Because producing a profitable mobile app requires companies to be experts in a wide variety of areas — ranging from app design and discovery, to app maintenance and mobile advertising — The Everything Guide To Mobile Apps has brought together the insights of more than 25 mobile professionals, practitioners and pundits to identify market trends, best practices and key lessons learned in developing, distributing and promoting mobile apps.

“In an ideal world, an organization hoping to succeed in the new App Economy would have their own personal expert to guide them through the complexities and intricacies of designing, producing, and marketing a high-quality, professional, robust and usable app,” observes Jez Harper, CEO of Tús Nua Designs, an Irish app development business, and a chief contributor to the Guide. “Companies don’t have that luxury, but they also don’t miss it since The Everything Guide to Mobile Apps draws on the knowledge and experience of the authors, as well as the world’s leading experts in the app arena, to package everything you’ll need to know in order to turn a mobile app into a serious business.”

Mobile apps allow mobile commerce transactions, but — more importantly — they enable organizations and brands to build relationships, to engage consumers and customers, and drive revenues and grow markets.

“Even first-time app developers instinctively know it’s no longer ‘enough’ just to develop a great mobile app,”  notes social marketing authority and mobile startup advisor Ken Herron, the marketing contributor to the Guide. “To meet your download goals, it’s critical to effectively use social media to build and engage your community of brand fans, and the Guide shows you how.”

PRESS RELEASE

About The Everything Guide to Mobile Apps

The Everything Guide draws from the vast experience of its authors and the insights of more than 25 mobile technology professionals and practitioners to help organizations make and market their app with success. This roster of expert contributors includes: Akash Sureka, Hoopz; Alfred DeRose, Tego Interactive; Andrew Levy, Crittercism; Andy Bovingdon, Bango; Asif Khan, the Location Based Marketing Association; Chris Jones, CodeNgo; Daniel Appelquist, Blue Via; Derek Newell, Jiff; Ed Vause, Appromoter; Gary Schwartz, Impact Mobile; Helen Keegan, Heroes of the Mobile Fringe; Itay Gadot, Inneractive; James (Coops) Cooper, Mobyaffiliates; Jennifer Hiley; Jez Harper, Tús Nua Designs; Jonathan Kohl, Kohl Concepts, Inc.; Ken Herron, social marketer; Linda Daichendt, MTAM; Lisa Ciangiulli, Optism; Magnus Jern, Golden Gekko; Martin Rugfelt, Expertmaker; Martin Wilson, The Mobile Web Company; Matos Kapetenakis, VisionMobile; Matt Lutz, AppClover; Mike Anderson, Chelsea Apps Factory; Moshe Vaknin, YouAppi; Paolo de Santis, ChupaMobile; Paul Poutanen, Mob4Hire; Phil Hendrix, immr; Rimma Perelmuter, Mobile Entertainment Forum; Rob Woodbridge, untetherTV; Ryan Morel, Placeplay; Sam Chan, Wireless Industry Partnership; Scott Townsend, Urban Airship; Stu Arnott, Spark Inspires; Suzie Mitchell, Mitchell PR; Viki Zabala, Fiksu; and Yasmina Haryono, Fjord.

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• #DearKen: How Should I Use #Socialmedia To Promote My Book?

In an age where every organization, brand, and product has a website, and many of your rivals churn out white papers like popcorn, having a book is one of the best ways to establish credibility and reinforce your company’s brand position as both an innovator and an industry leader. Your competitor has a business card. YOU have a book – that prospective customers (or employers) can purchase on Amazon, or even download for free from your website in exchange for their contact information. And what better advertising for your mobile app than having its hashtag and URL on your book’s cover!

Of course, writing your book is just the start. You also have to use social media to spread the word. The bottom line? No matter whether you’ve chosen to self-publish your book, or have taken the “vintage” route by working with a traditional publishing house, no one can ever market your information products (in this case your book) as effectively as you can yourself using social media. Note that this doesn’t just apply to books. The same rule applies to ALL of your different marketing assets, including your videos, white papers, underwritten research, podcasts, presentations, and blog posts.

A quick reminder that the opinions expressed here are my own. They come from my hands-on experience managing social marketing content and campaigns, leading social marketing teams, and consulting for social marketing clients. You, your organization, and your brand are unique! Please use what works for you, and toss the rest! Do you disagree with any of my guidelines, or think I have forgotten something? Please share your experiences with all of us in the Comments section below, so we can continue the discussion and the learning.

My guidelines for using social media to promote your new book are simple. More importantly, they are based on my ongoing and personal campaign to promote my own contribution to The Everything Guide to Mobile Apps: A Practical Guide to Affordable Mobile App Development for Your Business. The book, written by MobileGroove’s own Peggy Anne Salz, brings together the diverse insights of mobile professionals, practitioners, and pundits (say that three times fast!) to identify the market trends, best practices, and lessons learned in developing, distributing, and marketing mobile apps. As I share in the book, even small app developers can compete – and win! – in the big leagues, provided they use social media to promote their apps and create community. The book is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and has proven so popular that it is being released this month as an ebook.

To help the different contributors promote the book with social media, I developed a “Ken’s Author’s Toolkit” (catchy, no?) infographic/cheat sheet. Being the social marketing guy, I of course uploaded it to SlideShare – http://www.slideshare.net/KenHerron/kens-authors-toolkit – so I could share it with all of you! So enough with the exposition, let’s dive in!

#1  If your target audience is on a given social channel, then you must be too!

It doesn’t matter if you’ve never “pinned” anything before in your life. If YOUR target audience for your book happens to be on Pinterest, then you must be too. If you don’t know where your audience is online, then you need to find out. Fast! There are tons of free demographics research reports available for each social network. Whether your audience is mainstream or niche, B2C or B2B, you can *always* reach out to them and ask them. They will appreciate your asking, and it’s one more opportunity for you to personally engage with them.

#2  Share. DON’T sell!

This sounds easy, but it can be tough since it’s only natural for authors to want to say “Buy my book! Here’s the purchase link! Buy it now! Pleeeease!” in every single social post. Yes, you should make the purchase link for your book easily accessible for everyone, but focus your posts on the content in your book. Provide valuable content, not advertising. Don’t know what to write? Start off with short posts sharing your book’s key takeaways, and even your “top do’s and don’ts”. Sharing the story of how you came up with, wrote, and marketed your book – within the context of your existing online brand – makes for great social content. Compelling content, combined with your own personal story as an author, will drive exponentially more unit sales than a hard sell.

#3  Visualize, visualize, visualize

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” As old as that quote is, it applies perfectly to social media in 2013. You already know that people are social. Well, people are also visual. Find ways to share your story visually. Read C.C. Chapman’s NMX presentation on visual content. As C.C. says, “create an emotional response, look for ‘moments’, and share what no one else can.” Grab that spiffy new phone or tablet in your pocket. Find ways to visualize your content. Great visuals make even “dull” content come alive. With or without Google Glass, it has never been easier to capture and post [in real-time if you so choose] photos and videos on every single social network, from your own blog to Instagram.

Want a great example? Check out Debi Harper. She supports her husband and fellow book contributor Jez Harper by capturing the unique moments, such as when she presented a copy of The Everything Guide To Mobile Apps to Charlie Flanagan, TD, Fine Gael Party Chairman in Ireland and posted it in Facebook.

#4  Create [and use!] a hashtag for your book

Hashtags should be short, but should also be “readable”. What does that mean? Avoid long, unpronounceable, and meaningless acronyms. A hashtag should be simple, catchy, and to-the-point. You want to encourage [and make it easy] for people to talk about your book online, including tweeting about it.

True story. When I “shared” with the publishers of our Everything Guide to Mobile Apps book that we HAD to have a hashtag, it took a surprisingly herculean amount of persuasion to convince them that #EVERYapp trumped  #theeverythingguidetomobileappsapracticalguidetoaffordablemobileappdevelopmentforyourbusiness (yes, I behaved myself and refrained from sending them a pop-up book on dinosaurs). If there’s still time, put your book’s hashtag on your book’s front and back covers (and on your physical book’s spine!). If you’re not that comfortable with hashtags, I recommend reading posts on Hubspot, Mashable’s take, and yes, my next MobileGroove blog post which just happens to be about hashtags!

#5  Post FRESH content daily

Every author now struggles with the challenge of their information being out-of-date the second they publish their book. How can you keep your content fresh and relevant? Even if you’re time-crunched, social media enables you to both share new, original content AND to participate in the larger discussion in your industry, by showing how the content in your book relates to current events and trending topics.

#6  Share excerpts

Sadly, you can’t put your book on toothpicks and sample it like a new brand of cheese at your local supermarket, but you can let everyone around the world “taste” the first chapter of your book for free. Some (dinosaur) publishers will hate me for this, but I’m a huge fan of publishing the first chapter of your book on LinkedIn’s new professional gallery via Slideshare. You want to get people “hooked” so they are compelled to purchase your book to finish it. Also, your connections on LinkedIn are often your oldest professional connections. These are not only the people who are most likely to be interested personally in what you have written, but the people who will be the most willing and able to help spread the word about your new book.

#7  Directly target your key influencers

It used to be difficult to target reviewers, critics, the media, and industry influencers. Now you can engage all of them directly on social media. Remember, however, the definition of “targeting”. This isn’t about “friending” everyone on the planet. Instead, use tools like Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex to identify the social influencers for your specific niche. Connect with these influencers, and use Twitter Lists to monitor their tweets so you can more easily engage with them.

#8  Enable EVERYONE on the planet to attend your book readings and signings

When you hold a book signing or do a reading from your book, how many people get to connect with you? 50? 100? 200 (if you’re lucky)? When you are out promoting your book, have a friend video you and your audience’s reactions to you on their mobile device so you can live stream – http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/onair.html, http://new.livestream.com, http://www.ustream.tv, and http://www.justin.tv are four great tools. You can even upload the best clips to your branded channel on YouTube. The number of people who will be able to attend one of your in-person signings/readings will always be limited. Use social media to enable everyone around the world who is interested in the content of your book to attend, connect with you, and BUY YOUR BOOK!

#9  Leverage your email sig line

And finally, the one place where you absolutely MUST place the purchase link for your book is your email signature line. Keep it simple. No “Please buy my book!” Instead, share your excitement with something like “My new book, TITLE, is now available on Amazon at: LINK!” Remember to use a URL shortener such at http://bit.ly so you can track the clicks! You can even get fancy with a custom link with your book’s hashtag – http://bit.ly/HASHTAG (we used http://j.mp/EVERYapp).

Whether you’re looking for new customers or a new job, there is no better sales and marketing “leave behind” than a copy of your new book, showcasing your expertise AND your ability to successfully take a great idea from concept to execution.

What are the most effective ways YOU have found to market your book on social media? How do you use all of your different social channels to get people to buy your physical or ebook? Please share your thoughts with us in the Comments section below.

Ken’s note: I truly appreciate everyone’s questions, thank you! Do YOU have a question about social marketing technologies, tools, and best practices? Tweet your question to me @KenHerron with the hashtag “#DearKen”.  All tweets will be acknowledged, and considered as being submitted for publication.

We can do more with our screens — so it follows we will also come to expect more from our screens. It’s a dependence that spells opportunity for small business and companies that leverage mobile to deliver us information and experiences that are personal and engaging (hence valuable). Even better if companies build the capabilities that will allow them to deliver more contextually-aware information, offers, marketing — the works (!)

This is just one of the topics I explored with Tina Stock, YP’s Executive Director of Marketing, who was a special guest on the LinkedIn Lady, a popular Internet radio show on the Rockstar Radio Network hosted by Carol McManus that looks at how companies can leverage social media to grow their business. I join Carol on the first Thursday of each month to co-host the show and highlight key developments and opportunities at the intersection of mobile, local and social.

In this series of companion posts over at the YP blog I explore why ‘discoverability’ is the first and critical stage in the purchase funnel, and look at why context is key in the strategies that will help small businesses reach consumers on-the-move and “at the point where it makes the most sense for them.”

Read the full post here.

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Fortunately, this is precisely what can be achieved in an IP-based world, where platforms blend together and friction is replaced by flow. But it’s not just about harnessing the power of IP to create and deliver new experiences around context, content and communications. Mobile operators and service providers can also innovate and improve their offers around voice and messaging.

To borrow from Diarmuid Mallon, who is responsible for driving Global Thought Leadership at SAP Mobile Services, a division of SAP,  our arrival in a IP-based world is marked by radical change — and massive opportunity. In his recent blog Diarmuid tells us to get ready for a wave of change. “But this time, it isn’t new devices that will make the changes, but rather a fundamental shift in the technology than mobile networks.”

Game-changing

Indeed, IP is changing the game. Advanced mobile devices, new technology (most notably VoIP and spectrum scarcity), increased competition and a shift in customer expectations for truly personal and relevant interactions are coming together to cause disruption in the telecom industry – for operators and all the companies in their business ecosystems.

It’s ‘adapt or die’ as mobile operators and service providers struggle to find new ways to compete and win in an IP-based world.

The good news: there are abundant opportunities and pay-offs around strategies aimed to drive messaging revenue, generate new revenue streams from mobile commerce, build loyalty through customer engagement programs and plan for LTE roaming through IPX adoption. The better news: a new knowledge resource (developed and produced by MobileGroove) was released by SAP Mobile Services during MWC, equipping operators with the clear direction and critical information they need most.

New Guide debuts

This is where the inaugural edition of the Mobile Operator Guide — titled The Evolution of Mobile Services: Challenges, Strategies, opportunities — comes in. It draws from the real-life insights and experiences of 40+ global industry authorities and innovators to identify market trends, best practices and key lessons learned in deploying mobile services. Among the organizations interviewed and included: Bharti Airtel, CTIA, Globe Telecom, GSMA, Korea Telecom, MetroPCS, PCCW, Qtel, SingTel, Telefónica and Urban Airship, a market leader in push messaging and notifications.

All are unanimous in their view that the rapid pace of change and the rise in demand for services that are aligned with customers’ requirements are combining to generate the mobile industry’s own Perfect Storm.

Against this backdrop, mobile video is a market segment on the tipping point. However, other services, such as SMS, LTE, mobile commerce and mobile customer loyalty, are also entering a new phase of growth and innovation.

• SMS gets a boost from apps: Today the explosion of mobile apps, a development which many thought would mark the death of SMS, has actually pushed application-to-person (A2P) traffic growth to a new level. The result is a booming A2P market research firm (and MobileGroove partner) Portio Research estimates will be worth $75.1 billion by 2016. Watch for new opportunities to harness text messaging to power a variety of services around verticals ranging from retail and commerce, to education and marketing.
• LTE requires partnerships: As mobile network operators move towards 4G/LTE and an all-IP network, many will cooperate to expand their network footprint and many more will be challenged by Over-the-Top (OTT) players. Competition and innovation will go hand-in hand as everyone (including mobile operators) tries to wring more value out of operator core capabilities (such as billing support and network management).
• Mobile loyalty matters: Because mobile is a fiercely personal device, it’s an ideal means to reach customers on every step of their daily journey. Watch for operators and marketers to harnesses text messaging, Web or mobile apps (or all three together) to boost customer loyalty and recruit true brand advocates. However, just as in real-life, building a relationship is about talking and listening, and that’s why companies will have to  develop mobile loyalty programs that effectively do both.

These are just a few of the trends and key messages that make the Mobile Operator Guide 2013, a must-read resource. You can download your free copy here.

Personal thanks

It has been a huge undertaking spanning six months and the result is a 240-page knowledge resource packed with detailed market data and insights from over 40  mobile experts and authorities.

I am proud to have collaborated with the SAP Mobile Services team, headed by Carmel Coscia on the 2013 Guide, and pleased to report that work on the 2014 Guide will begin in a just a few months. My warm and personal thanks to the team (Diarmuid Mallon @diarmuidmallon, Jean Loh, Rebecca Kools, Shahzia Banth) for the inspiration, vision and insights (and good humor!) that have helped make this inaugural publication an essential read for the global mobile industry.

And a very special hat-tip to mobile author Tomi Ahonen (@tomiahonen) and Karl Whitfield (@KarlWhitfieldme) over at Portio Research for great stats and terrific insights!

Thanks also to the many experts and authorities who have shared learnings and lessons to provide the industry with a roadmap, one that will allow companies across the ecosystem to plot the transformational path their business needs to follow to succeed in this exciting new digital economy.

• Aditya Kurejkar, Money 2020 @money2020expo
• Alejandro Martinez, GSMA LA @GSMALatam
• Austin Murray, textPlus @textPlus
• Coleen Carey, Urban Airship @urbanairship
• David NG, SingTel @SingTel
• Declan Lonergan, Yankee Group @dlonergan @YankeeGroup
• Ed Chao, MetroPCS @MetroPCS
• Elena Sacco, GSMA @GSMA
• Eusebio Fulguera, Telefónica @Telefonica
• Gene Lew, MediaFriends @MediaFriends
• Gil Genio, Globe Telecom @ggenio
• Incheul Park, Korea Telecom
• James Middleton, Telecoms.com @telecomsjames @telecoms
• Madan Jagernauth, Mavenir Systems @Mavenir
• Mary Landesman, Cloudmark @cloudmark
• N Arjun, Bharti Airtel @airtelnews
• Pamela Clark-Dickson, Informa @PamelaC_D
• Ramsey Masri, Aylus Network
• Ranjeet Wilkhu, Neucom Solutions
• Richard Midgett, PCCW @PCCWGlobal
• Richard Morecroft, Qtel @QtelGroup @QtelQatar
• Sally Burley, The 3rd Degree
• Suresh Sidhu, Celcom Axiata @Celcom_Axiata
• Steve Largent, CTIA @CTIA
• Yasmina McCarty GSMA MMU @gsmammu

Finally, my appreciation to the many executives within SAP and SAP Mobile Services who provided their input and insights: Gregory Dunn, Howard Stevens, Jens Amail, John Candish, John Sims, Mark Weait, Matthew Talbot (@talbot_sap), Matthew Tonkin, Michael Van Veen, Mitul Ruparelia, Robert Rose, Stephen Gatien and William Dudley (@wdudley2009).

Disclaimer: SAP Mobile Services is a MobileGroove client collaborating with  Peggy Anne Salz to research and write strategic thought leadership and collateral including the new Mobile Operator Guide 2013 and the upcoming Mobile Commerce Guide 2013, slated for release later this year.

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• Newsbyte: SAP Survey at Mobile World Congress 2013 Reveals New Services Will Drive Adoption of LTE

This is the key takeaway of COMMUNICATE, CONNECT & CURATE: 3 ways you can encourage mobile app re-engagement with SMS, a new whitepaper that I have written based on input from mobile interaction specialist tyntec and interviews with mobile authorities including Tomi Ahonen and Jon Mew, Director of Mobile & Operations, IAB UK.

Drawing from these insights the white paper identifies three rules for app success:

• Communicate: Reach out with what matters most, make your customers interested – and make it a no-brainer
• Connect: Help your users share the apps they love with in-app invites
• Curate: Take charge of your app and build a community

This new white paper also picks up where my first white paper, Achieving App Impact: Using SMS To Encourage Interaction, Drive Loyalty, left off. There I presented reasons why mobile app developers should harness text messaging to ‘mobilize’ their app marketing and — ultimately — delight their target audience. (Read the summary analysis here.)

App case studies

In this new white paper we go one step further, using real-life case studies to show how companies are using messaging to make real money.

In the case of BLUE LION mobile GmbH — a German company that has developed Qeep, one of the world’s largest mobile social discovery platforms with more than 16 million users in over 200 countries— text messaging is used to reach and retain high-value Qeep users. In practice, BLUE LION has developed a detailed process to reach and reactivate app users who haven’t used their app for days or weeks, and bring them back into the community. These targeted campaigns achieve an impressive response rate of “slightly above 10 percent.”

Meantime, GET IT Mobile Inc., a U.S.-based company that provides app publishers a unified platform for delivering mobile apps from any online or offline marketing channel to any mobile device, regardless of operator, platform, app store or delivery method — uses text messaging to wrest the control of the user experience back from app stores.

In this scenario, GET IT establishes a one-click or one-text call-to-action that makes it  a no-brainer for users to download the apps they want. Why should app developers go the trouble of sending a download link directly to the user’s mobile phone? Because it’s smart business. As Steve Gleitsmann, GET IT President, puts it: “Telling your audience to find your app in an app store is like sending them into a warehouse piled high with competing products. “Using a mechanism like text “ensures that people download your app when they get to the app store, not a similar app from your competitor.”

GET IT also manages the user experience in a unique and clever way because it cookies people though the engagement experience and therefore has the ability to pass that information to the app. As a result, the platform can continue the interaction that prompted the user to download the app in the first place. (However, this is not a default behavior and has to be incorporated by the app developer).

So let’s say that a user is reading a breaking news article on a web page and then decides to download the app. The GET IT platform can make sure that the first page they see after installing the app opens to the page containing the linked news article. In other words, all users have to do is click on the link GET IT sends as part of the text message and they can literally access the app and the content where they left off.

Tomi Ahonen: Communities Dominate Apps

The white paper also highlights concrete ways app developers could use text messaging to enable — and monetize — conversations between community members, and provide a valuable feedback channel to show they listen to what their users have to say.

A huge hat tip to Tomi Ahonen, an independent consultant included in the Forbes list of the Top 10 Power Influencers in Mobile, for his great ideas on how app developers can borrow a page from the business models of LinkedIn (premium) and other major social networks and charge to broker the contact between members.

His advice to mobile app developers: Build your own community, and create ties that bind by enabling frequent ‘conversations’ via SMS. You will not only encourage engagement; you will build stickiness into your app.

Watch the conversions

Whether you are an individual app developer poised to take your good idea to greater heights, or a company mapping out a more comprehensive engagement strategy with mobile apps at the center, it’s both exciting and terrifying to think about the opportunities ahead. But don’t limit yourself to strategies that drive, measure and monetize app installs. There are also huge opportunities around app re-engagement.

Don’t think this is just for the benefit of your customer. There is also a hard-nosed business model at play here because campaigns that only count app installs are on the way out.

According to Peter Hamilton — CEO of HasOffers, a company offering tracking software for performance marketing complete with a MobileAppTracking solution, which is integrated with every major mobile ad network ­—there’s s shift underway to thinking about (and monetizing) re-engagement after the install. Significantly, this paves the way for affiliate programs that recognize — and reward —ad networks, publishers and even other app companies for the contributions they make.

Again, text marketing belongs in the toolkit of capabilities companies need to trigger deeper engagement after the install — and get paid for it.

My take:

As I stated in a recent press release: “The endgame is all about engagement after the install. Encourage it through your app, strengthen it with sharing and cement it with community. But don’t stop with your users. You can also create, cultivate and nurture a business ecosystem that will recognize — and reward — all players for doing their part to re-engage your users— again and again.  CLICK THE BANNER TO DOWNLOAD THE MOBILEGROOVE WHITE PAPER

The acquisition can be read as a starting gun for a new race in a new space, and smart companies are already jockeying for position, building the capabilities to take advantage of massive opportunity at the intersection of our social chatter and the entertainment we watch and want to share.

The timing could be better to recount the news and views from SocialTVConf, a conference cleverly dedicated to this hot topic that made its debut in London. Hosting keynotes and discussions on topics ranging from the success of celebrity social media management to the what is driving multi-screen audience engagement, the inaugural conference drew a large and diverse audience — as broad as this new business ecosystem itself.

Here’s my pick of three presentations/discussions that provided the deepest insights and best direction:

Social@Ogilvy stresses analytics

This presentation, hosted by James Whatley, Senior Associate Director at Social@Ogilvy, outlined some of the mistakes the industry makes — and can avoid. Addressing the three key players (broadcasters, agencies, brands) James provided valuable advice and boldly begged the question: Is social TV any good?

• Social TV could be better. Broadcasters need to learn that TV is a one- way medium, and that they have to include, not exclude other channels that enhance the experience. Isolation doesn’t work — neither do twitter walls or attempts to somehow separate our tweets (and conversation) from context. As he put it: the consumer is there to watch content, so why would they care?
• Agencies need to “think things through.” Sure, it’s about stimulating conversations around brands and campaigns, but it’s also about measuring real results. James gave the example of #DriveTime (which he also details on his blog here). He showed that, in the case of #drivetime, a Twitter conversation does indeed gather momentum, but it also creates more than buzz. It creates a lot of data that can be hugely useful – if companies analyze it for patterns and even hidden opportunities.
• Brands need to wake up: It’s all about their objectives. If they want to sell something using social TV, then be social. This doesn’t mean stick up a Twitter wall; it means thinking outside of the box. As James put it: Since people aren’t really looking at advertising (perhaps because they are too busy looking at their phones) brands have to get in front of us on our terms. That interaction will take place through social media. If you want to achieve your objectives, then get social!

Peggy adds: James’ presentation (below) is packed with insights and straight-talk you would expect from an industry veteran and social media marketing authority. Great stuff, James!

SOURCE: http://www.slideshare.net/whatleydude/social-tv-confwhatley130122

***

Tiffany St James: Move from schedule-based to behavior-based content

The advance of multi-screen experiences (mobile, tablet, console) and the flexibility offered by providers such as Netflix, Hulu and YouView allow people to watch programs when and how they want. Against this backdrop  Tiffany warns broadcasters that the time is NOW for broadcasters to integrate social media campaigns as part of their overall strategy rather than rely on pot luck. She urges broadcasters to decide their strategy( partner directly with social networks or build their own platforms for more control and ad revenue — or a mix of both) and start creating valuable content that extends the story outside of the show.

Tiffany connects the dots in studies from sources such as Ericsson to provide a picture of this new segment.

• 62 percent use social media such as Twitter while watching TV, an increase of 18 percent since 2011
• 12 percent of new U.K. TV shows have Facebook pages, compared with more than double (30 percent) in the U.S. Nonetheless, there are signs that U.K. gets the importance to start being social even before the show starts. UK show The Voice had an impressive 24,885 Twitter followers before broadcast
• For 18–25 year olds Facebook is the desired medium with 25 percent using the social networking site to express opinions etc about TV content, compared to 10 percent using Twitter.

SOURCE: http://fr.slideshare.net/SocialTVConference/socialtvconf-presentations-22113-tiffany-st-james-director-of-stimulation

***

@SecondSync: Real-time engagement is really valuable

Social media has completely changed the rules, turning static information into fluid content that we control (and influence). But what is the real — and quantifiable — impact of all on business and brands? For Ted Littledale, Product Director at SecondSync, a company offering social media analytics, tweets are DE FACTO CURRENCY for SocialTV. Thus, the success of a social TV campaign can be quickly determined by the number of tweets it generates. His presentation takes us on a tour of top U.K. shows and their value measured by the conversations they sparked on Twitter.

