Remember to RSVP either on our Facebook page or at our Meetup group

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We talked about a new Kansas City startup “What’s For Lunch/What’s For Dinner?” started by KarlKoelle. With it, you can sign up to be notified of restaurants in your region who have specials.

Also, Jason Ary of InTouch Solutions commissioned our new Logo and set up our new Twitter account @mobilemediaclub. Thanks Jason!

Our next Monday Mobile Meetup is the second monday in September (September 13th) at 5:30 pm at Harry’s Bar and Tables. Please join!

Also have you joined our Facebook page?

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Who: You of course
What: The Monday Mobile Media Club Meetup
When: 5:30 pm
Where: Harry’s Bar and Tables 501 Westport Rd, Kansas City, MO 64111
Why: Because Education is a life long obligation

Please RSVP on at Meetup.com

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Get rid of your phone book.

Here is what we found:

When we first meet our customers, many of them are still advertising in local yellow pages. They also rank low according to search engines. According to Entrepreneur.com a full page ad in the Manhattan Kansas Yellow Pages is around $12,000.00. In New York City, that same ad would cost around $92,000.00. When exactly was the last time you used a Yellow Pages to find a business? I asked this question of a local business owner last week and his reaction was that he used a Yellow Pages that very day! He was at a store and needed the number to a Sprint store.

Little did he know that even if he had a regular feature phone (not even an iPhone or an Android), he could text a keyword to 46654 and receive a list of businesses in his area.

Why have a five pound book in your home taking up space? What value does that book provide? We continued our discussion . . .

We centered our discussion around the average customer. What is one average customer worth to your business? Is it 1,000 dollars a year? 10,000 dollars a year? What if you averaged just one extra customer a month? What would that value be to your business? Today, is building a Web site that ranks highly (on the first page of Google) with organic search more valuable than buying a Yellow Pages ad?

What do you think?

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Essentially, all iPhone 4 users can sign up to receive a bumper that surrounds the iPhone (which helps prevent the breakdown) and if they are still dis-satisfied, they can get their money back.

I saw that a colleague of mine with the Mobile Media Club said that Steve Jobs should be owning the problem more. I was confused by what “owning the problem more” meant. It’s not enough to own the problem but there is a degree to which it should be owned that it currently isn’t?

I think I understand a little bit better now though.

Here is how I see it:

Apple builds products that can’t be duplicated. They can be copied but, as with any copy, it becomes farther removed from what it was copied from. These copies commoditize the value of what the original produced. Apple has a background to produce products like the iPhone. Other companies have a background to produce ancillary satisfaction. Steve Jobs refers to his products like they are his children.

In the now famous email over the stolen iPhone, Steve queries a blogger, after having been berated for “kicking in the doors” of someone’s house to retrieve it and what would Steve’s son say 20 years from now if he could see what Steve is doing.

As for us, we’re just doing what we can to try and make (and preserve) the user experience we envision. You can disagree with us, but our motives are pure.
By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

Steve looks at his role as a parent. And parents need to own up to responsibilities. Parents decide consequences, both positive and negative, for actions taken by the children. Sometimes, a parent lets a child take some hits and sometimes a parent needs to step in because the child can no longer defend himself.

To me, Steve stepped in today to tell people to get on with their lives. Don’t worry about the design of the iphone, leave that to Apple. We’re going to fix it but the situation isn’t really that dire. Steve isn’t going to do a “Mea Culpa” and leave his child out in the cold. He’s going to take care of it.

How do you take care of your small business in the middle of a crisis, whether real or perceived? How should Steve have reacted?

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I’ll be speaking Sunday on “Mobile: What you should know right now.”

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Please join us for Mobile Monday on June 14th, 5:30pm at Harry’s Bar and Tables in Westport

Harry’s Bar and Tables
501 Westport Road
Kansas City, MO 64111-3011
(816) 561-3950‎

We’ll organize and discuss around the purpose of the group:

* Commit to Innovate.
* Bridge the gap between small and large companies, those in Kansas City and outside.
* Share knowledge with each other on the meaning and relevance of the mobile space in order to affect concerns.
* Coordinate, collaborate and cooperate with others to fulfill common and individual ambitions
* Educate the public about the importance and relevance of mobility.

Bring with you, your concerns, an open and collaborative mind, and good ideas.

We’ll see you on June 14th.

**Please join the Mobile Media Club Facebook group and RSVP there**

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As I mentioned yesterday, something was missing though.

Businesspeople.

