Content Matters

The Publisher's Guide to Mobile and Tablet Development

During the past 12-18 months I've had more conversations with publishers about tablet and mobile than about any other topic. In fact, it's probably more than the next three topics combined.

The speed in which mobile and table computing are overtaking the desktop is unprecedented. According to Deloitte, more than one in five Americans own a tablet device. And every day, new vendors and agencies come along pitching products and solutions. The result for most publishers is confusion.

In speaking with colleagues at Newstex, I learned that they were seeing the same confusion among many of their customers. 

So, working closely with the Newstex team, I've authored a new eBook, The Publisher's Guide to Mobile and Tablet Development, which is currently available for free download.

The eBook starts with strategy, exploring 7 mobile content business models, noting that many publishers overlook new revenue opportunities on mobile. From there, it aims to demystify much of the mobile landscape, helping publishers understand the differences in platforms and providing tools to simplify issues like the app vs mobile web decision.

The last half of the book provides an action plan to help publishers implement their mobile strategy. Examples and case studies are provided throughout to help you understand the decisions made by other publishers - and their implications.

Whether you've already launched multiple iPhone, iPad and Android apps or are just trying to move past the hype and understand the mobile content space, this eBook provides quick and valuable insights. Download your free copy here.

A special thanks to Tom Shultz of Creative Attitude for his terrific design work.

Facebook Inside: How Facebook Can Win at Mobile

For several years we’ve been dismissive about the idea of an inevitable “Facebook phone”. Apple and Android have won the mobile phone wars and, as Microsoft, Blackberry and others have learned, there are few crumbs remaining.

But if rumors are true, Facebook just may have come up with a strategy for success. 

The Facebook plan is not to build hardware, nor create its own operating system. Instead, the strategy is for a “Facebook Home on Android” app launcher, with hardware built by existing handset makers. 

The idea of a customized version of Android is not new – that’s the approach that Amazon has taken with the Kindle Fire. But the potential impact for Facebook could be great.

Current rumors suggest that HTC is building the initial handset for the Facebook phone. The modified version of Android would provide the ability to launch any existing Android app, but the home screen would be Facebook-centric.

That approach is compelling. If you look at mobile usage statistics, users spend up to a quarter of their mobile use on social networks. For many of those users, having Facebook as their home screen would make sense.

For Facebook, a “Home on Android” could act as a Trojan horse that would allow them to shift increasing amounts of activity to their own platform. At launch, the Facebook Home on Android might simply be your news feed, Instagram feed, games and Facebook chat. Yet, over time, that could expand. Rumors suggest the initial search partner will be Google, but that could easily change. Facebook Maps, Facebook Music or Facebook TV could easily follow.

There are still many unknowns. Will the Facebook Home on Android version be forked, requiring developers to build custom versions of Android apps, or will all existing Android apps work on the phones? Will payments be handled through Google Play or Facebook’s App Center? Will the Facebook Home launcher be made available for any Android phone or will it only run on customized handsets?

We’ll learn a lot more on Thursday, when Facebook makes their introduction. But one thing seems clear - with the Facebook Home on Android strategy, the idea of a Facebook phone no longer seems silly.

Related articles

Facebook Home to be the OS name of Facebook's Android phone?

Facebook's Android Homescreen Could Expose Apple's Inflexibility

Facebook Phone Leak Points To Budget HTC Device, Homescreen App For All Androids

Flipboard's New Curation Platform a Boon for Brands

Last night, Flipboard 2.0 was released. 

The new version includes a curation platform that allows anyone to create a Flipboard "magazine" by curating content and sharing it with others. Here's Tech Readings, a Flipboard magazine I've created this morning.

The user interface couldn't be easier. From any article, simply click the + icon and add it to your magazine.

For the avid RSS reader/curator, this is a great new tool. Against the backdrop of outrage at Google dropping Reader, I realized that between most of my content consumption comes via Twitter and Flipboard these days, with Reader a distant third. With this new curation tool, Flipboard should become an even more important tool for me.

