90 percent of adults use at least one mobile device: Study

Segmentation of mobile consumers

Nine out of 10 United States adults today use at least one mobile device and 35 percent of mobile phone users now pay $100 a month or more for service, according to Experian Simmons.

Experian Simmons revealed its insight into the divergent and rapidly evolving behaviors and attitudes of mobile consumers in its National Consumer Study. The company evaluated dozens of data points measuring the behaviors and attitudes that consumers have toward mobile communications, information gathering and entertainment.

“Marketers are increasingly looking to mobile as a medium for reaching consumers, but it’s an area that many know relatively little about,” said John Fetto, senior marketing manager at Experian Simmons, Montreal, QC.

“The key feature of the mobile consumer segmentation system is to allow marketers to quickly and easily understand the different types of mobile consumers and identify skews within their specific target audience by tying these segments back to the consumer behavior and psychographic information collected in the Simmons National Consumer Study,” he said. 

Key findings
Experian Simmons found five distinct segments of mobile consumers including mobiriati, social connectors, pragmatic adopters, mobile professionals and basic planners.

Mobiriati, which consists of 19 percent of mobile phone owners, represents the first generation to have grown up with mobile phones. To mobiriati consumers, mobile phones are a central part of their daily life and they cannot imagine life without them.

Consumers who are social connectors – about 22 percent of mobile phone owners – find that their mobile phone is the portal they use to keep up to date with friends and social events.

Pragmatic adopters, which also consist of 22 percent of mobile phone owners, are in the early stages of realizing that there is more that they can do with their phone besides making calls.

Seventeen percent of mobile owners are mobile professionals who user their handset to keep up with work and family life. According to the study, a majority of mobile professionals use smartphones.

Basic planners – 20 percent of mobile phone owners – are not interested in technology or mobile devices. For them, the basic mobile package serves all their needs.

“Regardless of age, Americans are doing more with their phones today than ever before,” Mr. Fetto said.

“Sure, we see differences among generations with younger consumers who grew up using mobile phones adopting mobile activities like checking email and watching video on mobile phones at higher than average rates.

“Across the spectrum, consumers are increasingly viewing these features as standard functions of a mobile phone even if they use them only occasionally,” he said. “Our research also identified mobile consumers’ propensity to switch service providers. Interestingly, consumers most likely to switch are not those who average the least amount of time with a mobile provider, but those who have been with their provider the longest.

“Consumers who have been with the same provider for 4 years or longer are the most likely to say they’ll switch services for a better plan, better phone or better service.”

Additional findings
In addition, there are currently three mobile consumer psychographic scales available, including:

• Switching Propensity: This factor measures mobile consumers’ willingness to switch service providers for a variety of reasons, including improved quality, plan selection and technology.

• Feature Focus: This factor measures the propensity of mobile consumers to place value on new mobile features and technology versus traditional calling functions.

• Traditional Use: Mobile consumers who score above average on this scale would prefer to use a landline phone over their mobile and also lean toward having only a basic calling plan.

“This year may be the year that mobile video really takes off and market penetration is something that Experian Simmons is closely monitoring,” Mr. Fetto said. “Mass adoption of mobile video has the potential to have a significant impact on other media from television to film to even traditional Internet use and marketers need to know how to leverage it.”

“We also believe that GPS-integrated devices will present marketers with an opportunity to go hyper-local in marketing to consumers precisely when and where they are most likely to influence their behavior” he said.

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Yahoo puts into place ambitious mobile advertising strategy

Sketch-a-Search

A senior Yahoo executive discussed the company’s mobile strategy in an exclusive interview with Mobile Marketer.

Yahoo’s mobile initiatives encompass the mobile Web, paid and ad-supported applications, as well as mobile search. The company is especially bullish about the prospects for mobile advertising for this year and beyond.

“Mobile advertising went mainstream in 2009—2009 a breakout year for mobile advertising, and I expect continued aggressive growth,” said David Katz, vice president of North America at Yahoo Mobile, Sunnyvale, CA. “We and everybody else in the industry saw big jumps in revenue last year, but we still haven’t cracked the code on the right mobile ad units.

“For a long time we’ve been saying next year is the year of mobile advertising, but this year we’re saying last year was it, 2009 was the breakout year,” he said. “What’s next is getting much more creative about mobile-specific advertising experiences.

“While we’re all starting to make a lot of money, mostly with experiences that look like PC Internet ads, that is going to change in the next 12-to-18 months as we take advantage of things like device location.”