• Currently there are 6 million Twitter users who discuss TV. That’s 60 percent of total Twitter users in the U.K. Not an audience, or an opportunity, you would want to miss.
• A single onscreen hashtag can generate 10,000s of tweets, and 750 program per day, it seems ridiculous not to integrate social into TV programming or brand advertising.
• Ted predicts that 2013 will see social become a kind of secondary currency in TV media planning — and this will make it critical for broadcasters to integrate social, encourage interaction and measure the results.

SOURCE: http://www.slideshare.net/SocialTVConference/socialtvconf-presentations-22113-ted-littledale-product-director-at-secondsync

Editor’s note:

This regular feature, which highlights the key takeaways from mobile reports and insights important to running your business, is curated by Sophie Young , a member of the éclat team who has a passion for mobile trends, apps and her new Galaxy Note. If you have a report or survey you think should be included in this regular roundup, then reach out to Sophie directly via email sophie@eclat.co.uk or Twitter (@PheeYoung).

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It’s a fledgling market poised for explosive growth, and a mobile app mega-trend  highlighted in my new book The Everything Guide To Mobile Apps: A Practical Guide To Affordable Mobile App Development For Your Business (F+W Media Inc.), which is now available for pre-order via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and slated for release as a book — and later an e-book — on March 18. This book brings together the insights of 25+ mobile professionals, practitioners and pundits to identify market trends, best practices and lessons learned in developing and distributing mobile apps.

This article is the first in a series of in-depth posts drawing from the input and insights of expert contributors (see list below) to help make your app a success. We kick off with valuable advice to app companies wanting to break into the lucrative enterprise app market offered by Mike Anderson, CEO and Founder, Chelsea Apps Factory, a company that made the shift from consumer-focused fun apps to company-centric utilities over a year ago, and has been counting the money ever since.

In the case of the Chelsea Apps Factory, the focus on the enterprise was a happy accident. The company started out, like the vast majority of app makers with a sharp focus on developing consumer-facing apps — either as standalone apps, or apps on behalf of ad agencies, media companies and popular brands. That was before the company discovered that the enterprise market is the untapped opportunity.

Today the company has grown a whopping 135 percent and is listed among the top five companies in EMEA  that can produce industrial strength apps. More recently, the company was nominated one of the top 50 innovative companies by Mobile Entertainment. Its clients include Deloitte, Guoman Hotel Group,  Waitrose, BP, Mumset and Vodafone.

What is the size and scope of the enterprise app opportunity?

In a word: huge.

Big companies are hungry for business apps. In fact, nearly 4 in 5 large companies would like to purchase mobile applications for various business uses, according to a survey (via Supply Management) of company execs conducted and published by Partnerpedia, a mobile app development services company.

But don’t expect them to buy apps from popular apps stores managed by the likes of Apple. The business community takes issue with purchasing business tool apps through these consumer-focused stores for a variety of reasons. The top reason is a lack of business focus, a concern named by nearly 58 percent of respondents. Other concerns focus on the inability to own or control app licenses and the potential problems associated with security (or rather a lack of it). Additionally, organizations also cited a lack of volume purchasing or PO purchasing as another reason why they would prefer not to purchase apps from consumer-focused stores.

Sensing a business opportunity major software vendors are hoping to follow in Apple’s footsteps and open up their own so-called enterprise app stores, which sell not only their software but software and services from an ecosystem of partners and resellers. It should be noted that the term “enterprise app store” is used in this case as a vendor-hosted electronic marketplace serving up apps to customers. This shouldn’t be confused with another meaning of enterprise app store, whereby a company serves up apps (usually mobile ones) to employees.

Global software giant SAP has launched the SAP Store, and more are sure to follow. The SAP Store serves up some 1,500 different solutions across computing categories: mobile, cloud, on-premise, PC-based. Hundreds of solutions are added every quarter. Apps can vary in price from a few bucks to millions of dollars. SAP’s 190,000 enterprise customers around the world have access to the store. A couple of million unique visitors came into the store in the first year. SAP is now actively recruiting app developers with a dedicated partner program.

The next years will see an avalanche of enterprise apps and app stores. But don’t assume they will be as simple as consumer focused app stores. Mike warns us that enterprise apps stores are wrought with challenges and confronted with issues ranging from app certification to neutrality (because the software vendors who manage them are loathe to promote similar apps from industry competitors).

Enterprise app stores hold a lot of potential, yet it’s difficult to define the market, but that isn’t keeping app developers from flocking to take advantage of the opportunity. Studies from Appcelerator and IDC note that developers are turning away from consumer games to the more clearly defined business application. Interestingly, it’s a niche where Microsoft could stake its turf because a significant number of business users want a tablet that is completely compatible with Windows systems and about a third of respondents said they were ‘very interested’ in Windows 8 tablets and apps.

Made to order

Organizations striving to achieve or maintain a competitive edge are increasingly turning to mobile apps to help them respond to business needs more promptly and effectively.

Recent research supports that trend: A survey conducted by IDG Research Services found that IT leaders believe mobility will play a key role in their ability to increase efficiency, control costs, and improve customer service. It is estimated that by 2017, the global enterprise mobility market will be nearly $174 billion, according to a report by Global Industry Analysts. New, more powerful mobile devices – namely tablets and smartphones – and mobile business apps on them are, and will continue to, help drive this trend.

What are the apps enterprises want most? Fortunately, Mike has a list of enterprise ‘need-to-have’ features and functionality to help you focus your efforts and resources:

• Management: Apps that help companies conduct paperless meetings or take notes securely
• Marketing: Apps that help the company connect with its customers and explain/demonstrate key value services, products or broad-brush value propositions
• Sales: Apps that offer presentation tools equipping the mobile workforce to sell to customers on the spot
• Finance: Apps that enhance business cash flow or allow staff to input time

General Electric shines the way

A great example is GE (General Electric). Fortunately, I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Andy Markowitz (@andymarkowitz), GE’s Director, Global Digital Strategy to discuss the role of apps — and mobile — in the company’s strategy. The bottom line: GE is a pioneer, and it was a privilege to speak with Andy. The company that doesn’t just offer apps; it has cleverly positioned these apps at the center of a comprehensive strategy to engage with it’s customers and build loyalty. In this way, GE satisfies customers by allowing them to engage in ways they weren’t able to do before these mobile apps were created.

An example is an iPad app it developed for its gas turbines business, called Energy Transformers.  It enables customers to remotely monitor the performance of their turbines.  Through this remote monitoring, customers can optimize engines, and/or understand which ones need service, which ones need maintenance, which ones need attention, etc. without having to actually send someone out there.

But not all apps are so technical ­— and some are downright fun to use. Patient Shuffle is a game that literally uses gamification to illustrate the difficulty of running an emergency room and attempts to provide a hospital management software solution for these complexities.  The game basically shows how patients enter an operating room, then move onto a cardiology room, then to a recovery room.  The user matches the patients with doctors and moves them through the full hospital experience from entry to release.

GE are prolific app developers.  The company has created a mobile Center of Excellence within its IT group that has developed more than 90 apps for iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.  The apps were developed with the customer in mind and tailored to specific audiences.

Numbers speak volumes

According to Gartner’s latest worldwide IT spending forecast, global IT spending in enterprise software and apps has grown to $253 billion in Q4 2010 from $228 billion in Q4 2008, with a low point of $224 billion in Q4 2009. This represents a 7.5 percent growth over the 4-year stretch.

Connect the dots, and more companies are going to be needing more mobile apps to do more tasks. It’s early days, but app developers like Chelsea App Factory are preparing now for increased demand from enterprise clients for custom apps.

How can you prepare for the impact when enterprise apps hit?

Again, Mike has worthwhile and practical device.

If you’re a developer, don’t dismiss Window and Microsoft just yet. It would appear with Apple’s 68 percent share of the tablet market for now iPads are the winner.  But you should also keep an eye out for Window 8 because Microsoft traditionally enjoys deep ties with the enterprise, relationships that will likely sit more favorably with the C-level executives at companies everywhere.

If you’re a business thinking about mobile apps for your workforce, get in now. The companies with smart enterprise apps will have a fast-mover advantage when it comes to improving business efficiencies and making staff feel (and function) as if they were at the bleeding-edge of technology.

And keep in mind there is a shortage of quality development capability, so if you are a business looking to impress with enterprise apps, find your supplier now and lock them down.  There are not enough developers out there able to meet the demand.

Editor’s note:

It’s been crazy-busy at MobileGroove and it’s great to come back  and be able to present the key takeaways of the Everything Guide To Mobile Apps. More excerpts, exclusive interviews and  insights from our roster of contributors here on MobileGroove — and look for a new companion series over at untetherTV.You may also want to tune in to hear me on the LinkedIn Lady show, where I share the TEN THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MOBILE APPS. 

Meantime, a round of thanks to the book’s amazing and expert guest contributors:

• Akash Sureka, Hoopz @akashsureka
• Alfred DeRose, Tego Interactive @AlfredDeRose
• Andy Bovingdon, Bango @bangodotcom
• Asif Khan, the Location Based Marketing Association @AsifRKhan
• Chris Jones, CodeNgo @AppSubmissions
• Daniel Appelquist at Blue Via @BlueVia
• Derek Newell at Jiff @dereknewell
• Ed Vause, Appromoter @Appromoter
• Gary Schwartz, Impact Mobile @ImpulseEconomy
• Heini Vesander, Blaast @Blaast
• Helen Keegan, Heroes of the Mobile Fringe @technokitten
• Itay Gadot, Inneractive @Itay_Gadot
• James (Coops) Cooper, Mobyaffiliates @mobyaffiliates
• Jennifer Hiley, (formerly WeLoveMobile) @jenniferhiley
• Jez Harper, Tús Nua Designs @tusnuadesigns
• Jonathan Kohl, Kohl Concepts, Inc. @jonathan_kohl
• Joy Liuzzo, Wave Collapse @joyliuzzo
• Ken Herron, social marketer and ‘cool hunter’ @KenHerron
• Linda Daichendt, MTAM @MTAMLinda
• Lisa Ciangiulli, Optism @Optism
• Magnus Jern, Golden Gekko @MagicMagnus
• Martin Rugfelt, Expertmaker @expertmakertool
• Martin Wilson, The Mobile Web Company @mobilewebCo
• Matos Kapetenakis, VisionMobile @visionmobile
• Matt Lutz, AppClover @AppClover
• Mike Anderson, Chelsea Apps Factory @ChelseaApps
• Moshe Vaknin, YouAppi @YouAPPI
• Paolo de Santis, ChupaMobile @chupamobile
• Paul Poutanen, Mob4Hire @Mob4hire
• Phil Hendrix, immr @Phil_Hendrix
• Rimma Perelmuter, Mobile Entertainment Forum @MEF
• Rob Woodbridge, untetherTV @RobWoodbridge
• Ryan Morel, Placeplay @ryanmorel
• Sam Chan, Wireless Industry Partnership @wipjam
• Scott Townsend, Urban Airship @urbanairship
• Stu Arnott, Spark Inspires @MindingsStu
• Suzie Mitchell, boomer expert at Mitchell PR @suziemitchell
• Tomi Ahonen, best-selling author and consultant @tomiahonen
• Viki Zabala, Fiksu @Fiksu
• Yasmina Haryono, Fjord @yasmina

In the last shopping days before the holidays my guest is Michael Becker—North America Managing Director for the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and a leader in the mobile marketing industry. He’s active in the industry as an entrepreneur, an academic and a recipient of  the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation Rising Stars Award for his tremendous contribution to the mobile and direct marketing industries.

I caught up with Michael (@mobiledirect) earlier this week to discuss the results of a joint survey conducted by Sybase 365, a provider of mobile messaging and mobile commerce services belonging to SAP, and the MMA. [Press release]

The survey of 1,000 consumers in the U.S. confirms mobile’s profound influence on consumer shopping behavior this holiday season. One startling stat says it all: the vast majority (or 87 percent) of respondents said they are reaching to their mobile devices to make a purchasing decisions.

This dovetails with other holiday-time research that shows how people are using their mobile phones for comparing prices, researching deals and coupons, locating product reviews, and tracking loyalty points. In fact, a similar survey conducted by Sybase 365 and the MMA last year found that 62 percent of respondents said they would use their mobile device to help them make purchasing decisions. Clearly, this new survey shows that consumers today are eager to use their mobile device as a transaction tool.

I asked Michael to compare the two studies, discuss the findings and map out the bigger trends, including the increasing importance of mobile to drive results across the entire purchase funnel.

Among the highlights:

MOBILE IS A MUST: As Michael puts it: “It’s a siren call that is putting up a mandate, become mobile or become irrelevant.” But marketers need to “be careful not to put old world paradigms or mental mindsets on what we consider to be media and/or sales channels.” Mobile is both a stand-alone channel and a “connective tissue” that binds and bridges the digital and physical worlds.

MOBILE CHANGES THE RULES: And the holidays shows the tremendous impact of mobile on — everything. “We always talk about Black Friday or that weekend being the biggest sales weekend for marketers.  EBay just came out noting that December 9 was actually the biggest day that they’ve ever had with mobile, in terms of mobile commerce.” Mobile is transforming shopping and “we’re going to see that trend happening more and more.” It’s a trend Michael also calls “mobile warming, if you will.”

ADCOLONY HIGHLIGHTS: AdColony just presented a cross-screen study showing how adding mobile/tablet to a television/movie experience actually increased purchase intent significantly. [Check out the webinar for more results.]

CONTEXT GETS DEEPER/BETTER: Location is just the tip of the iceberg. Moving forward, mobile is going to “develop a number of additional layers of context such as: purchase intent, where am I in the store within a matter of inches, am I in the aisle in front of that product?  Within an hour of the flight, within two days of a flight, what kind of interaction can I be having with the consumer?” And then there is advance context to consider such as: what direction I’m going, what speed I am going, what floor of the building or aisle am I on, what direction am I facing, is it light or dark out?  All of that context will play a role in terms of how the marketer wants to interact with the consumer.” The advance of sensors and sensory networks (in addition to device features such as the accelerometer) mean that “digital exhaust” is being produced that can be aggregated, consolidated and leveraged — and “used for the benefit of the consumer and the relationship they have with the rest of the world, including the marketer.”

These are just a few of the insights that Michael shared, and I encourage you to listen in to the podcast (below) for great examples of companies leading the way, such as Safeway and it’s trail-blazing approach to truly personalized shopping and loyalty.

You can also download the Velti white paper Michael mentioned here. Among its key findings, the research reveals that most mobile marketing spend is allocated to upper-funnel tactics. Specifically, among the executives surveyed, 90 percent use mobile advertising tactics, while only 48 percent use mobile marketing tactics to engage with their customers.

My take:

Consumers are reaching for their devices every step of the journey— creating new opportunities all year (not just at the holidays) for marketers to use mobile in their cross-media strategies. Michael also stressed the increasing importance of context, particularly as trillions of sensors, as well as intelligence in the devices and in the networks, allow marketers to deliver more relevant marketing to more precise audiences. As he correctly points out: The challenge to marketers will be how to adapt and extract the real value out of this so-called data exhaust to delight the customer. So, will your company need to have a Chief Experience Officer in 2013? It’s a tough one to call. But it’s clear it won’t be business — or mobile marketing ­ — as usual in the New Year.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE. [24:00]

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Social media is no longer “optional.” Marketers MUST not only listen, but also actively participate in the online communities in which their customers are talking about their companies. More importantly, they must have prepared a plan of action to follow to avoid a social media meltdown.

The marketing teams at Gap, KitchenAid, and Celeb Boutique need no convincing. They experienced some of the nastiest social media crises of 2012, showing us that the worst social media disaster isn’t the one marketers cause themselves, but the one for which they have not prepared. The Altimeter Group found a whopping 76 percent of the social media disasters companies reported could have been avoided – if the companies had been better prepared.”

NOW is the time to kick off your New Year with a written social media disaster response plan to which all of your organization’s functional departments (don’t forget Legal/Compliance!) have agreed. Social crises can and do happen, even when we’ve done everything “right” to prevent them. It’s therefore critical to the financial health of our organizations to create – and rehearse – a formal social media response plan. No matter where you are or what you market, this is marketers’ number one priority for 2013!

A reminder that the opinions expressed here are my own. They come from my hands-on experience managing social marketing content and campaigns, leading social marketing teams, and consulting for social marketing clients. Your organization and brand are unique! Use what works for you. Toss the rest! Do you disagree with any of my guidelines, or think I have forgotten something? Please share your experiences with us in the comments section below, so we can continue the discussion and the learning.

To start, thank you for your question! When positive or negative content goes viral on a social channel, it requires marketers to act fast — and smart. The increasing ubiquity of mobile devices and apps, and the *explosion* in mobile video in 2013 mean the world is waiting to rave about your successes…and rant about your (perceived and real) failures. Let’s be crystal clear: This is not about image; this is about revenue. Good crisis management practices will mitigate the negative impact that social media goofs, disasters, and crises – self-initiated or not – would otherwise have on your revenues.

As regular MobileGroove readers know, I like to share both strategy and execution (let’s do this, and here’s how!). Here is my cheat sheet to help you assemble an immediately actionable social media response plan that makes sense for your organization. In it, I describe the various social media problems or “challenges” for marketers and identify the current best practice(s) to deliver the best results. I also share some of my favorite social media goofs from 2012 [in green], showing what can really happen and why a social media response plan is essential. While many of these goofs were truly innocent, they still had a serious (and sometimes fatal) consequences. When marketers mismanaged the situation, the result was a full-blown social media meltdown that had a significant negative impact on 2012 revenues.

Challenge #1: Social Authority

Your company is a media company. Period, full stop. While this simple statement of fact would have been inconceivable to a brand manager (or CEO) just five years ago, it’s a given that much of a brand’s Klout [sic] is now earned through their content. It’s not just about having influence online, it’s about managing effectively in a space where you are no longer the default authority on your own brand’s products and services. Think of social media as the great equalizer. Social media enables every person on the planet with a connected device to build influence and authority by sharing what they think about your brand. And it doesn’t even have to be accurate!

Best Practice: Presence

As a marketer, you are [hopefully!] already actively sharing, participating, and engaging on all of the social networks your customers are on. I include in these, the “review” sites – such as Yelp, TripIt, TripAdvisor, and Foursquare – where your customers (and target customers) are talking about your brand. Taking part in these conversations is the lynchpin of your crisis management strategy. Your goal here is to become the authority for your brand, build relationships with people and — ultimately — cultivate an audience of “brand fans.” Once you have created a community of brand advocates you can also reach out to them, in real-time, for ideas, insights – and help!

A great example of this is how diapers/nappies brand Pampers “pampers” its mommy bloggers, so these brand fans can quash rumors and inaccurate information about Pampers’ products the moment they appear online, anywhere on the planet. In a way, it’s similar to how tech companies have been befriending industry analysts for decades. At the end of the day, it’s about forging positive working relationships with your brand’s social influencers. And yes, this means you need to know who they are! Using social networks to connect with influencers and encourage brand advocates ensures you have valuable allies, who are willing and able to help you to get your message out when disaster strikes. They may even help you to avert a social media disaster altogether!

United Breaks Guitars taught everyone (unfortunately, except United) the high price a company can pay when it fails to make things right for a customer and correct a simple service delivery mistake.

Challenge #2: “Official Spokesperson”

Remember when organizations had a “company spokesperson”? This single, highly-trained person was designated as the only person authorized to speak on behalf of a company, and the media respected their position. Today, social media provides everyone in your company a platform to speak out — and be heard. Any post on any social network by any employee in your organization is “official and on-the-record” as far as the media is concerned. Moreover, every form of digital content (texts, photos, videos) can go viral in a heartbeat.

Best Practice: Consistent Messaging

It used to be the responsibility of skilled (in-house or agency) PR professionals to create and communicate for an organization during a crisis. Today, those talking points should be created by a team with representatives from each of the company’s customer-facing organizations [yes, you can still let your communications and legal/compliance heads in the room] and shared/distributed widely. How wide is widely? Everyone who touches the customer must now have the “talking points” that used to reside exclusively with PR and executives.

It’s also helpful to remind your entire employee population of your organization’s social media guidelines on a regular basis just as you do your organization’s Code of Conduct. Of course, listing what should be included in your social media guidelines (and why) would fill another column. In the meantime, here are some basics to get you started:

• Think before you post
• Negative online comments about employees and/or customers are grounds for disciplinary action up to and including dismissal
• Employees should NEVER “fight” online, with anyone, for any reason
• Communications with unhappy customers should be taken offline as soon as practical

The goal during a crisis is consistent messaging across ALL media channels, online and off!

#QantasLuxury taught organizations not to be tone-deaf to current events when launching [even long-planned] social media marketing campaigns.

Challenge #3: 24x7x365

In our crazy global mobile wired world, it’s not just that everyone, customer or not, has the opportunity to tell the world what they think of your organization. The real challenge is that social media is always “open”. In fact, nights and weekends, in every time zone, are often social media rush hours, so plan your resources accordingly.

Best Practice: Social Listening

Identify and use the right tools to suit the size of your organization to “actively listen” to what your customers are saying about you around the clock online. Solopreneurs and smaller organizations can make great use of free social media monitoring tools such as Google Alerts and the tracking tools already built into each social network (such as Twitter Search). Mid-size organizations, with dedicated marketing resources and budget, may be best served by products such as Brandwatch, Hootsuite, and Vocus. And the largest organizations (ones that have abundant, available  IT resources) may save money by investing in creating their own solutions. Remember, even the fanciest tools are worthless if you don’t use them!

Gap and American Apparel taught all of us NOT to be clever during natural disasters by offering Hurricane Sandy-themed discounts.

Challenge #4: Public Relations

Just a few years ago, larger companies had lovely little remote islands they called Public Relations. Each PR island had a high, thick wall, and life in the silo was good. So good in fact, that many companies decided to outsource their public relations functions altogether to reduce costs. This left few, if any, “in-house” experts to manage (let alone plan for and prevent) social media disasters.

Best Practice: Integrated Planning

With response times of minutes instead of hours or days, the traditional functional boundaries between departments can easily escalate a social goof into a full-scale disaster. The winning approach is the one that tears down the walls between your functional departments of Public Relations, Marketing, Employee Communications (often under HR), Legal/Compliance, and customer-facing organizations such as Sales and Customer Service. In fact, the most effective social media response plans are those built with input from each organization. But it’s not enough to draft a plan; they must also be rehearsed to make sure everyone knows their role when the tweet hits the fan. We rehearse fire drills to learn what to do in case of an emergency, and we need to treat social media response planning the same way. Ask yourself: which will have a greater revenue impact on your organization? A small fire in the employee lounge, or a toxic post that goes viral online? One may be expensive, but the other may close your business.

The Wienergate sex scandal taught executives everywhere that if they can’t keep it in their pants, to at least keep it offline.

Risky business

Social media never sleeps. So, it’s obvious that the speed of online communications will always be faster than your organization’s legal and content review cycles. I now routinely see professional industry analysts and journalists live-tweeting press events as part of their coverage, repeating, analyzing, and interpreting (if not always correctly…) what executives say as they say it. Ask yourself: Would YOUR legal department be nimble enough to review (and approve!) corrections to inaccurate product information or company earnings posted (!) online while a company event is still in progress? If your answer is ‘no’, then it is your responsibility to both teach your company the ‘new’ rules, and drive the required changes in your corporate culture that are required to support them.

Let’s recap. Actively participating on the social networks your customers are on is the best possible “prevention” for social media disasters. Leverage technology to monitor social media 24x7x365. Actively monitor conversations about your organizations and its principles. Respond to both positive and negative discussions. When someone posts a negative review about your brand, product, or service, first determine whether the review is accurate. If the negative content is valid, own it, fix it/make it right, and reply to the person who posted it, thanking them for bringing this to your attention.

If the information is inaccurate, consider NOT responding to the post yourself. (Remember, don’t feed the trolls – trolls WANT a reaction, so don’t satisfy them by giving them one!) Instead, let your brand fans respond for you as they will almost always be better able to correct inaccurate information without being salesy or defensive. It’s also important to note that censoring or deleting negative comments on sites you control [other than for language that violates your terms and conditions] usually exacerbates the situation.

As always, maintain your cool AND your sense of humor. Your company requires your leadership on this.

For more information on issue management/crisis communications in general, and social media crisis disaster communications in particular, I recommend the following resources:

• http://www.radian6.com/resources/library/radian6-social-media-monitoring-and-engagement-playbook/
• http://www.pr-squared.com/index.php/2011/07/social-media-crisis-communications
• http://ackermannpr.com/crisis-communications-social-media-plan/
• http://www.academicimpressions.com/news/including-social-media-your-crisis-communications-plan

What are the most effective ways have YOU have found to actively manage social media disasters when they hit? How do YOU bring together your company’s different departments to plan, prepare, and (most importantly!) rehearse? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

Editor’s note: Do you have a question about social marketing technologies, tools, and best practices? Tweet your question with the hashtag “#DearKen”.  All tweets will be acknowledged, and considered as being submitted for publication.

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Eric Petersen, director of new media, Caesars Entertainment, sees “four components” to mobile.

First, mobile Web is used to get consumers to Caesars’ properties — allowing them to make reservations.  Second, SMS is mainly used to reach consumers that are in market — sending them exclusive offers, deals and reminders. Third, mobile applications are “hotel-specific to enhance customer experience” — and these apps deliver value by enabling customers to access and use concierge services, room service and make dining reservations.

“Finally, Petersen noted, “we use QR codes on print advertising and on-site signage to increase the level of interactivity consumers can have with our brands.”

Petersen is wise to provide consumers choice and let them decide how (mobile, Web, on-site) they want to interact with his properties. He also correctly assumes that his customers have a certain level of sophistication and mobile savvy.

But there is a bar to reach. Brands have to deliver their customers a mobile-optimized website and experience. “Without it,” he argued, “you will give the consumer a bad experience and risk that they will never return.”

What’s more, with search being one of the most popular activities on a mobile device, it is imperative that search results lead to an optimal user experience. “This is why brands must optimize their sites for mobile, and [why] mobile Web will still lead as the main channel next year,” he said.

Petersen may work in glitzy Las Vegas, but the lights don’t blind him to what works in mobile — and what fails.

This is why Caesars’ mobile strategy is squarely focused on delivering user experiences that provide value.

“Mobile is making things easier for consumers,” he said. “You can deposit a check, book a flight or make a dinner reservation. As marketers, we need to keep this in mind. Mobile is here to solve problems.”