Yet I think the real opportunity for Flipboard will come with brands. As brands move into the publishing space, there's tremendous opportunity for them to create custom magazines for niche communities, using proprietary content, curated external content, or, ideally, a blend of both.

And this potentially creates new revenue opportunities for Flipboard. A professional version of the curation platform might allow brands to have some control over layout, to include their own branding and to package it up as their own branded app.

Those capabilities could also be of interest to publishers and informal curators within the enterprise. 

Flipboard has delivered a great reading experience since its launch. There's an opportunity for them to create a similarly great experience for curation and publishing. I'm excited to see how brands and publishers begin to experiment with these new tools.

 

Three Possible Strategies to Support Best Buy’s New Price Match Policy

Best Buy (BBY) announced this week its intention to begin price-matching prices from key competitor websites, such as Amazon (AMZN), Buy.com, Target.com (TGT), B&H, Walmart.com (WMT) and others, for purchases made in its stores.

On its surface, it seems like a smart and aggressive strategy for Best Buy to remain relevant and to discourage its customers from showrooming, using Best Buy to view items, then buying them cheaper online.

Yet in practice, I don’t know how the numbers could work. There’s no way to profitably run a brick and mortar big box retail business that matches the best of online pricing.

For comparison, I just spot-checked a few of Best Buy’s prices.

Best Buy offers a Canon Vixia HF M50 Camcorder for $499. Amazon has the same camcorder for $429. The Epson WF-2540 printer is $129 at Best Buy. It sells for $99 at Amazon.  And it’s not just Amazon. A pair of Sennheiser PX 100-II headphones are marked “sale – see price in cart” at Best Buy. That sale price is $55.98.  But B&H Photo has the same headphones for $43.46.

And those three items are hardly unique. On almost every item I checked, the Best Buy price was 20-40% higher than prices at Amazon and other sites. The exceptions tend to be large screen TVs, where Best Buy is competitive to the best online prices, and certain brands which are rarely discounted, like Dr. Dre Beat headphones or an Apple iPad.

And that experience is consistent with what I’ve seen in the real world. There was a Best Buy across the street from my old office. Any time I tried to buy anything there, I found their prices to be 25-50% higher than the online price. I might pay that premium for an emergency pair of earbuds, but for anything over $25, I found myself ordering via the Amazon app instead, often before leaving the store.

So, how might Best Buy adapt to a world of price-matching? I see three possibilities:

First, Best Buy can hope that while price-matching becomes a useful marketing campaign, customers don’t bother to actually do it in practice. This seems unlikely to me, unless they either make the process too difficult to perform (“let me find the manager for you” or “you just need to fill out this 12-page form and we’ll match the price”) or perhaps deploy cellular signal jammers in all their stores.

The second option is for Best Buy to work with manufacturers to create custom versions of its products for their stores. This is the trick that the mattress industry has used for decades, to make price comparisons difficult. When mattress discounters like 800-Mattress sprang up, department stores scrambled for ways to keep their artificially high prices up. The solution was for mattress manufacturers to create “exclusive” models available to each department store or retailer. So, you can’t compare the price of the Stearns & Foster Delana mattress from Macy’s, as that model is not available at Sleepys or elsewhere.

Might Best Buy try something similar? Could they ask Canon to make a Vixia HF M50BB (or similar) which is only available at Best Buy? That might be a bit more difficult to do across some product categories (I can’t imagine Apple participating) but for some products I could see it. Truly unique offerings would be most compelling, but that's really hard to do with electronics. Home retailers like Target (TGT) can get designers to create custom collections; FAO Schwartz has unique toys that Toys R Us can't offer. But there's not as much flexibility with electronics. Maybe a custom color for a phone or camera, but that's about it. Another option might be to create custom bundles. Perhaps a flat screen TV, a wall mount and HDMI cable could be bundled together into a package that is exclusive to Best Buy. Smart consumers might compare the bundle to the price of the unbundled components, but you won’t have a one-click price check from a barcode.