KFC is targeting college hoops fans on Yahoo's Tourney Pick'Em mobile Web portal

Mr. Katz had a sit-down meeting with this writer at the International CTIA Wireless 2010 Conference last week in Las Vegas.

As a current example of Yahoo’s mobile strategy in action, quick-serve restaurant giant KFC and Southwest Airlines are driving college basketball fans to their respective mobile sites via banner ads within Yahoo Sports’ “Tourney Pick’em” mobile portal (see story).

“We’ve worked a lot on cross-platform buys—in fact, most of the RFPs that Yahoo sees now have mobile in them,” Mr. Katz said. “Last year, our fantasy football app was completely cross-platform, with advertisers such as Subway, Toyota and Southwest Airlines taking advantage of mobile and online inventory.

Last month the Olympics dominated Yahoo's mobile search queries

“Similarly, with our recent Olympics mobile Web site, cross-platform was definitely a trend, and it’s something where we think we have a pretty big advantage because of the huge amount of traffic we see in both channels,” he said. “We’ve integrated our sales force such that the people that sell PC advertising at Yahoo can also sell mobile advertising.

“We also have a mobile specialist force to help them do that, but online advertisers don’t have to talk to different people if they also want to buy mobile inventory.”

Search frenemies
Last month, Microsoft and Yahoo received clearance for their search agreement without restrictions from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission, and will now turn their attention to implementing the deal (see story).

“The deal with Microsoft involves them powering the back-end of our search portal, supplying us with the classic set of links,” Mr. Katz said. “What we want to focus on is the user experience of search.

“Now that we don’t have to worry about core plumbing, we can focus on delivering fun, engaging, useful user experiences,” he said. “These new apps are examples of the differentiation we think we will be able to deliver consistently.”

New search apps
At CTIA Wireless 2010 last week, Yahoo released two iPhone applications—Yahoo Sketch-a-Search and Yahoo Search—to make search more engaging for consumers while delivering relevant and powerful information (see story).

“Other search apps use GPS, city names or ZIP codes to describe location, but none of those are the way people actually tend to think about location,” Mr. Katz said. “We launched the Sketch-a-Search local search experience that addressed that need by letting users narrow their search by tracing a circle with their finger on the iPhone’s touch-screen.

“Right now it is restaurants and hotels, but we will be adding more and more local information and rating information from Yahoo users that will integrate natively with the iPhone,” he said. “Yahoo has been in the local business for quite some time, and we will be leveraging that content for both Sketch-a-Search and our mainline search app.

“Both apps are free, and we haven’t launched advertising in either yet, but we absolutely intend to over time—we’re extremely excited about mobile local search advertising, and we’re doing very well monetizing queries.”

Local mobile search
Local and mobile have a natural affinity.

“Local is going to be of huge importance for Yahoo,” Mr. Katz said. “For Sketch-a-Search, we asked ourselves ‘How do you look at local through the lens of mobile?’”

“Mobile search results should be actual stuff that you care about blocks away from you,” he said. “There are a lot of opportunities to use location—it can be when you’re near a certain point, and there’s also a lot of opportunity pairing location with a time of day.

“We do some of that today, but with location information that isn’t very granular—we’ll continue to get more granular.”

While these new applications are currently only available for iPhone, Yahoo intends to release versions for other smartphone platforms as well.

“In 2009 most of our apps were for iPhone and BlackBerry, and in 2010 we’re adding Android to the mix—you should see Yahoo apps for Android fairly soon,” Mr. Katz said.

“Yahoo is platform agnostic—we go where our users go, and the proliferation of smartphone platforms is a good thing if it gets people using mobile Internet-enabled phones,” he said.

In addition to standard banner ads, Yahoo plans to monetize the applications with paid search listings, and over time, pay-per-call ads, local promotions, coupons and other offers.

The company has also offered click-to-download-in-the-App-Store advertising for more than a year—banners that tie directly into Apple’s iTunes.

Yahoo also has integrated with MovieTickets.com and corresponding click-to-buy-movie-tickets banners.

Mobile video ad units are in development, although Yahoo has been running rich-media mobile ad units for almost a year.

“Advertisers love those rich-media ads, mostly expanding ad units, and mobile video is something there’s a lot of excitement around,” Mr. Katz said. “We’ve added mobile video to the front page of our mobile Web site, and there’s been lots of excitement from advertisers.

