If you haven’t been thinking about mobile marketing and how it fits into your overall marketing strategy, it’s time to get a move on (ha ha, get it? Oh, never mind.) We’re seeing many of our clients dipping their toes into these waters to a greater or lesser degree, and with greater or lesser success.

• Mobile marketing isn’t cheap. Take what you would normally allocate for a TV spend – and put that same amount towards mobile instead. (Agreed, you can’t deliver usable, effective mobile apps on the cheap – although this directive sounds a bit self-serving.)

• Don’t plan more than 8 months out. As new technology is continually being introduced, and discontinued, the reality of planning your marketing for a full year is a thing of the past. (Honestly, we find in the software industry, we’re lucky if marketing plans are available one quarter in advance.)

• 90% of text messages are read within 6 hours. If you’re looking to reach your audience with relevant and timely messages, look at text messaging. Email marketing won’t deliver these kinds of results. (Although personally, I am very annoyed by spam text messages so I think you need to be very, very careful about permission marketing here. I also think this response rate will drop wildly as more marketers spam, I mean, use this medium. Remember when emails got high response rates too?)

During the luncheon, there were many discussions about other emerging technologies (hello near field!), however there was a consistent message throughout: mobile marketing cannot be ignored and is critical to the success of every integrated marketing plan.

Our caveat: don’t just jump on creating an app just because everyone else has one. Deliver mobile marketing solutions that address a need, deliver useful and usable content, build engagement and strengthen customer relationships.

Interested in exploring this topic more? Read the CMO article on Why Mobile Marketers Shouldn’t Obsess Over Apps and Harvard Business Review on Building a Mobile App is Not a Mobile Strategy. Want to see a brilliant example (that probably did cost as much as a TV campaign + media buy)? Check out the Guinness Passport to Greatness Cantonese speaking mobile app, pictured above.

As a virtual agency, our team is distributed far and wide. We have team members who live in eastern Canada, western Canada, central US and all points in between. We even have our contingent in Germany plus extended team members in Switzerland and Hawaii. And tying us all together are some excellent free productivity tools – Google docs for up-to-the-minute status reports and budgets, Skype for calls, instant messaging and screenshares, and SAP StreamWork for online collaboration and document repositories.

A recent blog post by our friends at Capulet Communications offers a useful primer on other free treats for your digital marketing toolbox. They included another fav freebie, Wordle. Can't call this a productivity tool though as I can spend literally hours playing at making word clouds, like this one showing Hotfusion services!

One of the many great things about Vancouver as an event city is the easy proximity to one of the most inviting all-season resorts in the world – Whistler, British Columbia. You can drive along the breathtaking Sea to Sky Highway and arrive in less than 2 hours from downtown or charter float planes for an unforgettable flight, as we did for an executive summit portion of a software conference we managed in Vancouver.

While Whistler is best known as a ski resort, one of my favorite times to visit is right now during the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. Every year, the entire village participates in the annual “Turkey Sale” with bargains galore for the skiier, boarder or après-skiier. The weekend combines everything a visitor could want – hotel savings, excellent food, gorgeous scenery, lovely walks, discount shopping and even a fantastic farmer’s and artisan’s market. If you’re running or attending an event in Vancouver and have the time, a side trip to Whistler is well worth it.

One of our clients, the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), has just finished its fourth biannual online educational event with 24 one-hour technical training sessions delivered by big-name experts from around the globe. The back-to-back sessions took place over two days and averaged about 600 attendees each.

Twitter has been invaluable to our success, helping us generate awareness, registrations and buzz. It enables the PASS community to connect across huge distances, adding the networking aspect that is most often lost at virtual events. I get the warm fuzzies reading the appreciative tweets and seeing the interaction between community members, and get super thrilled when tweets I send out for PASS get retweeted (I’m a geek, what can I say). Tweeting for PASS is much more satisfying than writing from my own Twitter account and reminds me that the value in this social media channel is really in two-way dialog vs one-way broadcasting.

One of our favorite annual events is the fantabulous Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA. It’s a weekend celebration of people who make things: creators, inventors, students, teachers, artists, sculptors, engineers, DIYers – anyone with an idea and a passion to share that idea. Sort of a family-friendly “Burning Man” without the nudity.

The highlight has to be the inimitable Arc Attack performances – 2 massive singing Tesla coil towers zapping half a million volts of musical electricity to the strains of “Dr. Who” or the Darth Vader theme. Don’t try this at home.

Maker Faire is an amazing place to explore creative innovations and get charged up with new ideas. There are currently 3 big Faires in the US, the Bay Area, Detroit and New York, and mini Maker Faires are popping up all over, including one in Vancouver. Check one out and I guarantee you’ll be inspired and energized.