With the growing popularity of Web access through smart phones, the need to optimize and customize content for mobile users is creating a growing market for design and dev tools that simplify mobile marketing. PhindMe is out of the gate with one of the first self-service mobile marketing suites for marketers and agencies looking to develop marketing content optimized for iPhone, Blackberry, and the new Android platform which will power T-Mobile’s G1 Google Phone.

Recent surveys by Azuki Systems found that four out of 10 Internet users surfed the mobile Web for two or more hours every week, and 62 percent of mobile users surveyed said they either already owned a smart phone or would own one within the next 12 months.

That’s Joe Barone, a former board member of the Mobile Marketing Association, and now an advisor of PhindMe, explaining the primary market driver for their platform. With an estimated 140 million people actively using SMS, the market is clearly sizeable. According to PhindMe, the compelling features of their latest agency-friendly release include:

• Improved mobile Web publishing providing optimized content rendering for any mobile device, including dedicated styles for iPhones, Blackberry and Android-supported devices
• Private label system that manages individual client accounts and provides business client access in a partner-branded portal
• A simplified user interface that supports text campaigns and a content system for creating mobile Web pages and user management features
• New features for client business pages, including a fully wireless carrier-certified permission-based marketing system and an easy, informative sign-up process for users

Now if they can just create a stupidity filter that prevents over-eager agencies and businesses from migrating spam and annoying ads to mobile devices.

WrapMail is fairly literal — wrap emails coming out of your domain with things that convey a marketing message. This can be featured products, sales pitches, or just customer communications. This is one of those incredibly obvious ideas that I am sure someone has done before. In theory, this is a good dea. There is no real reason why employees of a company or organization should not an active advocate in every email — a potentially viral and low-cost way to spread the word and communicate effectively with customers, not to mention boost incremental sales. On the other hand, it could get ugly and noisy pretty quickly if the message isn’t kept relatively mellow and the media wrap is not too rich (Do you really want punch the monkey wrappers on corporate email?). By extension, the wrappers could be used not only to sell but also to convey key facts — say about a fundraising campaign for a charity, for example. The terms are quite reasonable — $5 per user per month, unlimited wraps, $50 minimum sign-up commitment, no minimum length of usage. You can use your current domain with emails processed by the WrapMail server. No desktop installs are required — it all lives on the WrapMail servers. Whenever a mail recipient clicks on any of the wrappings, you get an instant alert. For retailers, WrapMail offers rotating product picks. No word on whether it can offer behavioral targeting for its message wraps — that would be amazing. The pay-as-you-go version offers limited reporting capability. The Enterprise version lets you install the software on your own servers inside your own firewall and get more robust analytics and reporting capabilities. Potential problems that I see? You better pray that someone on the same server as you doesn’t get too wrap-happy (Wrap sends emails for multiple accounts off the same server) or else you may end up SpamHaus hell. In the same vein, the whole point of email is to succinctly convey a message so over-loading emails with graphical geegaws clearly runs a risk of ticking off recipients. All of that said, I think smart implementations of this system for retailers or other commercial uses could be very powerful. Here’s what one looks like.

Any WrapMail users out there want to weigh in?

Measuring the Social Web has long been a royal pain, what with Flash, AJAX, RSS feeds, and other slivers of content mashed and remixed into a trail that even Sherlock Holmes might have trouble parsing. NuConomy, an ambitious Site Analytics startup launched in 2006, aims to restore some analytical rigor to the Social Web. TechCrunch and others have blogged it already but it merits a look.  The company opened up for public use today a suite of free analytics tools. If they can deliver on what they promise, then Nuconomy could set a new standard in Web analytics and offer a killer challenge for Google Analytics, not to mention Omniture and others. Here’s a rundown of what it promises, which is a lot. (P.S. – typo on the F.A.Q.. page, marketing team)