Social Media offers anyone with a business an opportunity to:

• Increase brand awareness
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Gather Intelligence on customers and competitors
• Increase sales

Yet, at nearly every social media event I attend (SxSW, Social Media Club, Free State Social, Highlight Midwest) the target audience appears to be those in mobile/social media, user experience design and application development.

There is one business exception — Non-profits. As management guru, Peter Drucker once noted, businesses can learn a great deal from the business efficiency of non-profits. At it’s core, social media is operationally efficient marketing.

Non-profits, out of necessity, are looking for ways to funnel as much of it’s cost to its core business. In the book, “Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices,” Drucker assesses that most non-profits are run more efficiently than most of for-profit businesses. Both types of businesses have something in common — sustainability. The reality is that the for-profit business probably has a budget to pay for an expert resource. The non-profit is more likely to be interested in offering you a volunteer opportunity.

Wouldn’t it be nice to network with businesspeople at these events or have a meaningful conversation about the type of help you might be able to offer? Wouldn’t it be a great opportunity to learn about specific problems businesses are struggling to solve?

So why don’t more businesses attend these events when they could obviously benefit? I speculate that something to consider is that it is easier to market these conferences to those wishing to become more competent in social media professionals. These conferences offer attendees an opportunity to improve their craft.

But a more likely reason why businesspeople don’t attend, I speculate, is that Mobile/Social media utility and value still isn’t obvious to business. I speculate social media isn’t yet relevant or meaningful for many companies. How can the social media industry make these methods more obvious to businesspeople?

I wonder if, because these are events are billed as “social media,” they would attract more companies if they were billed to be about “business innovation.” I wonder if a conference offered a business track and included education on “increasing sales, “lowering the cost of public relations,” or “lowering the cost of managing customers,” which highlighted many of social media principles, would more businesspeople attend. At the very least, I speculate more companies might pay more attention.

If we could create a space where business could look to the social media community as experts in business, instead of social media, we would see an opportunity to talk to small and medium-sized business owners and executives about their needs. It would create a powerful networking opportunity in which business leaders(potential customers) and experts (potential suppliers) could come together and give each other the type of help they need.

What do you think? If you are a social media professional, what more do you need to learn to begin to help someone with their problems in business?

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• Increase efficiency
• Increase brand awareness
• Compete in the global marketplace
• Anticipate market drift
• Produce satisfaction

The lineup of speakers was truly strong. Chris Brogan and Jeremiah Owyang represent two of the strongest thinkers in the industry. The rest of the lineup was extremely solid as well and in that assessment I also include the local panel of Zena Weist, Shea Sylvia, Ramsey Mohsen and Tony Botello.

I left the conference Friday afternoon extremely satisfied and thinking that I couldn’t wait til next year.

There will be a lot written about the Free State Social and what a strong event it was. After all, the Lawrence Journal World brought industry heavyweights to the region. They were exposed to legions of the social media professionals in the mid-west. This created a situation in which we in the mid-west walked away with some tremendous learning. There were a few things that I personally took away from the conference.

1. Be who you are all the time – You never stop being a mother or a father and similarly, you never stop being an executive, salesperson, customer service associate or a technologist. We tend to compartmentalize who we are. Do we decide we are only who we are at work from 8-5 and after that, do we become a cook, a chauffeur, or care-taker of virtual farms? We must embody our role and be that at all times.

2. Be a care-taker – Your customers, your employees and even your boss need to be tended after, much like your children, even when you are not with them. Take care of those who take care of you. Hold their concerns as your own.

3. The Rings of Influence – This is a powerful way to help businesses think strategically with social media. If you want to reach potential customers via social media, have you even reached your own employees yet?

4. Be Different – If you are the only supplier of what customers are looking for, they’ll come back for more.

5. Lastly, there was something missing from the conference which I will write about tomorrow. I speculate that for those of us who attended, there is a leadership opportunity available to us, that you hadn’t thought of.

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Keep the Free State Social momentum going! Please join us for Mobile Monday on May 10th, 5:30pm at Harry’s Bar and Tables in Westport

Harry’s Bar and Tables
501 Westport Road
Kansas City, MO 64111-3011
(816) 561-3950‎

We’ll organize and discuss around the purpose of the group:

* Commit to Innovate.
* Bridge the gap between small and large companies, those in Kansas City and outside.
* Share knowledge with each other on the meaning and relevance of the mobile space in order to affect concerns.
* Coordinate, collaborate and cooperate with others to fulfill common and individual ambitions
* Educate the public about the importance and relevance of mobility.

Bring with you, your concerns, an open and collaborative mind, and good ideas.

We’ll see you on May 10th.

**Please join the Mobile Media Club Facebook group and RSVP there**

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