Mobile Fix: Google Now and iOS7 Beacons

Is Google Now a glimpse at the future of mobile? And although there’s been very little buzz around it, is iOS7 Beacons going to prove a big deal? Simon Andrews thinks so as he provides us with another mobile fix…

Google Now, next

It looks like Google are going to spend big to launch the Moto X – and essentially relaunch Motorola as a player in smartphones. Reading about context being important and thinking through the examples given, we wonder if we can expect a new version of Google Now to coincide with this launch?

It’s hard to imagine that Google would have Motorola develop new contextually aware software. And given the constant reminders that Motorola won’t get any special treatment in Android we can’t see that a new version would only be available on the Moto X.

If you haven’t used Google Now yet, you really should. It’s a glimpse of the future of mobile.

iOS7 Beacons

We had an interesting chat with the nice people from Apple this week and as well as getting a much better understanding of the design changes of iOS7 we were very interested in Beacon. There hasn’t been a lot of buzz around this but we do think it could be a big deal.

Another demonstration of the revival in Bluetooth, Beacons can ‘recognise’ iOS7 apps and business rules can allow all sorts of interactions. The obvious use case is retail where they could mimic the Shopkick service by identifying the user and serving them an appropriate coupon. And it could see that a customer has arrived in the store but if they then leave – and your data shows they didn’t buy anything – they could be served a coupon for their next visit.

Right now Passbook is being used well by a few people but hasn’t really taken off – with many retailers concerned about having Apple potentially disintermediate their loyalty schemes. But we think Beacon will drive reappraisal.

Whilst the actual Beacons don’t seem to be being made by anyone – yet – this might slow down adoption. But the beauty of the concept is that any iOS7 device can act as a Beacon. So if you are using an iPad as your POS device, then you can use the Beacon functionality. And yes, Square is seemingly working on building Beacon into its retail ecology, including Stand, its new iPad card swiper.

If you are as interested as we are in how mobile is re-imagining retail, this is a good round up with some great examples. And if you would like some help navigating this space, get in touch.

Social at Scale

This week we have seen two great examples of how social operates at scale.

We have been helping out our friends at Trekstock with some social strategy for the amazing promotion they have cooked up with One Direction. Given how accomplished the band have been at building a social following, we knew that the promotion would blow up. But as soon as the promotion was announced with a tweet from Harry Styles we were amazed at the speed. The hashtag was trending worldwide within an hour and we got 100,000 views of the video within 12 hours. The tweet was retweeted 35k times. And the amount of money raised is astonishing. If you know anyone who would like to #HangwithLiamandHarry point them to http://www.prizeo.com/liamandharry

The second example is #Iceclimb where a socially smart stunt by Greenpiece is having a huge impact.

Book of the Week – Permission Marketing

Seth Godin has been a big influence on how we think about marketing. And we still use the value cube which we derived from his thinking on turning strangers into friends.

He wrote a good piece this week on the book and how relevant it still is. But he shares that he;

…underestimated how much fun it is to act like a big advertiser or a big media company, and how profitable it is to keep that industry moving forward. As a result, there are ever more techniques and ever more tools to act as if you’re doing brand advertising in the new media space, when of course, the results are a mere shadow of what you used to be able to do with TV.

Both the Trekstock campaign and the Greenpeace one are good examples of permission marketing. It’s crucial that we raise money for Trekstock to do its great work. But the bigger prize is having permission to talk to the thousands of young people tweeting and instagramming about the campaign.

And for Greenpeace the exposure is really important, but so is building a database of followers that can be activated in the coming weeks and months.

The book may be nearly 15 years old, but it is a must read so we have made it our Book of the Week.

Mobile Fix is being rested for the next few weeks as we go be optimistic in Cornwall. Back in early August.