And it shouldn’t just be about solving the problems of a select group of individuals (distinguished by their high-end devices or huge appetite for apps). This is why Petersen has purposely included tried-and-true text messaging in his marketing mix. Unsexy, yes. But it is effective. “SMS is an important factor for engagement,” he said. “It’s the only medium that offers 100-percent reach.”

HOW I SEE IT: As I’ve written before — here on MobileGroove and across the other destinations where I contribute guest posts — the travel and tourism vertical gets mobile. Marketers in this industry are among the most active — and most effective.  From enabling people to make last-minute bookings using only their mobile phones, to driving on-premises customers to nearby restaurants and shows, companies in this vertical have proven mobile provides convenience and immediacy. Caesars is another great example showing the way forward. As we look to 2013, you have to wonder whether Augmented Reality (AR), a technology gaining serious traction in mobile marketing, might not also hit it big in Vegas (and elsewhere) in 2013. After all, Las Vegas is surely a great fit (can you think of a place more distant from reality?). Granted, usage is small. But next year might be the time for AR to get its day in the big lights.

Mobile Breakfast highlights

Regular readers of this site know how smart Chetan Sharma is about mobile. His quarterly mobile data reports are chock-full of key data points and his events  — where MobileGroove is a media partner — are must-attend and standing-room-only. In the past week, he hosted a breakfast event to discuss the state of the mobile industry and where we’re headed next year.

Panelists included:

• Tracy Isacke – Director of Investments, Telefónica Digital
• Todd Achilles – VP, Mobility – Americas, HP/formerly with HTC, T-Mobile
• Omar Javaid – Managing Director and SVP, BBO Global/former VP – Google/Motorola
• Zaw Thet – Advisor, Signia Venture Partners/founder 4Info

As expected, the conversation was high-level and honest, not the kind of gathering where you hear hype and outrageous debate about the potential of the mobile wallet replacing cash by next Tuesday, for example.

I’ve gathered some of the best moments and comments here:

Isacke from Telefónica:

• On free messaging apps cutting into operator revenues: “Shame on us as carriers for not innovating in #SMS” like WhatsApp has done.”
• On the dominance of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android: “It’s “unhealthy” to have a duopoly.
• On wireless adoption: There is still a huge ramp in “normal communities” for wireless adoption versus super-connected places like California.

And there were other noteworthy nuggets. Javaid, for example, commented on the tremendous growth of mobile. As he put it, mobile is “not a first world phenomenon – it’s everywhere.” Meantime, Achilles struck down the myth that one product (or device) could satisfy every need and want. “Every device is a compromise” for users, he flatly stated.

HOW I SEE IT: I met Chetan Sharma nearly a decade ago, and getting to know him has been an ongoing and enjoyable learning experience. He consistently provides a level-headed view of our industry. And he taps invaluable examples and observation to drive his point home. He told us about a trip he took where he saw monks using jail-broken smartphones. It was that a-ha moment. “We realized we have a market,” Sharma said. Of course, he’s right. 2013 will no doubt be even more interesting (and transformational) than what we’ve seen in 2012. Happy days for mobile — and happy holidays to all.

About Lisa

Lisa Ciangiulli, Director of Marketing for Alcatel-Lucent Global Advertising Solutions, where she has been instrumental in the development and marketing of Optism, Alcatel-Lucent’s powerful permission-based mobile advertising solution. In this role, and throughout her career, Lisa has spearheaded efforts to encourage cooperation between players across the ecosystem with the ultimate goal of enabling closer communication with the consumer. In May 2010 she was named to the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) North America Board of Directors. You can follow her on Twitter (@LisaCiangiulli).

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Source: TechCrunch

Fat Fingers No Fear For Full-Screen Ads

No more Fat Finger Syndrome. Full-screen ads virtually eliminate that long-standing hazard of the banner ad, so said ValueClick’s Greystripe General Manager Kurt Hawks. Hawks pointed out that an internal study at Greystripe indicated that full-screen ads generate a conversion rate five times higher than small banner ads. He noted that, according to a Harris International estimate, 47 percent of small banner clicks are accidental – a problem commonly associated with oversized feelers. In addition, he said that larger smartphone screens and creative ad placement make full-screen advertising a key marketing strategy for 2013.

Source: Mobile Commerce Daily

Pandora and Twitter Make Magic With Mobile

According to analytics firm comScore, Pandora and Twitter mastered the mobile market in the month of September, with larger audience shares in mobile visits than desktop use. A study of user traffic revealed that Pandora can boast of a mobile audience nearly twice the size of its desktop counterparts, with 48.6 million visitors to 22.6 million. For Twitter, the lead was more narrow but impressive nonetheless, with mobile outpacing desktop use by 36.8 million to 30.6 million. ComScore VP of Industry Analysis Andrew Lipsman said, “It conforms to how people experience media brands on a day-to-day basis.”

Source: Inc.

Mobile Drives Social Media Growth

We are spending a lot of time socializing on our mobile phones – without ever making a call. According to the Nielsen Social Media Report 2012, time spent on mobile apps and the mobile web account for 63 percent of the year-to-year growth in time spent using social media. Of the nearly 160 billion minutes spent on mobile in July 2012, Americans report that 30 percent of that time is spent on social networks.  A whopping 46 percent of social media users say they use their smartphone to access social media.

Source: Nielsen

About Lisa

Lisa Ciangiulli, Director of Marketing for Alcatel-Lucent Global Advertising Solutions, where she has been instrumental in the development and marketing of Optism, Alcatel-Lucent’s powerful permission-based mobile advertising solution. In this role, and throughout her career, Lisa has spearheaded efforts to encourage cooperation between players across the ecosystem with the ultimate goal of enabling closer communication with the consumer. In May 2010 she was named to the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) North America Board of Directors. You can follow her on Twitter (@LisaCiangiulli).

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About Lisa

Lisa Ciangiulli, Director of Marketing for Alcatel-Lucent Global Advertising Solutions, where she has been instrumental in the development and marketing of Optism, Alcatel-Lucent’s powerful permission-based mobile advertising solution. In this role, and throughout her career, Lisa has spearheaded efforts to encourage cooperation between players across the ecosystem with the ultimate goal of enabling closer communication with the consumer. In May 2010 she was named to the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) North America Board of Directors. You can follow her on Twitter (@LisaCiangiulli).

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• Online sales on Thanksgiving grew by 17.4 percent followed by Black Friday where sales increased 20.7 percent over last year.
• Consumers shopped in store, online and on mobile devices simultaneously to get the best bargains. Overall 58 percent of consumers used smartphones compared to 41 percent who used tablets to surf for bargains on Black Friday.

SOURCE: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/marketing-solutions/benchmark-reports/benchmark-2012-black-friday.pdf

Local digital ad revenues on the rise

Revenue from local digital advertising continues to rise, driven by social advertising and local search. BIA/Kelsey, an independent market researcher, forecasts local online/interactive/digital advertising revenues will grow 13.1 percent in 2012. According to the report, several local media segments, such as mobile search and online video, are on target to exceed this overall growth rate.

• Digital/Interactive ad revenues on mobile have grown 44.9 percent throughout 2012. Jed Williams, program director for social local media at BIA/Kelsey, commented: “If you look at the overall growth of mobile social advertising, it has the most explosive or volatile growth of all of the various components of social advertising.”
• Williams also offers this advice to traditional media companies who are looking to embrace social media ads: “With traditional media getting more than three-quarters of the total local media ad budget, coordination between traditional and online media is the best way to explore how to effectively optimize new media, such as social networks and online video, to increase the chance of achieving business goals.”

SOURCE: http://www.biakelsey.com/Research-and-Forecasts/LocalMediaForecastFull.asp

RTB unlocking real returns

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is gaining traction as a smarter, more efficient way of buying and selling mobile inventory. No wonder since it goes a long way toward giving publishers greater control over their inventory, enabling them to generate the best return as many bidders compete for every ad request. The Global AdMetrics Q3 2012 report released by mobile advertising buying platform Adfonic,  suggests RTB could indeed be the key to unlocking digital advertising, especially in the mobile space. The new report reveals a 36 percent growth in ad requests processed through RTB, compared with 26 percent growth the previous quarter.

• In Q3, Real-time Bidding (RTB) inventory achieved higher CTRs across all publication channels. In particular, RTB generated CTRs of 127 percent above average for the Social Networking channel. RTB-enabled inventory also achieved higher eCPMs across all publication channels, with the Social Networking channel exhibiting eCPMs of 663 percent above average.

• North America saw a sharp increase from Q2 in ad requests from Social Networking publications, and from News, Sport & Information publications. Europe also saw a rise in ad requests from News, Sport & Information, but a fall in requests from Entertainment publications.

SOURCE: http://blog.adfonic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Q3_admetrics_final.pdf

(Editor’s note: This 38-page report is chock full of data, and Sophie will have more from Adfonic — including an exclusive look at Black Friday stats — next week.)

Editor’s note:

This regular feature, which highlights the key takeaways from mobile reports and insights important to running your business, is curated by Sophie Young , a member of the éclat team who has a passion for mobile trends, apps and her new Galaxy Note. If you have a report or survey you think should be included in this regular roundup, then reach out to Sophie directly via email sophie@eclat.co.uk or Twitter (@PheeYoung).

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So, what has changed? The MMA event showed us that mobile CRM (also called mobile loyalty) is becoming the end-goal, eclipsing ‘top of the funnel’ mobile marketing objectives (such as raising brand awareness) to lead the business agenda for 2013 and beyond. In fact, Gemalto went one step further, using its presentation to show how smarter (and more effective) conversations in mobile marketing can result when marketers mobilize their CRM strategy as part of the plan.

It’s all about understanding that mobile is at the core of a more conversational approach to commerce, one that draws from a deeper exchange with people (with a due regard to their privacy) to deliver value (through relevance) and — more importantly—cultivate lasting customer loyalty.

This dovetails well with what analyst firm Accenture calls the shift from mobile convenience, where mobile was a means to an end, to “Mobile Life,” where mobile is more like our default state. It points out that mobility “boosts the number of interactions a consumer can have with a seller and that yields data making for better segmentation and more personalized service. Combining digital as well as physical footprints, mobility will give sellers multidimensional data for customer relationship management – combining context, identity and behavior.

Think beyond “sellers” to marketers, brands and operators, and you can see where this is going.

All of this contextual information will be a powerful boost to innovative marketers, enabling them to go by what consumers actually do, not just what they say. With sophisticated, real-time analytics and a due regard for privacy, brands, marketers and mobile operators can wield the tremendous power of mobile to understand their customers, deliver better service and gain loyalty in return.

Numbers speak volumes

We live our lives on mobile.  Our devices are never more than three feet away.  What’s more, we look at our mobile phone displays at least 150 times a day, that’s roughly every 5 minutes (!). Mobile also plays a central role in our daily routines.  We reach to mobile devices to liberate our work lives, organize our home lives and strengthen our social lives.

Mobile is also our primary communications tool.  Two-thirds of the human race rely on text messaging to connect with a growing network of family, friends, businesses, organizations — even governments.  Little wonder that SMS is the most widely used data application on the planet. Tomi Ahonen — independent consultant and author of several industry best-selling books including Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media: Cellphone, Cameraphone, iPhone, Smartphone — argues that mobile is a new mass media and — what’s more— the most potent form of media in the history of mankind — following print from the 1500s, recording from the 1900s, cinema from the 1910s, radio from the 1920s TV from the 1950s and Internet from the 1990s. Mobile is the mass media where “all forms of content and communications converge.”

But mobile is also a fiercely personal device, which makes it ideal mass media for interaction and engagement and creating the conversations that can vastly improve customer relationship management.

Relationship media

Little wonder that Gemalto’s Caroline Doussot (@carolinedoussot) used the MMA event to explain how (and why) mobile is a “relationship media.” Put another way, the combination of mobile and CRM is capable of transforming all interactions between companies and people because it harnesses the unique bond we all have with our mobile devices to deliver us what we genuinely appreciate (services, advertising, marketing, content, apps — the works).

Significantly, recent research from Gemalto (based on a survey of 2,400+ consumers in France and the U.K.) sheds interesting light on our appetite for mobile marketing. While the vast majority have received marketing on their mobile devices, an equally high percentage are not impressed.

The survey also explores the disconnect between mobile marketing people receive and what they expect. Unsurprisingly, it found that people feel more comfortable if they can call the shots. This means, having a say in the marketing they receive because the company has asked their permission first (and provides a clear and simple way to opt out at any time.

More detailed results, data and analysis in my next white paper, produced in collaboration with Joy Liuzzo, my partner in our new MobileFirst venture, and sponsored by Gemalto. In it we outline why companies must have a conversational approach to marketing, commerce, CRM and everything! This means drawing on all mobile channels — messaging, mobile web, apps and social media — to ensure the exchange is deep and ongoing. Gemalto adds a new kind of interactive and innovative mobile messaging channel to the mix with an approach that draws on its heritage as a leading provider of SIM cards and security solutions. This channel, called Smart Messages, delivers messages — open and ready to read — to the phone’s idle screen. Studies show response is more immediate (and the experience is more seamless) because consumers can interact with the messages through a series of single clicks, not sending texts.

Caroline connected the dots in this data to deliver the audience at Istanbul three best practices they should bake into all customer interaction, from marketing, to commerce, to customer loyalty. (I’ve added some context based on my 3+ years experience analyzing permission based mobile marketing strategy and developments.)

1. Ask for permission: we are social creatures and mobile amplifies our requirement for two-way conversations that respect our ‘space’. It’s a conversation, so don’t barge in. Ask first and don’t overstep the boundaries. (This is also confirmed by the consumer survey where 82 percent of respondents said that permission was a condition for them to accept marketing in the first place.)
2. Segment: we want what we want, and it’s up to marketers to figure that out. It’s easier to serve — and consistently delight — a customer once you get to know them.  It helps to be able to ask — and find out —their interests, personal preferences and motivations.  This information allows companies to refine and improve their customer segmentation, ensuring the delivery of personal and relevant information and communications that are essential to boost customer loyalty. This approach also provides the basis for all communications with the customer.
3. Implement the ‘Golden Rules of Engagement’: permission (respect our privacy), relevance (give us value), reward (live up to your part of the bargain; we give you our time/loyalty, what are you giving back?)

The pivotal importance of these best practices is further supported by the survey results.

• TRANSPARENCY: 90 percent said they want to have a clear opt-out function, 86 percent want to be able to identify the sender of the message
• RELEVANCE:  71 percent want the message to be in line with their tastes and requirements
• EASE OF USE: 66 percent demand to have a quick and easy access to relevant information
• PRIVACY: Over half of all respondents — after they have opted in, of course — prefer to receive a few relevant messages (generally 1-3) and during working hours (not evenings)

Following this approach can lay the groundwork for a successful strategy to achieve a deeper, more valuable relationship with customers —allowing companies to move past one-off pitches to create engagement, build overarching mCRM programs and boost customer loyalty.

My take:

Customers are empowered to request — even demand — products and services on their terms. Against this backdrop, it’s never been more important for companies to know and understand their customers.  It is essential to create a 360-degree view of your customers based on details about their preferences, personal tastes and how they are using their mobile devices. This is why permission is critical. But it’s not just about gleaning information. It’s about getting our ‘green light’ to ask us more questions and listen to our answers.  Enable an ongoing conversation and you can build the capabilities mix to satisfy the customer, maximize revenue opportunities and create real and lasting loyalty. Turn the model on its head and mobile is the relationship media that companies can use to find out why a customer is unhappy, and work to fix it straight away. This personal outreach can turn a potential defector into a powerful advocate — and with mCRM this research and feedback process can be ongoing and automatic.

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It’s a key question that my panel (Russell Buckley, Tony Fish with AMF Ventures, Muriel Devilliers with LUMU Invest and Jouko Ahvenainen with Grow VC Group) will explore and debate in-depth. As Jouko wrote in an email to me today, this panel is out to push some boundaries.

“The theme is, could mobile make the UK the next Silicon Valley. I’m quite tired to these Silicon Valley copy-cat talks, but I would focus especially, how the UK can be unique so that it is good for startups, startup ecosystem, funding and growth. So, one important theme would be to discuss how to be unique and also be able to execute it, not only talk.”

I hear ‘ya!

I am transported to one of the most memorable mobile tech conferences I ever attended back in November 2009, when my dear friend Tomi Ahonen took the stage at a small venue in London and blew our minds. He described precisely how mobile would transform marketing (and — boy — did it ever!) and listed the reasons why 1) mobile was going to ultimately eclipse every medium and industry known to us; 2) why the shift to mobile was going to impact society at all levels; and 3) why London was going to be at the epicenter of ideas and innovation that would pave the way for the mobile-first revolution.

In Tomi’s view, London was destined to go one huge step further than Silicon Valley. It would rise up to compete head-on, and even beat, Silicon Valley because its community (academia, advertising agencies and innovators) had the talent and the values to move mobile forward. Winning in mobile was not about technology; it was about building services, content and entire businesses powered by mobile powered by people. He pointed to text messaging services in Europe and Africa — particularly successful mobile permission based marketing campaigns — to drive his point home.

Fast forward, and the U.S. consistently comes up with cool ideas, but cool alone won’t be enough for the next billion. That’s where Europe, led by London/U.K., can step up to take mobile that important step further.

Interview with Tony Fish

To set the stage for this discussion and the potential impact when people-powered ventures, models and funding approaches gain serious traction I caught up with Tony Fish (@tonyfish), an industry strategist/catalyst with a focus on crowdfunding, and Torsten Stauch (@torstenstauch), who founded AppShed.

The result is two video interviews (in collaboration with Rob Woodbridge over at untetherTV) that touch on the hottest topics in mobile. (Click on images below to play the video inteviews — each under 10 minutes.)

The timing couldn’t be better since startups everywhere (not just in Europe/U.K.) are at a crossroads. As this recent Business Insider post points out: “The fiscal cliff for startups funded in the recent explosion of seed-stage deals has arrived: Many are failing or have run out of money.”

Does it spell disaster for startups? Or it an opportunity for crowdfunding in disguise?

Tony Fish tells me it is the later. In fact, he argues that the end of Silicon Valley (and the funding models that made it great) is inevitable — and approaching fast(!).

As Tony puts it: Crowdfunding is hitting a need, particularly in the area of consumer- focused services where the venture capital market has never really showed a huge amount of interest.

He also tells the story of an idea he and a colleague had around 10 weeks ago and have since brought to the point that we will likely see an Alpha in December.  All thanks to crowdfunding! (It’s a story he will also share during ForumOxford).

Where is it going? Tony tells me that the market is evolving to models that “aggregate several sources of crowd funds.”

Interview with AppShed

Torsten’s company has cracked the code on how (and why) tech startups must offer us value first in order to build trust and — ultimately longer-term commercial relationships. In the case of AppShed, it’s freemium meets open innovation — and it’s am exciting business blueprint others can surely follow.

His presentation during ForumOxford will track his journey as an entrepreneur. As he puts it: his life at startups has a common thread: the importance of service models. In our empowered age, it’s all about developing models to give before you take.

We also discuss the new focus at AppShed on education and providing learners (teachers and students) the tools to get in on the app revolution and build apps on their own. Imagine children can build an app in a morning and share a link to the app with their parents by mid-day (!) It sounds incredible but AppShed is making it possible today.

My take:

I have been ‘head down’ for much of the last months writing book(s); including The Everything Guide To Mobile Apps and a soon-to-be released look at the options for mobile operators to stay in the game; researching white papers and producing Thought Leadership. I am excited about the impact all these projects will have on the space. However, I am even more excited at this moment to attend ForumOxford, connect with mobile thinkers and do-ers and discuss great ideas and even better ‘action items.’

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The one-day event (priced at GBP250 for MobileGroove readers) brings together a balanced mix of subject matter experts and successful entrepreneurs for a day of casual networking and brainstorming. Attendees will have ample opportunity to connect one-on-one and discuss how they should seek VC funding, tackle legal issues and build a business perfectly matched to mobile megatrends just crossing the chasm.

Real mobile insights

Why attend ForumOxford? Here are 5 reasons why you can’t miss it!

• Learn how to take your ideas from concept to execution.
• Network opportunities across the ForumOxford ecosystem – technologists, operators, investment experts.
• Learn about new funding models (Crowdfunding).
• Understand how start-up accounting is different.
• Become a part of the ForumOxford ecosystem.

But perhaps the most original reason comes from @HanTot who tweeted:

I am thrilled to be a premiere media partner for this event. In addition to moderating the session looking at the ‘fiscal cliff facing startups’, I will also be on hand to conduct video interviews with speakers and attendees. If you want to catch up or meet up, then email me (peggy@mobilegroove.com) or DM me (@peggyanne) to connect during the event.

In the run up to this event I have conducted video interviews with Tony Fish, Entrepreneur and Strategic Thinker, AMF Ventures, and Torsten Stauch, Co-Founder and CEO, AppShed, to find out more about the business models (crowdfunding) and approaches (freemium meets open innovation) startups should embrace — before they run out of cash.

ForumOxford speakers

Unlike many large, impersonal conferences, ForumOxford is highly interactive and promotes open communication between participants and speakers. Organizers expect in the range of 70 – 100 participants. You can register by click the link below, and MobileGroove readers receive a discount.

Discount online registration is at – https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/account/registration/index.php?id=O11C755H6Y

The event is designed with ample Q&A time and opportunities for further discussions of the conference topics during breaks, over lunch and at the early evening drinks reception.

• Svetlana Grant, Director of Smart Cities, Connected Living Programme, GSMA
  Presentation: The Future of Mobile: Innovating for Connected Living
• Simon Dixon, CEO, Bank to the Future
  Presentation: Mobile start ups and raising the funding you need
• Dan Appelquist, Head of Product Management for BlueVia, Telefónica Digital
  Presentation: TBC
• Margaret Gold, Chief Marketing Officer, Ether Books
  Presentation: How Mobile is disrupting the Publishing Industry
• Torsten Stauch, Co-Founder and CEO, AppShed
  Presentation: My journey as an Entrepreneur
• Andrew Griffin, Investor Relations, Monitise
  Presentation: Building a UK mobile tech company whose biggest competitors are its clients
• Neil Driver, Partner for Davis Grant LLP
  Presentation: Seven “must do” financial foundations
• Dr Andrew Eliasz, Director, First Technology Transfer
  Presentation: Interfacing a Raspberry Pi to a 3D – “Why would you want to do it and how?”

***Panel discussion ***

• Russell Buckley, (Founder of AdMob which is now Google AdMob), MobHappy
  Presentation: Start ups and funding
• Tony Fish, Entrepreneur and Strategic Thinker, AMF Ventures
  Presentation: Mobile and Funding – What is the best way to find your backers
• Muriel Devilliers, Founder- Managing Director, LUMU Invest
  Presentation: The long and winding road of a woman in Tech
• Jouko Ahvenainen, Entrepreneur, Investor, Founder, Grow VC Group
  Presentation: T Start ups and funding

***Panel discussion***

• Aditya Jaokar
  Presentation: Feynlabs & Concepts of Programming Language for Kids
• Rudy de Waele, Mobile Strategist, Business Angel and Appreneur
  Presentation: Mobile Opportunities in Africa – Engaging With The Next Billion
• Fabian Stelzer, Co-Founder and CMO, EyeQuant
  Presentation: The Attention Age – Designing Apps and Devices for the Brain’s Bottleneck
• Prof Khalid Al-Begain, Professor of Mobile Computing and Networking, University of Glamorgan, and Glamex Security Ltd
  Presentation: TBC
• Tomi Ahonen, Communities Dominate Brands
  Presentation: Augmented reality as the next mass media/Conference summary

No sales pitches – this is a conference for presentations, questions, answers, interactions and discussions

Hope to see you there!

***

Conference webpage at – www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/H600-22

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If you want to create an winning app you must have a broad base of knowledge that allows you to indentify your target audience and delight them again and again. Get ready to be an expert in applying design basics, conducting app testing, managing constant maintenance, encouraging mobile commerce, collecting payment, respecting personal privacy, leveraging to location data, respecting personal privacy, enabling app discovery, choosing mobile ad networks, harnessing social media and social networks.

It’s a mammoth task, which is why this book — a collaboration between myself and  Jennifer Moranz (a top producing marketing executive with deep knowledge of the mobile app ecosystem who currently leads marketing for Crittercism) — has brought together the insights of 25+ mobile professionals, practitioners and pundits to identify market trends, best practices and key lessons learned in developing and distributing mobile apps.

Our purpose is to provide you clear direction and critical information, equipping you to profit from your app venture. Think of this Guide as a starting point to a detailed roadmap, one that will allow you to plot the transformational path your app business needs to follow to succeed in this exciting new App Economy.

Mobile App Economy is booming

Look around you and it’s clear conditions are coming together to produce a ‘perfect storm’ that will rip across the mobile app space, paving the way for mobile apps that enable everything — from games and entertainment, to education and healthcare, to retail and daily productivity — and leave an indelible mark on our daily lives.

The Geography of the App Economy, a report released in September 2012, paints a positive picture of the impact apps are having on local economies and businesses. From job creation driven by companies that must scale up to meet massive demand, to an avalanche of opportunity unleashed as enterprises contract apps to boost productivity, support marketing and improve customer service, apps are emerging the growth engine of new and vibrant economy.

Connect the dots, and the App Economy has officially arrived! Now it’s time for you to get to work and reap the profits. Whether you are an individual app developer poised to take your good idea to greater heights or a company mapping out a more comprehensive mobile engagement strategy with apps at the center, this book will provide you direction, advice and inspiration.

For this reason, the book draws extensively from the data and insights reported in Developer Economics 2012, the third in the definitive series of developer research reports/surveys from leading market analysis and strategy firm Vision Mobile and sponsored by BlueVia. This must-read series of reports, and the first to expertly map and define the new App Economy, is freely available for download (www.DeveloperEconomics.com). The report, which surveyed 1,500+ developers from across the globe, sheds light on how your peers in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania and Latin America view mobile app business opportunities and obstacles.

As this manuscript is going to press we are eagerly awaiting the next in the Vision Mobile series of reports, which has surveyed double the number of developers (!), a whopping 3,400+ of your peers from across 5 continents and 95 countries. In addition to sizing up the market, rating platforms and identifying challenges, the 2013 report will also examining some of the hottest market sectors, including mobile ad networks, user analytics and cross-platform tools. (You can find a ‘sneak preview’ of the preliminary results/findings here.)

Open for everyone

I am also encouraged by a new study released by the Application Developers Alliance that declares there is “no end in sight for app market growth.” Indeed, global demand for apps continues to exceed analyst expectations with nearly half of the population in the U.S. alone having downloaded an app.

The supply side of the equation also breaks its share of records as innovations in devices (the anticipated launch of the iPad mini), platforms (the long-awaited arrival of Research In Motion’s BlackBerry 10 operating system), use cases (branded apps for marketing and retail, and life-simplifying apps for health and wellness) drive a new phase of growth and creativity.