-proactive analytics automates the tedious chores of slicing and dicing data and building customized reports.
-promises an “intelligent” data mining engine to continually monitor every aspect of site traffic and user behaviors and automatically highlight the most important things to make businesses better. (data can be retrieved onsite or via email/RSS feed)
-promises to catch formerly elusive but critical data like changes in commenting trends for a particular segment of viewers, etc
-says that companies without dedicated site analyst geeks can now fire its analyst geeks and be unfraid (sorry, analysts)
-claims its metrics measure the social elements of digital media, including Flash, AJAX, and Silverlight applications, along with page views, uniques, and other traditional analytics
-combines and packages multiple flavors of insights into real world behavior on the web (comments, ratings, video plays, sharing links, purchases)
-allows “publishers, advertisers, and business executives to finally see the people behind the numbers (???) and measure the engagement, or lack thereof, in order to cultivate relationships and brand interactions, optimize social media programs, and better monetize ads and e-commerce offerings.” A mouthful but it means mo’ money.
-Builds rich behavioral profiles, or interest maps, for each user by tracking site-level activity for individuals (would be interested in hearing more about how they plan to do this)– such as who is posting comments on bikes or sharing music recommendations with friends.
-This level of detail gives publishers a deeper understanding of user behavior so they can optimize their sites and marketing messages for different audience segments, even different individuals (I find this hard to believe – I regularly move between four computers – how would it work?)
-“features a two-way API that dynamically changes sites based on current metrics and insights, including the ability to show ads or push specific content relevant to a user’s interests.”
-easy to use with plug-ins for tracking users and traffic in WordPress, Movable Type, Community Server, and dasBlog
-partners include Technorati, Microsoft, Six Apart, Pioneer, Kaltura, and Federated Media. (heckuva partner list).
-register for free.

Video analytics and actions spurred by ineractions with widgets are other things NuConomy is offering. It’s a whole lotta package for free. If anyone out there is using it and already has an opinion, feel free to post.

Back in 2004, RSS was The Next Big Thing. The pundits breathlessly speculated on how it would change the Web, with everyone subscribing to content rather than browsing. But adoption wasn’t the hockey-stick the pundits expected, and the hype over RSS subsided into the background. But out of the spotlight, RSS has continued to grow, and companies like SimpleFeed have continued to innovate new and useful ways to leverage RSS as a powerful marketing platform. Recently SimpleFeed announced Version 3, a ground-up re-engineering of the SimpleFeed application, a powerhouse of RSS functionality used by companies as diverse as Sears, SanDisk and Electronic Arts to let prospects and customers pick their own stream of information, from product updates to coupons and promotions.

RSS (Real Simple Syndication] makes the delivery of all kinds of content easy over the Web, enabling users to subscribe to blogs, videos, music, news, even product sales and coupons, and have that content delivered directly to their desktops. From a marketing perspective, RSS provides a critical alternative to email and Web marketing. Since it is a subscription medium, RSS is more tuned to customer’s interests, making it more relevant, less intrusive, and the resulting metrics more reliable.

SimpleFeed helps marketers leverage RSS by making it easy to publish feeds that consumers can subscribe to for timely information and offers they want. SimpleFeed makes it easy to:

• Customize the look of each feed to retain brand image
• Individually code each subscription so behavior can be followed even without an identity
• Access metrics so that subscriptions and click-throughs can be monitored
• Dovetail with broader Web analytics tools so cross-channel campaigns can be managed and tracked

V3 adds some new and powerful innovations. The most interesting is the development of Search-Based Feeds. On many business sites, users rely on the on-site search engine to find relevant information. SimpleFeed V3 allows companies to provide RSS feeds for search results–so if users want to subscribe to any new information or updates on the same topic as their search query, they can receive alerts automatically. In essence, this allows users to go beyond the pre-defined RSS feeds companies normally provide to create their own customized feeds based on what the details of their search. V3 also includes enhanced analytics and tools to publish information to formats other than RSS, allowing content to be automatically published to other applications.

As a personal disclaimer, I met Mark Carlson, the CEO of SimpleFeed back when they were first launching, and I’ve stayed in touch ever since because I think they have a cool technology, and the right focus for a marketing application provider. They’re constantly innovating new tools and techniques to improve their product, and the features are always focused on empowering marketers. I’m impressed with how they’ve weathered the hype and post-hype cycles of market buzz, and maintained a steady pace of customer growth and product development. Congratulations on V3, guys.

Open-source project Drupal has long been praised as an extremely flexible, robust and extensible CMS. Big organizations such as Federal Express have built their entire Web presence on top of Drupal (note; a company I work for, SproutBuilder, has tightly integrated Drupal with its Web application software). Drupal has had a reputation, alas, as also being very complex and better suited for organizations with serious tech chops. As a CMS noob, I was intrigued to read that a company launched by key Drupal visionary Dries Buytaert would be launching a new company called Acquia that aimed to make Drupal out-of-the-box easy like WordPress and Moveable Type, among others. Early reviews are starting to come in. No one says its not easy to use. InfoWorld gave it solid reviews, with reviewer saying he was able to launch a very professional looking site with full Drupal functionality in 1.5 days (that’s kinda scary for people used to having WP up and running in  like an hour). Blogger and heavy Drupal user Hugh Durkin said it was kind slow and unwieldy in the Acquia version.  What’s your take on Acquia? Let us know. We’re watching it very closely.

