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You carry around a phone that cost hundreds of dollars, and more than a grand in service fees each year. No doubt, your phone is amazing in many ways, but there are too many content and functionality holes in need of a solution for it to truly rock.

When you search, for instance, something good better happen, or your investment in mobile technology loses a bit of its luster.

Natalie Wuchenich, writing on Search Engine Land, points to a new study that indicates 77.1 million mobile subscribers are accessing local business content across the U.S., up an astonishing 34% from a year ago.

The study found that among all mobile subscribers surveyed this year:

• 26% accessed weather, up 41% year-over-year
• 18% accessed maps, up 41% year-over-year
• 12% accessed movie information, up 32% year-over-year
• 10% accessed restaurant information, up 40% year-over-year
• 8% accessed business directories, up 26% year-over-year
• 8% accessed classifieds, up 51% year-over-year

There’s also a spike in the number of local mobile content users with GPS-capable devices, which grew to 87% from 76% last year. And 64% of local mobile content users own smartphones.

Local businesses should invest in building mobile-friendly websites so consumers can easily access their content in mobile browsers, Wuchenich concludes. Restaurants, for example, should prepare mobile-friendly menus and reservations tools.

Last week on AdPulp, I surveyed six local grocery stores. Only two had a mobile-optimized websites. Now, let’s look at local Portland-area restaurants: Higgins, Mother’s Bistro, Tasty and Sons, Buggati’s, Meet Cheese Bread and The Chart House.

Only one, Mother’s, has a mobile-optimized website. And The Chart House — the one national chain in the bunch — is requiring a flash plugin, which ain’t gonna happen. When you access The Chart House’s site via a laptop or desktop, the experience is just as bad–music starts blasting and the user has to search to quiet the unwanted intrusion.

To recap, seven million Americans are using their mobile handsets to retrieve restaurant information when they’re on the go. But from my random sampling, only one in six restaurants is mobile-ready. Clearly, this is a market opportunity for mobile developers and for agencies who work with small businesses. It’s also work that needs to be done. In fact, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to call it a public works project.

Please see my photo set on Facebook for more.

I saw a BIG film this week. A film that keeps unfolding in my mind a number of days after my initial viewing.

To Inform & Delight is a documentary about legendary designer Milton Glaser. The title is a reference to the Horace quote: “The purpose of art is to inform and delight.” It’s a powerful thought (and call to action), particularly for those working in marketing communications.

Glaser, who has run his own design shop in New York City since 1974, may be best known for co-founding New York Magazine and for creating the enduring I ♥ NY campaign. But he’s a prolific designer who also designs restaurants, books and provides design for advertising, among other things.

There are several themes in the documentary that deserve deeper exploration. For one, Glaser explains how he doesn’t want to be defined by a style. It’s a topic he has discussed before. As part of his “Ten Things I Have Learned” talk at AIGA London in 2001, Glaser said, “It’s absurd to be loyal to a style. It does not deserve your loyalty.”

Discussing his monoprints and the surprises that can come from purposefully working in a limiting form, Glaser says, “Works that are too preconceived tend to go dead, become inert and less lively. Work that responds to the peculiarities of the moment tend to be more energized.”

Think for a minute about how many preconceptions we bring to our work every day. In advertising preconceptions are fundamental to the business. Notions like “you can’t measure TV’s effectiveness” or “of course, the customer wants to hear from us again” are starting points in many a misguided journey.

Glaser’s declaration about “peculiarities of the moment” makes me think of theater, and how the best design is like live theater in that it creates an inviting experience. Factor in “the energized moment” and you have improvisational theater, and therein lies the new model.

Marketing is a real time activity today. Brands no longer need agencies who know well their lines, brands need actors who can stand and deliver, no matter where the story goes or how fast it travels.

According to Custom Content Council, which is focused on promoting the growth and vitality of this dynamic marketing discipline, ‘custom content is grabbing ever-larger shares of marketing budgets as marketers become more convinced of its value.”

Four-fifths of marketers said they were “increasingly” incorporating custom content into their marketing plans. The survey queried 100 CMOs and other senior executives at large and midsize companies in 20 industries ranging from finance to communications to retail, travel, and health care. The average portion of respondents’ marketing budget allocated to custom content was 20 percent.

The top three channels for custom content—customized websites, e-newsletters, and print newsletters—have remained the same over the past five years, but social media and video now take the fourth and fifth spots.

“There are now so many channels through which to disseminate branded content, and so much more understanding and acceptance of it, that it’s really a perfect storm for content marketing,” says Mike Winkleman, president and chief creative officer of custom publishing company Leverage Media.

All of which is music to Bonehook’s ears, since branded content is our area of expertise.

I’ve been talking to my friend Tom Asacker about the need to feed people’s hungers (metaphorically speaking).

To effectively feed these hungers, first one must find out what people who come to you are hungry for. For instance, there’s quite a difference between readers looking to eyeball the latest breaking ad campaigns, and those who visit AdPulp.com for more meaty content that can help them teach a class, or construct a content or social media marketing strategy.

On AdPulp, we cater to multiple audiences and they’re hungry for different things. The same can be said for the audience here. Small business owners who visit this site are hungry the things that help them build their brand and grow their business. But a creative director at an ad agency who wants me to write copy for a client, has a related, but different hunger.

The question is can I don my chef hat and deliver made-to-order content? That’s what I’ve been doing, but perhaps I’d be better off, saying you know what, I’m really good at making this one thing — creating lifestyle content, for instance. It’s the difference between being a full service restaurant and a food cart. Both are totally legitimate business models.

It’s an important problem to work out for any provider of products and services. Because you want to lead with your strongest offering, so you become known for that one thing.