And if you think you have to be a developer to get in on the action, think again. The app ecosystem is also quickly evolving to accommodate people who are not just programmers. The full-scale arrival of app component marketplaces, the growing availability of easy-to-use programming tools and the advance of cloud-based support and distribution are making it possible for anyone, anywhere to build an app.

One company showing the way is AppShed headquartered in Tech City in London (the Silicon Roundabout). It provides a platform that enables anyone (real people) to build their own apps that work on any smartphone. The freemium business model AppShed has embraced from the get-go means that everyone can get started making an app and only extremely successful apps end up paying a fee.

A special focus is on taking ed-tech (education technology) to a new level by enabling teachers and students (learners) to make the apps they need to master tasks and — ultimately — create and synthesize borderless knowledge. More about this disruptive model next week when I post my recent video interview with Torsten Stauch, AppShed CEO, where we deep-dive into his upcoming presentation at Forum Oxford: Mobile Apps and Technologies Conference 2012 — taking place November 23 in Oxford, U.K.

App developers are ‘biz dev’

It’s both exciting and terrifying to think about the opportunities ahead. It’s no coincidence that companies around the world are grasping the opportunity with both hands, producing an avalanche of smartphone apps and iPad apps aimed at getting their content, services and brands in the hands of customers on the move.

As I suggest in my regular column over at EContent magazine, It’s time for us all to take out and dust off Henry Chesbrough’s milestone book Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting From Technology and read it with mobile (and apps) in mind.

Chesbrough famously argued in 2003 that companies must be open to good ideas wherever they find them. To this end they should leverage the broad range of capabilities available in both their businesses and their business ecosystems. And they must “leverage multiple paths to market – even if the path to success is through another company’s business.”

I’m sure Chesbrough would agree the approach doesn’t just apply to heavy industry sectors such as automotive, pharmaceuticals and high-tech he was addressing when he wrote the book in 2003. Companies that open up their APIs and cultivate communities can likewise unleash a torrent of business innovation, enabling developers to build value-adding mobile apps.

Connect the dots, and mobile developers are more than the next innovators. They are also becoming stakeholders in an extended ecosystem where they provide the ideas (and apps) that allow media companies to extend their reach, grow their audience and master the challenges of doing business in a multi-channel, multi-device, multi-media world.

App marketing matters

But app developers also have responsibilities to their business ecosystems. In other words, it’s not just about mastering all the business and technology challenges of doing business in a multichannel, multi-device, multimedia world. App developers should also do their part (for themselves or on behalf of their clients) to drive the social media and marketing that will make sure their apps have impact.

Turning your app into a serious business (if you’re an app developer) or architecting an app to achieve sustained market presence from your product or service (if you’re a business) requires you to know your audience, understand your market and plan for success. In a way, it’s Retail 101 all over again, but there’s a catch. You have to do more than sell them; you have to convince us to insert then in our daily routines. After all, as my recent white paper shows, app downloads mean nothing if people don’t use them again and again.

With this in mind, The Everything Guide To Mobile Apps also identifies ways to extend the life of your app. Because mobile is a fiercely personal device, apps are an ideal means to reach customers every step of their daily journey to deliver value, encourage interaction, deepen engagement, boost customer loyalty and —ultimately — recruit true brand advocates and app fans. At the other end of the spectrum, apps help us get things done. They inform, entertain, communicate, advise, manage, streamline, simplify and execute.

It’s both exciting and terrifying to think about the opportunities — and this new book will help you navigate the tough terrain ahead.

A round of thanks to our amazing guest contributors (recognized app practitioners and authorities):

• Akash Sureka, Hoopz @akashsureka
• Alfred Depose, Tego Interactive @AlfredDeRose
• Andy Bovingdon, Bango @bangodotcom
• Asif Khan, the Location Based Marketing Association @AsifRKhan
• Chris Jones, CodeNgo @AppSubmissions
• Daniel Appelquist at Blue Via @BlueVia
• Derek Newell at Jiff @dereknewell
• Ed Vause, Appromoter @Appromoter
• Gary Schwartz, Impact Mobile @ImpulseEconomy
• Heini Vesander, Blaast @Blaast
• Helen Keegan, Heroes of the Mobile Fringe @technokitten
• Itay Gadot, Inneractive @Itay_Gadot
• James (Coops) Cooper, Mobyaffiliates @mobyaffiliates
• Jennifer Hiley, (formerly WeLoveMobile) @jenniferhiley
• Jez Harper, Tús Nua Designs @tusnuadesigns
• Jonathan Kohl, Kohl Concepts, Inc. @jonathan_kohl
• Joy Liuzzo, Wave Collapse @joyliuzzo
• Ken Herron, social marketer and ‘cool hunter’ @KenHerron
• Linda Daichendt, MTAM @MTAMLinda
• Lisa Ciangiulli, Optism @Optism
• Magnus Jern, Golden Gekko @MagicMagnus
• Martin Rugfelt, Expertmaker @expertmakertool
• Martin Wilson, The Mobile Web Company @mobilewebCo
• Matos Kapetenakis, VisionMobile @visionmobile
• Matt Lutz, AppClover @AppClover
• Mike Anderson, Chelsea Apps Factory @ChelseaApps
• Moshe Vaknin, YouAppi @YouAPPI
• Paolo de Santis, ChupaMobile @chupamobile
• Paul Poutanen, Mob4Hire @Mob4hire
• Phil Hendrix, immr @Phil_Hendrix
• Rimma Perelmuter, Mobile Entertainment Forum @MEF
• Rob Woodbridge, untetherTV @RobWoodbridge
• Ryan Morel, Placeplay @ryanmorel
• Sam Chan, Wireless Industry Partnership @wipjam
• Scott Townsend, Urban Airship @urbanairship
• Stu Arnott, Spark Inspires @MindingsStu
• Suzie Mitchell, boomer expert at Mitchell PR @suziemitchell
• Viki Zabala, Fiksu @Fiksu
• Yasmina Haryono, Fjord @yasmina

More excerpts, exclusive interviews and more insights from our roster of contributors here on MobileGroove and tune into my new companion series over at untetherTV in December. You can pre-order your copy of the Everything Guide To Mobile Apps on Amazon today. AND – if you want to meet up or catch up during Forum Oxford, then pls reach out to me directly (@peggyanne or peggy@mobilegroove.com).

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Source: eMarketer

There’s a good (and growing) chance you’re reading this on your phone

According to new Pew Research, 31 percent of Americans are using their mobile phones for a majority of their online reading. Staggeringly, this percentage rises to 45 percent for 18-29 year olds.  “In the space of three years, we’ve seen the proportion of cell owners who do this almost double,” Pew senior research specialist Aaron Smith explained. “Depending on where you start the clock on the consumer smartphone revolution — most people do that with the introduction of the iPhone in June 2007 — within the space of five years we’ve gone from basically zero to half the country, with a sizable percentage using cell phones as their main source [to go online].”

Source: Nieman Lab

Eye-Opening Mobile Usage Statistics of Consumers

In a survey conducted by Google, virtually all (96 percemt) consumers had encountered a mobile site and most (75 percent) prefer a mobile-friendly site over non-friendly site. Additionally, 67 percent of consumers are more likely to buy from mobile-friendly site. Finally, about half of consumers say that even if they like a business that will use it less often if it isn’t mobile-friendly and that sites that aren’t mobile friendly make them frustrated and annoyed. For retailers who don’t have an website optimized for mobile and especially mobile-commerce, these are tipping point statistics.

Source: Google

Recap of the Mobile Media Summit in Chicago

Mobile Media Summit was held in Chicago earlier this fall, as 300 brand marketers, ad agency execs and mobile industry professionals how to best leverage the mobile medium for CPG, Retail and QSR.  Some very interesting data points came to light, most importantly was that mobile is beginning to impact every other advertising medium – TV, online, print. With the rapid growth of the smartphone, mobile will  soon become the center of advertising strategy for most companies. Other factoids included that iPhone users are spending more money than Android users and iPhone users also spend much more on luxury goods. The only roadblock to mobile’s growth was expressed by Beth Reilly, Global Digital Strategy at Kraft Foods said that CPG marketers and advertisers are spending money in mobile, but in order to spend more they need better metrics on return rates.

Source: Boston Innovation

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Visit the Optism Blog to read more about Facebook and its privacy troubles.

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This dovetails with new numbers from Millennial Media that lists the big spenders (by vertical) and shift to more precise audience targeting techniques. In Q2 2012, five verticals experienced triple-digit growth year-over-year on the Millennial platform. Specifically, the recent SMART report (Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting) has drawn from actual campaign data to conclude that ad spend for the Automotive vertical grew over 370 percent year-over-year. Notably, Automotive has been a Top 10 Global Advertising Vertical on the platform (ranked by spend and growth) for over a year. DOWNLOAD REPORT HERE

The increase in spend is attributed to the rise in brands, marketers and campaigns harnessing mobile to generate awareness and excitement around new model launches.

Interestingly, the vertical Personal & Home Services also saw a jump in mobile ad spend. While the vertical doesn’t make the Top 10 Global list for growth to date, it did show a year-over-year increase of 353 percent. The report suggests this increase could be linked to brands and marketers using mobile advertising to connect with consumers around seasonal home and garden needs, such as pest control.

An examination of mobile ad calls to action shows that app download still accounts for the lion’s share of campaigns (based on data around the top 750 campaigns on the platform). It came in at 44 percent, followed by enroll/join/subscribe (23 percent), site search (18 percent) and store locator (13 percent).

Audience targeting trends

While the report doesn’t provide detail about the breadth of audience segments, we do have some insights into how brands are fine tuning targeting to deliver advertising to the real-world audience most likely to appreciate it and respond.

For Q2 2012 the most frequently targeted audiences on the Millennial platform included IT Decision Makers, Gadget Geeks, Movie Buffs and Moms.

Read between the lines, and marketers’ mindsets are evolving. It’s not about broad reach its about precise targeting that allows a more perfect match between the advertising and the audience.

In line with this, In-Market Auto Intenders were the leading audience on the Millennial platform — a development linked to the fact that the Automotive Sector was also the biggest spending vertical overall in Q1 2012.

Other top ranking audiences included:

• DIYers, a group that was frequently targeted in Q2 2012 by marketers delivering people advertising related to seasonal home and yard care needs. This, in turn, contributed to the growth of the Personal & Home Services vertical year-over-year.

• Business Travelers, a group that includes road warriors who 1) have a variety of need states and interests and 2) naturally reach to their mobile devices every step of the journey.

• Mobile Switchers, a group that includes consumers at the Consideration stage of the purchase funnel where they are open (and eager) to research the newest technology available.

Global mobile trends

The new report also recounts key eMarketer research findings and complements these insights with internal data to reveal overarching trends in smartphone use and activity. According to eMarketer, smartphone ownership worldwide is set to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 37 percent into 2016. Put another way, smartphones are expected to be in the hands of nearly one-third of the world’s population.

The Asia-Pacific region will see the largest growth in the number of smartphone users with Indonesia and India leading the way. But, in 2016, the market there will be far from saturated.

But penetration isn’t the only area of growth. Millennial observes that more advertisers in South East Asia have started to make use of “some of the more unique benefits of mobile” in their campaigns. Notably, brands are harnessing location-based targeting. what’s more, “in Q2 2012  brands that used locations-based targeting had greater return.”

This differs from the audience targeting techniques chosen by marketers in other regions. In North America, where eMarketer forecasts significant smartphone growth driven by users upgrading their devices or increasing the number of mobile devices per household, Millennial indicates brands are focused on techniques that allow them to reach the right customer in the right context.

My take:

Every report in this series is a worthwhile read if you want to find out how brands are leveraging mobile to connect with their target audiences. The highlight here is the data that sheds important light on how marketers are making the effort to reach a more relevant real-world audience segment and the results this strategy delivers. Gina Preziosa — VP, Group Digital Media Director, Mullen mediaHub— summed it up best when she said: “Using a combination of Audience Targeting and an in-mobile camera simulation demo, we were able to reach in-market camera shoppers with relevant messaging and a rich mobile creative experience.”

This post is part of our Mobile Advertising Briefing Room, a thinking space dedicated to providing its community mobile intelligence, consumer research, case studies and industry best practices that equip marketers to reach and engage their target audience at scale. This discussion is hosted & sponsored by Millennial Media.

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So how can retailers use mobile, big data, permission, mobility and engagement to get a 360-degree view of consumers and increase revenue? Lisa Ciangiulli, mobile marketing expert from Optism, provides 3 recommendations on how retailers can effectively leverage mobile to combat showrooming and increase revenue.

• Mobility Element:  on the sales floor
• Permission Element: asking for opt-ins
• Engagement Element: examples of persuasive engagement

Read Lisa’s 360-Degree View of the Consumer Is Going To Require Retailers to Do a 180 by using Mobile over at the Optism blog.

The latest companies to adopt a truly mobile mindset are Fab and Allrecipes.com. In an interview with Mashable, Fab founder Jason Goldberg says: “Back in February or March, we realized that fairly soon, mobile customers will be more than 50 percent of our usage, and we need to start thinking of that day and what Fab will look like in that world.”  Goldberg further expects mobile use to outpace Web. As he puts it: “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some days this year where we see mobile on par with web. I would expect that around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we could see some of that. I think definitely going into Q1 next year, we’ll have mobile usage on par, if not greater, than web usage for Fab.”

Meantime, Minonline interviewed Allrecipes VP of brand marketing Esmee Williams about the decision to redesign the recipe page on the website. What was the chief motivation? People! As she puts it: “As media consumption habits shift, Allrecipes is committed to providing our community of 25 million family focused women a seamless multi-screen experience that connects them with premium food focused content whenever and wherever they need, whether it be on a PC, tablet or mobile device. Our enhanced mobile site is also a premium opportunity for brands to engage women and accelerate brand advocacy with home cooks at all points of need – from planning to purchase.”

Movie studios: mobile is your friend

Escaping to a movie in the theater is one of the small pleasures in life.  And for those of us that do it at least once a month, we are using mobile to help us enjoy it even more.  IAB’s study on moviegoers finds that 67 percent of this audience uses their mobile phone to help them figure out what movie to see and they are three times more likely to purchase their ticket on mobile (although this number is still small, around 5 percent in the past 6 months).  When it comes to trailers, 61 percent said they watched a pre-roll video so they could see a trailer, with more men than women reporting this behavior.

Bottom line for movie studios is that their audience is turning to mobile for discovery and, like anyone wanting to be discovered, you’ve got to go where the people are. Peggy adds: Yep, mobile and entertainment are the perfect match. Check out this analysis of a recent Mobile Intel report PLUS an except from an exclusive interview with a leading studio to get the inside track.

SOURCE: IAB and inMobi

Email campaigns must lead to optimized sites

Yesmail Interactive conducted a study with 500 consumers and tracked their interactions with 20 major brands over a three month period to provide us important insights just in time for the holiday season.  One of the most sobering findings: 41 percent of mobile owners made a purchase (in-store or online) based on an email promotion they received but sadly, 7 out of the 20 brands (that’s nearly one-third!) included in this study linked to web pages that were not optimized for mobile. With reams written daily about the role of mobile in retail it’s disappointing to learn that seven major brands still haven’t optimized their email campaigns to be mobile-friendly.

Look into your web analytics and if even small portions of your visitors are coming in from mobile, then you need to optimize their experience for this device.  Consumers’ expectations are for a good experience, regardless of the device they choose to use. Fail to meet those expectations and you could be pushing them away — and into the arms of your competitor.

SOURCE: Yesmail Interactive

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The bottom line: app developers need to work out a strategy to increase engagement, not just downloads. To provide them a blueprint to follow as they take these first critical steps I have produced a new white paper — ap(p)tly titled Achieving App Impact: Using SMS to encourage interaction, drive loyalty (sponsored by Tyntec, a global mobile interaction service provider). CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

When it comes to cultivating and continuing a conversation with people on their personal mobile devices, text messaging is a direct marketing channel that delivers real impact.

Indeed, the vast majority of people open and read text messages within minutes of receiving them. (Mobile Squared/Singlepoint famously  reported in 2011 that “about 90 percent of all text messages are read within 3 minutes of their delivery – and over 99 percent of all text messages are read by the recipient.)

Supercharge marketing with SMS

But people aren‘t only reading messages; they are answering a call to action. Internal research from Optism, a mobile marketing solu­tions provider, reveals the vast majority (59 percent) of people respond to text messages within the first hour of receiving them. Moreover, 41 percent of people responded to text messages within just 10 minutes of receiving the communication.

Text messaging is ubiquitous, universal and widely regarded as the true native language of mobile. It‘s the simplicity, pervasiveness and sheer dominance of text messaging that has made it the world‘s leading data communication tool.

People everywhere on the planet can (and do) use their mobile phones to send and receive text messages. (And you can read some great coverage showing just how much mileage is left in SMS on this must-read destination run by the fantastic Emily Turrettini.)

Today, SMS can reach over 5.4 billion people around the world — over 77 percent of the world‘s population. Veteran mobile author and analyst Tomi Ahonen estimates people sent a whopping 6.1 trillion text messages in 2011, up from 1.8 trillion in 2007.

Meantime, other analysts predict total traffic by 2015 will reach between 9.4 and 11 trillion messages.

But the real power of text messaging is its ability to connect up and amplify other marketing formats. From display banners to push notifications, text messaging is the way to continue an ongoing conversation once you get our attention in the first place. (Even better if marketers get our permission first.)

Reach and reactivate app users

The white paper also recounts the successful app marketing strategy of Qeep, one of the world‘s largest mobile social discovery platforms connecting more than 16 million users in over 200 countries. The app allow community members to meet new friends around the globe, chat, flirt, share photos and play live multiplayer games. (Qeep can be downloaded for free at qeep.mobi or via the Google Play Store.)

Qeep has baked text messaging into its comprehensive app marketing strategy to deliver valuable content, drive traffic to the community website, and reactivate users who haven‘t interacted with the app in while. In this scenario, the user receives a personalized SMS suggesting they check out the new features, for example.

What‘s more, messaging allows BLUE LION to reach out and connect with app users — even if they have deleted the app from their devices. (By way of background, push notifications can deliver a message when the app isn’t opened on the device, but they cannot deliver when the app has been deleted altogether.)

For the white paper I caught up with Christian Schulte, co-founder of BLUE LION mobile GmbH, the company behind Qeep and a winner of the Red Herring 100 Europe Award (recognizing it as one of the best technology startups in Europe). As Christian puts it: “If users used your app, loved your app, and then — for whatever reason — deleted your app, then we see that. Our last attempt to reactivate this user will always be an SMS.”

App marketing & more

Drawing from interviews and research the white paper presents app developers with the 3Rs, key scenarios where text messaging can deliver value — and results. These are Relationship, Recommendation and Reactivation — and you can download the white paper to read more. For more on how app makers can build a serious business (to make serious money) watch this space for more white papers in the series sponsored by Tyntec.

###

These and other insights will also appear in The Everything Guide to Mobile Apps, a new book slated for release in March 2013 that represents a collaboration between myself, Jennifer Moranz (a top producing marketing executive with deep knowledge of the mobile app ecosystem who currently leads marketing for Crittercism) and an amazing and extensive roster of guest contributors (app practitioners and authorities) including (in no special order):

Andy Bovingdon at Bango, Daniel Appelquist at Blue Via, Yasmina Haryono at Fjord, Jez Harper at Tús Nua Designs, Scott Townsend at Urban Airship, Jack Philbin at Vibes, Sam Chan at WIP, Magnus Jern at Golden Gekko, Asif Khan at the Location Based Marketing Association, Phil Hendrix at immr Gary Schwartz at Impact Mobile, the Mobile Entertainment Forum, Paolo de Santis at Chupa Mobile, Itay Gadot at Inneractive, Akash Sureka at Hoopz, Moshe Vaknin at YouAppi, Matt Lutz at Appclover, Alfred DeRose at Tego Interactive, Martin Wilson at Mobileweb Company, Chris Jones at CodeNgo, Christine Perey at PEREY Research & Consulting, Viki Zabala at Fiksu, Heini Vesander at Blaast, Jonathan Kohl at Kohl Concepts, Inc., Joy Liuzzo at Wave Collapse, Lisa Ciangiulli at Optism, Martin Rugfelt at Expertmaker, Stu Arnott at Mindings, Ryan Morel at Placeplay, James Cooper at Mobyaffiliates, Paul Poutanen at Mob4Hire, Mike Anderson at Chelsea Apps Factory, Matos Kapetenakis at VisionMobile, Linda Daichendt at MTAM, Derek Newell at Jiff, Rob Woodbridge at untetherTV, boomer research expert Suzie Mitchell, Helen Keegan (who needs no introduction!)  and social media guru Ken Herron.

That debate continues — and so do the developments that shed light on how mobile has impacted news consumption.

A new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project validates our belief that mobile users in different geographies consume news in different ways.

The report reveals that residents of large cities (a segment that on the whole skews younger and are more mobile than other populations) are most likely to stay informed about local topics that interest them through a combination of online and traditional sources. They are particularly likely to get local news through Internet searches, Twitter, blogs, and websites of TV and newspapers.

In contrast, small city (31 percent) and rural (34 percent) residents are more likely than those in larger cities (21 percent) and suburbs (16 percent) to rely solely on “traditional” forms of media for their local news such as local print newspapers and broadcast television.

Suburban residents are distinct in their higher dependence on local radio (likely due to longer commutes to work), while small city and rural residents stand out in their reliance on word of mouth for some types of local information.

Urban and suburban residents on average use more sources of local news than their small town and rural counterparts and are more likely to consume local news on mobile devices.

In an average week, residents of large cities and suburbs use more sources of local information than others.  On average, residents of large cities and suburbs use just under four sources per week (3.63 and 3.72, respectively) compared to those in small cities or towns and rural areas who use closer to three sources per week (3.31 and 3.28, respectively).  In addition, more than half of urban (53 percent) and suburban (57 percent) residents get some kind of local news or information via cell phone or tablet computer compared with 45 percent of small city and 35 percent of rural residents.

The most active “local news participators” also tend to reside in suburban and urban communities. Suburban residents are more likely than any of the other groups (53 percent vs. 45 percent large city, 36 percent small city, 32 percent rural) to actively participate in local news and large city residents are more likely than small city or rural residents to be classified as local news participators, meaning they email local stories to others, post news or information about the local community on social networking sites or Twitter, comment on local stories they read online, contribute to online discussions on message boards about the local community, and the like.

Rural residents are the least likely to say it is “easier” to keep up with local news and information today than it was five years ago.

The impact of mobile on news — and everything in our lives — is profound. I therefore applaud the decision by CNN to dedicate a month to examining all the ways mobile technology is changing our lives.

Readers of my Mobilized Marketing book know that I included many insights from Louis Gump, vice president of mobile for CNN. He is behind this initiative that tells us how “mobile technology has shifted from nicety to necessity.”

Appearing across all of CNN platforms, the month-long coverage looks at the impact of mobile devices on many aspects of our daily lives including personal relationships, work habits, cultural quirks, heath, finance, and etiquette.

This coverage will be supplemented by other in-depth reports from CNN Digital, which will investigate topics related to our mobile society, CNNMoney.com and HLNtv.com. The stories cover all regions of the world and air across CNN International properties.

How I See It: Because of my background and training (12 years working as a reporter for United Press International), I believe that consumption is driving how (and how fast) information is gathered, even by “credentialed” reporters. Just look at the many mistakes that have been hailed as breaking ‘news’. The false reports on the “death” of United States Congresswoman Gabby Giffords top of the list. Yes, we as mobile subscribers want our information in real-time. But it is up to the trained journalists to follow proven practices like double sourcing to make sure that what is reported is indeed fact. And it’s up to others on social networks to not cause confusion, hysteria or something worse simply because they have used the mobile medium to instantly distribute mere hearsay.

South Africa loves BlackBerry (!)

I’m fresh from an unforgettable trip to South Africa, where I spoke at events, soaked up local culture, identified areas of mobile marketing opportunity and spent some time in a game reserve.

A huge surprise that speaks volumes (literally) was the sight of BlackBerry devices — everywhere. In fact, some South Africans carried two – one for work and one for pleasure. Imagine that, for pleasure (!).

But BlackBerry isn’t only popular; it has ‘cult’ status. In June, South Africa’s youth named BlackBerry the ‘Coolest Brand Overall’ in the Sunday Times Generation Next 2012 Brand Survey Awards. BlackBerry also topped the ‘Coolest Cellphone’ and ‘Coolest High-Tech Gadget’ categories for the second year running.

What do the numbers tell us? BlackBerry’s BBM, a messenger service that has now peaked in the U.S., is used by 98 percent of South Africa BlackBerry customers, according to parent company RIM. RIM reckons there are more than 56 million active BBM users worldwide, and 70 percent of them use it to communicate daily.

The lesson here for marketers? Open your eyes and minds. What happens in one region isn’t necessarily mirrored in others. Know your audience is a universal rule, and you can reach them by using the devices they use. Be prepared to adapt that approach to local preferences. In South Africa, BlackBerry rules.

Case in point: the news about the new iPhone 5, which went live while I was in South Africa giving the keynote at a CMO Conference and conducting a mobile workshop. The countdown to the news and the live blogging was a ‘happening’ in much of the world, but my audience did not fawn when the iPhone 5 was announced. Many were unaware of the news being made 11,000 miles away. Others simply didn’t care.

Here are some other data points (via Ogilvy) to guide you, should you decide to sharpen your strategy to take tap into opportunities in South Africa.

• 80 percent of South Africa’s population is on mobile
• 33 percent of all mobile users access Web via mobile
• 20 percent of mobile subscribers have smartphones
• Mobile phone use increased from17 percent of adults in 2000 to a whopping 76 percent in 2010
• Smartphone penetration is expected to hit 50 percent in the next four years
• 38 percent of users access Facebook via their mobile devices; it’s 58 percent among mobile subscribers 25 years old and younger
• Churn rate among prepaid users is 43 percent

How I See It: As much as I went to South Africa to teach, I traveled to learn. And I learned a lot. Mobile marketing is moving fast, and using other approaches and channels to reach impressive results. As I traveled the country, I heard text message calls-to-action on the radio, saw them on billboards, and I even grew to expect them. Groupon has also made inroads in South Africa. Marketers I connected with spoke highly of the service and continue to run Groupon programs. These folks have the same goal as we do – to sell more stuff.  Yes, I learned a lot — including the fact that game reserve visits belong on everyone’s ‘bucket list’

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We’ve known for a while that iOS owners make up a bleeding-edge customer segment, and this only confirms our hunch.  Retailers need to pay close attention to analytics and monitor the activity from iOS platforms across their mobile properties.  Watch where these users are browsing, what they are searching for, what activities they conduct and then move in to optimize them.  It’s the simplest way to maximize your ROI.

