Marketing Pilgrim

This morning, Apple pulled the wraps off their newest mobile phone, the iPhone 4S. It has a better camera, it’s faster, it has the largest storage capability of any iPhone and it responds to voice commands in a way we’ve never seen outside of Star Trek.

The live blogger for the New York Times summed it up best with this statement:

“We are clearly headed to Terminator/HAL territory here. Humans are doomed. Deal with it.”

Here’s a quick rundown of the new features.

Siri: Your Personal Assistant

Voice command module, Siri, is the main reason to switch to this new iPhone. It’s an incredibly intuitive system that understands and responds to conversational English (and a few other languages).

Ask what the weather is and you’ll get a weather report.

How many years have we been talking about the death of the newspaper? In fact, we used to talk about it a lot more because we were watching the industry die. That talk has been replaced by practically ignoring the medium altogether because I suppose it has slipped into the irrelevant phase of its slow and painful demise?

Whatever the situation actually is there is one irony in a new advertising product that Google will be rolling out today with large brands (like Macy’s and Best Buy) called Circulars. Mashable got a look at these “new” ads”.

Our fascination with social media and anything other than search seems to give the impression that search marketing is losing its influence. The desire to continually move forward (which actually is a relative term since many things we chase after don’t move anything forward except a VC’s wallet) makes the Internet industry look like the spoiled kid at Christmas. We rip open a new present, play with it for a minute or two then move on to the next shiny object that will occupy our need for gratification in our increasingly impatient and shallow world.

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The iPhone 5 is just around the corner.

Sprint is betting the farm on the new device.

Some are reporting that Sprint may have an exclusive on the new smartphone for a while (rumor alert).

All that said, the chart below from Business Insider (data supplied by Michael DeGusta) says that by October 20 there could be 1 million new Android activations each and every day.

So whose got whom by the “you know whats”? It’s a tight race that only promises to get more intense as the social mobile movement continues to evolve. I honestly don’t see a clear victor. The camps are set and there seems to be plenty of users to fill both sides with fan boys.

How do you measure the success of your Facebook page? We look at the number of Followers, we look at the number of comments and the number of views per post. But social media marketing is more encompassing than that. It’s about connections and reviews, it’s about creating buzz that travels from your customer to their friends and out to their friends and so on.

Facebook is making an attempt to quantify these connections with new metrics for Pages. Once the product is launched, you’ll find these new details on the Insights tab which is open to any admin on a Fan Page.

It’s October and you know what that means. It’s time to brew up some scary Halloween-themed marketing for your Facebook page. Here’s how a couple of the big boys are doing it.

Target

Target knows that recommendations are everything in social media marketing, so they’ve created an app that involves your friends in the biggest decision of the season: “What costume should I wear?”

The app offers a variety of subjects in the drop down, from personal costume choice, to your kids, parents, babies and pets. Using the catalog at the bottom of the app, you choose four options then ask your friends to vote via the share button. The app also directs you to Target’s full costume catalog and coupons for deals on candy.