Mobile Groove

It has been a crazy-busy, exciting week at MSG! The Mobile Advertising Research U.K. report, which combines desk research with extensive primary research and surveys to offer invaluable insight into the attitudes of people and companies across the emerging mobile advertising business ecosystem, is ready for release after receiving the final polish.

Regular readers will recall that MSG was commissioned to conduct Mobile Advertising Research UK, a project research endorsed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), to expertly document the state of the mobile advertising industry in the U.K. and identify growth opportunities in the emerging mobile advertising marketplace.

The report — which combines valuable consumer insights gathered by ÆNEAS Strategy Consulting and Management (coordinated by my esteemed colleagues Tarik Fawzi and Atva van Zanten) and qualitative research based on more than 20 interviews with operators, enablers, agencies and brands contributed by MSG — marks the first in a series of region-specific reports that will include Germany (2009) and North America (2010).

During the inaugural event (Mobile Advertising Research U.K.) last week in London, Tarik and I presented an overview of key findings (documented by MSearchGroove here) and revealed the results of an online survey of over 1,000 British. consumers. Pricing is GBP 2,999 ($4,866) for the report, and a 500 GBP discount is available for MMA/IAB members, and people who attended the event. For more information, email James Cameron (james@camerjam.com) or call +44 7940 749874.

And speaking of reports, I am pleased to announce that I will provide a sneak-peak at the results of a performance analysis of voice-enabled mobile search services from search giants Google, Yahoo! & ChaCha during a special Mobile Search Masterclass in London on June 30.

Yahoo finally and officially joins the group of search companies getting on the voice search bandwagon, and announces that it has launched voice-enabled oneSearch for the Yahoo! Mobile iPhone app.

While Yahoo comes to the party more or less six months later than rivals such as Google, there is some indication that the wait was worth it if we consider that this service extends beyond allowing people to conduct keyword searches (for flight numbers, locations, Web site names, local restaurants – the works). People using the app can also use voice to customize the ‘My Interests’ tab. The procedure (according to the press release): “Simply click on ‘add anything’, speak the topic you’re interested in, then select the relevant content and add it to your page.” The Yahoo! oneSearch with voice application is currently available on more than 80 different devices and across platforms including Blackberry, Nokia, Windows Mobile, and now the iPhone – with support in eight languages.

Various bloggers have tried out the voice app, which harnesses speech recognition technology from Vlingo, and reported mixed results. But it’s difficult to judge the user experience based on random road tests. (This is why MSG has pooled its resources to produce mobile search research that, like my own mobile advertising white papers, offers readers a balanced assessment based on first-hand experience and solid methodology.)

The Yahoo app, however, comes in too late to be included in Pump Up The Volume, MSG’s own assessment of Web search on the iPhone. But that won’t keep us from conducting our own road test of the Yahoo app soon. Regular readers and Twitter followers (@peggyanne) may recall I announced the project a while back (a teaser before we had further refined our methodology to account for fundamental differences between natural language and keyword search, an important improvement that makes the results all the more compelling).

The white paper, researched and written in collaboration with Peggy Albright, MSG Associate and founder of Albright Communications, will be released next week. By way of background, our work assesses the overall performance of the voice-enabled search services offered by ChaCha, Google, and Vlingo in a typical range of use cases and scenarios. (Vlingo for iPhone converts queries into text and submits them to one of two search engines, Google and Yahoo. We chose Yahoo.)

A special highlight: A foreword by Bill Meisel, Editor of the specialist publication and voice technology knowledge destination Speech Strategy News. I’m honored to have him on board for the voice search white paper, and look forward to showcasing his analysis/columns on MSG soon.

I won’t divulge all the white paper results and stats here. However, I can say that ChaCha’s results proved superior to both the Google Mobile App’s voice feature and Vlingo for iPhone.

Bango has a real mobile site http://mobislim.com that we use to test different mobile marketing and mobile advertising initiatives and also, different mobile analytics solutions to compare performance with Bango mobile analytics. We blog everything we do in http://mobislim.wordpress.com. It has also been the testing platform for Peggy’s white paper “Mobile advertising for newbies”and “Mobile advertising for the masses”.

Today I would like to share with you our latest work. In our effort to get our Mobislim mobile site ranking and SEO optimized, I found this blog post “The place to be: mobile search engines and portals where you should register your site� at mobithinking.com, which is just exactly what we needed for our mobile site mobislim.com. Thank you mobiThinking for sharing this with all of us! This is great information and I thought I would help to spread the word.

An exclusive podcast with Bob Rosenschein PLUS a look at some recent mobile advertising stats from the U.S., Vietnam, and Japan.

The 450+ attendees at Think Mobile that descended on NYC in March can count themselves lucky. We were treated to an excellent line-up of 60+ top-notch speakers, chosen by my esteemed colleague Matthew Snyder, Founder & CEO of ADObjects, a strategic cross-media consultancy, for their insights, ideas, and willingness to share both. Feedback from my panel on Mobile Search & SEO has been overwhelmingly positive, in part because Matthew and I brainstormed and purposely brought together an eclectic mix of individuals passionate about their work and the mobile industry at large.

Today I kick off this “mini-series” with Bob Rosenschein, Answers Corporation CEO and mobile search “guru” (my description- he’s far too modest). The company’s social search service WikiAnswers.com has seen some stellar growth, according to comScore. In March, the measurement and market research firm reported that WikiAnswers.com U.S. unique visitors reached nearly 19 million in January 2009, compared to 729,000 in December 2006. I caught up with Bob to get the inside track on his company’s mobile ambitions, discuss the key criteria for an optimal mobile search experience, and the role of mobile advertising in the scheme of things.

Listen to the podcast. [16:18]

Regular readers will know and appreciate that I got the most out of my frequent flyer miles last year, speaking at over twenty industry events across three continents. This year, and with the help of Stuart Willett, Director, Business Development, MSG has reached a tipping point and I can focus on what I love most: Commenting on the industry and creating thought leadership in the form of white papers and research projects (I’m thinking here of Mobile Advertising U.K., a mobile advertising project undertaken by MSG together with AENEAS Consulting, and endorsed by the major mobile marketing organizations).

In order to focus my efforts on these exciting new projects, I will not attend CTIA in Las Vegas this year. But nothing could keep me from speaking at ThinkMobile in New York (March 18-19). From the moment that Matthew Snyder – ThinkMobile Conference Chair and Founder & CEO of ADObjects, a strategic cross-media consultancy – contacted me to brainstorm on the program and speakers, I knew this event was going to set the bar. (I have known and highly respected Matthew for several years, dating back to the time that he was responsible for mobile search at Nokia. He has drawn on 20 years of experience and contacts to compile an impressive list of speakers, and the pieces are in place to be sure this inaugural event pushes the boundaries.)

We not only identified individuals with something important to say; we also invited people we felt were most likely to make a lasting and significant contribution to the mobile industry. If you want to see the direction the industry is going, and connect with the people who are going to get us there, then this is THE event to attend.