eTrigue has just announced the release of eTrigue 3.0, an enterprise marketing application that dovetails lead generation and campaign management. They call it intelligent demand generation:

[eTrigue is] designed to align marketing and sales efforts to develop and identify leads and close sales faster. eTrigue 3.0 creates, executes and tracks powerful multi-channel campaigns, email and online activities with real-time lead alerts, automatic 3-D prospect scoring/reporting and search-based profiling without requiring dedicated staff or IT integration.

eTrigue integrates with Salesforce.com to accelerate sales and marketing coordination. One of the features I like about the application is that it separates lead generation and lead processing, which means you don’t clog up your CRM system with a lot of unqualified leads that sit there forever.

eTrigue integrates with Salesforce.com

Other highlights for the 3.0 release include “3D Lead Scoring”, which allows marketing and sales to qualify prospects based on demographics, activity and buy time (who, what, when). All measures are customizable, and can be used to dynamically adjust prioritization of qualified leads. The new release also includes real-time email alerts, which can be set to notify sales and marketing teams whenever a prospect triggers certain qualification thresholds–such as a prospect with a certain job-title visiting a particular page on your Web site. Marketers need to be smart about how they use such features–you don’t want to creep prospects out by stalking them the moment the pull up your web page–but being in tune with customer behavior and how it triggers sales opportunities is a major competitive advantage in a tough economic environment.

For more information about eTrigue, check out their online information center. They’ve got a good collection of case studies and whitepapers, along with some decent content on how to tune demand generation programs.

There’s no shortage of online survey tools floating around cyberspace, from the entry-level affordable fave SurveyMonkey (running only) to much more expensive enterprise-ready tools that can do all sorts of sophisticated analysis. Working on a project for Vivek Wadhwa at Duke University, I got the chance to mess around with SurveyGizmo.com, which comes in roughly in the middle of the price range for these types of online apps. Pricing ranges from free to $159 per month for the top offering. A quick peek under the hood shows that these guys have been doing some real work and putting a lot of distance between their product and SurveyMonkey. The breakdown of the offerings runs almost four full screens vertically and is fairly dizzying. All the offerings have some nice heft and SurveyGizmo claims it will never delete your survey data for any survey as long as you are an active member — a sort of “oops, I deleted it” insurance policy that I can attest from personal experience is quite handy. All levels have unlimited numbers of questions. All the paid levels also have a month-to-month contract and no forced lock-in, although you will get a better rate coughing up for an annual version.

Serious users will want to stick to the Enterprise or Pro ($49/mo) versions due to the larger sample sizes possible (50,000 for Enterprise and 5,000 for Pro). Only Enterprise users get team-based permissions, a very nice feature for larger sample sets. The survey pages are highly customizable with full CSS/HTML control so they can be branded to match other Webpages. You can include pretty much anything you want in the survey content - video, audio, multi-media. There are a dizzying array of question types and tons of advanced features such as Salesforce and ExactTarget integration, external database synching, and validation tools to make sure no one is pulling funny stuff. The feature set is actually far more than mere mortals would need or use, even among ace marketers. The true gem in all this is the Reporting tools. The tools make it super easy to create granular screens using simple logic commands in pull-down menus — even an idiot could slice and dice data with these tools. Even better, SurveyGizmo allows enterprise users to execute crosstab analysis on questions, obviating much of the need to make nasty Excel pivot tables. Reports can be exported in Word, Excel or PDF. I’m going to be looking at several other tools like this but I personally enjoyed working with SurveyGizmo. They charge a relatively modest $45 to import surveys from other engines (first three are free for enterprise users on an annual contract). I never had any trouble figuring out how to make the tools work. The company itself is very responsive (although they won’t go as far as to promise full-fledged support, understandably). I got email replies fairly quickly. Among their happy clients they include Harvard, University of California, Johns Hopkins and a host of other top-tier schools. I can definitely reccomend this tool to folks pondering online surveys.

I’m still producing periodic “What’s Happening in Marketing” videos, in partnership with Miner Productions. I was inspired this time by the buzz that Serena Software has been generating with their viral videos and social media programs. When you dig below the surface, the story is even more surprising. Serena isn’t some new startup born on the Web 2.0 front line. In fact, they’ve were around before many of the geeks programming Web 2.0 applications were even born. So how does an old-line software company reinvent itself as a social media innovator, and what do they see in social media that compells such a transformation? I sat down with Rene Bonvanie, the CMO behind Serena’s new marketing efforts to find out.

As always, this video was filmed and produced by the great people at Miner Productions.