A third option might be for Best Buy to treat big ticket items as loss leaders then offer private labeled accessories, unique to Best Buy. This is not far off from their current process for large screen TVs. Their prices on these tend to be fairly competitive, as they know people price compare before dropping a thousand bucks on a flat screen. But they hit you up for a $59.99 HDMI cable and a $119.99 wall mount, items that can be purchased for a third that price at Amazon.

If they truly wanted to be price-competitive, Best Buy would make it easy to check competitive prices in their stores. But they’ve actively avoided this to-date. Best Buy actually incubated a startup, Tecca, which offered mobile apps providing detailed information and comparisons on electronic products. The apps included barcode scanners which returned pricing from Bestbuy.com, Amazon.com and Google Products. Yet although they funded it, Best Buy was never comfortable enough with Tecca to encourage its use in their stores. Tecca was shuttered late last year, but could have been the centerpiece of this new “price matching” strategy.

I think Best Buy will likely employ the use of bundles and white-labeled accessories to improve margins, while using price-matching on major items as loss leaders. That approach may slow the showrooming somewhat, but it doesn’t seem like an effective long-term strategy for a profitable business. They can’t possibly sell enough overpriced accessories to support 1,000 big box stores across the U.S.

How do you think Best Buy will handle price matching? Add your thoughts in the comments.

Photo: Best Buy - Champlain Center Flickr/daysofthundr46

Related articles

Best Buy to make online price-matching policy permanent

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What Are Your Favorite Content Apps?

I'm writing an ebook aimed at helping publishers develop and implement their mobile strategy.

One section of that book will spotlight apps from publishers that get it right. I've got a bunch in mind, but would love to get your suggestions on content apps that are deserving of recognition.

First, to define what I'm looking for, I'm focused on apps from publishers, not on generic readers. So, the NY Times app would be a fit, but Flipboard or Pulse would not.

The focus can be b2b or b2c; I'll include native apps, mobile web apps and hybrid apps in the discussion. Content can be text, images or video. And I'm looking across a wide range of business models - free apps for brand awareness, paid subscriptions, content-enabled mobile commerce, digital-print bundles, sponsored apps and more.

Please respond using this short, one question survey.

If you'd like, you may add comments below. Or, if you prefer, you can email your suggestions to me at barry-at-contentmattersllc-dot-com.

Thanks for your help!

NOOK Sharpens Focus on Education Market with Pearson Stake

Pearson (NYSE:PSO) has taken a 5% stake in the recently spunoff NOOK Media LLC division of Barnes & Noble (NYSE:BKS) with an $89.5 million investment.

The investment values NOOK Media at $1.789 billion, unchanged from its recent spinoff. After the Pearson investment, the Barnes & Noble stake will be reduced to 78.2% of the company, with Microsoft (MSFT) owning the remaining 16.8%.

The investment was clearly strategic for Pearson, as a means of providing more seamless technology solutions for the education market. According to Pearson North America CEO Will Etheridge:

"With this investment we have entered into a commercial agreement with NOOK Media that will allow our two companies to work closely together in order to create a more seamless and effective experience for students. It is another example of our strategy of making our content and services broadly available to students and faculty through a wide range of distribution partners."

At the same time, Barnes & Noble filed an 8K indicating that "the Nook business will not meet the company’s prior projection for fiscal year 2013″.

The NOOK is a product in a tough position. While the NOOK HD has aimed to expand its capabilities beyond that of a single-function e-reader, it faces a highly competitive market. Traffic generated by Nooks are a fraction of that from the Kindle and are a rounding error when compared to the iPad. As single-function gadgets are subsumed by smartphones and tablets (see iPod for example), the life expectancy of the standalone e-reader market will be short. 

As I've previously written, I don't see a promising future for the NOOK as a general purpose e-reader or tablet. Instead, they should narrow their focus to the educational  and early reader markets, where they are better positioned for success. As I wrote last fall:

Barnes & Noble needs to root itself deeply into the textbook market. That market is up for grabs and it seems that Apple or Barnes & Noble will become the likely winner. Barnes & Noble should move quickly to secure the needed partnerships and focus its efforts on winning there.

