As the rubber companies moved away from the region in the 1990s, Akron’s economy needed to transition to a more service based economy. The entrepreneurial, lunch pail mentality fortunately still thrives within the city, paving the way for a successful transition that is bearing more fruit now than ever before.

As successful economic development and job growth thrive within Akron, many benefit. Improvements have been made in the job market with successful and fast growing businesses beginning to populate once dormant buildings along Main Street, and residential real estate has also seen a positive impact. In fact, NBC’s Today Show recently highlighted Akron, Ohio as the second best residential real estate market in the country, taking into account job opportunity, housing costs, and house size for the investment.

“Not the old rubber capital,” remarked the real estate expert who made an appearance on the show. “Akron has research, financial, and high-tech businesses moving in. Jobs are easy to get in Akron.”

Good jobs plus cost-efficient real estate is the right mixture to keep talent in Akron and attract more.

Economist Joe Cortright, president of Impresa Economics, recently spoke in Akron about the many opportunities the city has within its grasp. Cortright is an expert in attracting quality talent to ambitious cities with opportunities. Cortright underscored the importance of connecting researchers and talented people with good ideas.

One forward-thinking and aggressive way to attract and maintain a strong talent pool in Akron is to provide a business environment talented people can thrive in both short and long-term. The city is taking many steps in the right direction on this front, with one of the larger steps coming in the form of the Connect Akron downtown Municipal WiFi project. The goal of the project is to blanket the Main Street corridor and surrounding areas in downtown Akron with free WiFi enabling professionals to work on the go and congregate to encourage new business growth and development. The network seamlessly links the university downtown, too, enabling students to access the school’s network throughout the city – not just on campus.

Community transitions can be slow at times, especially when transforming the economic foundation of a region. Akron was once a thriving hotspot in the Midwest, and is well on its way to becoming that again – and Knotice, recently named Akron’s fastest growing company, is happy to be playing a small part!

Nowadays, everyone has the world in their hands, literally, thanks to the ubiquitous mobile device. A mobile device delivers the world, anytime, anyplace. But, to who? Who is the “you” that a mobile device is connecting to? It is the technology lover? Yes. Is it the business professional? Well, yes. But also, young women. A lot of young women.

Women (ages 12-24) overwhelmingly report their mobile device as the single most important technology in their life. In fact, over 80% of women in the United States now use a mobile device (see the Women and Digital Life study) AND it is frequently becoming the preferred method of communication over their PC. Young women, surprisingly, even surpass business professionals in Internet usage with a mobile device.

What are young women using their phones for? They use them for the obvious social networking and texting applications, but they are also using them for shopping and browsing the Web. Women use their phones to stay organized and stay connected. Their phone is their trusted sidekick, their security. They never leave home without it.

What does this mean for direct digital marketers? Well, if you are not currently utilizing mobile in your marketing mix, it means a lot of missed opportunities. If you need to reach these young women, the power is in your hands (well, and theirs). You need to be savvy with mobile marketing. Is your website easily accessible via a mobile device? Is the content easily searchable and viewable? Are you running any mobile marketing programs? These young women love to text. So, entice them with an offer, a savings message, or a contest. Once you understand how easy mobile marketing is, you can start engaging a fast growing demographic that wants to interact.

According to PEW Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, Generation X is the most active group of online shoppers. In fact, 80% of people between the ages of 33 and 44 are using the Internet for online shopping. They’re the most active online generation when it comes to using the Internet as a tool for shopping and banking. This is a fact that surprised me. Like many, I assumed my Millennial generation would be more apt to partake in these online activities.

Being a Millennial, I would feel a bit lost if I wasn’t logged into the Internet at some point during the day. Therefore I just assumed that shopping online would be the natural progression of things for other people my age. Then I got to thinking about how I spend my time online, and then how my friends spend their time online. The fact is, we are not really shopping online at all. We are spending the majority of our time on social media sites. We are on Facebook updating our status, or on Hulu catching up on our favorite TV show. I found that 75% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 are online using an online social networking site – not shopping (subscription required).

I feel that one explanation for the disparity between Millennial and Generation X’s online shopping habits is simply stage of life. A Gen Xer would typically have a family, a job that requires them to work a longer set of hours, and a house to keep up. All of these things take time and leave less time to go wander around the mall. So, online shopping for Generation X is a function of convenience more than anything else. Millennials have more free time to wander around malls, and spend time on Internet for entertainment purposes, and less for a shopping tool.