“User adoption of mobile video, while accelerating, is still pretty nascent, and advertisers are eager to see those numbers grow,” he said. “Advertisers, in general, are definitely looking for experiences that get the user involved and engaged with the content on the page without disrupting the experience.

“You’ll be seeing some new Yahoo rich-media ad units that are unique and innovative, but all of that stuff still emerging, and our first priority is getting the user experience right.”

While Yahoo’s bread-and-butter for mobile local search is national or multinational brands and retailers with bricks-and-mortar locations, Mr. Katz said that he eventually sees small businesses playing a bigger role.

“There is an opportunity for smaller merchants, but the challenge has always been bringing them into the system,” Mr. Katz said. “One of the best ways to do that so far has been partnering with folks with local sales forces, and over time you may see self-service interfaces for local merchants.

“Uptake among SMBs for classic sponsored search has been mixed, as there’s the impression that it is still fairly complex for the average mom-and-pop shop, so it’s up to us to make it easier for them," he said.

“A challenge we need to address for all advertisers, large or small, is to present mobile search in a way that’s easy to buy—it can be hard for advertisers to specify all of the GPS locations they need to buy.”

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At the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas, Ericsson announced that measurement of actual network traffic in 2009 shows that mobile data traffic has now surpassed voice traffic.

The company said data traffic grew 280% in each of the last two years, and should double over the next five years.  Ericsson says the crossover point was December 2009 at about 140,000 terabytes her month…

Here’s a quick video clip of the interview >>>

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Experts' Guide to Keyword Research for Social Media

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Google Wants More Small Advertisers to Build their Own Ads on the Video Site

YouTube's first serious attempt to monetize web video — text overlays — is still the most effective, with click-through rates that are eight to 10 times higher than other ad formats, according to the company. Get ready for more of them.

The new move won't get more brand advertising on YouTube, but Google's hope is it will create more of a long-tail market for video advertising.
That's because Google is making the overlays self-serve, meaning any advertiser can create and place overlay advertising on video, much as they might place their own display or search campaigns.

Overlays will now be part of Google's self-service advertising tool, Display Ad Builder, which has 40,000 advertisers. Most of those advertiser are small and 80% entirely new to the online display market.

This won't get more brand advertising on YouTube, but Google's hope is it will create more of a long-tail market for video advertising, just as there is for search. Small advertisers can currently buy promoted videos, YouTube's equivalent of a search ad. At the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, YouTube announced it is opening up its partner program to indie musicians, giving them an entirely new way to sell-out by accepting advertising on YouTube as well as third-party sites.

"The big thing here is we're trying to make display advertising as simple as search advertising, especially for the small advertiser," said Brad Bender, product management director for display at Google.

The humble overlay, the most ubiquitous in-video ad on YouTube, is its most effective unit, from a click-through perspective. Mr. Bender said Display Ad Builder includes templates to help small advertises create their own ad units. Overlays can be bought on a per-click or cost-per-thousand-impressions basis; advertisers can target a specific video, a genre or other demographic criteria provided by YouTube.

The challenge for YouTube — by far Google's largest display property — is to open up the system to the long tail while maintaining a premium environment for brand advertisers, the kind which place 15- and 30-second spots as well as the splashy home-page ads, which increasingly pay the bills.

The fundamental belief at Google, however, is that more advertisers is better, no matter how small they happen to be. "It is generally beneficial to open up the ecosystem," Mr. Bender said. "Finding the perfect ad for everyone is going to vary on the person and on the context."

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I remember the day when brand management meant we worked hard to maintain a flexible yet consistent brand identity. And, in those days, if a group misused the brand we said they "went rogue." We meant they deviated from the standard.

I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that corporate branding has gone rogue and the cause is social media. Here's why.

Social media is not just another tactic to be tacked onto the proverbial backside of a corporate identity system. It needs to be recognized for what it is — the disruptive technology that radically changes the game. So much of what operated in the old corporate branding model simply does not apply anymore. In the chart below, I give just a few examples of the differences in corporate branding in the pre- and post-social media world. To me, the post-social media line in the sand puts us in the early days of 2009. That's when (more or less) social media usage crossed the chasm from being an early adopter behavior to something "Judy Consumer" did regularly.

What's changed? Everything!

Lots of dramatic changes happening very fast make it especially hard for corporate America to adapt. But adapt we must and fast. So what might the new corporate branding approach look like?

