Mobile applications have created a bridge between our digital and physical worlds. One of the more important trends, projected to be the top mobile app by 2012, is mobile money transfer and payment. In this article, we will look at a compelling case (recently highlighted in The Economist) for mobile transfer and payment in an emerging market and then see where the industry is moving in the developed world.
M-Pesa
In 2007, M-Pesa was introduced in Kenya as a money transfer system through Safaricom. Using a similar model to PayPal, members are able to transfer funds and manage their account through a mobile device. Leveraging the network effect, M-Pesa created a faster, more economical way for Kenyans to conduct business, but there were a few unforeseen outcomes from the introduction of the program.
First, this proved to be a safer way of doing business. Rather than traveling with cash in hand or storing cash locally, entrepreneurs mitigated the threat of theft with virtual money. M-Pesa customers felt safer about their money.
Second, mobile access helped stabilize market prices. Mobile changed the competitive landscape giving participants better tools for monitoring the free market and actually reduced price discrepancies.
Lastly, M-Pesa opened up an entirely new segment of customers – the “unbanked.” Although the service started as a complementary bank feature, 40% of service users have never banked before.
What started as added customer service feature actually increased the size and efficiency of the market as a whole. With 8 million subscribers (that’s 1 in 5 Kenyans) and an average of $10 million in transactions daily, M-Pesa has revealed a substantial opportunity for mobile penetration and growth in developing markets.
But what about developed markets?
The developed world isn’t going to see a economic transformation in the same way emerging markets might, but major players are taking note and moving forward. Established and start-up companies are testing the waters in mobile money transfer (ie. PayPal Mobile), but the future is looking toward point-of-purchase transactions with the mobile device. This idea, coined contactless payment, entails scanable hardware embedded in/on the device.
At the Cartes Exposition in Paris two weeks ago, Visa showcased it’s contactless system with Nokia that will be introduced in the next year. This system allows items under a certain price threshold go through immediately and for items over, the user will be prompted to enter a PIN number for added security. Another similar system, Mastercard‘s PayPass mobile program partnered with Blackberry, is currently pilot testing in Canada. And American start-up Bling Nation is working on a smaller scale to create local networks of banks and participating retailers with mobile device transaction capabilities.
As larger programs are being tested and introduced outside of the US, it will be interesting to see who will tap the American market first. Although safety and security are hurdles to adoption, the idea of an m-wallet is showing appeal and pushing companies beyond transfer and into transaction. Fear not developed world, our phones are about to get a whole lot smarter.
Twitter’s First Christmas
Brian Kress
Friday kicked off America’s first Twitter Christmas. While Twitizens are sharing deals, steals, and Thanksgiving meals over the weekend, companies like Toys ‘R’ Us, Best Buy, and Barneys were leveraging Twitter to drive practical goals.
New Google Search Ad Formats
John Keehler
Advertisers will not longer be constrained to short text ads in search results. These new ad formats can include video, maps, images of products and more. More options to get the right ad in front of the right person using Google.
Further Signs of M-Commerce Adoption
Jeff Whang
Coming off the heels of eBay’s announcement that its mobile value of goods sold is growing at a double-digit rate, month-over-month, reports are coming in that m-commerce is beginning to make a significant impact. One indicator: mobile online payments through PayPal on Black Friday surged nearly 650% from a small base last year.
Revisiting Art, Digitally
Jill Krumsick
Digital technology allows us to experience, and in this case, re-experience, in ways not previously possible. Check out this video of a 3-D exploration of Picasso’s famous painting, Guernica.
New Facebook Promotions Guidelines
Luke Lancaster
Facebook has launched new promotions guidelines. The biggest changes? Those wishing to conduct a promotion soup to nuts through Facebook will need to use an application to do so, and get approval from their Facebook sales representative.