As a digital marketer, being aware of how different people are utilizing digital channels is extremely important. Knowing who you are targeting with your digital marketing campaigns – and knowing the best way to stay relevant to these people – will ultimately determine the end result for conversions. So, happy targeting!

I was looking for the Rascal Flatts’ album release date and, to my excitement, not only did I find the date I found something better – a wake-up call from Rascal Flatts themselves reminding me to go out and buy the album. I did the obvious thing any fan would do and opted in. They had a complete cross-channel interactive marketing strategy, integrating email, web and mobile marketing with a great target audience of people that are excited about a band. They utilized both their homepage and their MySpace page to target fans about the promotion then used mobile and email once the person had signed up.

The opt-in process was easy. All I needed to do was text “FLATTS” to the short code provided and then respond with “Y” to the return message. Then they provided you with a separate website to check out other events and sign up for email updates that appeared to be for a secret Rascal Flatts fan club. Perfect for anyone that is even mildly savvy about sending text messages and then going on the Internet.

So then the big day came when the album was released on 10/28. But, I forgot about signing up for the “wake up call.” At 9:30am on the 28th I get a call from a number I do not know. I did what others may do and didn’t answer, figuring if it’s something important they’ll leave me a message. However, they do not leave a message. A few minutes later I receive a text message from the same number stating “PLEASE CALL.” At this point I am concerned. I am then worried that there is an emergency and that someone had accidentally gotten my number by mistake. I am very nervous at this point that there is an actual emergency, so I call the number back. I am very aggravated to find that it is a voice recording from Rascal Flatts telling me to go out and buy their new album.

There are a few issues that I see with this cross-channel online marketing execution. First, it wasn’t clear that the number was theirs, and they could have easily left the prerecorded message as a voicemail and been just as effective. Second, receiving a text message in all caps from a number you know is alarming… and even more alarming when you get a message like this from an unknown number. A simple solution to this would have been to have additional messaging that identified its origin as the band’s promotional agency and not some sort of emergency.

Mobile is such a personal an intimate form of communication. If you violate a person’s trust once through this channel, it increases the chance you’ll lose them. Even if they opt in to receive the messages at first, they will immediately opt out if they feel that their trust has been violated.

Everyone knows the tactics by now. Everything from using mobile to announce his running mate (even though CNN out-scooped them) and support his massive GOTV campaign, to iPhone apps, to online infrastructure for fundraising, to paid and organic search, to an online social network (built from the ground up), to geographically targeted media buys and Facebook (almost 2.5 million friends at last count) and MySpace (almost 850,000 friends) pages.

What do all of these tactics add up to? Votes? Well, it’s hard to draw a direct connection between these tactics and the “conversion” – the vote. So, what effect did they have? Enthusiasm.

The great “enthusiasm gap” the media talked so much about in October was real, and can’t be discounted when analyzing Obama’s victory. Here are two quick, pre-election stats from the most reputable surveyors around:

Gallup: “Only 51% of Republicans say they are more enthusiastic about voting than in previous years, compared to 71% of Democrats, marking a shift from October 2004, when enthusiasm was about the same for both partisan groups.”

Rasmussen: “Just 48% of Republicans have a Very Favorable opinion of their party’s nominee. Seventy-two percent (72%) of Democrats are that enthusiastic about Obama. (From Oct. 13)”

This is not to say that the McCain campaign didn’t leverage online marketing. McCain raised plenty of money online, really pioneering the tactic in the 2000 Republican primary. The campaign had solid paid and organic search strategies. The VP pick of Sarah Palin was actually leaked online when someone updated Palin’s Wikipedia page before the press conference happened. The strategy simply wasn’t as widespread or important at headquarters.

I’m certainly not saying that Obama won because of the campaign’s online strategy, and McCain’s lost because their strategy wasn’t as in depth. But, denying online marketing played a role in the outcome is naïve.

The Obama campaign was effective at leveraging the might of online tactics and communicating with their supporters in new and intimate ways, like mass texting. The campaign is significant in teaching all online marketers the value of creating opportunities for consumers to interact with their brand as much as possible. The more brand interaction, the more brand loyalty. It will translate into conversions, even if it’s harder to quantify.

