesses who are best marketing to them, promoting to it and being accessible through heir own mobile site, mobile app or having a presence on other mobile apps that are driving tourism behavior.

Will the iPad change the direction of mobile or will it end up being more of less portable computing device like a laptop?

As a category as a whole, tablet computers – including the iPad – are going to have a significant role in the marketplace as a whole, but in the tourism industry, I don’t forecast a big impact over the next 18 months. Where that device is targeted is a category of consumers who will use it as their general web browsing and media browsing device within the home and workplace – mostly home – not necessarily one they’re taking with them to go discover what’s around them. The iPad and tablet devices as a whole are not going to replace mobile devices as a primary computing device.

Where there are opportunities for that device to be utilized by tourism businesses may come from point-of-purchase opportunism within tourism attractions. It may serve as a very powerful tool in conduction surveys, for museum docents to be able to use rich-media to augment tours. There’s a great opportunity for those platforms to create interactive experiences as part of an on-site experience.

I just don’t know yet if the adaptation will create a new demand or a way to market to consumers. And, if I were, as a whole, trying to find ways that mobile was being incorporated into Indiana tourism locations, I think the biggest thing to be thinking about is: Does my community have assets that are created for mobile users? For example, does the Hendricks County CVB have an app for discovering things within the county? Also, does my subset within the tourism industry have an app? Another example, if I’m a chocolate factory, do all the chocolate factories have an “Indiana Chocolate Factory” app?  The key is that not everyone needs an app for their business, but they might get involved in an app for their niche, or category [county, or region] where they can share the cost and collaborate.

Many CVBs in Indiana have small budgets and few staff members. Where is the best place for those organizations to get started in mobile?

I think it depends on how they’re going to market it and promote it. If they’re seeing good branding and marketability of their current website to consumers, and they feel that consumers…are easily finding their website to find things to do, I would start with a mobile site because the cost factor is probably lower. Technology and opportunities around mobile continue to be more accessible and more affordable, so they shouldn’t dismiss an app if they can make sure their members and locations around the community are marketing it. Apps as well as mobile sites are only as effective as the audience they reach so it’s critical that when organization are budgeting towards doing things in the mobile space that they’re also planning to promote and [are] marketing themselves effectively through the channels they have.

Smart mobile initiatives leverage what already exists. If they have a website then the site should automatically detect if the person is browsing from a mobile phone and switch over to the mobile site. Mobile sites should be automatic [don’t create a mobile.site.com] and should detect which phone they’re coming from and prepare a version that works for that [phone]. That’s one thing [Mobiltopia] is doing. We’re creating mobile-optimized sites that take your current website and convert it to a mobile-optimized version as well as create custom apps. We’re actually working right now on a very exciting tourism app that focuses on organizations that are a part of a tour at a lower cost than has previously been made available in this market.

Any last thoughts or comments?

Mobile is a very new, emerging space and there are a lot of questions. Companies and organizations should not be afraid to ask those questions and become more educated. If they have question and just want to learn more about mobile or want have an exploratory conversation about “is mobile right for me or not”, the folks on my team are very happy to have that conversation and if they call our office at 317.426.0865 or email us at getstarted@mobiltopia.com we’re very happy to schedule time to talk about mobile. Yes, we’re in the business of selling mobile stuff, but we’re not in the business of selling people things they don’t need, so I’m happy to give people advice and recommend to them where they should spend their dollars. It may make sense to pursue mobile now and it may make sense to wait and we’re happy to provide that insight.