Read it here.

1. The study’s top finding – “consumers acknowledge that online video shows great potential for advertising” – points to the exploding importance of social media. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but maybe it does. Sometimes I slip into assuming that everybody tracks “the next” like I do, but the truth is that the pace of advance these days is so rapid that it’s hard to keep up even if keeping up is your main job.

2. The study suggests one potentially dramatic finding that the authors either ignored or failed to recognize. I’m going to ask you to study a couple charts from the report and see if you notice something:

Here’s what has me curious. In that first graphic, notice that there’s no mention of mobile at all. But in the second graphic, we see that at least eight of the responses – maybe more, depending on how you slice things – reference mobility. Texting, mobile Web, mobile gaming and more.

So we know consumers are spending a lot of time with their mobiles. But the survey apparently didn’t ask about the impact mobile has on purchasing. However, I wonder what percentage of that third response – word of mouth – was transmitted via mobile?

It’s hard for me to know exactly what the ultimate facts are here, but we know mobile use is dominant and booming. This means either that the survey didn’t provide the opportunity for respondents to report mobile influence on their consumer behavior or that mobile is exerting less influence on such behavior than it ought to be because marketers are ignoring it as a channel.

The former may or may not be true, but I assure you that the latter is dead on.

This is a useful report for marketers looking to better their grasp of social media, and if you come across any insights from it please let me know.

Meanwhile, if your organization is ignoring mobile, pray that your competitors are, too.

post Black Dog Strategic:

First, when things began unfolding in Blacksburg yesterday morning, the university notified its students via e-mail. There are a lot of problems with the response, starting with this: college students don’t use e-mail, at least not any more than they have to. As a recent Chronicle on Higher Education article explained, e-mail is for old people. (And CHE is a source that VT administrators ought to be acquainted with.)

I had to deal with this phenomenon firsthand when I was a university professor a couple years ago, and more and more evidence backs it up – like this Pew Internet and American Life Project report from 2005. So the school’s response utilized a channel that many, if not a majority of students, were unlikely to access. And there was no reason why they wouldn’t know this.

Add to the research a bit of common sense. E-mail is site-restrictive – that is, you’re not going to get an e-mail unless you have your laptop with you and the campus has ubiquitous wi-fi. What Tech needed was the ability to reach every student, regardless of location, instantly. Tragically, this technology exists, it’s simple to deploy and it’s affordable. It could have and should have been in place – and there will be no dodging the issue, because the university was talking about it last year:

Tech looks to tap into text messaging
The university would use cellphone technology to communicate with students.
By Albert Raboteau

BLACKSBURG — When Virginia Tech wanted to alert students to developments in a recent campus manhunt for an accused double murderer it relied on e-mail, the Web and messages sent to dorm phones. One method that was not available: sending text messages to cellphones. That could change.

University officials are considering following the lead of Penn State University and other schools that use text messaging to stay in contact with students for whom even e-mail is becoming passe.

The manhunt in Blacksburg for William Morva, which led to the evacuation of Squires Student Center and the first day of classes being canceled, is an extreme example of the type of situation that Tech officials would like to be able to notify students about on their cellphones.

“We will certainly be investigating other kinds of communications vehicles,” Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said, though he cautioned that a text-messaging system was still a “blue sky idea” that would take investigation to implement.

Hincker said he became interested in such a system after seeing news accounts of the text-messaging program Penn State launched this school year.

About 350,000 people subscribe to Penn State’s e-mail news service, which includes sports items. Working with e2Campus, a division of Leesburg-based Omnilert LLC, Penn State upgraded its system so subscribers can choose to be updated by text message. (Story.)

Of course, if you’ve ever worked in an academic environment, you know that things move at a glacial pace, so I’d be surprised to see a campus like VT get from where they were psychologically when that story was written seven months ago (“blue sky”) to implementation in less than a couple years – and that would be warp speed by university standards.