For me, the place to start is to really embrace the notion that the new corporate branding model is one where there is a creative, collaborative dance between the company and the networked social world. In the best of situations, the community is the inspiration for the company brand strategy; they set the pace and type of dance to be shared. More than that, in this model, different communities will inspire their own special dances that will need to be incorporated into the brand strategy iteratively over much shorter cycles than ever before. One can think of the new corporate brand leader as a choreographer, encouraging the different dances at the same time, but able to thread them together so they make up a cohesive suite with a distinctive style and signature.

That's a tall order and a big challenge. It is also what makes it all incredibly interesting. Happily, this vision for corporate branding can now become real because the systems and technologies are maturing quickly to support this model. As a marketer, we can now harness the newer platforms and technologies including:

• "Brands as publishers" concept (a phrase I gratefully attribute to R2i) which allows you to create a focused message distributed over a range of outlets using CMS technologies. This type of program is best used to support a new product, a new marketing campaign or in support of cause because it can be adapted for multiple audiences or communities.
• Evolve a way to attract and retain influencers within your existing user groups as your first line of brand monitoring. To keep them pumped, reward them with special badges, previews or other perks.
• Create "buddy" types of programs that link volunteer brand advocates to newbies. This gives you a powerful "early warning system" for adverse reactions or brand events.
• Develop a clear reputation management system that lets you gauge your brand's influence across segments.
• Evolve community-engagement platforms into multimedia communications (e.g. video-based communities) so that you can create multiple ways that members can reach each other and you easily.
• Pay particular attention to channel partners. First, monitor how they present your brand within their e-commerce site (companies like WebCollage solve a big part of this issue). But also monitor their user groups and communities. A lot of rich insights are there to be gleaned about your brand's messaging.

All these new approaches implicitly understand that in the post-social world, businesses are interacting with "Judy Consumer" on her territory — in her communities and networks. That reverses the balance of power. Judy Consumer demands she be treated with respect in her digital social world. I suggest we listen; otherwise she might go rogue on us.

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For so many small business owners generating leads, converting customers and creating a predictable flow of business is a constant battle.

While there are many reasons for this, the primary one is that most small businesses focus all of their marketing attention on selling when they should really focus every fiber of their being on creating a better customer experience.

The best way to generate more leads is to create a customer experience that makes people talk. The best way to convert more sales is to create a customer experience that puts sales and marketing on the same team. The best way to create a predictable flow of business is to create a customer experience that builds trust over and over again.

The logical path

There’s a simple definition of marketing that I’ve coined after years of working with small businesses. Marketing is getting someone who has a need to know, like, and trust you. Once you’ve established know, like and trust, you can more easily move to creating try, buy, repeat and refer.

These seven steps make up what I call the Marketing Hourglass (pictured above) as they produce a logical progression of steps from the point where a prospect first becomes aware of your business to where they voluntarily work to help you grow it.

Creating a marketing system that addresses and offers products and processes at every step along this logical path is how you teach your business to market itself.

Plug the gaps

Almost every business I encounter attempts to move from know to buy, without addressing the phases in between or after. This causes gaps in the customer experience and often leads to generating a customer that’s not a good fit or one that doesn’t value your unique way of doing business.

By carefully plotting how a prospect comes to know your business, how you help them understand and like the unique benefits of doing business with your firm and how you build trust by showing them customer proof and expertise, you properly prepare them to try and buy your products and services. (Usually at a premium)

Of course once a prospect decides to become a customer you must work equally as hard at plugging any gaps in customer service, delivery, packaging, communication, and even finance. In every fashion that your business comes into contact with a customer you are in that instance performing a marketing function, no matter with department is engaged.

So ask yourself this question? Does every department in your organization produce positive customer experiences? Here’s how to find out. Become a customer of your business. Follow an order or service request around your entire business from advertising to ask for referral and see how many gaps you can find. 

Gaps come in many forms, but the two most common are gaps that are produced intentionally – a process that doesn’t make sense to anyone but Bart in customer service, and unintentionally, no follow-up process to make sure your customer is thrilled.

Process and product

As you teach your business to market itself, you need to arm it with products, services and processes that can make this notion a reality.

If you sell a product, surround it with services that allow you to create better product experiences and repeat sales. If you sell a service, ask yourself what product might enhance your service or be used to create a trail priced version of your service.

In fact, ponder these lists of questions as you consider your gaps.

Product/service questions

• What is your free or trial offering?
• What is your starter offering?
• What is your “make it easy to switch” offering?
• What is your core offering?
• What are your add-ons to increase value?
• What is your “members only” offering?
• What are your strategic partner pairings?