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It’s not every day you hear something described as the “challenge of the age”, but that’s what the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was recently quoted as saying about Social Search. With the recent explosion of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, a whole new world of opinions, reviews, and sentiments is being unleashed on the web. Each of these tweets, status updates, blogs represents a huge opportunity and challenge for marketers seeking to harness the collective power of internet users to further their company or brand.
However, an awareness that this social material exists online is only half the battle. The proliferation of different social media outlets has also led to increased fragmentation. Rarely is this material contained in a single location where users can browse all of it at once. Even if there was, new sites are constantly emerging which makes keeping an updated repository a formidable challenge. Enter Social Search. Social Search is simply the way to empower people to find the information they seek that’s embedded in all of these various social media outlets from one central location.
Being no small task, it becomes more reasonable to start calling the collection, organization, ranking of all this social activity a “challenge for the ages”. This is where Google, Microsoft, and a number of other players who are working to create a real-time resource for finding all things social about anything that interest you.
Currently, social search features exist in several beta programs such as Google’s Social Search (below). In Google’s ‘experiment’ searchers will have the opportunity to filter search results by blogs, forums, and the ‘social’ option. Results from a user’s search will include content from users’ friends and contacts (from Gmail, for example).
Another example is what Bing is starting to do by incorporating Tweets in their search results along with dedicated Twitter search capabilities (below).
As more of this material becomes indexed and ultimately more findable, marketers and advertisers will be presented with the aforementioned challenges and opportunities. There are three things that marketers can and should be doing to capitalize on the social media opportunity:
- Companies should focus on getting their customers to tell the right kind of stories about their experiences. By making it easy for users to share their good experiences, marketers help give their consumers a voice. By increasing the number of brand mentions by users, the potential for a brand to show up in other social searches increases.
- Brands should actively engage with users of social media. Companies are starting to leverage Twitter as a customer service tool to help distraught customers find a solution to their woes. This two way dialog helps to humanize brands as entities that want their customers have the best experience possible.
- Companies should be actively listening to what their customers are saying. While this might seem like a basic suggestion, many companies are unaware of the 100’s of Facebook fan pages, unofficial blogs, and countless Tweets that might be out there about their brand. Each may hold priceless information about how brands can become better and satisfying their customers. By paying attention, companies can centralize their efforts to more effectively control what’s being said about the brands.
Social media could be called one of greatest collaboration tools in the history of mankind. Ensuring that brands actively engage in using this method of communication will help them to stay connected with the customers for the long run and ultimately help drive their success.
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Mobile Coupons. Brought to you by Google
Brian Kress
Even though they’ve had coupons for a couple of years, Google has now announced the availability of mobile coupons just in time for the holidays. Sound like no more cutting on the way to the grocery store.
Hulu Takes Advantage of Crowdsourcing
Jeff Whang
In a move to help solve its search and classification system of its catalog of videos, Hulu has added the ability for users to add their own tags to videos. The hope is that users get more relevant search results, hopefully even better than the metadata their content partners provide. Hulu isn’t the first video aggregator to use crowdsourcing to solve its video search woes, but it’s certainly the biggest.
LinkedIn Builds Developer Network
Jill Krumsick
Looking to create a wider presence on the web, LinkedIn announced its LinkedIn Developer Network – the platform is now open to third party developers and has strategic partnerships with Twitter, Tweetdeck and Outlook.
Twitter Will Have an Ad Model… And You’ll Love It!
John Keehler
Twitter COO Dick Costolo confirmed last week that Twitter will indeed be introducing an ad program, saying only: “It will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it… It’s going to be really cool.” Of course, you’ll have to wait for any more details.
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How Blogging Has Changed
Jeff Whang
Analytics firm Postrank reports on how reader engagement with blogs have changed dramatically over the last three years, mainly due this little phenomenon called social networking. The most significant finding? Blog posts have a longer lifespan, as the pieces of content squirrel their way across social networks and find their niche.