Had they acted that day, however, the system could have been in place in time for yesterday. When the shooting started, public safety could have accessed the campus red alert system to send a text message to every student with a mobile phone (a number that likely approaches 100% of the population). This would have allowed them to:

• lock down every building on campus
• steer students, faculty and staff heading toward campus away
• provide updated info on the crisis as it became available

The texts would have reached everyone in the campus community no matter where they were at the time, because unlike e-mail, mobile phones are always on them. Effective communication could have directed people away from harm; on the other hand, the shooter could have literally been directly between students and their closest access to their e-mail.

There are a number of firms in the US that could have implemented this service for Virginia Tech. I’m not privy to everybody else’s pricing, but my firm could put it in place for less than $25,000 and it would have been live in one day.

Let me say that again. This “blue sky” idea that Tech officials were cautiously easing up on last September 6 could have been installed for less than $25,000 and could have been live on September 7. (Please forgive me if this sounds like salesmanship – I’m just trying to stress how simple and quick the process really is.)

This leads us to a question so obvious I’m not even going to ask it.

What happened at Virginia Tech was a horrible tragedy, and it’s clear from the early information that university officials are going to get absolutely hammered for their response. I don’t know if any of that criticism is going to make the leap to what a mobile alert system could have accomplished, but I seriously hope that administrators at other schools around the country are paying attention and are doing all they can to prepare their campuses for this sort of crisis.

[Thanks to Shelley Jack for pointing me to the Roanoke News item cited above.]

Check this wonderful bit about the new West Virginia Tourism campaign:

Readers flipping through the newest edition of O, The Oprah Magazine might stumble upon an ad headline that reads, “Whatever you do, don’t come to West Virginia!”

If you’re a Mountaineer, don’t be offended.

The West Virginia Division of Tourism and Charles Ryan Associates are trying a new marketing technique.

The ads are meant to lure vacationers to the Mountain State.

Officials say standard travel ads, such as a picture of a mountainside and a message to “Visit West Virginia,” don’t really do the trick anymore. (Story.)

I love the creative approach, but cannot imagine how they got it executed. I’ve worked with more timid ad people – both in agencies and in the corporate groups that manage advertising – in the past few years than I can shake a stick at, and had I taken a concept like this one to the principal at the last agency I worked for the best I could have hoped for was an extended, exasperated whine about how I just don’t get it.

On the planet these folks live on, you can’t take any risk of acknowledging any kind of possible negative at all. Even if you know that your target audience spends hours a day bad-mouthing your client, the last thing you can do is acknowledge that reality. Right now my old boss would probably be advising the good folks at Menu Foods (and their clients at Iams, Nutro, Hills, etc.) to carry on as though nothing unusual had happened in the last couple of weeks

Of course, those of us with an informed acquaintance of how real audiences actually work know that the single dumbest thing corporate communications of any sort can do is to ignore what their audiences already know.

Pretend bad news doesn’t exist, and they’ll pretend you don’t exist.

Hats off to the West Virginia Division of Tourism and Charles Ryan Associates. They get it. Selling West Virginia isn’t the easiest job in the world, but I’m betting they get significantly better results than the folks over at The Conventional Timid and Terrified Group.

But what about Blackberries and all the phones that stream higher-order content, she wondered. She was under the fairly common misperception that penetration of these technologies is a lot greater than it actually is. For example, what do you think the penetration of WAP-addressable handsets is? You probably guessed high – despite all those cool commercials featuring all those cool features, market penetration of WAP-enabled phones is only around 60%. That’s not nothing, of course, and the numbers are growing with each passing day. But do you really want to ignore 40% of the market?

So what about smart phones – you know, Blackberries and Treos and the like. Those are the ones with the serious capabilities, and from what we can tell every business person in America has one. The penetration number there: single digits.

Meanwhile, penetration of SMS-capable devices is well over 90%.

The lesson here is important for marketers looking to launch mobile strategies (and I hope this number is growing, too). If you want to target a significant audience, you need to think in terms of SMS programs and applications. The good news is that SMS is incredibly powerful – far moreso than most people realize.

