Cerado

Mobile tech vendor seeks to ease the strain on wallets…literally
From InternetRetailer (August 18, 2009)

Many consumers’ wallets and purses are bulging with loyalty cards, membership cards, credit cards and other pieces of plastic. It seems sometimes one could use a second wallet or handbag just for the ever-growing number of cards.

Mobile technology vendor Cerado Inc. believes there’s a market for a niche mobile solution to ease management and carrying of loyalty cards. It has introduced Scanaroo, an iPhone application that enables consumers to take close-up pictures of loyalty cards and store and organize the images. The goal is not to have to carry loyalty cards at all, using the iPhone, instead.

After a card has been photographed and stored in the Scanaroo library, a consumer can read the number of the card to a cashier or, in some cases, let the cashier scan the card’s bar code image directly on the smartphone. Some types of bar code readers can scan from a computer-based image; others cannot.

“Mobile phones and Scanaroo today do for loyalty and other cards what the iPod did years ago for CDs,” says Christopher Carfi, CEO of Cerado. “It used to be you’d grab a half-dozen CDs on your way out and hope you had enough and the best ones for the day. Then the iPod came along and you could have every CD you owned on one, small mobile device. The iPod was transformational technology. And so are mobile phones. In this case, it’s Scanaroo carrying all your cards on one, small mobile device.”

Related:

InternetRetailer

We had the chance to chat via email with Jordan Crook from Mobile Marketer earlier this week about Scanaroo, our loyalty card app for the iPhone.

Here’s a link to Crook’s side of the story, which we think was pretty-much spot on.

The key graf:

This is really the foundation of why we built the app, and it derives directly from Doc Searls’ drive with ProjectVRM, which has a stated goal of creating “tools of independence and engagement” for the customer side of the business relationship.

That said, Crook really grokked that what we’re trying to do with Scanaroo provides a benefit for both parties.

I saw this tweet today from @FitMenu which said “I’ve turned down loyalty programs to avoid that one more thing to carry,” and Crook noted that “often times, loyalty cards, gift cards and membership cards are not used on a daily basis,” which is exactly right, because it’s currently a hot pain to carry them all around. So, the retailers win, too, by always having the opportunity to have their card easily available.

Related:

Cerado Launches Loyalty Card Organization App (Mobile Marketer)
Scanaroo web site (http://www.scanaroo.com)

On July 2, RetailTouchpoints featured a great article about how the retail industry is evolving to embrace social media. Some key thoughts from the article:

For those retailers, just starting down the social networking path, industry experts recommend the following key strategies for social media:

• Get Personal: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh handles the company’s Twitter account, putting a friendly face behind a big company. Hseih also follows people back for that extra special personal touch.
• Let Customers Know What’s Happening: One of the main foundations of social networks is the real time updates and information sharing. Let customers know about store openings, in-store events, promotions, etc.
• Ask Questions: Apparel retailer Mandee posts questions on Facebook through the status feature, which provides rich, real-time customer intelligence on preferred styles and colors to assist in merchandising decisions, as well as understand customers on a more personal level.
• Be Engaged and Participate: Retailers need to monitor feedback by listening to what consumers are saying about the brand and respond accordingly.
• Be Relevant: Post information not only relevant to your brand, but to people who shop in your stores. Whole Foods posts recipes for organic dishes on their Twitter site. People want useful information that can help them make informed decisions.

Read the rest here.

(This article originally appeared in MobileMarketerDaily on July 1, 2009)

On the surface, there are stark differences between business-to-business marketing and business-to-consumer marketing: audience size, volume of sales and magnitude of purchases. But as mobile becomes ubiquitous for connecting with customers, are we starting to see a convergence between the two?

I would contend that the answer is, yes – if we have the courage to think creatively and move beyond the already-tired clichés of mobile marketing such as text campaigns and mobile couponing.

In fact, with a bit of creative thought, the opportunity for connecting with new customers in both audiences is quite remarkable if we concentrate on the experiences that can be provided with today’s mobile devices.

So what are the ways that we can get creative?

Let’s look at the root of that word, “creative” for a second. It stems from create.

Every one of our prospective customers – both B2B and B2C – has not just a tiny screen onto which we can foist our message, but now has the ability to create things as well – photos, videos, conversations and relationships.

Let’s look at the taken-for-granted camera phone capabilities.

Again, why not think about how we can bring prospects into the process by enabling and encouraging them to be a creative part of the sale, instead of a passive recipient?

In the B2C case, we can, for example, encourage contests and participation where customers take their photos with the most interesting/scenic/extraordinary usage of our products and submit them to a community site.

Similarly, we can encourage B2B customers to send their sales reps photos of their unique environment/circumstance/prickly problem so that the reps can better understand the situation and propose an insightful solution.

In the B2C case, we could encourage video testimonials to be pulled into a powerful montage.

In the B2B case, we can gather videos of customer best-practice tips to illustrate how our products perform in the real-world and how they are being used to solve real problems in an efficient manner.

But, more important than the technical tools, why not enable prospects to easily connect with the people and information they need to make a decision to buy?

It is all about the connections and the relationships.

In the B2C case, a great example of this would be making it easy for customers to locate and, after the initial sale, create reviews of their experiences with a product from other customers.

Similarly, in the B2B realm, this entails providing tools to connect the prospect with other similar past customer references, testimonials, case studies or a knowledgeable sales associate.

The upshot is that for both B2B and B2C we have a real opportunity with mobile: the opportunity to differentiate based on how we encourage, empower and enable active, social customers instead of passive targets.

The organizations that crack the code on this are going to be the winners in using this medium.

So let us use mobile to bring both B2B and B2C customers into the process, instead of simply throwing marketing messages at them.

Let’s challenge ourselves to start conversations, and enable prospective customers to engage with us and with each other, regardless of what bucket  – B2B or B2C – in which they have historically been classified.

When a major national newsmagazine identifies “You”—that is, anyone blogging, posting videos, or networking online—as the Person of the Year, it’s fair to say that social collaboration has hit the mainstream. There are a few consumer-oriented social collaboration sites, such as MySpace and YouTube, that grab lots of traffic, media attention, and huge sums of acquisition cash, but what are businesses to make of the social networking buzz? Perhaps because the memory of the first dot-com crash and burn is relatively fresh, established companies are cautiously matching up collaborative functionality with measurable ROI before throwing resources into social networking features like searchable profiles, blogs, tagging, and wikis on internal and customer-facing sites.”

- Nancy Davis Kho, EContent Magazine

“If you are interested in developing an online community for your business, I highly recommend attending Paul Greenberg and Chris Carfi two day seminar on ‘Social Media & CRM 2.0.’ The next two dates are April 10-11, 2007 in Washington DC and May 10-11, 2007 in Naples Florida. I’m sure they’ll be adding additional dates in other cities. It’s a great 101 on how to effectively use of blogs, podcasts, wiki’s, and social networks as part of your customer strategy.”

- Jamie Grenney, Salesforce.com, Customer Success Blog