The educational technology market remains somewhat fragmented. Apple has clearly set its sights on the classroom. I think it's time for Barnes & Noble to focus all of its efforts on this market. If the Nook cannot gain significant market share in the education space, it will have no viable future as a platform.

 

Lessons Unlearned: Why The Daily Shouldn't Derail Your Tablet Strategy

During the past week, my Twitter stream has been filled with various thoughts on the demise of News Corp’s (NWS) tablet-centric news app, The Daily (including my own). Some, perhaps in an effort to be provocative, have suggested that the end of The Daily signals the idea that tablet-based publishing itself has proven a failed model. Here are a few of those stories:

Felix Salmon on The impossibility of tablet-native journalism.

Mathew Ingram: Why Rupert Murdoch's bold bet on The Daily was doomed from the start.

The failure of The Daily says little about the future of tablet publishing, and mostly tells the tale of a failed publishing initiative. Let’s take a look at what The Daily was:

A tablet-only (to start), paid subscription, consumer app, providing general news content, with a very high budget. 

Now, let's break that down into its parts:

Tablet-only: By the end, The Daily had moved beyond tablets to include smartphone, and also had integrated the ability to share content via the web. But to start, it was a single-platform (iPad) product. And the fact that it was optimized for the iPad was both a strength and a weakness. 

Paid subscription consumer news app: the good news is that we are seeing paid content take hold in various markets. But consumers are only willing to pay for content not perceived to be readily available for free elsewhere.

High budget: one of the challenges large companies have when trying to launch something new is that they bring with them high cost structures. Startups don’t dangle 7-figure salaries to attract talent, but large companies fall into an expense base that’s not sustainable. Oh, and The Daily was the only app to run a Super Bowl commercial.  

Yet, despite that high cost structure, The Daily really only faced a challenge once News Corp split into two companies. As part of a single, diversified entertainment business, a $30m annual budget for the Daily was almost a rounding error, easily covered by box office proceeds for the movie Avatar in Poland. Not much to pay for a real-time R&D lab, whose learnings can be applied throughout the multi-billion dollar company. Yet, split off into a business already wracked by difficulties, it became an expensive luxury.

So, what lessons can we learn from The Dailly

Mobile First vs Tablet-Only: There’s a real difference between being Mobile First and being Tablet Only. The Daily became a walled garden, making it difficult to share content or to shift your reading from one platform to another.

In building digital products, it’s critical to understand user behavior. Will users skim your content on their mobile device during the morning commute, marking content to read on the desktop when they get to the office? Or, are they marking content during the day to read later on their tablet on the ride home? Do users need to share your content with peers? Particularly for b2b content, the need to shift from one platform to another is critical.

User Experience Matters: While The Daily ultimately failed in reaching their goal of a half-million paying subscribers to a consumer news product, they did exceed 100,000 paid subs. That’s pretty impressive considering the ubiquity of free news sources on tablets and the web. User engagement was high and they created many real fans. Rather than a boring “replica” app, the Daily created a compelling user experience, leveraging the iPad in ways few others have done.

Specialized, hard-to-find information beats generic news: This one almost goes unsaid, but while many companies are finding that users will continue to pay for information they can’t find elsewhere (particularly in b2b),there’s no appetite to pay for content where there is a viable free substitute. Editorial quality and a big marketing budget can’t overcome “good enough” free alternatives.

I’ll be exploring these and related issues this Thursday at the Specialized Information Publishers Association (“SIPA”) Digital Publishing and Marketing Institute conference in Miami.

SIPA members, by definition, should not face the problem of selling generic information to consumers. These companies offer niche products aimed at b2b markets. During this session, we’ll be exploring trends in mobile and tablet use, particularly among business users and explore how to develop an appropriate mobile and tablet strategy. We'll take a hands-on look at publishers who are doing it right (and a few who appear to be on a misguided path). I hope to see you there.