SOURCE: Forrester

Health information at their fingertips

Manhattan Research brings us some great news for the mobile health industry.  Based on survey projections, the number of adults in the U.S. who used their mobile phones for health information and tools increased to 75 million in 2012 (up from 61 million in 2011).  When it comes to tablet owners, the number of people who used it to access health information doubled from 2011 (29 million in 2012).

Additional information shows that 60 percent of those with three screens (online, mobile and tablet) are using all three for their health information.  Immediacy, privacy, and ease of use are driving this behavior, and there are plenty of opportunities for start-ups to claim their turf in this space.

SOURCE: Manhattan Research

18-34 year old shoppers aren’t afraid to buy on mobile

The absolute number of mobile owners in the U.S. that report making a purchase is about 28 percent,  but there are marked differences between age groups. Research firm eConsultancy reports that 42 percent  of 18-34 year olds have made a purchase on their mobile phone.  This is double the number of 35-54 year olds (21 percent) and three times as many in the 55+ age bracket.  No matter the size of the business, retailers can’t ignore people’s growing comfort with the idea of purchasing products, services and other stuff directly from their mobile device.

SOURCE: eConsultancy

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Check-in offers heaviest between 2-3pm on Saturdays

But don’t ignore Friday night either.  LocalResponse slices and dices data around check-ins to find out who, where, and when we check in so retailers can make the most of their strategy.  The ‘who’ isn’t too surprising, it’s mostly men. (An additional celebratory ‘yeah!’ that men are in a real-world store — and you thought it was mostly women.)  As for the ‘where’, the heaviest amount of check-ins happened at Wal-Mart (38 percent), followed by Target (15 percent) and Costco (9 percent).  Grocery stores Safeway and Kroger both came in at 4 percent, which tells us that there is a huge opportunity for grocery stores to push check-ins more.

Foursquare is the most popular place to check-in, so get your offers ready for the Saturday afternoon and Friday evening offers.  Treats, after a hard work week or long day of errands, will probably be most appreciated.

SOURCE: LocalResponse

African Americans are heavy users of mobile for shopping

Nielsen gets another call out this week on their data around African American consumers.  Boil down the data points, and we get an extremely interesting tidbit: this consumer group is not just using mobile for price comparison. They are also reaching to their mobile phone to gather information along the purchase journey.  This is fabulous news for retailers and a data point that should assuage their fears about delving more into enabling — and encouraging — mobile-assisted shopping.

SOURCE: Nielsen

Security concerns are now a barrier

For years, companies from PC and online have worked to educate consumers about the malware threat and how to better protect their personal data from attack. But it may be that they have done ‘too’ good a job since people are now both wary and oblivious at the same time.

How careful have we become? Research from Metaforic reveals that 68 percent of smartphone owners who are not using mobile banking yet, haven’t done so because of security fears.  A majority (54 percent) of these non-mobile banking users would be interested if app security was increased. But these respondents also couldn’t identify what elements of their app experience would need to be enhanced to give them the feeling of security they need to use mobile banking. Hmm. Sounds like a Catch-22 to me. Clearly, this is a no-win situation because neither the bank not the app maker has a clue what they must do to earn and keep user trust in mobile banking.

With people so concerned about security, you would imagine that they are taking matters into their own hands. Ironically, people are not even installing security to protect their personal data.  Juniper Research released stats showing that only 5 percent of mobile phone and tablets are running security programs.  It’s a wide open market right now to establish a dominant play in mobile security. Peggy adds: This guest column from Ciaran Bradley takes it a step further, and argues that mobile operators are a shoe-in since we already trust them to broker the data that powers our mobile lifestyles. Read on, and let us know what you think.

SOURCE: Metaforic and Juniper

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With this we kick off a regular series documenting what you need to know to take advantage of this mobile mega-trend. Strap yourself in — it’s going to be a terrific ride!

***

Strategy Informer: Start Geo-Targeting 1-2 Miles Away

Mobile network YP brings us information we need to map our mobile strategy and connect with people where it counts most. The company’s 3^rd Quarter Local Insights Report found that mobile CTRs increase the closer a person gets to a physical location.  The sweet spot was between 1-2 miles, with the CTR 1.48 times higher than the average.   Between 2-5 miles away, the CTR is 1.26 times higher than average, still not shabby.

If you are advertising to drive store traffic, put in a geo-target that triggers when people are about 5 miles away, with the heaviest impression numbers going to people that are 1-2 miles away.

SOURCE: Local Insights Report

Reach Data: Those Smartphone Owners Are Getting Younger

In probably one of the most dramatic upticks we’ve seen in years, Nielsen reports that smartphone ownership among 13-17 year olds increased 62 percent year-over-year.  We’re now seeing that 58 percent  of this age group own smartphones, compared to 36 percent just last year.

Now that parents are buying smartphones for their teenagers, what does it mean for marketers?  Expect your ability to reach this group online and via other channels to decrease because they are going to be treating their smartphones as their primary gateway to the world around them.  If you don’t have a heavy spend in mobile yet, think again. You are missing out on reaching this audience.

SOURCE: Nielsen

Mobile Video Data:  Visitors Like Video

Invodo, a video commerce provider, studied their internal data and found that about 6 percent of traffic comes from mobile devices, but mobile visitors make up about 14 percent of all video views on sites.  If someone watched a video on their mobile device, they were three times as likely to buy as those that didn’t watch the video.

So, should you have videos on your mobile site if you want to drive sales?  If it gives more product information, loads quickly, and adds to the overall experience, then the answer is YES.

SOURCE: Invodo white paper

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Research from independent mobile ad and data platform company Millennial Media and mobile measurement firm comScore shows that entertainment brands are stepping up efforts to engage people every step of the consumer journey and drive objectives further down in the purchase funnel. Granted it’s critical to encourage people to click on entertainment ads on their mobile devices. But now brands have to get creative about the call-to-action and enable people to do much more: access movie information, check TV show times, view mobile video trailers, buy tickets, pre-order and buy DVDs, and connect with social media sites to spread the word to friends and communities.

Mobile Intel: Entertainment, the latest in a series of Mobile Intel reports, shows how entertainment brands are using mobile to run campaigns throughout the entire product lifecycle, from promoting releases to driving sales of associated merchandise. In many cases, entertainment brands use retargeting techniques to reach consumers who have previously interacted with their earlier ad campaigns.

Mobile commerce convenience

The report is geared towards brands, providing them insights to help identify key mobile entertainment opportunities and engage with the growing audience of mobile entertainment users— the segment of consumers using their mobile devices to access information, download content and apps and make purchases.

In fact, the report tells us a significant percentage of mobile entertainment users are already reaching to their mobile phones to research and buy entertainment content. Specifically, digital purchases — movies and TV shows — are the top-ranked purchase made on a smartphone. Nearly half (47 percent) of all consumers bought content or music, followed by clothing/accessories (37 percent) and tickets (35 percent).

Why does this demographic buy entertainment content and merchandise using their mobile phones? comScore connects the dots in recent consumer research to tell us it’s all about ease of use. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of those who made a purchase listed on-the-go convenience as their chief motivation. Read between the lines here, and this all ties back to the shift in our behavior. We can do more with our phones — and we do (!) provided there is no friction and lots of value. Being able to buy tickets before a sell-out perfectly captures the impact mobile has on our lives, and underlines the importance of mobile in the consumer journey.

Mobile entertainment audience

Who are mobile entertainment users and what are the key characteristics that marketers in TV, films, and home entertainment, need to note?

Unsurprisingly, the mobile entertainment audience is already huge. But expect growth to continue thanks to the advance of the tablet and our new appetite for multi-screen entertainment experiences that demand the smart hand-off of entertainment content, engaging activities (like social media) and commerce across smartphone, tablet and TV.

According to comScore, smartphone ownership was up 55 percent year-over-year, representing 42 percent of the total mobile audience in December 2011. In particular, 80 percent of the mobile entertainment audience owns a smartphone.

What’s more, comScore reports that the mobile entertainment audience over-indexes in tablet ownership. Compared to the overall smartphone audience, the mobile entertainment audience is 22 percent more likely to own a tablet.

As you would expect, demographics for segments of the mobile entertainment audience vary. Consumers accessing Kids & Family Entertainment content skew more heavily female and slightly older, with a large concentration in the 25-34 and 35-44 age groups. In the U.K., Asian consumers are 3 times more likely to access Kids & Family Entertainment content than the overall smartphone audience.

Overall, consumers who access mobile entertainment content tend to be younger than the overall smartphone audience. Multicultural consumers also make up a larger percentage of the mobile entertainment audience than the overall smartphone audience. In the U.S., for example, Hispanic consumers are 39 percent more likely to be part of the mobile entertainment audience than the overall smartphone audience; African-American consumers are 10 percent more likely.

But the real news is the massive increase in the amount of entertainment content the audience of mobile entertainment users accessed. comScore notes an 82 percent increase from December 2010 to December 2011. The jump confirms these consumers have a strong and healthy appetite for entertainment content. Now the challenge is to meet that demand with content and advertising that is aligned with our multi-screen behavior.

One example that stands out is how TV networks are achieving their objectives by running campaigns that use day-parted Wi-Fi targeting. In other words, they target specific demographics (such as women ages 18-34), who are using a home Wi-Fi connection, during a specific time of the day. The approach also reaches consumers who are watching TV and using their tablets or smartphones at the same time.

Creatives and cross-platform

From 2010 to 2011, mobile ad spending by companies in Entertainment vertical grew 133 percent. However, this was eclipsed by spending by other verticals, such as Finance and retail, where brands are already sharply focused on reaching consumers deeper down in the purchase funnel. Nonetheless, Entertainment never dropped out of the top 10 verticals, demonstrating that the growth came from an already established base level of spending.

When compared with the goals of  all the advertisers on the Millennial Media platform, Entertainment advertisers focused much more heavily on Product Launch / Release campaigns, which are a perfect fit to promote the vast number of new releases in the industry.

But Entertainment brands are also leveraging mobile (and increasingly tablets) to drive a wider variety of campaign objectives that match how we want to engage. One-third (33 percent) of entertainment campaigns included a mobile social media call to action, making it easy for fans to discuss and share content.

The report also provides key proof points about the attractiveness — and effectiveness — of video. Nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of entertainment campaigns incorporated video in their campaigns. Specifically, studios drove awareness (and engagement) by showing trailers leading up to new releases. At the other end of the spectrum, TV networks featured previews for upcoming episodes, and developers gave fans a chance to view new games around popular films and shows.

Entertainment advertisers also leveraged innovative types of video ads, such as interactive video and click-to-video ads. Expect more marketers to use video now that consumers are increasingly using smartphones and tablets, and connection speeds have increased to make it easier to deliver video content at scale.

Relativity Media engages

The key messages of this new report dovetail with the trend Liz Jones, Senior Vice President, Digital Marketing at Relativity Media — an independent film studio that acquires, develops, produces, and distributes films and produces television programming — is experiencing first-hand.  As she put it in a recent interview: “The biggest shift for us in mobile is the rise in people watching video with their mobile phones.”

Another “game-changer” is the way people use mobile to get things done, a new characteristic of mobile that allows Relativity Media to achieve objectives deeper in the purchase funnel. Chief among these is ticket purchases.

But recent mobile ad campaigns are not just driving ticket sales for the movie entertainment Relativity Media creates. Because people are also using their devices to do show time lookups and see what is playing in a movie theater near them, “mobile is a place where people make their decisions,” Liz observes. “They are deciding where to go to this weekend, and we are on mobile because we want to make sure they are aware our movie is playing, and that they choose our movie to go to.”

This approach is doubly important when it comes to connecting with a younger demographic, Liz says. “They are just spending more time on mobile and it’s the only place we can reach them.  So we have to be in front of them with our marketing message.” Interestingly, Liz is excited about the power of mobile — thanks to geo-fencing — to make sure that her brand can continue the interaction long after the person has watched a video, clicked a banner or bought a ticket. “It’s about being near the theater where our movie is playing and the movie-goer getting a reminder about the show time or an offer for free popcorn if they do a certain action right at that moment.” It’s also where Relativity Media will be focusing some mobile ad campaigns over the next six months.

My take:

The above interview except speaks volumes about where Entertainment brands must focus their strategies to sync up with the shift in our behavior. Whether it’s buying tickets, setting up reminders so we don’t miss a show or just immersing in a video trailer on our smartphone, mobile is where we make decisions, take actions and amplify our choices. The effective strategies are the one that harness mobile (as part of a multi-screen approach) and apply targeting techniques to take advantage of location, interest and intent to deliver entertainment content and advertising. Success is about driving results deeper in the funnel and delivering advertising and content that serve as a stepping off point to for us to get things done.

Editor’s note: Look for more mobile insights and examples from Relativity Media and others in a project that brings together the Mobile Marketing Association and Millennial Media.

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Joy and I share a long industry track record, a deep respect for quality analysis and an obligation to document the seismic shift in mobile marketing and advertising. Together we will gather the data and insights to show how companies are harnessing mobile to achieve objectives deeper down in the purchase funnel.

Active outreach

Regular readers will recall that my work over the summer — interviewing 60+ brands, agencies and thought leaders (a project commissioned by the Mobile Marketing Association) — has provided me unique insights into how executives at the c-level view mobile and where it contributes most in the consumer journey. Rather than focus on this project, I have made the conscious decision to go one step beyond and outreach to a wider range of industry players and professional organizations, such as the CMO Council, to incorporate learnings, insights and guidance we feel will benefit everyone in the ecosystem.

After all, knowledge is truly only valuable when it is freely shared.

Joy and I will therefore collaborate on primary research to create our own unique and in-depth analyses and Thought Leadership publications. We will also amplify key messages using our family of media properties and a dedicated microsite here on MobileGroove.

Congratulations to us!

So, does the global industry need real-life insights and learnings to help it navigate the mobile terrain and develop strategies to drive positive results further down in the purchase funnel? The answer is an overwhelming ‘YES’!

We shared plans for our new venture with brands, agencies and esteemed colleagues — and we are absolutely blown away by the positive response.

Peggy and Joy,

First off, congrats! You’re two of my favorite thinkers and doers in the mobile space, so that’s a very exciting alliance, even if it means too much of the mobile marketing brain trust is now concentrated in one place. The better news is it sounds like you’re even more determined to spread best practices and all important developments in the mobile space.

– David Berkowitz, Vice President, Emerging Media, 360i

***

Ladies, congratulation on teaming up! I think the two of you will be a fabulous team and can’t wait to see what comes of your partnership:)

– Rachel Pasqua, VP, Mobile, iCrossing

***

WOW!  Congrats Peggy!  Looking forward to scheduling another interview and working with you further.

– Erin Finegold, Corporate Communications Specialist, Content Specialist, Slingshot

***

Thank you for letting me know, Peggy. Please keep me posted on your new initiative and congrats on teaming up with Joy!

 – Jonathan Stephen, Senior Producer Mobile Product, JetBlue Airways

***

#MobileFirst

This is a welcome and wonderful confirmation of our new venture, and Joy and I look forward to connecting with brands, agencies and thought leaders in the next weeks.

YOU are invited to reach out to us directly with your insights, experiences and case studies (peggy@mobilegroove.com). You can also DM your details to @peggyanne.

And, to make sure you can follow the conversation that evolves around our work, insights and exclusive interviews, we will tag all content with the hashtag #MobileFirst.

Voice at the center

It’s been a super-busy last couple of months at Nuance, and Vlad recounts the some of the milestones that speak volumes about where voice (and Nuance) is going. By way of background, Nuance hasn’t just been cementing its market-leading position by rolling out its Dragon Search apps for iPhone/Android devices in key markets such as Brazil, UAE, Malaysia and countries across Southern Europe.

It has also secured turf in new areas of application such as cars (BMW will be making Dragon Drive! Messaging available in some car models as a connected car service that lets people speak emails and text messages); Smart TVs (Samsung’s 2012 premium Smart TV lineup is powered by Nuance allowing consumers to use natural voice commands to change channels, search for content and connect via Skype); and customer care.

To this end Nuance released Nina — the first virtual assistant customer service app to incorporate both speech recognition and voice biometrics into a single integrated solution— allowing companies to make, brand and support their own virtual assistant persona. (Smart move since surveys show that people appreciate self-service with a personal touch.)

Connect the dots, and it’s clear that human speech is on its way to becoming the no-brainer interface to smartphones, TVs, cars, computers, household appliances — and smart devices and services.

As Vlad puts it: Voice is becoming the “amazing shortcut”, bypassing the vision and touch. “We are coming from the era of the visual interface…With voice, coupled with natural language understanding, we are at a point where we can deduce your intent — what you want done. You can suddenly start interacting with things you don’t necessarily see.  You don’t have to find that app in order to get something done. In an increasing number of cases, you can simply state what you want.”

Highlights:

Cutting-edge & multimodal: Voice is the game-changer, but it’s all about reaching a balance between voice and the other input methods that will ultimately lead to the fastest completion of tasks and the best user experiences. Vlad tells us that exploration into ways to use a camera to capture and read the lip movement of a person speaking into a device or at a TV are producing the building blocks for models that will impact our connected lives.

Voice baked in: In Vlad’s view it is an “absolute given is that some level of speech recognition, natural language understanding support will be now built in as part of the fabric or even the operating system.” In fact, a lot of the chip manufacturers are planning future generations of chips that dedicate co-processors to doing things like speech recognition and natural language understanding processing. Will voice be a feature of all services going forward? Let’s just say the technology and support will enable speech recognition and natural language understanding to run in the background.

Search shifts: Speech can replace key word search. Vlad is betting traditional search will “fall by the way side” because we don’t really need a powerful search engine that has indexed the whole Web just to access a restaurant review from Yelp, for example. And look for smarter search services that use “questioning answering” and artificial intelligence to listen to our queries and deliver us what we need. Dragon Go! shows how search can — and will — evolve. The idea, as Vlad puts it, it to take us directly to destinations or content that are relevant to us with out “intermediate stopovers.” It’s all about getting the right answers (for us) faster. (Check out this post for more on Dragon Go! recounting the highlights from an exclusive interview with Nuance via mPulse, the video show produced with partner, untetherTV.)

The last word: Vlad wraps up our interview with a few scenarios (based on real-world progress in the industry and at Nuance) that map out our near future. In his view: “We are quickly entering a really science fiction world where we have immense power at our finger tips or, maybe I should say, at our lips that just would have been inconceivable to people just a decade ago.”

What role will voice soon play in computing, mobile and our daily lives? For the full answer listen in to the podcast by clicking the link below. A hint: “Users we will have a portable virtual environment where — through a variety of devices and context in our daily lives — we will be able to continue interacting a receiving information and communicating in a very transparent and flexible way.” As a result, the intelligence we are building will follow us and remember our preferences. We will control (and increase) this contextual intelligence using voice.

For the inside track on voice and more, register today to hear Vlad at Mobilize, the must-attend mobile conference organized by GigaOm, on September 20th and 21st in San Francisco.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST with Vlad Sejnoha [20:00]

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It’s a tough one to call. New data from independent mobile ad and data platform company Millennial Media shows that Apple mobile devices certainly led the pack in Q2 2012, accounting for 31.4 percent of all impressions. The Apple iPhone was also the number one device on the Millennial Media platform, accounting for nearly 16 percent of total impressions (up from 15 percent in Q1).

It will be interesting to see if the new iPhone 5 will generate a spike in impressions, and follow in the footsteps of the iPhone 4S. When the device was released in mid-October 2011, ad impressions on the platform for that device alone increased 200 percent after one week, and grew over 1800 percent after being marketed for just one month.

Meantime, an online survey of 1,000 adults in the U.K. — conducted by Usurv immediately after the iPhone 5 news yesterday — indicates the new device might not be a crowd-pleaser. While 44 percent of existing iPhone users already want to buy it, only 20 percent of all smartphone users in the sample said they would to upgrade to the new iPhone without needing any further information about the product.

Samsung, the number two device manufacturer, showed significant growth over Q1 2012 (almost double actually), accounting for 22 percent of impressions. In fact, Samsung — with eight phones in the top 20 devices — did surprisingly well on the platform, accounting for 13 percent of handset impressions, nearly double the impressions it chalked up in Q1. RIM was the third device manufacturer on the platform, followed by HTC and Motorola.

Android rules

Apple may have the lead in devices, but iOS remained relatively flat and represented 34 percent of impressions on the platform in Q2. Android held on to its number one position, accounting for 46 percent of impressions on the platform. It’s likely that the advance of Android devices by several manufacturers available to consumers at more reasonable range of price points will widen the gap between the operating systems measured by impression share.

But the real news is the rise of smartphones as a device category.

Overall, smartphones accounted for 74 percent of impressions, up from 66 percent in Q2 2011.

The numbers mirror the wider market trend to smartphones and penetration in key markets such as North America. Nielsen reports that two-thirds of handsets sold in Q2 2012 were smartphones, which means smartphone penetration in the U.S. has reached 55 percent. However, smartphone penetration across the key demographic of adults ages 18-54 is already 78 percent, according to research firm BI Intelligence.

Since roughly 20% of the 6 billion mobile handsets in the world are smartphones, the opportunity for growth is in Europe (Spain, Italy, and France come in below 40 percent penetration) and in developing markets including Brazil and China.

Tablets: the one to watch

The number of impressions on tablets (and so-called non-phone connected devices) far exceeds impressions on feature phones, accounting for 19 percent of impressions up slightly from 17 percent a year ago.

However, several factors — including the rise of multiscreen/multitasking — are coming together to drive massive growth in tablet penetration and usage. Our media time is spent in front of multiple screens (PC, TV, smartphone and tablet). Recent research indicates that tablets are used for entertainment and as a starting point for activities such as shopping where the bigger screen and the context (use at home) encourage relaxed and leisurely interaction with content and advertising.

Data from Millennial Media and consumer research firm comScore also confirm a shift as we migrate our viewing habits from online to mobile devices. The vast majority (95 percent) of total tablet impressions on the Millennial Media platform were from Wi-Fi networks, “supporting the idea that most tablet owners use their device at home or work where they have reliable connections.”

Who are the tablet users? According to comScore data, the U.S. tablet user profile (by tablet model) is similar and equally split between gender, age and household income. Interestingly, Kindle Fire counts more female users.

Popular apps

Finally, the report provides the inside track on developer trends, including the Top 10 Mobile Application categories. Games and Entertainment continue to hold the number one and two positions.

Interestingly, impressions from Science and Technology books and reference apps came out of nowhere to take the number three spot. The report attributes this to year-end school exams and students interacting with educational apps to prep for lessons and tests.

Click HERE to download the full report.

My take:

Once again developers and advertisers have a report that helps them identify and monitor the trends they need to factor into their strategies and planning. In addition to key data points about the Top 20 Mobile Phones, Top 10 Mobile Application categories and the Top 5 Tablets on the platform, we have confirmation that Smartphones and non-smartphone devices are the ones to watch. I mean that literally, since this report ­— and a raft of industry research ­— underlines the huge opportunity in mobile video driven by how we use our devices (often simultaneously) to consume digital media. As I have written before, we are becoming cross-platform consumers, and this will have a profound impact on mobile marketing and advertising.

This post is part of our Mobile Advertising Briefing Room, a thinking space dedicated to providing its community mobile intelligence, consumer research, case studies and industry best practices that equip marketers to reach and engage their target audience at scale. This discussion is hosted & sponsored by Millennial Media.

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• Television doesn’t command the world of multi-screen viewing. The majority (77 percent) of viewers watch live images or VoD on another device — 49 percent on a laptop/desktop and 39 percent on a smartphone.

• Multi-screen viewing is classed into two categories: sequential screening, which is when we move from one device to another to complete a single goal; and simultaneous screening, which is when we use multiple devices at the same time.

•SOURCE: http://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/multiscreenworld_final.pdf

Brands need to get engagement right

It’s not surprising that many brands reach out to engage with college and university students. But it’s frightening how some companies can get it so wrong. As we enter into the multiscreen era, more and more companies are crafting approaches to get mileage out of marketing to mobile, tablets and laptops. But brands need to ask themselves: which platforms really work. Barnes & Noble College Marketing (BNCM), a division of Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, has some answers in its 2012 College Marketing Report. The report, which delves into students’ media habits, social and digital behavior, and marketing preference, found that college students still consider TV ads the most effective form of advertising. Moreover, they prefer to receive emails over texts from marketers; their engagement with brands on Facebook tops all other social networks; and most are very open to direct brand engagement.

•  Since this demographic lives on their mobile phone, you would expect that communications should be text based. Surprisingly, 61 percent said a text message campaign is a NOT good way for a brand to connect with them. In other words, this method of marketing wasn’t good for engagement and it didn’t make them want to buy the product.

• On the other hand, 58 percent of students said that they viewed the majority of their emails on their laptop/desktops and engaged more with this marketing that on mobile devices.

• SOURCE: www.bncollegemarketing.com

Find your gateway

This is the summer of the multiscreen. The Olympic Games in London drove home the point that users tweet and watch the TV at the same time. This new multiscreen communications behavior is even becoming the norm for viewers, according to AdWeek. It draws from data to tell us that:

• Multiscreening is about how we like to combine our devices. 81 percent of viewers said that they prefer to use their TV and their smartphone, while 66 percent said they go with smartphone-computer or TV-computer pairings.

• Even though TVs may be little more than background noise, they can still spur spontaneous action. When users conducted a search on their computers, 10 percent said it was prompted by seeing something on TV. That number rose to 22 percent for searches conducted on smartphones.

• SOURCE: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/tv-smartphone-combo-dominates-multiscreen-consumption-143173

Editor’s note:

MobileGroove has partnered with éclat Marketing — a company that has consistently delivered breakthrough PR campaigns based on a deep understanding of developments impacting mobile, technology, and our society at all levels — to bring you Mobile Data Points. This regular feature, which will highlight the mobile reports and insights you need to know to plan and run your business, is curated by Sophie Young, a member of the éclat team who has a passion for mobile trends, apps and her BlackBerry. If you have a report or survey you think should be included in this regular roundup, then reach out to Sophie directly via email sophie@eclat.co.uk or Twitter (@PheeYoung).

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Wells Fargo & Company, a financial services company with $1.3 trillion in assets, serves one in three households in the U.S. More than 10 percent of its 70 million customers use mobile to interact with the company for at least part of their customer journey.

