Mobile marketing must go social

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 | By Alex Farber

Last week’s cover story focused on the trend for FMCG giants, such as Coca-Cola and Unilever, to move away from launching campaign sites and towards social media (nma 14 January 2010). And this week Kellogg’s and Procter & Gamble made similar moves (nma 21 January 2010).

But mobile marketing campaigns often centre around driving traffic to frankly uninspiring campaign sites, limited by the platform rather than the creative agencies. While these might have some data-gathering and direct-response benefits, they could only loosely be described as brand building. Much better for brands to head to social media that consumers already use and engage in an environment in which they’re comfortable. While it remains tough to create a rich experience there are significant opportunities for communication.

Tapping into this trend would offer brands the chance to improve both their efficiency and engagement levels via the channel and would give social networks the chance to open up new revenue streams.

Social media’s impact in educating consumers about the mobile internet must rank on a par with even the iPhone. Facebook claims more than 65m active users are accessing the site via mobile, who are 50% more active on the social network than non-mobile users.

History has shown consumers are comfortable engaging with brands via their mobiles, as exemplified by ad-funded MVNO Blyk. Mobile social networks are understandably concerned with offering a slick user experience and as such are pared down versions of their online siblings, mainly centred around friends.

But as people become more comfortable, so a real opportunity exists to extend this commercially.

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