Process questions

• How do you identify an ideal customer?
• How do you use content to build trust?
• How do you nurture new relationships?
• How do you present your offerings?
• How do you orient a new customer?
• How do you assess value delivered?
• How do you teach and educate?
• How do you handle problems?
• How do you create success stories?

If you can address and fill the gaps from know to refer with products, services and processes that create a winning customer experience, creating a well-oiled referral engine will be your reward.

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Search is Dead. Long Live Social Media.

This seems to be the rallying cry of late. And social media does show lots of promise for marketers. But discussions like this seem to miss the point. Both search and social media are weapons in a smart marketer’s armory. And used together, they can help to better target consumers.

In Marketing Sherpa’s recent Social Media Marketing Benchmark Survey, only 32% of respondents found integrating Social Media with SEO very effective. Fifty-four percent found it somewhat effective, and 14% not effective at all. Presumably, these are people who have tried to integrate — a small fraction of those engaged in social media. These statistics are surprising. Search is about figuring out what people are looking for when they enter keywords into their favorite search engine. Social media is what people are actually saying to each other; they’re telling us what they’re looking for. We, as marketers, should be able to fit it all together pretty nicely.

Are you leaving Search keywords on the table? You probably are. A recent Search Engine Watch post laid out many of the privacy issues related to social media. But consumers willingly offer a wealth of information about themselves in various Social Media outlets all the time. And much of it can help you further optimize your site and improve your search rankings. Consumers are helping you to help them.

What are people saying about your company or product? And how are they saying it? It’s time to find out. Look at all the tweets related to your Twitter hashtag and follow the conversations. Search Twitter using your current keywords and see what other words people are using in the discussion. Click through to Web sites and blogs. Visit Facebook Fan pages and individual pages if you can. But you don’t need me to run through all the social media options, especially since one in particular provides most of the chatter.

My point is simple: Use social media outlets as a keyword suggestion tool.

Social media research should yield long-tail keywords appropriate for deeper pages on your site. The incremental traffic these pages attract is likely the most targeted and potentially the most valuable. And you never know. Maybe a sea change among consumers is bubbling under. Such research conducted in real time (at least more real time than last month’s analytics) will help you plan for it and keep you out ahead of it.

The whole exercise is worth performing for your competitors and the industry as a whole. In a perfect world, there would be someone on staff dedicated to following the appropriate social media conversations everyday. And in a perfect world, we’d all be rich and drink martinis on the beach everyday. Most companies can’t afford to dedicate an employee as office Internet monitor. Still, the exercise is worth repeating whenever you re-examine keywords.

Tomorrow’s keywords are out there to be found, courtesy of social media. And when they become today’s, you’ll be well-positioned to receive all the traffic. Social media wants to help in your search efforts… Let It!

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Facebook and Twitter Access via Mobile Browser Grows by Triple-Digits in the Past Year

Social Networking Penetration via Browser Reaches 30 Percent among Smartphone Owners

Digital measurement firm comScore released a study today highlighting the rise in social media access via mobile phones and offering some comparison metrics for some of the biggest social networks and their usage on mobile devices.

comScore measured the changes in both mobile browser access to social networks and the access numbers to specific social networks from January 2009 to January 2010.

Some highlights:

– 30% of smartphone users accessed social networks via mobile browsers — this was up from 22.5% in 2009.

- Total social networking access via mobile browsers on all mobile phones rose to 11.1% — this was up from 6.5% in 2009. Most of this growth was in the uptick in smartphone usage.

When it comes to specific social networks, Twitter and Facebook both had increases in mobile browser usage in the triple digits. Twitter usage via mobile browsers was up 347% while Facebook mobile browser usage was up 112%.

Mirroring non-mobile usage, MySpace mobile access was actually down 7% year over year.

It’s important to note that these figures are just from mobile browser statistics — they don’t even take into account the use of mobile applications for Twitter or Facebook.

Both Facebook and Twitter have prospered from having strong mobile strategies. Twitter’s mobile strategy and integration with SMS messages has made it a natural mobile player since its inception; still more and more users are turning to its mobile browser counterpart to send and receive messages.

Facebook has a great presence on mobile platforms, but the fact that so many people are continuing to use it from a mobile browser shows that its strategy of catering to mobile users is working.

Do you use Twitter or Facebook more on your phone or via your regular computer? Let us know!

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courtesy of Christina Warren and comScore    

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