This has prompted Wells Fargo, now number 26 on the Fortune 100, to make mobile part of the mix. To date Wells Fargo provides banking, insurance, investments, mortgage, and consumer and commercial finance through more than 9,000 stores, 12,000 ATMs, the Internet (wellsfargo.com), and mobile.

The approach speaks volumes about the value of mobile as a complement to all the other channels.  As Alan Gellman, SVP of Digital Marketing, put it: Stores are a critical part of building the relationships that Wells Fargo nurtures — and “mobile won’t replace them.”

By far, the most common use case for mobile is allowing customers to check their account balances. Each month, Wells Fargo receives 27 texts on average from customers using mobile. Of the 70 million customers, 21 million utilize online banking and 8.5 million use mobile to interact.

As Gellman sees it, it’s all “about the consumer, not the technology.” For this reason, Gellman implores his team to create compelling experiences and to “mobilize, not miniaturize.” That’s a smart idea since the technology should adapt to people, not the other way around.

To deliver a good customer experience every step of the journey Wells Fargo has designed “voice of the customer” programs to monitor “what are they saying, where are they saying it, and how are they saying it.” Beyond customer relationship marketing (CRM), Gellman sees acquisition and cross-selling as critical in mobile initiatives.

Other Gellman gems:

• On mobile and security: Gellman notes his company understands its duties go beyond what is regulated. “It’s about what’s right for the customer.”
• On chasing the newest technologies that some call ‘shiny objects’: Gellman challenges his marketers to reveal “what’s the value-add.”
• On mobile advertising approaches: Gellman says mobile is efficient and effective, because it offers “cheap CPC (cost per click) and high impact on awareness.” But there is a catch: “it can’t totally be measured.”

Lowe’s looks at mobile

Equally compelling was the viewpoint shared by Sean Bartlett, Director of Mobile Strategy and Platforms for Lowe’s. By way of background, Lowe’s is the second-largest home improvement retailer in the world and number 54 on the Fortune 100 list. Lowe’s serves approximately 15 million customers a week at more than 1,745 home improvement stores in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Bartlett’s view on mobile products and services centers squarely on the value it delivers. Questions top of mind must be: “Is it compelling, and is it incremental?”

A recent initiative by the chain has put 42,000 iPhones into the hands of sales associates as a way to help customers get a more satisfying experience from the iPhone app. It’s all about creating a virtuous circle by helping sales people to help their customers, who have already made mobile part of their daily routine. The outcome is a solid relationship. At a deeper level, this can strengthen the ties between the customer and the retailer and boost involvement and interest in the MyLowe’s loyalty program.

Bartlett has been in his position for just 18 months, but the change in mindset is significant. While Bartlett calls the early mobile efforts by his company successful, he reveals the company is “blowing it up” to start again with a new focus on the experience.

It’s all about using mobile to be more friendly and personal. As Bartlett put it: “Mobile is the evolution of the experience economy.”

How I See It: The theme of the conference was “mobile first,” a phrase generally attributed to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who proclaimed it at the 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The words referred back to the requirements to design user experiences with mobile in mind. Since then the phase has regrettably become the rallying cry for some in the industry who just want marketers to spend on mobile first. That’s nothing more than hype.

As I wrote in my Mobilized Marketing book, it’s really “sell more stuff first.” Mobile may, or may not, help a marketer get there. Gellman and Bartlett are among those in the industry wise enough to know that the what — the business objective of moving products and services — remains the same. Mobile has simply changed how brands can achieve this.

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Significantly, travel brands — from booking agents, to hotels and resorts, to cruise lines and airlines, to tourist attractions and tourism boards, to regional transit companies and  rental car companies — are using mobile advertising to reach and engage vacationers and business travelers.

In fact, the recent SMART report (Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting) from the independent mobile ad and data platform company Millennial Media, has drawn from actual campaign data to conclude that spending among travel advertisers grew 200 percent year-over-year in 1Q2012. Travel also took the number three spot on the Top 10 Global Brand Advertising Verticals (ranked by mobile ad spend). The vertical has had a top spot on the list throughout 2011, but advertisers stood as being particularly active in Q1, a period during which they proactively presented mobile users with post-holiday getaway ideas and travel deals.

On the road — connected

The SMART numbers match the real-life behavior documented by recent consumer research.  According to eMarketer data, which the SMART report also notes, travelers may be out of the home or office, but they prefer to stay connected to their world through their smartphones and tablets.

Predictably, most use their devices to check personal email, access map content and keep in touch with friends and family. But vacationers and road warriors are also in an interesting state of transition, a special state where they are looking for things to do, places to be and entertainment to pass the time.

In this new kind of need-state, people reach to their mobile devices for a variety of tasks. They search for local restaurants and tourist attractions (62 percent), consume entertainment (55 percent enjoy content at their final destination and 54 percent watch content in-transit), and make reservations (27 percent).

Have phone, will travel

A special area of opportunity identified by eMarketer (and confirmed by my ongoing interviews with leading brands and agencies around the world) is reservations. Put another way, people are not only reaching to their mobile to perform typical ‘top of the funnel’ tasks such as researching hotels, flights and restaurants, but they are also using mobile to make the bookings.

According to eMarketer, 16 million consumers in the U.S. alone are expected to book travel on their smartphones. In addition, 36 million will be researching travel.

This is where mobile advertising can play a central role— helping to drive bookings and allowing brands to retarget people who have already downloaded an app, or responded to a campaign call to action.

Travel brands ‘get’ mobile

In a recent interview with Matt Briant — Regional Mobile Platform Director at Dentsu Möbius in Singapore — I learned that his agency is seeing a similar trend. As he put it: The percentage of the overall budget allocated to mobile is up across the board. “But the percentage of budget making it to mobile from the travel sector is growing massively.”

We also discussed why the travel sector has become so active, and so far along the learning/execution curve. Matt suggests that the travel sector is moving down the purchase funnel ­— past brand awareness ­— to encourage transactions because it can. (Look for more mobile insights and examples from Dentsu and others in an upcoming Thought Leadership project.)

Like retail, travel is a sector that maps perfectly to mobile — and to the purchase funnel. Automotive, for example, can harness mobile to support a variety of real brand objectives, such as brand awareness, footfall to the dealership and registrations for a test-drive. But few will buy a car using their mobile. For many other verticals, the story is a similar one.

Not so for travel. Here mobile stitches together a seamless experience. From finding a holiday destination, to clicking the app or site that allows us to book a reservation, mobile is our constant help and companion.

Purchase funnel

This level of activity creates the perfect conditions for brands to deliver effective mobile advertising if they get it right. The SMART report shows that travel brands are indeed leveraging mobile to connect with travelers and vacationers.

Among the findings:

• Booking Agents & Sites accounted for 57 percent of the travel campaigns run with Millennial Media in Q1, using mobile to promote getaway specials and trip ideas for spring break and summer holidays.
• Sustained In-Market Presence was the number one campaign goal, representing 62 percent of the Travel Campaign Goal Mix. To this end advertisers ran application download campaigns to encourage adoption of their booking and travel planning apps.
• Travel brands are focusing spend further down in the purchase funnel. In total 16 percent of campaigns focused on Site Traffic as a campaign goal, and only 9 percent of campaigns focused on driving broader brand awareness.
• Hotels, Resorts, and Cruise Lines made up 18 percent of all travel campaigns in Q1, enabling and encouraging people to make reservations and book travel directly from mobile sites and apps. Also: App Download represented more than half (59 percent) of the Post-Click Campaign Action Mix for Travel Advertisers, showing that brands have recognized the need to have a persistent presence on consumers’ mobile devices.

My take:

Connect the dots, and it all about taking the friction out of travel research and booking by harnessing mobile to provide people a convenient (and seamless) experience. Many travel brands are evolving their mobile advertising strategies to achieve precisely this. The next step will be to use the data provided by these campaigns to reach people who have responded and — ultimately — build loyal brand advocates.

This post is part of our Mobile Advertising Briefing Room, a thinking space dedicated to providing its community mobile intelligence, consumer research, case studies and industry best practices that equip marketers to reach and engage their target audience at scale. This discussion is hosted & sponsored by Millennial Media.

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This pilot — which concludes this week —is built from the ground up to provide brands (in this case Coke and Auntie Anne’s) data that tells them which ads were viewed and which ones led to an actual redemption. As Tom Daly —Group Manager, Interactive Marketing, Coca-Cola — put it in a recent interview: The pilot is the first to connect “the  dots from awareness building, to driving foot traffic,  to a [Coke] customer, to a transaction.”

Read between the lines, and Coke clearly has it’s eye on the prize. Yes, effective advertising is about using mobile to track an offer from the moment the ad is served to the moment the consumer (who fits the target demographic) responds. But smart companies are beginning to realize they can also use the data mobile delivers to go much deeper in the purchase funnel. Granted, this pilot is sharply focused on coupon redemptions. But Coke is also looking to this particular campaign to help understand precisely where it is in the “transaction chain” that mobile makes the biggest contribution.

Fortunately, this is precisely what the pilot partners set out to make possible in the first place.

Mobile’s true role

In a nutshell, Coke and Auntie Anne’s have partnered on a location-based mobile ad test in Atlanta, Georgia. The aim is to close the loop by tracking mobile coupon redemptions at the point-of-sale through technology supplied by Sparkfly.

The pilot is running exclusive on the Millennial Media platform, and is leveraging Millennial Media’s audience targeting to reach moms in or around shopping malls where Auntie Anne’s has a physical location.

The creative offers consumers a coupon for a Coke and a soft pretzel at the moment the  consumers are close to one of Auntie Anne’s 11 shopping mall locations. Consumers can then click on the ad to redeem it immediately, or save the offer for later. (If the person  chooses to save the deal, they will receive a SMS message with a link to the redemption code that can then be used at any time during the promotional period.)

If the consumer chooses to use their coupon for a purchase at that moment, then they can redeem the offer by showing the clerk at Auntie Anne’s a unique four-digit code (that was delivered directly to their device when they clicked on the display ad).  The cashier manually enters the code into the existing POS system, where the combined reporting capabilities offered by Millennial Media and Sparkfly allow Coke and Auntie Anne’s to track campaign results in real-time, and right down to the creative that triggered the purchase.

As Marcus Startzel, Millennial Media General Manager, puts it: It’s all about making the right connections to get the right audience. ” We use our first-party data to build unique audiences on our platform…. We can then overlay this with location data we have on our platform, and combined, it allows us to reach the right consumer, at the right time and place.”

My take:

The pilot is making the headlines, but the real news is the data it can deliver. The point-of-sale integration from Sparkfly and the technology and analytics from Millennial Media effectively equip brands to track campaign performance in real-time, as well as item-level tracking of individual sales.

Brands have more than visibility into what works (and what fails), and can use this new data to gain a holistic view into the performance of their advertising and marketing campaigns.

This is huge, when we consider that brands are already focusing their campaigns — and their mobile strategies — further down in the purchase funnel. I know from my own exclusive interviews with +35 C-level executives at brands and agencies that the action (and spend) is all around understanding mobile’s real role. I can’t reveal more about this project just yet, so watch this space!

In the meantime, Coke gets high marks for thinking BIG Picture here. It knows that mobile maps to every stage of the purchase funnel, and it has set out to show the way.

It will be interesting to learn what this pilot delivers. No doubt the results will be impressive — and confirm the pivotal importance of data in marketing and advertising as brands seek to understand mobile’s real value and assess of the performance of mobile against other channels.

This post is part of our Mobile Advertising Briefing Room, a thinking space dedicated to providing its community mobile intelligence, consumer research, case studies and industry best practices that equip marketers to reach and engage their target audience at scale. This discussion is hosted & sponsored by Millennial Media.

Related articles

• Leveraging Our Real-World Mobile Behavior To Deliver Real Results
• Hey Mobile Moms, How ‘Bout a Coke and a Pretzel?

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Digital Moms in the US are an increasingly important demographic for marketers. Mothers are accumulating more wealth and making more shopping choices and using more technology than the average person. Digital moms are more likely to be owners of smartphones and more likely to consult others when making purchase decisions.

How should mobile marketers tap into this important segment?

Here are a number of mobile stats that can help marketers effectively market to digital moms.

Moms have money. An article from Asking Smarter Questions provides some key statistics about both women and mothers. Moms represent a $2.4 trillion market in the US. By 2028, the average American woman is expected to earn more than the average American male. Women are earning, spending, and influencing spending at a greater rate than ever before, accounting for $7 trillion in consumer and business spending in the US. Women are making more than 85% of all consumer purchases, including more than 50% of traditional male products, such as  cars, power tools and consumer electronics.

Moms are socially connected via mobile. In a study by NM Incite, at least half of moms use social media via mobile devices, compared to 37% of the online population. In an article from Asking Smarter Questions, 64% of moms ask other mothers for advice before they purchase a new product and 63% of all mothers surveyed consider other moms the most credible experts when they have questions. Additionally, 92% pass along information about deals or finds to others. Moms are using Facebook and Pinterest to share tips, product recommendations and shopping deals with their friends.

Click here to read the full post.

About Lisa

Lisa Ciangiulli, Director of Marketing for Alcatel-Lucent Global Advertising Solutions, where she has been instrumental in the development and marketing of Optism, Alcatel-Lucent’s powerful permission-based mobile advertising solution. In this role, and throughout her career, Lisa has spearheaded efforts to encourage cooperation between players across the ecosystem with the ultimate goal of enabling closer communication with the consumer. In May 2010 she was named to the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) North America Board of Directors. You can follow her on Twitter (@LisaCiangiulli).

Related articles

• Mobile App Developers: Know Your Boomers
• Social Moms on the Rise [INFOGRAPHIC]

Yes, the shift to multi-device multi-tasking is real — in fact, it’s a trend we have observed for months that will have a profound impact on mobile marketing. Already the Pew Internet and American Life Project tells us that half of all adult mobile phone owners now reach to their mobile devices to enhance and enjoy their television-watching experiences.

The London Games will show what cutting-edge companies are capable of right now.

Just in time for the Olympics, entities including Twitter, ESPN, Facebook and Yahoo!, are taking the wraps off of comprehensive complementary initiatives to transform television viewing, making what used to be the passive activity into a completely interactive one.

ESPN gave me the inside track on their strategy, insights I documented in my new book Mobilized Marketing. Specifically, ESPN intends to create worldwide fan communities around events like the Olympics. It’s an exciting approach that brings together fans experiencing the games live in the stadiums with fans cheering on their sofas. Further, the social aspect of this encourages live viewing since the back-and-forth between fans in the community happens in real-time as events take place.

Is ESPN on to something here? Let’s look at what the numbers tell us.

The results highlighted below are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from March 15 to April 3, 2012, among a sample of 2,254 adults, age 18 and older.

• 38 percent of mobile phone owners used their phone to keep themselves occupied during commercials or breaks in something they were watching
• 23 percent used their phone to exchange text messages with someone else who was watching the same program in a different location
• 22 percent used their phone to check whether something they heard on television was true
• 20 percent used their phone to visit a website that was mentioned on television
• 11 percent used their phone to see what other people were saying online about a program they were watching, and 11 percent posted their own comments online about a program they were watching using their mobile phone
• 6 percent used their phone to vote for a reality show contestant

Altogether, Pew reports that 52 percent of all mobile phone owners are “connected viewers”—meaning they use their phones while watching television for at least one of the activities listed above.

Aaron Smith, a co-author of the Pew report, sums it up best in an interview with  Mediapost. As he put it: “Thanks to the widespread adoption of mobile technologies, what was once a passive, one-way information flow is often now a social contact sport.”

But mobile social isn’t just fueling a new way to experience television.  The combination of social and mobile has also encouraged more sales. With devices typically no more than four feet away at all times, more people are open to impulse buys. It’s interesting that people who are responding to calls to action delivered by traditional media (TV) are actually driving additional business for advertisers and mobile marketers.

In fact, AllThingsD reports that eBay and PayPal mobile expect to each transact $10 billion in volume this year. That’s more than double 2011. In the words of eBay’s CEO John Donahoe, the jump represents a “staggering surge” in mobile commerce that did not exist just a few years ago.

How I See It: The shift is real and marketers who fail to realize that consumers are participating in experiences and events like the London Olympics (across multiple screens) will likely miss this year’s business goals. The proof is in the numbers — and in exclusive interviews I conducted with brands and companies gearing up to ride this wave. As ESPN told me: Consumers will punish brands who don’t have a rewarding mobile presence. It has passed the point of a “nice to have.”

AT&T charging confusion

In the U.S. AT&T has followed Verizon Wireless’ lead and announced shared data plans.

With new AT&T Mobile Share plans, available in late August, new and existing customers can share a single bucket of data across smartphones, tablets, and other compatible devices, plus get unlimited talk and text. According to the company, “AT&T Mobile Share plans make it easy for customers to manage their data, voice minutes and texting, without needing to keep track of multiple plans.”

With AT&T Mobile Share plans, customers start by choosing how much data they want each month, then choose up to 10 devices to attach to their shared plan, one of which must be a smartphone. Each plan includes tethering and unlimited domestic calls and texts for smartphones and basic or quick messaging phones. The larger the data bucket you choose, the less you pay per gigabyte and the less you pay for each smartphone added to the shared plan.

To help customers track their data usage, AT&T keeps users informed with courtesy alerts as they near their data allowance for the month. Also, customers can check their usage at anytime online, through the myAT&T mobile app, or by calling *DATA# from their mobile phone.

The move follows the June launch of Share Everything plans by Verizon, a charging scheme it said “will forever change the way customers purchase wireless services.”  Share Everything Plans, which are now available, include unlimited voice minutes, unlimited text, video and picture messaging and a single data allowance for up to 10 Verizon Wireless devices.  In addition, the Mobile Hotspot service on all the devices is included in the Share Everything Plans at no additional charge.

How I See It: The new pricing models may be a step in the right direction, but the tariffs are still a jungle. In my view, mobile operators are overselling the ease-of-use here, and I have read multiple reports from techies who can’t make sense of the plans. As I’ve said in my column here — and in my book Mobilized Marketing— keeping it simple is critical. Ladies and gentlemen of mobile, every day when you come to your desks, whiteboards and assembly lines, think of just two words: Easy peasy. Let’s rally around this children’s rhyme and make it our motto to stop the insanity of metered data plans, crazy distribution points and even crazier product line introductions. It has to be EASY — but this new model isn’t. Instead it demands mobile subscribers to count their “MBs” and “GBs.” In an age where connected is fast becoming our new ‘default state’ that’s like asking people to measure the air they breathe in cubic square feet.

Related articles

• Mobile Usage Hot Trends: Mobile Apps, Multi-screen & Mobile Video(mobilegroove.com)

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Why are mobile developers leaving money on the table and failing to make an effort to connect with the 78 million people in the U.S. alone who can be classified as Boomers? Well, it can’t be because the numbers don’t add up.

Boomers are a BIG group with a lot of buying power to match. They control 77 percent (!) of the nation’s wealth, and they buy 45 percent of all consumer goods. In fact, Boomers spent a whopping $2.5 trillion in 2010 alone. And, since we are all getting older, this is a market that shows no signs of slowing. There will be an additional 53+ million people over 50 in the next 20 years.

And forget the stereotype that Boomers are luddites when it comes to mobile technology. The Pew Internet Project reveals that 80 percent of Boomers are online and 46 percent of them own smartphones.  They spend 15 hours per week online doing research, emailing, shopping, reading and socializing about their hobbies like gardening and travel.

So why aren’t mobile developers jumping at the opportunity to connect with this underserved customer segment and deliver apps they will genuinely appreciate?

It’s a tough question and one that was hotly debated at the recent Silicon Valley Boomer Venture Summit. The event, which I also attended, brings together entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to share insights and discuss the tremendous window of opportunity for growth and profits Boomers represent, even in a challenging economic climate.

The entrepreneurs attending the conference thoroughly understood the importance of meeting the online needs of the Boomer generation.  During the event they shared examples of how technology and mobile is coming together to power healthcare and caregiving services and applications targeted squarely at this wealthy group.

Early adopters – myth and reality

So, why do so many app developers tag Boomers as laggards in technology when the facts show the exact opposite? Boomers are actually among the early adopters of technology, and their immense wallets demands respect from the same the Millennials who develop and market websites and apps.

Conventional wisdom among these developers seems to dictate that early adopters — as a rule — are young. Wrong! Early adoption is a behavioral characteristic. It has nothing to do with age.

So, while youth has been a convenient demographic proxy, it’s a poor one.

Put another way, age and early adoption are independent.  What’s more, plenty of Boomers would jump at the chance to try new technology — if developers would only let them. But when an app is purposely designed from ground up to appeal to the ‘young’ early adopter, it effectively limits the ability of the Boomer early adopters to participate.

More importantly, it also limits the size of the market developers can address with their apps.

Boomers ‘get’ technology

Boomers have a unique historical perspective about technology. They were in their early teens when the first IBM PCs and Apple computers appeared. They grew up empowered by this technology,  an experience that made them the first real early adopters of that era.

But Boomers also lived much of their lives before the Internet became the way we connect with communities, content, advertising and all things digital.

Boomers recall a time before mobile when telephones had wires. They watched TV delivered by a handful of network broadcasting stations, not Hulu. And when their friends moved to another state they lost touch; there was no way to connect via Skype.

We should also remember that Boomers’ ideals were developed during the Vietnam War years, an era when human rights and individual freedoms were primary concerns.  Their concerns about privacy and security continue to impact their attitude about technology today. According to a 2009 study conducted by AARP and Microsoft, 67 percent of people ages 18-24 said they were concerned about online privacy.  The number increased to 86 percent for people 55 and older.

Connect the dots, and Boomers want technology to fit into their lives and meet their values. But they also expect technology to adapt to them — not the other way around.

How to reach Boomers

So if app developers are serious about getting a share of the Boomers’ $2.5 trillion wallets, here is some helpful advice.

• Size matters: Make the site clear and easy to read. You may want to use a thin font in a small point size that looks cool.  However, it’s too hard for Boomer eyes to read.  Use a sanserif font like Tahoma, Calibri, or Arial.  And never use a point size less than 12 point.
• Easy does it: Light or bright letters against a dark background is hard to read and even hurts the eyes. Try to limit reverse type for headlines only. Use a lot of white space.  Primary colors are a plus a well.
• Keep it simple: Make navigation clear and simple. Use large buttons placed in areas that are easily recognizable. And don’t make them search for the save, share or help button.
• Explain clearly: Make the ‘help’ section and home page accessible from every screen, if possible.  Boomers absolutely hate being lost in a maze with no way to access help or get back to the home page. Also, make sure your help section uses easy to understand terms in its FAQ, not technical jargon.
• Healthy is better: When it comes to health and wellness products, Boomers are THE early adopters. Health and fitness mobile apps are a natural next step — provided developers deliver value and ease of use.

If you follow these simple steps, you are destined to delight Boomer users.  Boomers naturally think of themselves as young and cool — after all, their ranks include dozens of pop icons ranging from Mick Jagger to Madonna. So stop thinking in stereotypes and make an effort to address this demographic. Remember Boomers want to stay relevant, and this also means having the latest tech toys and equipment.  Developers who make the effort to understand Boomers will open their hearts — and their wallets.

About Suzie:

Suzie Mitchell (@suziemitchell) is president of a nationally (U.S) recognized marketing research, public relations and public affairs firm Mitchell Research & Communications, Inc. Her personal passion is mobile apps—primarily focused on health and wellness.  She is committed to bringing tech understanding to Baby Boomers.  She recently formed a new division of the company MitchellPR, which is dedicated to helping technology companies understand the needs of Boomers.  She is the author of the BoomerTech blog and of a weekly blog for AARP called App of the Week.  She is co-author of the book, Growing Into Grace: Adventures in Self Discovery through Writing, which assists women in find peace with their lives as they age.

Related articles

• Mitchell Poll says: Boomers Will Listen to Their Doctor to buy Smartphone Medical Apps(mitchellpr.com)

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• Leveraging Our Real-World Mobile Behavior To Deliver Real Results(mobilegroove.com)

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MEF will be accepting entries for the Meffys awards until 6pm (GMT) 19th July 2012. Entry costs have been frozen from last year and are as follows:

• MEF members : GBP150
• Non-members : GBP350
• Start Ups/NGOs : GBP75

The winners will be announced at a gala dinner attended by the industry’s most influential players on 12th September at the Park Lane Hotel in London’s Mayfair. Last year’s winners included: The Coca Cola Company, BlackBerry, Velti, AKQA, Shazam,
Electronic Arts, ForgetMeNot Africa, Onavo, Hungama Mobile, Eagle Eye Solutions, CBS Interactive, Aspiro, Movellas, OnStar and Saffron Digital.

Judging Personalization & Trust

Once again MobileGroove is a media partner for the Meffys. I am also honored that the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) has asked me to head the panel of judges for the fifth consecutive year.

Given my strong background in search and discovery, I will head the judging panel for the category Discovery & Engagement. http://www.meffys.com/meffycategories/discovery-engagement

This award recognizes companies who enable increased discovery and engagement on the mobile device, delivering consumers relevant and timely information or services, as well as facilitating the sharing of assets, activities, events and interests. This may be in the form of a search engine, ad network, social network. Or is can also be in the form of a  sharing application that has gained commercial success through a user-friendly interface and the use of communities that facilitates content discovery and engagement. In particular, judges will be looking for companies that can demonstrate they are truly driving mobile traffic and engagement.

I am also delighted to be head judge of an entirely new (and vital!) category: Consumer Trust.

My work in this exciting area goes back to the most recent Netsize Guide, an industry analysis and resource I write each year on behalf of Netsize, a Gemalto company. The book looks at trust and concludes that trust — and the ability of companies to build lasting trust assets — will separate the industry leaders from the also-rans. [To download the complete Netsize Guide by Gemalto, click here.]

By way of background, this new category recognizes early adopters who are paving the way for managing privacy and security in line with regulation and  industry developments of best practice. Entries may be a technology or service that is ensuring compliance and transparency to advance consumer trust or an individual app, product, service or campaign that utilizes consumer data effectively and responsibly.

A full list of categories can be found at http://www.meffys.com/meffycategories/2012-award-categories

In addition to the 13 award categories there will be two special awards presented at the ceremony; the CEO Summit award for Innovation and the Meffys Outstanding Contribution Award. Honoring mobile pioneers and visionaries, the Outstanding Contribution Award celebrates a mobile hero whose seminal work has been fundamental to the growth of the mobile industry. Nominations for this special category are now open online.

So get working on your entry now

It’s a really simple process – and only costs GBP350 (GBP150 for MEF members). Just make sure you have a visual demo of your service as the judges will need this in order to understand exactly how it works.

