In a down economy, it's easy as a business to stick your head in the sand and hope for the best while your peers run screaming "The sky is falling!". All you can do is hope that you're still alive when things turn around, and then you can go back to the way things were. Except that things will no longer be the same, and you'll have a whole other uphill battle in front of you.

What Basket do you put your eggs in?

Let me explain more. Last month, Equation Research published their 2009 Marketing Industry Trends report, and it was largely focused on Social Media. I was surprised by the attitudes of large companies (over 500 employees) in respect to the future of marketing. 22% of big brands have no plans whatsoever to use mobile marketing to reach their audience, only 31% have mobile marketing as a budget line item with plans to execute something this year. That leaves 69% of all large companies ignoring the possibility of mobile marketing. Only 9% of these companies have no plans to use social media, with 62% of those companies already participating.

The Challenge

While I have nothing against social media, and understand the value opportunity for companies to use these tools, using social media because everyone else is doing it, is not much of a strategy. And here is where I'll challenge companies to take their heads of the sand and look to the future. Someday the economy will be better, and by that time more people will have internet capable phones.  And no one wants their company to have been so busy trying to catch up with Twitter trends that they've completely overlooked mobile markeing. Respondants of Equation Research's study put mobile marketing as only slightly more promising than radio advertising in terms of effectiveness. I think companies just haven't thought hard enough about how to make mobile advertising effective.

 The Rise of Mobile

I'm not going to argue that running Google AdWords on mobile phones is the groundbreaking strategy we're talking about here. Effective mobile marketing is going to have its roots in the connetivity of social media. Think of it as link bait meets social meets branding and spits out something amazing and relevant to your business. Just take a look at what's in iTunes App store today - Webber's On The Grill recipe companion. Maybe not the most far fetched or ground breaking idea, but handy and well branded.It's your brand, how do you add value to your customers?