Holiday Shopping: Now Social and Mobile
Brian Kress
According to a Deloitte study, holiday shoppers will be turning to new technologies to help them with their holiday shopping. Those turning to social are looking for bargains and wish lists while mobile users are looking for store locations and comparing in-store prices with online.
2009 Word of the Year: Unfriend
Jill Krumsick
The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its 2009 Word of the Year is unfriend. The verb, defined as “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook,” attests to the mainstream merit of social networks.
Call of Duty Breaks Single-Day Entertainment Sales Record
John Keehler
Over $310 million in a single day in the US alone, more than the $310 Grand Theft Auto made last year globally. To put this in perspective, and to understand why movie studios feel threatened, The Dark Knight, one of the most popular recent box office successes, made less than $300 million in the first seven days.
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These days, I’ve been spending an awful lot of time helping get my mom on the Internet. I’ve been putting it off for awhile. But now is the time. Her first grandchild lives with me and grandma wants to see some pictures and videos.
(In case you were wondering, this is not my mom)
And what I found out was, she’s not alone.
According to a report from the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing, while fewer Seniors are online than other generation groups, the ones that are online are extremely active.
In fact, Seniors (65+) lead all other generation groups when it comes to shopping online – 77% of them do so regularly. They also regularly use email (94%), look to the Web for health and medical information (71%) and manage their finances and banking (59%).
And Seniors are certainly not far behind in technology adoption. While Gen Y enjoys a 96% adoption rate of cell phones, Seniors aren’t far behind at 80%. And the gap is even closer with things like a digital camera (Gen Y: 85%, Seniors: 77%).
The one area where seniors have been slow to adopt are…you guessed it, social networking. According to SeniorJournal.com, only 7% of Seniors have a profile on a social networking site – well below the average of 35% of all adult Internet users and
My own experience with my mom wasn’t too far from what’s happening in the marketplace. When I asked her what she wanted to do online. Here’s what I got:
1) See pictures and video of baby
2) Email said pictures and video of baby to relatives, mostly back in Korea
3) Watch Korean TV dramas on websites like www.naver.com
Zero interest in social networking (unless it was links to see pictures, which may not be that different from the rest of us), but email was high on the list. I can’t see her managing finances and banking online anytime soon, so maybe she’s part of the 40% who won’t for now.
So knowing these facts about our audience, coupled with our own experiences, keep these things in mind as you consider your digital strategy to connect with Seniors:
How should websites be designed differently for this audience? Particularly if your brand attracts an older audience, consider usability testing to help your developer understand how the site needs to be architected and designed to appeal and be user-friendly to an older audience. My own experience trying to navigate my mom around busy, cluttered sites was extremely difficult – and simple ones like Leica’s site were instrumental in helping her understand how to navigate around sites.
Does the fact that boomers are getting older mean this is a more important issue? While social networking has really only caught on in the last few years, as Boomers get older, they’re going to have much more experience and comfort with social features. They’re also going to be the most online-savvy audience we’ve seen yet (and obviously a trend that will continue on with subsequent generations). Think about ways to learn more about the first wave of Boomers that transition to Senior life and how the online world affects their lives.
What do seniors want online? If you’re really bold, you might look to see when your local community college or recreation center puts on Internet 101 classes for Seniors and see if you can attend one. Observe – see what they gravitate towards and what turns them off. And consider that accordingly to a 2009 study from AARP, 1/3 of people 75 and older live alone. While social networking use is low now, according to comScore, “among older people who went online last year, the number visiting social networks grew almost twice as fast as the overall rate of Internet use among that group.” And according to Antonina Bambina, a sociologist at the University of Southern Indiana, trends point to current Seniors and the next wave of Boomers growing up to see online networks to be a place where they can make new connections, feel empowered and talk to others in similar situations without having to ask friends and family for yet more help.