Related articles

• Have you entered for the Meffys 2012 yet?(mobileindustryreview.com)

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Buying, paying, transacting, banking — these are all part of what we have come to call mobile commerce. With such a broad definition and so many scenarios it’s little wonder that mobile commerce now tops the list of mobile-megatrends. Interestingly, what people want (and the impact on financial institutions, mobile operators and companies across the emerging ecosystem) differs depending on the region where you operate and the opportunities you pursue. An essential read is the 2012 edition of the Mobile Commerce Guide which brings together advice and case studies from senior execs, analysts and organizations including the Mobile Marketing Association. Diarmuid Mallon kicks off this series with a look at

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What is mobile commerce? It is rapidly becoming a mainstream term, but ask a hundred people what it is, and you will get a hundred different answers. Some will talk about accessing your bank account on your phone, others think it’s all about paying for goods or services. And still others are excited about marketing or coupons. Connect the dots, and it’s clear that mobile commerce is in fact all these and more.

It was this multitude of uses and use cases that drove us to publish our first mobile commerce guide in 2011. We wanted to show how broad a topic mobile commerce is, and how the definition of what mobile commerce means really depends on where you are in the world. We also wanted to share how best practice was already being implemented by many companies and deployments across the globe.

A split emerged in how regions approached and adopted mobile commerce. In emerging markets mobile commerce was embraced by both merchants and consumers, filling the gap that had yet to be addressed by the traditional banking services. There consumers used mobile commerce services to transfer money, pay bills and purchase goods and services. In developed markets, it was a different picture. Mobile commerce was primarily focused on mobile banking services and mobile marketing.

A year later and the new 2012 Mobile Commerce Guide documents the spread on mobile commerce — and what mobile commerce has become. At one level, mobile commerce is a huge growth story. A recent study by Juniper Research forecasts that the gross value of physical goods bought and sold via mobile will exceed $78 billion worldwide in 2012. But the excitement is not just about market growth; it’s about the advance of mobile commerce and how the range of services on offer has increased and changed as a result.

(R)evolution in mobile commerce

In emerging markets, the focus has been on P2P money transfer solutions. These solutions have since been extended to support merchants and, in some cases, advanced services such as bill pay or remittances. Typically, these P2P services were offered by mobile operators. So, while these services provided clear benefits for their users, they didn’t always fully address the necessary financial inclusion requirements. this is because the majority of these services were based on SVA (store value accounts), rather than bank accounts. For full financial inclusion, the ideal financial vehicle is a bank account, as it can support services such as interest and loans, and enables the customer to access other financial services.

However, this is changing. In the last year we’ve seen the rise of Mobile Money, also known as Branchless Banking — where banks such as Dutch-Bangla Bank Limited (DBBL) headquartered in Bangladesh, and Standard Bank of South Africa — have used the ubiquity of mobile to service customers and reach far beyond their branch and ATM networks. And all this at a fraction of the cost.

In developed markets, mobile banking initially started as a service aimed at retail customers. Today it is more about meeting the needs of SME and Corporate customers.

For business users mobile banking is focused on providing convenience, allowing customers to check on accounts and transact business on the move and on their mobile devices. Mobile commerce also enables businesses to eliminate cash and paper invoicing from their day-to-day business, paving the way for innovative services enabling mobile payments for cash-on-delivery for wholesalers delivering to small independent stores.

Mobile commerce gets personal

However, companies are not just using mobile commerce to provide customers an additional transactional channel. They are harnessing the power of mobile — an intensely personal, interactive and immediate channel to the customer — to boost customer engagement.

This is a smart strategy since the nature of mobile enables companies to create and deploy a completely new breed of services and encourage new types of interactions that were simply not possible before.

Before the advance of mobile devices and the mobile shopping behavior they power, retailers and shops could own the customer relationship, leaving the brands to observe sales of their product, but never really connect with their customers at a deeper level. Mobile commerce — and the personal exchanges between people and the brands they like —changes all this.

Consumer products (CP) companies across the board are beginning to use mobile commerce to build a  direct relationship with their customers.

At Sybase we are observing first-hand how companies are harnessing mobile commerce to ignite an ongoing exchange with their customers.

CPs are using mobile loyalty as the key mechanism to drive repeat purchases. Leading durable goods companies, brands that produce and sell home appliances and products that consumers generally only buy two or more years, are using the mobile channel to push product hints and tips, thus supporting loyalty programs and cross-sell to build and maintain consumer relationships between purchases.

Frictionless mobile commerce

Mobile has moved our businesses — and our society — into the Age of Pull. The seismic shift to a participatory culture marks a clear departure from the push approach that allowed companies to deliver one-size-fits-all content, services and marketing to a mass-market audience. People are empowered to interact with the companies they choose on the terms they demand, and companies across all sectors are using mobile — and the direct connection to their customers — to engage and listen.

At first, mobile commerce was a simple and defined landscape where banks offered mobile banking and operators offered mobile payments. However, this is no longer the case. Instead, the boundaries between banking services and mobile payments have begun to blur. Many mobile payment services include bill pay – a traditional banking service, and banks are now offering P2P money transfer – which has been the base offering of all mobile payment schemes.

More recently, retail, utilities and consumer products have begun to see the opportunity to use mobile commerce to create a new customer engagement beyond simple marketing and —ultimately — connect directly with their customers.

What is mobile commerce? Where are the boundaries? Will there be a showdown as companies jockey for position to deliver people a broad range of mobile commerce services? These are tough questions indeed. While we have not yet come to a consensus on what mobile commerce is, it is clearly an area of opportunity no business can ignore. It’s also a space destined for significant growth. As more consumers have access to more advanced mobile devices with capabilities such as cameras, GPS and of Near-Field Communications (NFC) that make buying content, goods and services (both physical and digital) a breeze, the way is clear for many more of our daily interactions to end in a transaction and an ongoing ‘conversation’ that can build deeper relationships between purchases.

Editor’s note: The 2012 edition of the Sybase 365 Mobile Commerce Guide draws from  insights and contributions to provide expert advice, case studies and best practice to a broad and growing audience of financial institutions, mobile operators, enterprises and companies seeking to plan and execute mobile commerce services and strategies around the world. DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY TODAY!

Next in the series: Dutch-Bangla Bank Limited (DBBL) discusses how it has combined philanthropic leadership and mobile technology prowess to bring mobile financial services to millions in rural Bangladesh.

About Diarmuid

Diarmuid Mallon, who was instrumental in the Mobile Commerce Guide, is head of Product Marketing for Sybase 365, a company delivering mCommerce, mCRM, Operator Services and Mobile Messaging products and solutions. Before joining Sybase, Diarmuid was a Product Manager at Logica’s Wireless Networks division. He has worked in mobile messaging for more than 16 years, in wide range of roles from Business Development to Product Evangelism. Follow Diarmuid on twitter @diarmuidmallon, and read his blog at  blogs.sybase.com/dmallon/

I might add that hosts also get great exposure and extra traffic for the week that they host. (One reason why Alcatel-Lucent Optism, a newcomer to the COM, has already chosen another slot to host the COM in September.) Hosts also benefit from connecting with the COMmunity and can be sure that, once the Carnival is live on their site, bloggers who made the lineup will use their social media channels and voice to amplify your post.

How to host the COM

• The COM generally showcases the top 10 posts chosen from the posts that were submitted throughout the week.
• One post in your Carnival should be your Best Post of the Week. Please don’t post a roundup without providing us your pick of the week and your reasons why it sets the bar.
• If possible, try to choose and highlight a newcomer to the Carnival.
• Remember that your job as host is to encourage the reader to visit the post on the contributors’ site and generate traffic for the individual blogger. Therefore, don’t tell the whole story — the purpose of your post is to recap the best of mobile blogging and make the reader want to click through your summary and read the whole post.

You can also check out the COM website for additional detail and a list of past posts.

The week’s lineup:

Lee Cocking over at the Fixmo company blog submits two posts: one a clear, concise and well-written blog expertly outlining the complex concept of Mobile Device Sandboxing (aptly titled Mobile Device Sandboxing 101; and the other (titled BYOD Security Strategies ).The sandboxing post is really more of a primer, providing an overview of the three approaches and ways companies can/must minimize the security risks around embracing BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) in the organization. In Lee’s view the winning approach “needs to be more than just simple application abstraction and should also include increased encryption for data-at-rest and data-in-transit, with enhanced policy control that goes above and beyond the standard application level control (which is usually nothing).” The takeaway: If your organization is embracing BYOD, or you require additional security on consumer-grade devices, then you have to think about including sandboxing requirements when looking at your mobile security and mobile risk management needs. The second post, like the title says, lists recommendations (and provides practical advice) on how companies can secure their organizations against BYOD-related threats.

JT Klepp, a newcomer to the COM, provides us a post that deep dives into what a winning mobile wallet solution will have to offer. He argues a wallet will need to know our context (to serve us the right deal while shopping, for example). And it should also be location-aware. The takeaway: Wallets will have to facilitate payments (that’s table stakes) — but winning wallet solutions will do much, much more.

Steve Smith over at Mediapost  muses about how mobile changes all the rules of mobile marketing in The Age of The Branded Action. He shares some examples and campaigns (such as the campaign from Google and Grow Interactive that won the won the Mobile Lions Grand Prix) to show how mobile is not just about targeting and tracking us; it’s about providing us a kind of platform that allows us to engage and act in our interests (and prompted by the brands we appreciate). In the case of the Google campaign the aim was to re-imagine the famous Coke hilltop ad (“I’d like to buy the world a Coke”) and effectively enable us to buy people around the world a Coke. It’s a great piece packed with other great examples to drive his point home — which is why it is my hands-down Pick of the week.

Jonathan Kohl brings us two parts of a three part blog series laying out all the steps you need to follow when setting up a test lab to test your mobile app I was impressed by his hands-on, no-nonsense style, which is surely valuable to developers faced by this challenge. Building an app on a budget? Then read on and follow Jonathan’s extremely helpful hints.

• Creating a Test Lab for Mobile Apps Testing – Part 1: http://www.kohl.ca/2012/creating-a-test-lab-for-mobile-apps-testing-part-1/
• Creating a Test Lab for Mobile Apps Testing – Part 2: http://www.kohl.ca/2012/creating-a-test-lab-for-mobile-apps-testing-part-2/

Chris Reynolds over at MobyAffiliates— an excellent destination providing app developers and marketers numbers, reports, lists and trends  — brings us a new review of Mobile Social Gaming Market Statistics and Trends.  It’s a massive new industry and Chris details the “huge waves of new value” it has created. As he puts it: “With freemium business models that combine huge mass market usage with multi-million dollar revenue streams from virtual goods and ‘in-app purchases’ this is a huge new market developing.” It’s a worthwhile post — particularly in view of all the app reports underlining that games are the number one genre — full stop.

And finally, here at MobileGroove draws our attention to a guest column contribution from AdaptiveMobile’s Ciaran Bradley. He draws from recent in-house research (a survey of 1,000 smartphone) users to gauge current usage patterns of mobile applications and the awareness of security threats associated levels of subscriber trust in mobile network operators, and the factors that serve to both build and erode that trust. The combined research produced some surprise findings for both operators and consumers. The takeaway:  There are many apps and services that compromise our data (and our trust). But don’t expect people to take matters into their own hands. While the majority of respondents voiced concern over what they consider to be an unacceptable breach of their personal privacy, many more simply choose not take action to prevent or limit the damage done by rogue applications. This is where operators can/should/MUST come in to  provide the advice and the tools to help users understand the risk and fight back.

NEXT WEEK:

The COM touches down at Wapple, so be sure to submit your best mobile blogging by end-Sunday. Remember: You can also submit a post on behalf of another blogger if you think the post is outstanding and should be shared with the larger community of Mobilists.

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Opportunity or threat? It’s a tough one to call but you can rest assured that Chetan’s lineup of speakers and industry insiders (such as  Frank Meehan, part of the Horizons Ventures VC team) will not shy away from asking (and answering) the tough questions.

By the way, I had the pleasure of conducting an interview with Frank for MobileGroove that you can read and listen to here. in it Frank gives us a preview of his talk this Friday and outlines the options open to operators serious about maintaining a central spot in the value chain. In a nutshell, operators can/should move innovation activities outside of the company (like Telefónica Digital). They can also claim a lucrative niche such as the Connected Home or focus (following the lead of AT&T and its Digital Home connected home and security offer, for example).

LONDON: Speaker lineup

If you are in London ­ — and much of the U.K. telecoms industry is concentrated in the City — then be sure to check out this worthwhile day-long event. Chetan’s events — as a rule ­— offer a great opportunity to network and discuss the big picture trends that matter most.

June 29th – London

Operators and OTT

Frank Meehan
Horizons Ventures

James Finn
Director, Product Design
Telefonica Digital

Andreas Bernström
CEO
Rebtel

Patrice Slupowski
VP, Digital Innovation
Orange FT Group

Mobile Future Forward is coming

The timing is also right to start making plans to attend the annual mobile executive summit known as Mobile Future Forward (September 10). I am proud to be a media partner for this (and all) of Chetan’s high caliber events. Chetan likes to call MFF a “mobile boot camp with the brightest brains in mobile” — and a scan of the preliminary program shows this tagline is no exaggeration.

Steve Elfman, President, Sprint, will provide an update on the state of the wireless industry.

Glenn Lurie, President, Emerging Enterprises and Partnerships at AT&T Mobility, will deep dive into the world of emerging devices and the opportunities this new connectedness offers.

Mung Ki Woo, Head of Mobile at Mastercard Worldwide, and Antonio Benjamin, Global CTO at Citi, will discuss the mobile commerce ecosystem evolution.

Stephen David, former CIO of Procter & Gamble, will talk about how wireless is going to disrupt retail.

Check out the complete program to date here.

I’ll have more about the speakers and the topics in the next weeks — as well as exclusive audio interviews with the speakers.

Registration is open now. Early bird will expire July 10^th. The last two events were sold out, so be sure to grab your seat at one of the most anticipated mobile gatherings of the year.

Related articles

• Frank Meehan, Horizons Ventures VC: Why Operators Should Follow Telefónica & AT&T Innovation Blueprint(mobilegroove.com)

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• M-Pulse: Chetan Sharma Talks Mobile Commerce, Payments & 2012 Mobile Predictions Survey Results(mobilegroove.com)

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• 5 Mobile Data Points You Need To Know From Chetan Sharma, Flurry & ABI Research(mobilegroove.com)

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• 5 Data Points You Need To Know From xAD, Nielsen, IAB Chetan Sharma & Mogreet(mobilegroove.com)

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Yes – it is! A survey looking at our mobile communications and social networking behavior —conducted by YouGov and commissioned by Tyntec, a global mobile interaction specialist  — shows that the vast majority of young adults would happily live without basic necessities than give up their texting habits.

• 71 percent said they would be willing to give up alcohol, chocolate, caffeine, exercise or even a toothbrush for a week

• Millennials have not only made texting part of their daily routine. They also leading the pack in interest to adopt new cloud-based models for texting to their social networks. Specifically, all age groups responded that they were “interested” or “maybe interested” in being able to receive text messages if they were integrated with their social networks. Overall, 40 percent reported having little or no knowledge of group messaging services like WhatsApp and Pinger.

• SOURCE: http://www.tyntec.com/news/press-releases/press-release/article/survey-finds-millennials-driving-demand-for-emerging-cloud-based-mobile-services-329//archive/2012/june/07.html

Canada warms to mobile loyalty programs

Mobile marketing is sharpening its focus on activities and interactions further down the purchase funnel, with mobile loyalty topping the list. This is what Aimia, a loyalty management company, found when it conducted research into precisely how customers engage with marketing.

• Over three-quarters (78 percent) of Canadian Millennials surveyed said they were more likely to choose a brand that offered a loyalty or rewards program than one that didn’t.

• Millennials also sought out their social networks for opinions and ideas (34 percent) and used their mobile phones to research a product (52 percent) before purchasing — results that tell companies they need to monitor their branding (and the conversations) online to be successful.

• SOURCE:  http://www.aimia.com/English/Media-Center/News-Releases/News-Release-Details/2012/Canadian-Millennial-Generation-Redefining-Customer-Loyalty—Millennials-willing-to-engage-with-marketers-but-want-to-know-wh/default.aspx

Bots follow brands on Twitter

Reuters brings us the details of a new study focused primarily on Italy and Italian brands revealing that many brand followers brands are bots, not people. The study, undertaken by Marc Camisani Calzolari, a communication and digital language professor based in Milan, analyzed the Twitter feeds of big brands like, Vodafone, Coca Cola, Dell and IKEA and found that they have fake followers. It’s a conclusion that leads Calzolari to urge companies to think over how they conduct and measure social media activities. “The number of followers is no longer a valid indicator of the popularity of a Twitter user, and can no longer by analysed separately from qualitative information,” Calzolari said in an interview.

• 39 percent of @VodafoneIT followers are probably bots

• Calzolari believes that companies and brands can’t be blamed for their “fake followers” because they result when companies delegate their PR and Social Media campaigns to third parties.

• SOURCE: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/08/twitter-companies-idUSL5E8H86VM20120608

Internet of Things

Everything that can be connected will be. And out of this interconnectedness will flow solutions for global problems such as energy, transport and healthcare. It is a wonderful vision made possible by Smart Systems and The Internet of Things.

Interestingly, a new and detailed report by Harbor Research provides us insights into what will have to be done to there from here.

• Open IP-Based Connectivity needs to be implemented. Instead of having multiple standards and the underlying model of the Web needs to be more flexible, especially when dealing with real-time and event driven data.

• Phones need to rely on automated development of software or risk constraining the growth of the market.

• SOURCE: http://harborresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/HRI-2012-Forecast-Report_Brochure_v.8K.pdf?utm_source=wysija&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ForecastAnnouncement_5.12

Yahoo mobile search stats

We are doing more with our mobile devices, a rise in activity that naturally plays in favor of mobile search. Yahoo has also released some stats that confirm a significant rise in mobile search activity (even thought the search engine itself is seeing some decline in market share).

• Yahoo estimates 20 percent of its search traffic will come from mobile devices before the end of 2012. The rate of growth will continue to outpace the same on the desktop

• The announcement coincides with the company’s launch of its new smartphone and tablet browser, Axis, which also has a desktop plug-in.

• SOURCE: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/175907/yahoo-gains-in-mobile-works-through-challenges.html

Editor’s note:

MobileGroove has partnered with éclat Marketing — a company that has consistently delivered breakthrough PR campaigns based on a deep understanding of developments impacting mobile, technology, and our society at all levels — to bring you Mobile Data Points. This regular feature, which will highlight the mobile reports and insights you need to know to plan and run your business, is curated by Sophie Young, a member of the éclat team who has a passion for mobile trends, apps and her BlackBerry. If you have a report or survey you think should be included in this regular roundup, then reach out to Sophie directly via email sophie@eclat.co.uk or Twitter (@PheeYoung).

* * *

Smartphones are part of the fabric of our daily digital lives. According to the latest study by Kantar Worldpanel over half of the population in the U.K. alone now own a smartphone. However, this rise in device penetration has been matched by an increase in both the sophistication and number of threats targeting mobile devices.  Specifically, the central role of applications — which we download to do everything (consume news, play games, go shopping) — leave our smartphones increasingly vulnerable to the threat of malicious code and malevolent applications.

At AdaptiveMobile we have observed first-hand a significant and startling growth in the number of rogue applications, applications that appear harmless but are actually accessing and sharing your personal information without your consent.

This development prompted me to conduct research into rogue applications and consumer expectations. In addition, Loudhouse, an independent marketing research consultancy, was commissioned to conduct a survey of 1,000 smartphone users to gauge current usage patterns of mobile applications and the awareness of security threats associated levels of subscriber trust in mobile network operators, and the factors that serve to both build and erode that trust. The combined research produced some surprise findings for both operators and consumers.

Take free mobile apps such as Jaws, Paper Toss and Angry Birds. All these apps have access to personal information (such as the user’s city, location and name), and what’s more, are actively sharing this information with external partners including advertisers. And then there’s the issue of social gaming networks – with many having the ability to automatically post and share (on behalf of the individual user) to Facebook and/or Twitter.

The main point: There are many apps and services that compromise our data (and our trust). But don’t expect people to take matters into their own hands. While the majority of respondents voiced concern over what they consider to be an unacceptable breach of their personal privacy, many more simply choose not take action to prevent or limit the damage done by rogue applications. In fact, the vast majority of survey respondents (75 percent) fail to take the time to read an application’s terms and conditions – a simple action that could easily protect privacy.

Clearly, there is a disconnect. Users are outraged that their data may not be secure, yet they are  unwilling to take the steps to protect themselves. How can that be? The answer is simple: they expect their mobile operators to do it for them.

Consumer expectations

Whether users need help configuring their mobile devices, or want to ask their money back for disappointing apps/content, most people view their mobile operators as a one-stop contact for advice and assistance. Clearly, the relationship we have with our mobile operators is a complex one. We hold them  responsible for many aspects of our mobile experience. But we also reward them with our trust.

The good news: reports show consumers trust mobile operators more than other service providers. The not-so-good news: this trust hinges on the ability of those operators to safeguard subscribers’ personal data and protect them from financial loss.

Critically, our research shows that 83 percent of consumers would change their service provider if their privacy was compromised. I should add that it’s not just U.K. subscribers who would take this action.  Recent research from Canon shows consumers in France and Germany would react to privacy breaches in the same way, cutting ties with any business that lost personal data.

This finding alone should have alarms ringing in the offices of all mobile operators everywhere. In my opinion, this statistic confirms that customers expect mobile operators ­— not developers or third-parties — to ensure the integrity of the services (and apps) they use. And, with 80 percent saying they feel extremely strongly about mobile security, the need for operators to take the lead and provide reassurance is clear.

Sure, you could argue that many smartphone owners are in fact making themselves vulnerable to attack by not taking simple precautions (reading the terms and conditions before they download apps, for example).  But that’s not the way consumers see it. Indeed, less than a third of respondents take responsibility for creating this risk.

Security sells

Perhaps more importantly, our research also highlighted a new business opportunity for mobile operators that make mobile security their business.

Specifically, 75 percent of consumers would happily pay more for privacy protected applications. This presents mobile operators with a clear opportunity to make margin and retain customers. While many mobile operators provide some guidelines about mobile security, operators would be foolish not to delve deeper into mobile security and the opportunities it offers to increase revenue and lower churn.

Put another way, mobile subscribers need to be educated on how best to protect themselves, and operators need to provide the advice and the tools to help them.

Two trends — the increasing complexity of smartphones and the rise in consumer concerns about the data privacy — are coming together to underline the pivotal importance of addressing mobile security. While mobile is clearly playing an increasingly central role in our lives, our devices are also becoming increasingly vulnerable to attack. And, just to complicate matters, fighting off these attacks will also get harder since no one really ‘owns’ the security for mobile devices.

Responsibility for this is the domain of several stakeholders — mobile operators, handset manufacturers and consumers — and each has its own ideas about what constitutes good security measures.

While the industry works out who is responsible for what, it’s clear is that smartphone users don’t now have what it takes to defend themselves against the inherent risks of rogue applications masquerading as harmless apps. As our research shows, people have strong concerns about their privacy, but are unable (or unwilling) to take responsibility for their protection. Instead, they expect mobile operators to protect them from these increasingly sophisticated threats to their personal data.

Smart operators can turn this problem into an opportunity to enhance loyalty, tackle churn and safeguard their future. Put another way, security could be the value-add that equips operators to be competitive and more than make up for the drop in mobile data revenues operators are currently experiencing.

It’s easy to imagine a service that relieves subscribers from the burden of their privacy worries, while  — at the same time — empowering them to decide and control just how far their device is protected. People can pay for additional levels of security (some people may want to broadcast their location at all times and others may want to restrict the delivery of any location-linked information ­ full stop). Mobile operators can step in to provide a seamless and secure experience to all customers on their terms. Implementing security at the network level makes all this (and more) possible. Sure security can be hard to sell without traditional scaremongering, but, by leveraging the trust of their brands, there is a unique opportunity for operators to differentiate and protect against the “over the top” services offered by Apple and Google.

About Ciaran

Ciaran Bradley is VP of Handset Security at AdaptiveMobile. A father of three, he has a keen interest in scuba diving after learning to dive in Saudi Arabia when he was a teenager. Ciaran received a first class degree in Marine Science but after working as a Marine Scientist in Ireland for just over three years, decided on a career change after realising the Atlantic is too cold and miserable in winter. With a strong interest in computers and gadgets Ciaran moved into the technology sector and has stayed ever since. After achieving another honours degree in Computer Science, he held positions with Caudwell Group, Anam Mobile and Sentry Wireless – before being acquired by AdaptiveMobile in 2011.  Ciaran has a keen interest in mobile malware and the increasing mobile threats being developed by cybercriminals and as a result is active in several industry security groups. You can follow AdaptiveMobile on Twitter @AdaptiveMobile.

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Here are some of the points that define the industry debate now.

Trust matters

Privacy is a concern, but don’t expect people to take the matter into their own hands. As Ash Evans, Verizon’s director of corporate strategy, put it: Consumers care about protecting their identity, but they aren’t interested in doing much themselves. In fact, he forecasts a “bit of a car wreck” in privacy discussion, an unfortunate development that he said will lead to degradation of share value for brands.

“People will leave, he said flatly. To complicate matters Evans foresees a “further degradation of trust” if brands tackle privacy on their own.

The executive got pushback from the audience when he suggested that government has a role to play. Evans heard even more dissension from the audience when he called for a “universal” identity system – a central place where one’s personal information would be housed and accessed. I can understand the disagreement on this. Such a system is problematic at best given the potential for breaches.

Talking strategy

Elsewhere at the show discussion centered on the disconnect between the importance of the mobile channel in our lives (consider alone the time we spend on our devices daily) and the fact that only approximately one percent of the overall marketing spend is being allocated to mobile. With this in mind, many brand marketers talked about their initiatives and progress, as well as their hesitations.

Case in point: Omaha Steaks. Rather than SMS, a channel we naturally associate with being able to deliver offers to consumers on their phones, Omaha Steaks is driving results (leading to real sales) with approaches that incorporate Groupon and mobile search.

The restaurant chain has used mobile ads, QR codes, apps, in-app ads, SMS and a mobile website to facilitate the delivery of deals to consumers.

“Because we are direct response, we are always pushing out offers,” Steve Morse, Omaha Steaks’ manager of search and social marketing, told the Forum audience: “We’ve learned that in SMS, people don’t want offers continuously. On the other hand, on the mobile Web redemption for our offers have grown by leaps and bounds. That is why we are continuously improving our mobile Web experience.”

Morse outlined how harnessing Groupon to deliver deals has boosted sales and allowed him to address a new audience of consumers. On average, 60 percent of the transactions that are triggered by Groupon, are performed by new customers, or customers who are purchasing from Omaha Steaks for the first time. Morse added that mobile search is the best performing in terms of driving redemption of offers.