Related articles

In Defense of the Daily (RIP)

Why Magazine Apps Suck

News Corp.'s The Daily: Successful Experiment, Failed Publication

The Daily closes shop: why the news app was doomed from the start | Jeff Jarvis

Is Mobile First Still The Right Strategy?

There's an interesting discussion going on this morning on Fred Wilson's A VC blog in a post called Rethinking Mobile First. I'd encourage you to read the entire post AND the comments, but here's a short recap, along with my thoughts.

Fred's post is in response to a post by Origami Labs and Everyme co-founder Vibhu Norby questioning whether mobile is the right platform for many new app developers to focus on and why Origami is pivoting from mobile first to web first.

The Norby post highlights the fact that mobile-centric startup success has been limited to a handful of apps:

Only a handful of apps have succeeded mobile-first: Instagram, Tango, Shazam, maybe 2 or 3 others 

The challenge, as he notes, is that the conversion process from download through true engagement eliminates most users. In the case of Everyme:

At best, we retain 5% of users through the entire onboarding process. Attempts to fix it have raised it only nominally. We are not alone on that count even amongst apps with much better onboarding and many more app versions than our own.

In his response, Fred notes that despite the fact that it's hard, it's necessary:

But just because something is hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do it. I am convinced the next set of large and valuable consumer facing services will be built with mobile as the primary user interface. You can see it in the success of Uber and Etsy this holiday season. That's where your users are most of the time. And if you don't design your products and services for what is rapidly becoming the dominant UI, you will not maximize the success of your business in the long run.

I tend to agree with Fred on this one. Mobile IS difficult. It's hard to get your app noticed in the first place, hard to get users to download it and even harder to get them to return to it a second, third and fourth time. But that's not altogether different than the web experience. In the early days of the web, people bookmarked sites all the time. I had hundreds of bookmarks in my Netscape bookmark manager. Of those hundreds of bookmarks there were even a dozen or more than I returned to frequently, but most just sat in the list, never to be clicked again. 

Your platform is not the biggest factor in user engagement. Your application is. Are you providing a compelling experience that users rely upon in their daily life? If so, I'm convinced you can deliver that experience on any platform. That's not to say that the experience won't differ on the mobile platform than on the desktop, but if you deliver value, users will return.

That said, the platform is key in how users interact with your app. Does your onboarding process require users to type a lot? That's fine on the web, less so on tablets and a real challenge on smartphones. Does your business model depend on running tons of ads on every page? Again, that may be fine on the desktop (though I could argue otherwise), less so on mobile devices.

The key, of course, is understanding what you are enabling users to do, then optimizing your offering (whether a native app, a mobile web app or a web page) to deliver that capability as simply as possible. Understanding your audience is critical. Are you aiming for smartphones or tablets? Do you expect a lean forward or a lean back experience?

And mobile first doesn't have to mean app-first. For publishers, mobile first can simply be rethinking your content so that it thrives in a mobile and/or tablet experience. That may mean creating shorter articles with more images and video content. If you build web pages that look great on tablets, they'll probably serve you well on the desktop. The reverse is rarely the case.

So, is mobile development easy? Not at all. Is there a simple path to success? No. But does that suggest that mobile-first is not the right strategy? No. Your customers are shifting more of their time to tablets and mobile devices. Mary Meeker's latest study shows that 29% of American adults currently own a tablet or eReader. And it's safe to say that after this holiday season, that number will probably be more like 33%. Is that a trend that you're willing to bet against?

Success will come to those publishers and developers who understand their audience and delight them with engaging products on the platforms where they are increasingly spending their time.

 

Related articles

Why We're Pivoting from Mobile-first to Web-first

Beware the Mobile-First Strategy

Rethinking Mobile First

In Defense of the Daily (RIP)

Many took delight in today’s announcement that News Corp (NWS) would be shuttering the Daily, the first paid tablet-only news product. I take no pleasure in seeing that product fail.

I’m biased in that I had the opportunity to work with the Daily team while at Crowd Fusion. Yet beyond getting to know many talented people, I got the chance to see them doing some really great things.