The future for my mom
So what does the future hold for my mom and the Internet? Well, baby steps. It’s been a bit stressful getting to this point. But I can see her getting into some online shopping, at least to browse different products. It will certainly be difficult with all the complicated navigation structures out there but over time, I’m sure she’ll get the hang of it. And using things like Google Maps/Streetview probably isn’t far off either. As she explores the Web, I’m expecting to be intrigued by having her share what she finds online with me. The Internet, as seen through the eyes of a senior – what will she find compelling? I’m looking forward to finding out.
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Twitter has finally completely rolled out their new “Twitter List” feature. This might leave many of our readers wondering: What exactly is a Twitter List… and how could I be using it for my clients or my brand? We’ve included below an introduction that will get you pointed in the right direction.
What are Twitter Lists?
Quite simply, they’re a way for anyone to “group” feeds together.
How are Twitter Lists Used?
There are several ways that Twitter Lists are being used. We’ll look at two very important differences in how people can utilize Twitter Lists, private and public.
Private Twitter Lists
Private Twitter Lists are used to organize the people you’re already following. For many people, this may be as simple as dividing up co-workers and personal contacts. However, lists can be as granular as you’d like them to be. Perhaps you’d like to split your followers into west-coast and east-coast co-workers, or family, friends, co-workers and celebrities. Quite simply, lists allow you to organize these folks in any way you wish. Once you’ve organized them, you will see tweets from all the folks in the list on one page.
Public Twitter Lists
Public Twitter Lists are more about shaping how others follow groups on Twitter. We’ve only just scratched the surface of how these public Twitter Lists can be used, but here are several key uses we’ve seen so far:
1. Experts
Want to follow only the most influential in tech? You don’t need to spend countless hours digging for them, just look to Robert Scoble’s Twitter List of the most influential in tech: @scobleizer/most-influential-in-tech, or follow Danny Sullivan’s list of influential search engine marketers: @dannysullivan/searchmarketing, or Maria Popova’s list of TEDsters: @brainpicker/TEDsters.
2. Brand Consolidation
Many companies now have multiple Twitter accounts. Wired, for example, has 12 blogs currently, and each has a Twitter account. They’ve consolidated the ability to follow all 12 with a single Twitter List: @wired/wiredblogs. Our Home Depot client is another great example, as they have created one location where multiple International Twitter accounts, such as Canada and Mexico can be found, along with deals and customer service: @homedepot/homedepot.
3. Employee Lists
For those few brands who have really embraced social media and are willing to let their employees speak on their behalf, Twitter Lists are a great way to aggregate the true footprint of a brand in Twitter by linking to employee accounts. The New York Times is a great example, having used one of the 18 lists they’ve created to be a “staff” list: @nytimes/staff. Zappos, who have been encouraging employees to be active in social media, have also created an employees list: @zappos/employees.
While it’s a very simple idea, there are quite a few interesting possibilities that haven’t been explored yet. I’ve heard great suggestions about using Twitter Lists to aggregate people attending events, or Twitter Lists to create a more local experience on Twitter. The folks at Mashable have a great “How To” guide if you’re interested in learning more about using Twitter Lists.
If you’d like to explore some of the best Twitter Lists currently out, there’s already a website aggregating Twitter Lists, which you can find at Listorious.com.
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Burberry Goes Social
Jeff Whang
Burberry has just launched a new social networking site, artofthetrench.com to encourage people to share their stories about their Burberry trench coat. This move reflects a broader move by luxury goods who are finally trying to crack the retail web as something more than a place for bargain hunters to search for knock-offs or counterfeits.
221B: A Sherlock Holmes Online Game
John Keehler
As a promotion for the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie, the 221B.sh website uses Facebook Connect to enlist you and a friend as Watson and Holmes to solve an online mystery.
Phonebook, Redefined
Jill Krumsick
“Rather than inventing new tech from whole cloth, the answer may be boosting dead-tree media, with everyday gadgets.” Check out this video that repackages current iPhone and app technology to create new form nostalgia – interactive children’s books.
