After laying out oodles of cash for television time and impressive spots, what do you do next to help cement your success? This year, you probably did a couple things. You previewed the spot online to build buzz. You made sure your website supported the brand proposition on click through. And in most cases, you built in multi-channel social engagement during and after the game.

But if you’re a marketer at Chrysler, Audi, Mercedes Benz, Skechers or any of the movie studios advertising big new movies, you forgot to think about the guy on the sofa with a smartphone in his hands. Especially the one who was interested in your brand. That’s right – you spent millions to reach consumers in a high-impact environment but didn’t build a mobile site to let them take action right away on the interest your ad created. In fact, nearly half of Super Bowl advertisers didn’t have a mobile site.

To quantify what they missed:

• In 2010, Pew Internet found that in the 30-49 age cohort, 43% of Americans now access the internet on their smartphones. (A 12 point increase over 2009.)
• Among the 18-29 year olds, that number increases to 65%.

And to put it in perspective alongside Twitter:

• Of the 30-49 age cohort, only 7% use Twitter.
• Among 18-29 year olds, just 14%.

To be fair, social media strategies we saw this year had more to them than Twitter – Audi’s “estate sale” Facebook promotion, for example. But Audi’s other big social concept was based on driving use of a conceptual hashtag – and consequently was aimed at a tiny fraction of their audience. (Among 50 – 64 year olds – those likely to buy a big fat Audi A8 – only 6% used Twitter, as of December 2010.) I’m sure the agency would point out that small groups of highly influential individuals tend to profile well against both advanced social media use and likelihood to influence purchasers. I know I’d probably haul out that rationale, but I’m not sure I’d really be able to feel good about it.

And if you’re Chrysler, and you just spent millions on a spot that powerfully communicates a new positioning for a company attempting to rise from its own ashes – how do you justify not providing an immediate next step?

For anyone looking for Super Bowl advertisers with great mobile sites that really delivered on the next step, check out Kia, Hyundai, GoDaddy, and VW. And be sure not to miss SalesForce’s mobile microsite for Chatter, which let you start the signup process for a free trial in a beautifully simple way – and gives Salesforce what they needed to follow up with you through your work email, thus moving the conversation from your living room sofa to the office. The site’s not elegant, but it’s remarkably effective at furthering prospect engagement.

I know from personal experience how hard it can be for the agency to affect decisions about the website; in many cases, the client’s marketing organizations are structured to split ownership of site and campaign decision-making and budgeting. And site development roadmaps are often built with far longer lead times than campaigns. These are gaps best closed by senior client-side marketers. The data is there to justify it – is the will?

Robert Davis is SVP Digital Marketing at PJA advertising + marketing. This post was written with research support from Tessa Sandler.

I try to stay up-to-date and actually use most new technology – even if just to try it out for a while. I consider it part of my job as a marketer, but honestly I’m just a gadget geek.

So, if you’re like me, you may have experienced a situation like the one I had this past weekend. Saturday morning, standing in line for my coffee, I look to my phone and become overwhelmed with the number of places that I needed to check-in to.

Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla, SCVNGR….whew…thankfully it was a long line.

Location-sharing applications are still growing ( some growing 75% faster everyday, in fact), however it’s getting to

the point where there are so many social networking versions of the application that most people I know – myself included – are using the services less and less.

But it’s more than just being overwhelmed; some people are concerned about safety. In arecent survey by Webroot, 55% of geolocation application users were worried about compromises to their privacy.

45% are worried about the tools being used by burglars and 49% of women surveyed were “highly concerned” about letting potential stalkers know where they are.

However, to be fair to the women in the survey, I tried Google Latitude on my phone recently and lasted about 30 seconds before I became creeped out too.

Creepiness aside – it’s important to remember that geolocation isn’t all bad.

In fact, the less-social aspects are becoming increasingly useful. Whether it’s for personal use –  such as finding restaurant recommendations in unfamiliar territory or getting notified of possible speed traps using Trapster. Or for business use, like networking at meetups or creating buzz for your brand through contests and games – the future of geolocation is more than just burglary and stalking…at least I hope so.

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Kevin Smith is an Account Supervisor at PJA Advertising & Marketing. Follow him on Twitter: @Mr_KevinSmith

This post was featured as a social media dream segment of the July 29th edition of This Week In Social Media.

The metrics loyalty marketers typically favor are those that measure increases in customer lifetime value, or LTV. By their very definition, LTV metrics include a monetary component, which is sorely lacking from foot traffic calculations based solely on frequency. Of course, increasing frequency can increase value, but in most cases involving day-to-day behaviors, visit-based rewards programs do not stimulate enough extra visits to pay back the cost of the rewards structure. Instead, they simply reward existing behavior, and in doing so give away margin.

Marketers might be better off focusing on program strategies designed to increase customer value, such as

• Incenting referrals. For example, LooptStar allows marketers to reward a group if they check in together. If you’ve got five people checking in as a group at your restaurant, it’s likely at least one of them is a net-new customer, and hence a revenue boost. Empowering program members checking in to share a first-time reward with friends via their social graph is another way to go.
• Stimulating trial. ShopKick’s CauseWorld platform can reward visitors for scanning a bar code on a product on a store shelf. Consumers could also be asked to answer a question based on copy on the product packaging. In return, consumers could get points, or offers for a new product, such as that new, heavily bacon-driven item of the moment on a QSR’s menu.
• Tying spend levels to geosocial behavior. Starbucks already lets consumers replace their physical stored-value card with a smartphone app. Linking purchasing to the location-based program would provide marketers with much more powerful tools for understanding the role of location based programs in driving customer value – and enable targeting of rewards and offers based on the sophisticated predictive models that can make loyalty investments pay off.

These are obviously early days in the rollout of geosocial apps. It’s easy to forget that we’re still addressing a minority of “geosocial nerds.” (A group in which I count myself. Maybe “enthusiasts” is a better word…) But as smartphones proliferate, and marketers are pressured to “do something – anything” with location-based programs to drive loyalty, just as they have been with the web, with viral, with crowd-sourcing and with Facebook, it’s not too early to get in front of the movement, and think about strategies that link location with measures that truly matter to the business.