Response Magazine - June 2008

Cover Story > Susan McKenna

to them for more than a year. It’s a great company with a really unique mobile and text concept. There’s another company called Gumiyo that Borba is exploring ideas with. Gumiyo takes inventory and puts it online through the mobile platform. From a tech standpoint, it’s a different company than Shop Text. Shop Text is specifically for direct marketers.”

McKenna says that the mobile space is moving into a commerce mode. “It’s not about marketing, it’s about commerce!” she exclaims. “PayPal mobile has transactions now, Shop Text allows transactions. It could be really huge.”

Is Social Media DR’s Future?

McKenna’s excitement for mobile marketing transitions to an even greater excitement for the social media space — and even combining the two. She contends, “People look at mobile, and wonder, ‘How can I get my message out on cell phones?’ But people need to jump the

chasm of ‘talking to’ and go to ‘talking with.’ You’re in a dialog with them, and that’s how we move from sales to commerce. That’s what social media is going to do for marketers in the future. Mobile is a perfect platform for that.”

McKenna says that utilizing the popularity of social networking online has to start with the idea of “community.” She also tires of hearing social networking and Web 2.0 as just “buzzwords,” while people don’t dig deeper to understand what they could mean for marketers in the

SUSAN MCKENNA Vice President of E-Commerce, AlternativeHealthJournal.com, Santa Monica, Calif. Owner, Licensed Learning/ OpenTrafficSchool.com

near future. “Web 2.0 is a vast buzzword, but what does it really mean?” she asks. “To me, it’s about the next generation of what’s online for us to use as consumers and as marketers. Community is a big part of that, but a major part of social networking is about collaboration and communication.”

Those two ideas come up repeatedly when McKenna discusses concepts that may have value to marketers looking at how to first broach the social media landscape. “What if, on an E-mail mar-

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