My friend is a smart woman and she asked me a lot of really intelligent questions. She just didn’t realize – and how would she. My guess is that a lot of marketers out there who are starting to think about mobile are just like her – they’re operating with some faulty assumptions.

The news is better than they suspect.

Not too long ago, ad:tech 2006 was held in Chicago. The organization, which also holds events in New York, San Francisco, London, Shanghai and Sydney, bills itself like this:

ad:tech is an interactive advertising and technology conference dedicated to connecting all sides of today’s brand marketing landscape. Worldwide shows blend keynote speakers, topic driven panels and interactive workshops to provide attendees with the tools and techniques they need to compete in a changing world. We’re committed to bringing you the now and the next of modern marketing. Who should attend? CEOs, CMOs, Marketing Execs, Brand Managers, Ad Execs, Media Directors, Buyers, Planners, Product Managers, Solution Providers, Creative Directors.

Issues to be addressed: Email marketing, Podcast, Consumer Insights Blocking and Tackling: Data Details Strategic Roadmaps, Plans, Case Studies of Integrated Programs.

If you read all this and conclude that ad:tech is cutting edge, that it’s where marketing is going, then they have successfully projected the intended message.

But there’s something missing. Something huge. ad:tech is ignoring the most important technological channel in the lives of the most significant demographic market perhaps in the history of the world. The medium is mobility and the market is the Millennial generation.

Millennials currently range in age from about 7-27, and they represent buying power that’s unprecedented for a group so young. Teenage Research Unlimited estimates that young adults spent nearly $160 billion in 2005. Ketchum estimates their financial stroke at $172 billion, and everybody watching the gen expects that number to rise dramatically in the coming years. From a marketing and branding standpoint, they’re a massive force to be reckoned with.

Anybody who’s ever paid the slightest attention to this group knows that their mobile phones are oxygen to them. In fact, mobility is the medium the defines this generation. It’s how they connect to each other and to the content that matters to them. It’s a critically important tool in helping them shape their personal identities and forge communal bonds. It’s the most intensely personalized communications medium ever developed – you can customize its look and functionality, and it’s linked to the individual, not a location.

Millennials are turning away from television and other forms of traditional media, and while they still spend plenty of time with the Internet, some marketers will probably be surprised to learn that they’re abandoning the use cases we take for granted. While they love social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook), and YouTube is simply exploding, they’re moving away from e-mail. It’s not immediate enough for them.

These factors should be exerting a tremendous influence on every marketer who targets customers under 30. But I almost never see campaigns that are integrating mobile plays, and this personal perspective was validated in spades by ad:tech. Best we can tell, there were precisely two mobile vendors in attendance. No mobility panels, no major sessions, nada, which is evident from their own promotional verbiage noted above. And the general awareness level of mobility and its importance to the Mill market was almost nonexistent.

How is it possible that an org dedicated to tech in an industry is failing to notice the most dominant technological trend affecting its members? Imagine that it’s 1997 and you go to a conference on technology in advertising, marketing and branding, and only a couple people are talking about the Internet. That’s where we seem to be.

Well, it’s easy enough to flog people for being behind the curve, but it’s not especially productive. The point here is that a veritable tsunami of opportunity is cresting for those positioned to take advantage. Think-forward brand pros need to understand the power of mobility and begin integrating it into their activities now. We have to speak to our audiences in their own language, and it does us no good to grok the language if we aren’t seeding the channels they’re tuned into.

Medium = Message.

At RazzberrySync, we outfit future-ready businesses with the wheels and rocket-packs they need to boom in today’s dynamic, on-the-go marketplace. Perhaps the challenge is about reaching young, active consumers with engaging mobile entertainment. Maybe you need to deploy dynamic mobile marketing programs that go where your customer goes. Or it could be as elemental as knuckling down to figure out what the real marketing opportunity actually is.

In any case, the RazzberrySync team focuses decades of advanced mobile and interactive strategy, business consulting and content development savvy on helping you leapfrog your competition by putting your brand, products and services as close as your customers’ mobile devices.

So, ready to roll?