As many publishers have discovered, it’s incredibly difficult to differentiate a general news publication. Just the other day, USA Today CEO Larry Kramer was widely quoted as saying he would not charge for USA Today on the web, as its not unique enough content:

"There is so much national news out there,” Kramer said. “I think we would lose more than we would gain.”

The Daily struggled to differentiate its content. When it was first launched, the editorial content was a bit weak. But they definitely strengthened their editorial during their two year run.  More importantly, the Daily, more than virtually any other publication, has experimented with ways to best leverage the tablet environment.

Portrait or Landscape? While cost-cutting forced the Daily to shift to “portrait only” last summer, the Daily initially had two complete versions of every page – one optimized for portrait (vertical) mode, the other for landscape (horizontal). It’s not just that the page could be viewed either way, but that they actually did a full layout of each edition in both portrait and landscape mode so that every page could be optimized for either. This enabled features and functionality that would only work in landscape mode, for example.

Visual news While Pinterest and Instagram have made the image the key element of the mobile web, the Daily was early to realize that tablets were a visual experience and that text-heavy pages would not fly. Today, many others have followed suit – Reuters Wider Image, the Guardian’s PictGrid and others – but the Daily was early to that decision. And it makes reading the Daily on an iPad much more enjoyable than reading a typical newspaper app.

Video content Again, the Daily may not be unique in this, but they were quick to realize that HD video was a key aspect of tablet news consumption.

Navigation The Daily simplified their navigation this summer, but the app offered multiple forms of navigation at its start. A news carousel, similar to the iTunes cover flow, greeted new readers, while a traditional table-of-contents was available as well.

360 Degree Photos The Daily’s 360-degree photos were another way in which this daily newspaper became more of a visual magazine. Whether swiping your way through the St. Patrick’s Day Parade or the surface of Mars, these panoramic images were compelling.

Did the Daily have its faults? No question. The editorial content got better, but was never unique enough to make it a must-read for me. The navigation features were cool but remained clunky at times. And despite adding social sharing and other features, they were never able to fully integrate the app with the web. And while they exposed all of their functionality to advertisers, it seemed few were able to come up with creative campaigns that took full advantage of the device.

Update: Ceros (formerly Crowd Fusion) Chief Scientist Brian Alvey adds his thoughts to the Daily's legacy from a technology standpoint. While some suggest the $30 million per year cost of the Daily was high, noting that:

"...that’s a great R&D lab within a $60 billion company. If you spend $30 million every year to test every new platform that’s actually cheap.”

In the end, all of these features were not enough to attract the 500,000 paid subscribers that News Corp set as its break-even goal. It’s really hard to get consumers to pay for news, regardless of the container. But many of these features are now prominent in other news apps, by News Corp and its competitors.  The Wall Street Journal has begun adding 360 panoramic images to its iPad app, and countless publishers are investing in more video content.

And while it’s easy to poke fun at the failure of this well-funded startup effort, I would instead commend News Corp for doing what’s really hard for large companies to do – innovate. At a time when most publisher's tablet and mobile apps are Zinio-like replicas of print, the Daily attempted to create a product that new and exciting.I hope this failure won't make other publisher afraid to even try.

Social Media Strategies for Black Friday

As we move into Thanksgiving week, brands, retailers and ecommerce sites are focused on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the 32 shopping days leading up to Christmas. All, of course, have active social media components to their marketing efforts. And some will do it well, while many others will not. Let’s take a look at what makes for an effective social media Black Friday strategy.

Multi-platform

The first thing, of course, is to not focus your efforts on a single platform. Customers use various tools, so don’t fall in love with your favorite platform, while neglecting others. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest should all be part of your Black Friday Social Strategy. For those with brick-and-mortar stores, Foursquare is important. Why not offer special discounts for check-ins? And as mobile takes hold, the web is becoming more and more visual. Retailers should take advantage of visual platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.

Existing or Specialty Accounts?