The takeaway from all of this? Give your consumers the opportunity to interact with your brand and build their enthusiasm. Technology is the most effective way to accomplish that goal.

“Call Friends” sorts your iPhone contact list by state (based on area code) and marks them all as called or not called on behalf of the campaign. It also reports this data back to the campaign in the aggregate. (“Your privacy is important: no personal data or contacts will be uploaded or stored. Only the total number of calls you make is uploaded anonymously.”) It also allows you to see how many calls you’ve made compared to the total and the leader.

It seems to me, when it comes to the iPhone as a gadget, the campaign “gets it”. They have also made it clear through their fundraising efforts using email and SMS that they “get it” when it comes to new media (Biden announcement not withstanding). But this app is larger than that.

It takes social marketing techniques, those that are the hallmark of “Web 2.0” and applies them to a new platform. It’s an exciting convergence of phone, computer and web technology. Perhaps it’s “Phone 2.0.” Perhaps no one else will pick up on this after November 4. Or perhaps the next social networking app will get us all talking a bit more and typing a bit less.

The intention was to review both Obama and John McCain’s iPhone apps. However, only the Obama campaign has released an iPhone app to this point. If/when the McCain campaign develops one, it will be reviewed.

I thought more about this after reading Josh’s review of Don Tapscott’s session at the Shop.org Annual Summit on the “Net Generation.” Looking at Tapscott’s definition of the “millennial” title not fitting the generation – combined with changes on the Internet – inspired me do a little bit more research on the subject. I came across another article that really drove home the point that my generation has really grown up online and is beginning to utilize it in an unconventional fashion. This really got me thinking about my own life and my informal survey group. I remembered a conversation I had recently with a few of my survey members and the results of the marriage between online and offline formalities surprised me.

I looked into how my friends use sites like Myspace and Facebook to interact with friends on a regular basis. As a generation, I think that we look at these sites as our personal property and for some reason feel the need to post every element about our personal lives. In fact, one of my friends was recently invited to a wedding through Facebook, and another used Facebook to invite people to a wedding.

According to my first friend, the couple decided to invite people this way to save money since they got married away and were having a reception back home for their friends and family. By not purchasing invitations they saved hundreds of dollars. My second friend invited people to a wedding via Facebook, because the couple did not have mailing addresses for all the people they wanted to invite. They knew that their friends checked their Facebook accounts and that this would be the best way of contacting them. I looked into it a little further to see if other people were utilizing Facebook in this way and found two other instances where people were asking the same question as I was about taking this formal process and putting it online and how to react to it.

My question is what will be next for us? Having the engagement process happen via Facebook?

I’m not claiming to be an expert on Millennial marketing. But, I have been (and will continue to) conduct an informal marketing survey of my own. My survey is not traditional by any means – I know traditional isn’t something my friends do. The survey method involved asking open ended questions to my friends about how they like to be reached, along with some of the ways that they stay in contact with their friends, and how they like to receive marketing messages. I also did my “survey” in a unique manner by utilizing Facebook, in person interviews, and simple phone conversations to best engage my audience. I found that what my friends are saying is not exactly in line with what the experts are telling everyone.

First off, the Millennial generation likes to have the choice of listening to you or not. Ads have always been in our lives, and we’re masters at tuning things out. In our minds, ads aren’t that interesting, so it doesn’t matter how clever they are – we can tune them out. We think that our time is important and find ourselves constantly multi-tasking just to keep up with everyday life. To keep up, marketers need methods that keep our lives simple, and catch us while we are on the go in quick and extremely relevant ways. We’re constantly texting instead of placing simple calls, because it seems to keep up with our hectic lifestyle better. In fact the Millennial generation seems to think that texting while driving is the best way to reach them. That’s something you won’t see the experts mention.

The focus must shift from the actual creativity of the message to how and when the message is being sent. Most Millennials I know have their phone on them 24/7 and find time to send or receive a quick message throughout the day. As much as I personally hate to admit it, we’re a captive audience while driving. If marketers reached us using a simple SMS message and a direct call to action — while we’re driving, walking to class, or even walking around the mall — I’d bet that conversion rates would increase. The challenge is the opt-in process and keeping that simple enough to respond while doing other things.

With so much to talk about, it can’t all go into one post. I’ll be posting more insights into marketing to the Millennial generation from a Millennial and her friends in the future. Stay tuned!