Mobile Technology in the Classroom
John Keehler
Explore the mobile classroom of the future, including Purdue’s experimental “hotseat” pilot program that integrated Twitter, Facebook and SMS text messaging to allow real-time commenting during class.
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From text to apps to mobile sites, mobile marketing presents a wide range of opportunities. Today, I’m going to explore one of the most promising platforms, mobile search advertising.
As of March 2009, there are a little short of 20 million mobile subscribers using search engines, a number that is expected to climb to 60 million by 2013. In this search environment, Google is the far and away leader, capturing even more market share than it does in desktop search with more than 90% of the U.S. mobile search market.
How is mobile search different?
Today, the mobile search market, particularly in Google’s case, is conveniently integrated with the general search campaign. This meaning that search engines will typically serve the same ads within a mobile search as a desktop search. Over time, though, websites will feature more mobile-specific content. In the future, we expect that search engines will grant this content a higher ranking than its standard, desktop counterpart when competing for the same keywords from a mobile device.
That isn’t to say that marketers shouldn’t build a separate mobile campaign. People searching on their mobile phones aren’t as keen on typing in specific searches as they might be on the desktop, so our mobile search campaigns likely need to be a little different. Mobile search campaigns often require a different set of keywords – usually shorter and more general, and need to be monitored and optimized on their own. In addition, mobile search ads often have the option to include a phone number and a click-to-call link inside the ad itself.
Cost and performance
As with desktop search, the price of mobile search campaigns varies depending on the keywords you choose and how much you bid. For these campaigns, marketers set a daily budget and are charged only when a user clicks on their ads. Placement depends on whether or not they out-bid other companies competing for the same search keyword.
There have been conflicting reports on performance of mobile search ads. Some have enjoyed significantly better results than their desktop counterparts – often reaching 15% click through rates – while others have had difficulty even reaching their desktop search numbers with 0.5%. Brand metrics tell a different story. We’ve seen consistent increases of brand metrics, particularly unaided brand awareness, when a marketer has top position on mobile search results.
Considerations
Along with an up and running mobile campaign, it’s important to live with a couple things in mind:
Think post-click
Because many mobile campaigns currently experience high click through rates, it is important to build interesting and appropriate mobile websites. More often than advertising, these sites have the opportunity to include rich brand experiences like video and, for some phones, interactive elements.
Think integration
Mobile advertising works best as part of an integrated campaign. It’s a channel that has the flexibility to compliment both traditional and digital media over a wide range of objectives. Often, mobile can act as the brand bridge between the traditional and digital worlds, blending the sometimes-disparate experiences together. The best practice here is to keep pointing your audience to the next brand experience. From print, point to mobile, from mobile, point to online, from online, point to an event.
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Introducing Twitter Lists
John Keehler
Twitter Lists is a new feature that helps form groups on Twitter. It can help you organize the people you follow, or provide a central location for others to find people to follow. This article from Mashable is a great primer for how to use Twitter Lists.
The DVR: No Longer Killing TV
Brian Kress
It’s OK to leave the bomb shelter… it’s looking like the DVR isn’t such a bad guy after all. As more households pick up DVRs, they’re neglecting the fast forward feature and actually watching commercials, boosting ratings at an average of 10 percent.
How to Save the Internet
Jeff Whang
A nice review on Ken Auletta’s forthcoming book “Googled, The End of the World As We Know It”. Ken gives a quick overview, some predictions of Google getting into the same antitrust mess that Microsoft went through a decade ago, and six principles for Google (or any company offering online services) to follow so they don’t get caught up in the same issues that Google may face sooner than later.
Real-Time Bidding for Display Media: What It is and Why It Matters
Lindsey Herring
Over the next couple of years, the pricing model for purchasing display advertising might mimic that of search on a large scale. This will mean better cost efficiency, in terms of performance and ROI.
Reading is the new Tetris
Jill Krumsick
In late August, book applications overtook game apps. Although there are more reader friendly devices, the market penetration of iPhones created a great opportunity for mobile reader apps to gain traction.
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