While Morse did not disclose what his company spends on mobile, he did report that 5 percent of sales come via the mobile channel.

Coca-Cola was everywhere – in the coolers during the breaks and (fortunately for us marketers attending the event) on stage for several sessions to share their experience and key learnings.

Coke,one of the first and most active brands in mobile, encouraged us to grasp mobile with both hands. “You can’t stop learning” was the message throughout the day. And — thankfully — Coke didn’t stop teaching us what it had learned first-hand.

Coke has been open about its approach in the past, revealing that the majority of its efforts are focused on proven strategies and tactics, including large-scale text messaging programs that provide “reach.” At the Forum we also got the inside track on how Coke mapped mobile to the Super Bowl. It chose to make mobile an element, not the main attraction. The message to marketers: Do not “compete” with the telecast. Instead, make the marketing complementary.

GE provided insight into its extensive and expanding mobile strategy — shedding light on what brands can glean from the data only mobile can deliver. For instance, the company’s key mobile metric for appliance sales is activity around the dealer locator feature on their mobile website and app. That “shows intent”, GE’s Andy Markowitz said.

How I See It:  The high-level discussion throughout last week’s Forum was a welcome departure from the mobile marketing discussion of the “basics” that characterize many other conferences, not to mention books, in this space.

What makes the Forum special is the large representation by brands and agencies. Their words and actions bring a sense of realism to the mobile industry, an industry that often hypes so-called solutions that aren’t solving much of anything.

But not everything I heard was believable. Mobile was called the first screen, but that description seems premature. Mary Meeker’s highly-respected Internet trends report tells a different story. It states that  46 percent of time spent consuming media is with television, nearly double the runner-up (which is not mobile). So, calling mobile the first screen is quite a leap. There was debate about whether people really  pay attention to television (as opposed to content and advertising delivered to people’s personal and portable devices) but that all sounded like mobile hype to me.

Happily, the hype was at a minimum in New York.

Related articles

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The June 2012 SMART report (Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting) from Millennial Media, which draws from actual campaign data to deliver insights on key mobile advertising trends such as spend, highlights the beginnings of a new and seismic shift in the way marketers think about mobile.

Specifically, the new SMART report states that advertisers started “moving away from content targeting and shifted to buying audiences.” What’s more, advertisers leveraged the “the power and uniqueness of real-world data found only in mobile.”

Marcus Startzel, Millennial Media General Manager, North America, described this shift during this week’s Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) Forum event in New York City. In his view it’s not about serving the right ad in the right place at the right time. It’s about finding “the right customer in the right place at the right time.”

Actions speak louder

Mobile is what we are.

The advance of smartphones and tablets changes all the rules, equipping us to watch ‘wow’ impact mobile video, manage our daily routine, do our personal banking and budgeting, research products, make purchases and download tons of apps. Naturally, our real- world actions speak volumes about our interests, intent and passions.

Marketers that can connect the dots in our breadcrumb trail have a serious edge on the competition. Wielding the hard data and deep insights mobile provides allows these brands to have a holistic view of their target audience and — more importantly — an understanding of the key characteristics of ‘intenders,’ the audience segment already using their devices to research and purchase goods and services.

Knowing (and targeting) ‘intenders’ is critical, which is why this new SMART report also details how Millennial Media has adjusted its reporting to highlight the Leading Behavioral Audiences targeted in Q1 2012.

Significantly, this dovetails with the Mobile Intel series of reports, a series of reports geared to specific verticals (Finance, Retail, Automotive) that draws from Millennial Media platform data and consumer research conducted by comScore to help brands identify (and engage with) ‘intenders’. To achieve this, the report series sheds light on the make up of intenders: age, gender, income bracket, preferred devices and interactions (Web, app) and the array of content they access (sites where automotive advertising would likely address this audience and yield results).

Having succeeded in producing the research that identifies ‘intenders’, this new SMART report takes it one step further, sharing a deeper look at the “sub-categories that make up this audience.”

Good intentions

Zeroing in on In-Market Auto Intenders ­ consumers directly in the market for a car— the report details the approaches (and audience targeting) brands embraced.

Clinching the deal by interacting with customers who were in the all-important the ‘research phase’ of the purchase process, the Auto Interest sub-category of Auto Intenders, were the focus of 24 percent of campaigns and targeted with a variety of brand awareness campaigns. Other sub-categories targeted in Q1 focused on consumers who were further down the purchase funnel and had expressed their clear intent by identifying the vehicle they were interested in purchasing. These included: Luxury Vehicle Intender (23 percent),  SUVs/MPVs Intender(19 percent) and Truck Intender (16 percent).

The message to marketers here: Identify your Intenders and follow their lead with campaigns aimed at clinching the deal. After all, these consumers have shown by their actions that they know your brand (Brand Awareness) and are researching to make a purchase. The way is clear to focus further down in the purchase funnel.

But it’s not just about offering consumers ‘fries with their fries’ (showing automotive advertising on typically automotive focused sites, for example). A case study from Pandora shows that brands can excel if they think outside the box.

In the case of Pandora, which designs and manufacturers modern jewelry, the target audience was males and the objective was to give them gift ideas for Valentine’s Day. To this end the brand cleverly created a specially themed campaign (“Create a Valentine’s Gift in Minutes”) and purposely timed it to run heavy on Super Bowl Sunday, when it correctly figured ads on mobile sites and apps would reach men while they were browsing between plays.

As Angel Ilagan,Vice President, Marketing, Pandora North America put it: “Pandora didn’t have $3.5 million to spend on a :30 second Super Bowl spot, but we wanted to reach this male audience leading up to Valentine’s Day.” The approach made sense since “86 percent of our target is using their mobile phone while watching TV.”

Sports ad spending up & other insights

For me, this report stands out because it deep dives into how (and why) targeting ads by audience —delivering advertising in sync with what we do and not just where we are — can drive positive results.

However, the report also details a number of other top trends in observed in Q1 2012 including:

• Increased mobile advertising budgets year-over-year

• More developers making ad buys to promote their mobile apps

• The rise (and rise) of Sports, a vertical that didn’t increase enough to list in the Top 10 Global Brand Advertising Verticals, but nonetheless “experienced growth of 287 percent year-over-year.” The driver: Sports advertisers harnessed mobile to raise awareness of seasonal events and drive ticket sales.

• Sports apps nearly doubled quarter-over-quarter, moving up to take the number 6 slot in Top 10 Mobile Application Categories. The driver: Larger publishers created branded apps around seasonal sporting (Super Bowl and March Madness) and encouraged users to download their apps by providing real-time updates to sporting events and – in some cases – allowing users to watch games directly on their mobile devices. (The momentum around sports will likely move up a gear as events such as the UEFA European Championships and the Summer Olympics move into full swing.)

My take:

It is still important (and extremely effective) to serve ads to people based on ‘clues’ such as their location and time of day. But marketers should also leverage the data only mobile can deliver about our real-time activities to deliver advertising that is in tune with our actions (and aligned with our expressed intent).

This post is part of our Mobile Advertising Briefing Room, a thinking space dedicated to providing its community mobile intelligence, consumer research, case studies and industry best practices that equip marketers to reach and engage their target audience at scale. This discussion is hosted & sponsored by Millennial Media.

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• Report: Tablets Impact Mobile Advertising; Generate 20 Percent Ad Impressions(untether.tv)

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• Finance & Health Verticals Increase Mobile Advertising Spend: Millennial Media Report(mobilegroove.com)

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• The launch of Windows 8 and Blackberry 10 will see Microsoft and RIM seeking to take advantage of the shift, by enabling developers to easily create products across tablet and smartphone devices.

• However, developers that primarily support tablets have increased to 36 percent to 13 percent from last year, indicating that developers now feel this market offers more of an upside than smartphone development.

• SOURCE: http://www.mobilebusinessbriefing.com/articles/survey-tablets-the-future-for-developers/24131

Ever find yourself lost and desperately needing a coffee? According to Street Fight, local search and discovery is quickly becoming one of the most routine and ubiquitous activities for the local consumer.  The Consumer Insights Report shows that consumers are turning to their mobile devices to help them source venues such as restaurants, coffee shops, live concert performances and much more.

• 30 percent of those surveyed said they used their mobile devices on a daily basis to source local amenities.

• The study also found that consumers identify “local venues” differently. For example, 55 percent of recipients would only travel ten minutes to a grocery store, but 60 percent would travel 20 minutes for a live performance. In light of this, Street Fight believes that the notion of a trade catchment area will soon be forgotten by consumers.

• SOURCE: http://streetfightmag.com/2012/06/05/street-fight-study-33-search-daily-for-local-businesses-via-mobile/

Companies of all sizes seem to be expanding their allocated budgets for mobile marketing, but not all are developing the comprehensive mobile strategies they need to wring the most value out of the money they invest in mobile. This is the key finding of a survey conducted StrongMail, a provider of digital solutions. The survey showed that this practice is holding businesses back from embracing and making the most of mobile marketing.

• Mobile websites (70 percent), mobile applications (55 percent) and QR codes (49 percent) are the most popular forms of mobile marketing, but are only being used by half of marketers.

• Companies also cited that a lack of resources (22 percent of those surveyed) was another main constraint when launching their mobile programs.

• SOURCE: http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/mobile-marketing-budgets-grow-but-not-their-strategies-23225/

As we’re slowly becoming a cashless society, consumers are turning to alternative providers to make financial transactions.  Interestingly, four out of five people would prefer to use PayPal than big organisations like Apple and Google for money wallet transactions, according to the Carlisle & Gallagher Consulting Group.

• The online survey of 605 consumers found that 48 percent of respondents are interested in a mobile wallet. These consumers were described as young and affluent and fell into two categories; payment optimisers or techno shoppers.

• Currently 76 percent of the consumers are currently using or intend to use mobile banking and within five years will integrate their financial transactions using mobile wallets.

• SOURCE: http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/2012/06/05/consumers-prefer-paypal-over-google-apple-for-mobile-wallet

Following the successful adoption of customer-focused mobile applications, companies are increasingly deploying mobile apps to connect to partners and employees.  However, Research2Guidance find that only 14 percent of the 200,000 enterprise mobile application available addresses core enterprise needs.

• The “off-the-shelf” enterprise mobile apps can be primarily found within Business, Communications/Social Networking, Finance, News & Magazines, Productivity and Tools/Utilities categories.

• Companies looking to source enterprise-relevant apps from public app stores will find the task of identifying high value apps extremely time consuming due to broad the range of functionality.

• SOURCE: http://www.research2guidance.com/enterprise-mobile-apps-200.000-in-stores-but-only-14-address-core-enterprise-needs/

Editor’s note:

MobileGroove has partnered with éclat Marketing — a company that has consistently delivered breakthrough PR campaigns based on a deep understanding of developments impacting mobile, technology, and our society at all levels — to bring you Mobile Data Points. This regular feature, which will highlight the mobile reports and insights you need to know to plan and run your business, is curated by Sophie Young, a member of the éclat team who has a passion for mobile trends, apps and her BlackBerry. If you have a report or survey you think should be included in this regular roundup, then reach out to Sophie directly via email sophie@eclat.co.uk or Twitter (@PheeYoung).

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The advance of mobile has real-world retailers beating a retreat. Take the knee-jerk reaction of Target (via this article in the New York Times), the U.S. retail giant that recently decided to stop selling Amazon e-readers. Yes, the move is one way to retaliate against Amazon’s strategy of offering 5 percent items checked through it’s Price Check app.  But is it effective?

The article also mentions Target’s communications with vendors and its requirement for solutions to beat ‘showrooming’ via mobile.  Read between the lines, and retailers are overwhelmed and worried about the impact of mobile on their business. Should they forbid these devices or embrace the benefits? My new consumer research on mobile shopping behavior (which I also presented at Mobile Marketers Mcommerce Summit) draws from  a survey of 1000 U.S. smartphone users to shed some important light on the problem — and the opportunity. (Slideshare of full presentation with commentary is here.)

Showrooming is nothing new

Roughly a third of smartphone owners told us they use apps while they are in a physical store to help them shop.  Sure, this is a significant portion of the smartphone population, but it’s by no means an indication that a widespread, overwhelming majority of people are using apps in-store to help them shop.

But let’s not focus only on the absolute number of people in this group. Instead, let’s take a look at what makes this group especially interesting to retailers: their intent.

Folks that use mobile apps in-store are more likely to purchase products across all mediums (in-store, online, mobile website, mobile app, tablet website, tablet app) in an average week than consumers who own smartphones but do not use apps in-store.  Put simply, they are tech savvy and flow across devices, platforms, and physical locations to get their shopping done.

In-store app users are also more likely to browse in a physical store and purchase in a digital (online, mobile, tablet) environment.  In other words, in-store app users are die-hard ‘shoppers’.  They enjoy the shopping experience regardless of how they choose to shop. Put simply, this customer segment has a completely different mindset from people who are not in-store app users.

The mindset, not the mobile device is the driver here. Folks who are using mobile in-store are people who just like to shop and — based on the preponderance of price comparison behaviors we found — love a bargain.

If they are doing price comparisons, they are just as likely to be comparing local store prices as online store prices. It’s not all about using a physical store as a showroom for an online product; it’s in the DNA to do what they can and harness the tools at their disposal (including mobile) to get the best deal.

To be clear, people do not develop new behaviors out of the blue.  These same folks who are price-comparing in-store — a component of ‘showrooming’ — have been doing this for years. Only now — thanks to the advance of smartphones — they can do it better. Before smartphones, these folks would have gone into the store and left after a round of unsuccessful bargain-hunting.

This was in the days of analog, and the tools these folks used were written lists, printed store circulars and envelopes packed with paper coupons. Obviously, retailers didn’t see these people when they went home to compare prices online, or call five different local stores to inquire about the prices.  It’s only now that retailers can actually see people using their smartphones in the store that they assume ‘showrooming’ is a new activity.  It’s not.

Furthermore, the absolute number of people who fall into the ‘scan & scram’ category of behavior is small. In fact, only 6 percent of all mobile owners have done this, and the majority of people characterized by this behavior is concentrated in the New York Metropolitan area (article here).

Fighting smart

As I have pointed out, in-store app users are shoppers are not a new phenomenon. They were doing ‘showrooming’ long before smartphones broke on the scene. So, how should retailers react? What can they do to ensure they get a piece of the action and a share of the revenues?

Well, in an age of ‘access’ closing your eyes (or your doors) to mobile won’t work. Trying to shut down price comparison and ‘showrooming’ activities by developing unique store-specific barcodes or products only opens up more options for the competition to eat your lunch. In other words, some industrious person will develop a workaround, such as an app that finds related products at all the different stores and still gives a price comparison, and laugh all the way to the bank.

To influence customer behavior retailers have to accept it first. Shoppers will be shoppers and retailers need to embrace this behavior.  And it’s not about competing on price. Some shoppers  want the best deal, but they also enjoy the internal satisfaction that comes when they have been successful at getting the best value too.

Retailers can leverage this internal satisfaction driver to their advantage by focusing more on ways to enhance the in-store store experience to make the customer segment enjoy the hunt even more than the bargain.

Kmart’s old strategy of Blue Light Specials provides a perfect blueprint for a mobile/in-store tie in.  Build a location-aware component into your app and deliver  a Blue Light Special time-sensitive notification to shoppers when they are in your store that drives them to an aisle and (to sweeten the offer) produces a coupon that can be used for a discount that day when the item is scanned on their phone.

Following this approach allows retailers to take advantage of an established behavior (scanning bar codes) and make shopping a convenient, compelling adventure. The customer is offered unexpected value (the Blue Light Special doesn’t happen every time they are in-store), and they are experiencing the internal satisfaction of getting a good deal (discount/coupon).  This way retailers aren’t fighting the price comparison behavior; they are leveraging it to offer value (and embracing technology such as bar code scanning and mobile apps to make it fun, interactive and easy).

The paradox of mobile shopping

Turning our attention now to what happens on the mobile device, we find that mobile is more of a browsing medium than a purchasing medium (~75 percent browsing/25 percent purchasing).

However, if someone is purchasing products on mobile, their frequency of purchase mimics that of purchases made in a physical store.  In other words, if people are buying on mobile, they are doing it as frequently in a week as they are buying from a physical store.  Mobile inspires that all-important impulse buy? Maybe not…

Flipping our perspective a bit and focusing on those people who have not made a purchase on their mobile device, we see that this customer segment is nonetheless perusing  products using their mobile device.  Furthermore, they only have strong resistance to purchasing a few select categories of products (such as insurance, financial products, and oddly enough, groceries) using their mobile device.

The takeaway: these people could be mobile purchasers, provided brands and retailers give the right triggers.

Our findings show that mobile is a browsing medium and a frequent, planned purchase medium. But can we explain this paradox?

It’s simple once you see both of these behaviors as being different sides of the same coin.  The mobile shopper has many sides, so it’s futile to focus on a single mobile shopper segment. There isn’t one.

In fact, our research identifies an array of profiles: the deal-hunters, the browsers, the taskers, the impulsives, the maybes, and the avoiders.

• Deal-hunters are on their devices frequently comparing prices, using coupons, and looking for offers; heavy shoppers in general
• Browsers are on their devices to look at products, maybe to find more information, but not focused on making a purchase on the device
• Taskers are on their devices to buy something now.  They know what they want and they know who they will buy it from
• Impulsives could be Browsers or Taskers but they are making purchases on their device that they did not plan to make
• Maybes are Browsers who have not made a purchase on their device yet, but aren’t opposed to doing so in the future
• Avoiders are people that do not see the value in using their devices to help them shop and are less frequent shoppers in general

To complicate matters, these characteristics often overlap and co-exist in the same individual. Thus, it is essential to abandon generalities and embracing this multi-view perspective of mobile shoppers.

Are you experienced?

Developing strategies built from the ground up to serve shoppers (and all the behavioral states they experience) will allow retailers and marketers to take advantage of the full benefits of mobile.

Retailers need to integrate all their channels and use each platform to educate, engage and then drive people to purchase where (and how) they are most comfortable.  Offering linked shopping carts based on login data, adding a “Save for Later” feature for online or in-store usage, or incorporating a live chat/customer service element will provide value throughout all channels, not just mobile.

And internalize the biggest lesson from the research: mobile is not an isolated channel and treating it as such is a flawed strategy doomed to failure.  We’ve learned how important the online channel is to our businesses over the past 10 years and mobile is following that same path, albeit at a much faster pace. Taking advantage of mobile’s ability to provide a two-way conversation, either while people are in-store or while they are on their device, will more deeply engrain the retailers with the shoppers.

Hipmunk was built from the ground up to search for hotels and flights. At one level, Hipmunk can be compared to other hotel and flight search sites including hotels.com, Expedia, Kayak, and Priceline. But there are distinct differences that I highlight in my road test below.

At a deeper level, Hipmunk is about improving the search experience and optimizing the time we spend on Hipmunk. Interestingly, there are other topics that lend themselves to Hipmunk’s deep and vertical approach (shopping, real estate, tickets, job and wine search engines, just to name a few). You have to wonder if Hipmunk doesn’t have expansion into other travel related verticals on its roadmap. (Peggy adds: You are on the money with this one Charles! In this companion post Steve Huffman, Hipmunk Co-Founder, talks about plans to do just this.)

What stands out

Right up front Hipmunk shows off two features the company is quite proud of (and for good reason). First, Hipmunk thinks like a human. Search for a flight and the search results are not simply ranked by price or time of day. Hipmunk knows we take more factors into consideration than just that. To help us make a holistic decision Hipmunk has come up with an ”Agony” Index, defined as a mix between price, duration of flight, and number of stopovers. Hipmunk also has an “Ecstasy” Index for hotels, that combines price, amenities and review/star ratings.

Second, Hipmunk is agony-free. The search engine displays your flight results in a colorful, visual timeline, aiding you in understanding your choices and trade-offs and selecting the best flight for YOU at a glance. From there you can proceed to book your flight by leaving Hipmunk and clicking through to the airline website, for example. The most recent update of the Hipmunk app also integrates your calendar and your hotel and flight results, allowing you to see the proximity of your meetings in a destination to hotel options and find flights that don’t conflict with events on your calendar. Now how cool is that?

You can also tap over to conduct a search of hotels. These search results are shown on a map so that people can view where in a destination they will be staying and the landmarks near them.

Hipmunk in action

Now for the road test, or test flight in this case. Beginning with the iPhone app, the first impression I have is that Hipmunk is a playful, family-oriented travel search engine. It starts with its ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks-style’ icon (which GigaOM dubbed the world’s cutest mascot), which is continued through to the splash page, the hotel search (check out the Hipmunk bellhop!) and so on.

Even the searching timer is a tiny flying Hipmunk. This is great if your audience appreciates a lighter-approach. But I have to wonder how this resonates with the hardened, hard-nose ‘ Up in the Air-type’ business travelers, and if they might not feel more at home with the more corporate look-and-feel of sites like Expedia and Kayak.

But there is also a real value to being different — and showing it. In fact, as we move through this series, I will introduce you to other search engine apps that have chosen this tack. Milo, DuckDuckGo, and Goby all have cartoon animal icons, and — like Hipmunk — they are all regarded as successful and well-engineered apps. Perhaps the very nature of the iPhone and the AppStore lends itself to more whimsical approaches. Disney and Pixar, I have heard, have also been fairly successful.

My only concern with Hipmunk is that one of its heat-maps, areas of concentrated activity like shopping, food, or walking, is labeled “vice.” That’s like having a liquor store in Disneyland! I would at the very least use a less explicit term!

To put Hipmunk through it’s paces I naturally searched for flights and hotels on an apples to apples basis with the likes of Kayak. Not surprisingly Flight 515 leaves at the same time and costs the same amount on alternate apps.  The same goes for hotel searches, although here not every app had exactly the same selection.  What I found most amusing was that the hotel results were different on the Hipmunk iPhone and iPad apps.

One note about the flight search results, when you do choose a flight, you leave the app to go to Delta, which isn’t so bad, but let’s assume that you have to make the slightest change in your itinerary. You have to conduct your new search on the Delta website. That’s good for Delta, but it means the user has to jump out of Delta and back into the Hipmunk app — and back again.

For booking hotels the user is taken to the hotel supplier such as Hyatt.com or Orbitz to make the purchase.

Overall, what you see is what you get: solid search results arranged in a way that allows us to select what we want —easily and intuitively. But I did spot a few shortcomings. I would have wanted to see my flight and hotel information appear back in my iPhone calendar. An itinerary email to forward to my family or office would have been a great plus as well.

We all have our wish lists but they can be a tad bit unfair. For example, I suggested to Adam Goldstein, Hipmunk Co-Founder, that his app should have a Flight Tracker or an On Time flight board (similar to the features offered by the Kayak app). Not surprisingly he replied that Hipmunk has them covered. They are just located below the (secret) Top Priority project. Reviewers like me make the easy suggestions, but it’s the CEOs like Adam who have to make the tough decisions!

Hipmunk iPad app

Now let’s move on to Hipmunk’s iPad app, which is free and represents a spot-on translation of the Web experience. Put another way, the Hipmunk iPad app is, for the most part, a large version of its iPhone cousin with a few added features. This approach has its merits, but it also conflicts with my guiding principle for Universal or iPhone / iPad app combinations. For those of you do not attend my iPhone / iPad or App classes (currently in Philadelphia) here it is again: The iPhone is for Now; the iPad is for Wow!

Admittedly, following this philosophy can put the burden on companies that have released an iPhone to invest heavily in an iPad app that delivers even more impact and features. Therefore, I can understand (but not entirely accept) why companies choose to simply ‘super size’ their iPhone app as an economical way to get on to millions of iPads.

In my book the prize goes to the companies that take their iPad-sized apps to the next level. A large Hipmunk map could achieve just that with a national map complete with miniature flying airplanes on a flight tracker.

My own research revealed apps that are making the most out of their screen real estate. One app uses the space for a large seat guide, while another searches for hotels with a sweeping radar motif — complete with the beeps. I also downloaded the Priceline Negotiator iPad app which takes advantage of sound and motion, as well as its alternative approach to hotel search. I encourage you to check it out.

Granted Hipmunk is first and foremost about vertical search and optimizing the time we spend searching and selecting hotels and flights. It’s not about cool stuff and graphics. Nonetheless, there are a few improvements Hipmunk could make to its iPad. My recommendation: Allow the long list of horizontal flight results to be swiped to the left, revealing a red delete box so that I can winnow down the list. The hotel search has three ‘Save’ boxes which are functional but nondescript, they could also be swiped away when in list view.

Additionally, the iPhone and iPad apps do not have an (i) information screen explaining the all-important Agony and Ecstasy formulas. (If they do, it is certainly not easy to find!) To my knowledge they are only explained back in the App Store description. Similarly, I had to go through the App Support link to access the Internet website where the useful About and FAQ pages are displayed. All this information belongs on a concise ‘Info’ page within the apps. It would be quick and inexpensive to address both points in an update. Likewise a link to all of the “Tips” would be great.

My take:

Hipmunk started as a snappy, solid flight search engine with a great hook, its Agony index. Now you can flip it over and do a decent hotel search. Using my calendar brought up a bold Conflict! alert; a nice feature. So what does Adam have up his sleeve that is more important than the flight tracker and arrival board that I  personally would like to see? It’s tough to call since he isn’t talking. Hipmunk’s Steve Huffman did talk strategy (roadmap, expansion, biz models — the works) with Peggy in this companion post [I will insert link], so we do have our hunches.

Meantime, I encourage you to download the free Hipmunk iPhone and / or iPad app(s). They have excellent ratings (in addition to my own Seal of Approval which I make official with this post). Another reason to download the apps: you will be automatically notified of each Hipmunk update, and I know that I don’t want to miss’ em!

Next in the series: DDG

 Editor’s note: The mission to discover and promote every alternative Internet search engine in the world took Charles three years and over 4,000 posts to accomplish. Now he’s back with his pick of mobile search engine Apps. If you have a mobile search app or service, or would like to suggest a company for this series, then please reach out to Charles (csknight1@hotmail.com).  Through Appaholics Anonymous (AA) Charles hosts the informal and formal sharing of the very best Apps he has discovered in the Apple App Store, and encourages discussion around the gems that other ‘Appaholics’ have found. What’s the coolest app you have? Let Charles know and you just might end up an honorary member of Appaholics Anonymous!

Related articles

• Hipmunk adds calendar integration to mobile apps(gigaom.com)

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• Mobile Search App Review & Road Test: Biznar(mobilegroove.com)

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• Hipmunk nears 1 million-downloads mark(sfgate.com)

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