One key decision is whether to use your existing brand accounts to communicate Black Friday deals or to create new ones. In other words, should you push deal offers through your existing social media accounts or create custom Black Friday accounts? I recommend the latter. If I’ve been following a brand and am accustomed to seeing 3-5 messages per day from them, I don’t want to see that change to 40 deal offers per day for the holidays. Use your existing accounts to promote awareness of these Black Friday deal accounts, but don’t suddenly change how your existing brand accounts function. Your customers chose to follow you for a reason; don’t alienate them by changing behavior for five weeks.

Personalize

Should your social media streams be “one size fits all” or should you have multiple streams for different buyers? That depends a lot on the size and diversity of your offerings. For some brands, that’s easy. For a retailer like dELiA’s, catering to a single demographic, one stream will suffice. Amazon uses a single Twitter address, @amazondeals, for all its Gold Box deals, though I think they would benefit by adding category-specific deal streams as well for electronics, media, home and other key categories. A good rule of thumb might be if at least 25-30% of your deals could be relevant to a given customer, keep it as one stream. If less than that, you should consider splitting it into multiple streams.

Rewards

There must be a benefit to your customers for following you. Benefits might include early access to a deal, notification of what deals are coming up, or special discounts available only to social media followers. And keep timing and inventory in mind. Just as physical stores alienate customers by not having enough inventory on doorbuster items, etailers can lose customers by promoting items that are sold out by the time you click.

Awareness

So, you’ve created one or more Black Friday streams – how do you promote them? First, use your existing social media accounts. Sprinkle messages into existing streams with messages like “for early updates on Black Friday deals, follow us at …”.

Make sure that the social media buttons appear prominently on your BF Deals page. Amazon (AMZN) uses a text link “Stay connected via e-mail, Facebook and more” with a pulldown menu on its Gold Box page, but it took me a minute or two to find it. They’d be better served by adding the graphical buttons there.

Amazon’s links may not be prominent, but at least they have them. Walmart (WMT), which uses its standard Twitter and Facebook accounts to promote its deals, does not have any link to those accounts on its Pre-Black Friday page. Best Buy (BBY) and Target (TGT) offer the ability to sign up for Black Friday deal email alerts, but no links to their social media accounts.

Retailers have been talking about integrated, multichannel marketing efforts for several years. Yet, few of them seem to be taking even the simplest steps to make that happen. Your social media marketing should not be isolated; it must be integrated with your other online and offline marketing efforts.

Engage and Monitor

Most retailers still treat social media as a broadcast medium, but the real value comes from engagement and monitoring.

There are many ways to engage with your customers on social media platforms. Why not allow them to vote on which item will be the next deal? Or use Instagram to post pics of the hot deals they land? And, of couse, you should listen for frustrated customers. Your messages will be shared in positive and negative ways. Watch for criticisms of items that are sold out by the time customers click or other negative comments. Work to make those customers happy if you can.

Track hashtags like #blackfriday to see where your content is being shared – as well as that of your brands and competitors.

Mobile

Mobile commerce is growing rapidly. Your customers will be researching Black Friday deals on their tablets and phones. And they will price-check their purchases in the stores. Many will complete purchases on their mobile devices. Yet the user experience on most ecommerce sites is less than ideal on mobile.  While you can’t solve that overnight, there are steps retailers can put into place today to improve the customer experience. Make sure that all your social media links go to mobile friendly pages. Don’t overload your deal pages with unnecessary fluff. Amazon does this better than almost anyone. While their website landing pages are a crowded mess, their Lightning Deal pages are clean and simple.

 

Some retailers choose to create or modify their apps for their Black Friday sales. Macy’s, Walmart and others have launched apps. Apps are great for those customers who will be shopping at your brick & mortar store, but I’m not as bullish on Black Friday apps as some.  I think shoppers will only use apps from the one or two places they plan to do most of their shopping. For me, that’s Amazon, and that’s the only BF app I use. I believe it’s more important to get your content into the streams that customers will be using – and those are Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and of course, email.

The 32 days starting this Friday are the make-or-break period for most retailers. Social media is a key part of an integrated marketing program, yet most retailers still struggle with the "integration" aspect. The rewards are great for those who can truly do so.