Being known for more than one thing is asking too much from people bombarded by messages from every direction. So, while I want to appeal to at least two different audiences here–small business owners and managers and creative directors at ad agencies–I might be asking too much. I may need to rebuild this site so visitors come to a landing page first, and then get redirected based upon their particular hungers.

But enough about me. What are your customers hungry for?

Scott Ginsberg is the author of 12 books. He’s also a popular speaker and the guy who turned wearing a name tag into a six figure income.

He gets lots of press and he creates lots of press. Writing on RainToday.com, Ginsberg compares content to contact:

People can get information anywhere, anytime, immediately, and for free. But that’s the thing. We don’t need more access to information. We need more access to each other. That doesn’t make information irrelevant, but contact offers an unquantifiable humanness that content can’t provide. And if your brand fails to deliver that interaction in addition to the information people need, customers will quickly switch to another brand that will.

In other words, brands need to do more than play in the social sandbox. Their real life representatives need to be on the communications front lines, talking to people and creating lasting bonds between customer and company.

Ginsberg does this for his own company by regularly speaking in public and by making instructional videos available to people who aren’t in the physical audience.

I like how Scott warns of the dangers of falling in love with one’s own product or service offering. “Customers want to buy something that solves their urgent, expensive and pervasive problems.” That’s such an obvious, yet often overlooked reality, of the marketplace.

I also like how he says, “Nobody notices normal, nobody buys boring and nobody pays for average.”

Rawle Anders, Client Services Director at HappyCog in San Francisco, has some great advice for managing internal and agency-to-client process.

These two tips especially, are spot on:

Re-Establish Humanitarianism – Even with the best projects, the doldrums set in. Weeks fly off the calendar, design iterations number a half-dozen, feedback is a week late in coming. Sometimes, in the midst of a project, you just need a reminder that an actual person is still in-step with you. A quick one-on-one conversation with the client’s project champion will reshuffle the deck by allowing each side to express their concerns and get the teams working on collaborative solutions. The client will appreciate the transparency and extra attention, and the relationship will be stronger for it.

Control the Communication Tipping Point – It starts with a feeling: you need to head off an issue, you can sense confusion, you know the questions are coming. Before you get an email or a Basecamp post asking what’s wrong, you should control the tipping point by being proactive with communications. You’ll demonstrate a firm grasp on all facets of the project while having the client’s interests explicitly in mind. As athletes in training might say, “run the trail, don’t let the trail run you.”

Taking a proactive stance is the common thread here. Great client service people don’t react, they proact. I’ll be honest, I’m not a great client service person. But I’m heading in that direction. You know why? Because great work that sells is the result of relationships built on mutual respect and trust. All the creative thinking in the world can’t make an impact until the relationship is right.

At any rate, I appreciate the reminder to reach out. Consistent, effective communication — which is at the core of an agency-client relationship — is responsibility number one. Without it, there won’t be any room for a celebratory beverage, much less a trip to Cannes.

photo credit: Rachel Hadiashar

The last “head shot” I sat for was 10 years ago in Omaha. Thankfully, Portland photographer Rachel Hadiashar helped to remedy that situation last week.

Here’s a look at one of the images from the shoot that took place in her industrial Southeast studio space:

If you have the need for a portrait, head shot or wedding photography, I highly recommend getting in contact with Rachel. She helped to put me at ease right away, even though it’s unnatural for me to be on the receiving end of the lens.

Here, let me show you what I mean:

Rachel also suggested I change outfits throughout the session, and that suggestion was key, as I now have the “dude in a sport coat shot” that I can use for conferences, on my About pages or anywhere else where I need to convey a modicum of professionalism.

I love helping companies perfect their brand identity. And I feel strongly that brand identity is fundamental to the marketing plan, for everything flows from the brand. In other words, it’s critical to get the brand right, so good things can come a client’s way.

To get the brand right is no small task, as you might imagine. First, a client has to recognize the need for an upgrade, and it’s easier said than done. Take our client Danville Development. The company was founded in 1979 and doing just fine with its original identity. Right?

Here’s the company’s new identity:

It is our job, and privilege, to help Danville Development express its true self today. And we needed a new brand identity to properly do that.

As she has done many times before, Omaha-based designer Cathy Solarana came up with a look and feel that communicates a powerful visual message, one that instantly evokes home, safety and wellness (all key brand attributes).

Lisa Barone, Chief Branding Officer at Outspoken Media, Inc., writing for Small Business Trends, says local citations — any appearance of your business name alongside its address or phone number — is the most recommended off-site activity for small business owners looking to increase their SEO efforts.

You’ve already taken the steps to perfect your business listing on Google Places and Yahoo Local (right? Please say yes?), but what about the small local search engine and third-party data providers like Localeze of Best of the Web? If you haven’t, I’d recommend that you make it a priority to do so. Not only do they serve as trusted citation sources, but they also feed information to the bigger search engines. As a small business, you want as many sources as possible all giving Google the correct NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) for your business.

Barone also points to David Mihm’s “Most Important Citation Sources”.

Most Importlant Review Engines (U.S. Specific)
1. Yelp
2. Google Places
3. Citysearch
4. Yahoo Local
5. Nice Industry Sites (like Trip Advisor, OpenTable, DealerRater, etc.)
6. Insider Pages
7. JudysBook
8. Superpages
9. YellowPages
10. Kudzu

Other sites: Angie’s List, Facebook, Merchant Circle

As you can see, there’s a lot of work to be done here. Of course, there are search experts on every corner ready to lend a hand. The other option is to bring this work in-house. Either way, it’s important to help people find your business online, and on foot.

Note: I’m currently helping Danville Development with this process, as they have multiple locations throughout northern Utah, and one in Wyoming.