PODCAST: Is Social Content Discovery The New & Improved Mobile Search?
In brief: Back after a conference where – surprisingly – recommendation and content discovery took center stage as the mobile megatrends to watch for NEXT. What’s happening now and how important is social search going to be soon? Colm Healy, Vice President of EMEA Services for Qualcomm Internet Services and General Manager of Xiam Technologies, is back to discuss the business drivers and why discovery is hotter than ever.
Excitement around app stores and a gold rush mood around mobile commerce sites and schemes is turning up the pressure on content owners and mobile operators to offer a much more engaging experience in tune with what we are like and are likely to appreciate. But are the use cases and data points that underline the role of content discovery in digital strategy?
One sure-fire sign could be the decision by the Mobile Entertainment Forum to increase the number of categories for its coveted Meffy award by seven – including a Blockbuster app category (reflective of the explosion in apps) and Personalization and Content Discovery (a nod to the increasing importance of these technologies in our mobile experiences).
I caught up with Colm Healy — Vice President of EMEA Services for Qualcomm Internet Services and General Manager of Xiam Technologies – a third and final time to discuss developments in the space and the heightened interest in approaches that tap us and our social interactions to super-charge content discovery and commerce.
In Colm’s view mobile search is no longer the tool we need on our super smartphones. This is because these superphones are also action phones. “These are devices where you want to get fulfillment straightaway and that is why discovery is over-indexing …on the mobile versus the Web.”
Among the highlights:
BETTER SHOPPING: Discovery and personalization is core to achieving a high level engagement with us when we shop or browse content storefronts and app stores. It is also becoming the measure for all mobile commerce interactions. Morgan Stanley believes that about 25 percent of Amazon’s sales come from recommendation and Colm is seeing a similarity with mobile. “People are using search less and less to find something, which means they’re less and less likely to have come into the store with a specific intention in mind….They’re coming to be entertained, to be amused, and to find stuff in a much more serendipitous way.”
ENAGEMENT: “If you get it right, people engage with the content, they rate it, they review it, they tell their friends about it….One of the key metrics today I think will predict your success in the future will be that level of engagement. Are your visitors reviewing the content, are they telling their friends about it, are they doing more than just searching and buying?” If you want to see where all this is going, then look at shopping in the real word. “It’s about getting amused, finding stuff, sometimes buying stuff… not just going in and grabbing the thing you need.”
MOBILE OPERATOR OPP: It’s a new world with new opportunities. There are three [parties] who can do it right. “One is the webcos, the other is the handset manufacturers, and the third is the operators…. With the right will, the right focus and the right partners, operators have a really strong chance of being a major player in a big market. They won’t have walled gardens, that is, 100-percent of a tiny market. They will have a very significant share of a much, much larger market and that’s the opportunity for the operator.
TRENDS: Social discovery. It’s all about “harnessing of community, a greater harnessing of social networks for people to find what they’re interested in.” Another one to watch is video. “If you want to make a business that is distributing video, you need to be able to keep people on your site and not just looking at a single video. You need to keep them for extended periods of time and that’s where a really great discovery technology like ours helps to provide the visitor to your site a stream of entertaining content.”
Editor’s note: Well, that wraps up this three-part series – but there will lots more to come in the form of columns, contributions and some surprises from ecosystem companies and partners speaking their mind on the money-making opportunities around personalization and , recommendation and the strategic value of content, apps and digital stuff that is in-tune with what our preferences.
Listen to the podcast here. [9:15]
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Disclaimer: Xiam Technologies, a Qualcomm company, is an MSG supporter.
