The Global Impact of Smartphones

Posted on September 27, 2012 by marc meyer

Courtesy of the folks from Protect Your Bubble.

The Confluence of Social and Search

Posted on January 8, 2010 by marc meyer

When defining the next big think, I am never surprised how much mobile, search and social continue to loom on the horizon. In fact, if you look at what’s happening in Japan it would boggle your mind.

Three-quarters of Japanese social network users access the sites only from their mobile phones.

Couple that with Google buying AdMob for $750 million and you can easily see where this is all heading. But as the barriers to search and social and mobile continue to be broken down, I cannot help to think that the following is not true to some degree…

Best ROI in the next 6 months and other random thoughts

Posted on June 12, 2008 by marc meyer

Did you know, and I have this scrawled on a napkin, so that means I read it somewhere… but that the best ROI in the next 6-12 months will be broken down this way:

-Search 30%

-Email 18%

-Mobile 8%

-Digital Advertising 18%

-Social Networking 21%

-Other 5%

A couple of thoughts. The first being that you will see wholesale changes in those numbers. I have been telling anyone willing to listen and in interviews that the 3 things that people, marketers, advertisers and businesses should be aware of over the next 12-18 months are: Mobile, Social, and Search. Why, well lets think about this… The one indispensable thing that you have and need every day. What is it? What one thing is no more than a foot from you at all times? What bill always gets paid? That’s right, your mobile device, your phone, your extension of YOU.

Quick thought; Do we now as a society, judge people on the type of phone they have? The same way we do when it comes to cars? Maybe not, since 10 year olds are now armed with them.

Ok So here’s the phone( I’m using the g-phone prototype as my example) and with it, the browsers are getting and will be getting quicker, the rates are dropping, the interfaces more user friendly, and lastly, lo and behold- a news bastion of advertising landscape has opened up. Marketers now have another way to reach a captive audience. How? Through ads driven by search, contextual and paid. Search is going to be huge for mobile. Bottom line-Google knows whats up.

Ok, so now we have the mobile part, we have the search part, but we’re lacking the other piece. I have written previously how social nets are still somewhat bourgeoisie, in that in some cases they are not accessible to everyone because of certain economic situations. But… even in extreme cases, people manage to have a cell phone. So, the next big extension of Social is and is moving towards a “Mobile Social” environment! Want an example of a mobile social environment? How about Brightkite? BTW, Does anyone know if they are still doing it by invite only? I’ve played around with Brightkite, and I must say it’s pretty cool. I can invite you if you need me to, just let me know.

On a side note, if you’re still curious, and have a spare $695 laying around on the dresser, emarketer has a mobile social report available, and I quote:

eMarketer forecasts that over 800 million people worldwide will be participating in a social network via their mobile phones by 2012, up from 82 million in 2007.

As my man in the Bud light commercials so aptly says it….”Dude”.. That is a major number. 800 million! That’s a tad south of a billion! One last thing, did you see the last ROI figure from the above list? “Other” was going to have 5% market share! Which means someone is utilizing or going to utilize “other” to their benefit over the next 6-12 months, but they have chosen not to share with us, what “other” is? Anyone care to venture a guess?

Last thing, I have another piece of info I want to share with you, and this is for all the folks out there, that have marketing on the mind but do not know where to put forth their efforts. This is a list of online marketing tactics, how many of these do you use?

Affiliate marketing
Corporate web site
RSS advertising
PPC
Behavioral targeting
User generated content
SEO
Mobile Advertsing
Widgets
Contextual advertising
Video Marketing
Virtual Tradeshows
Webinars
Virtual worlds
Rich media avatars
Rich media apps
Podcasts
Advergames
Social networks
Forums/BBS
Online display ads
Branded microsites
Email marketing
Cross branding
Microblogging
Social bookmarking
e-commerce feeds
Viral marketing/WOMM
Online PR
Online contests
Free content
Paid reviews
Blog advertising
Blogger relations

Here are a ton of questions for you:

How many of the above do you recognize or know?

How many of those are you reading about for the first time?

How many have you actually used?

How many have you used with some success?

How many of those make more sense now than they ever have?

How many of those will you absolutely never use again?

How many of those are indispensable to your success?

I think what you’ll find is you can still use certain elements of them and have various degrees of success assuming that you know what you are doing. But at the least, now you have an idea of what you should be aware of when you get pitched or maybe I’ve given you some ideas on what might work with a particular challenging client. Either way, Good luck!

Mobile Marketing is a $1 billion business. Are you in?

Posted on April 25, 2008 by marc meyer

Did you know that a billion text messages are sent per day? Did you know that 2 years ago that nearly 11% of all voting done on American Idol was via text messaging? What kind of a hard number was that? Try about 65 million. Mobile marketing is projected to grow from $708 million in overall revenue in 2007 to $2.2 billion in 2012 according to Jupiter Research. In 4 years it’s going to grow almost 300%.

The mobile web is exploding, and if you don’t understand that by now, then you’ve been living under a rock. Thanks to the iphone in particular, and Safari more specifically, intenet enabled phones are becoming more user friendly and more robust in their offerings and overall customer satisfaction. With that being said, the mobile web is now becoming a more desirable place for marketers to try and pitch their products.

Interestingly enough, the mobile web is a more collaborative environment for marketers and their products in that It requires and has a lot of moving parts. You cannot run a mobile campaign without buyin from multiple channel partners, multiple departments, and multiple vendors and technological entities. But truly what marketers need to know best is their consumer, their user, the person they are trying to reach through their mobile device. Yes it’s product centric, but trying to appeal to a demographic of 54+ with a NIke mobile text to win ad, might be tougher than going after the 18-24 male demo- so the point is mobile is best at going after the meat and potatoes consumer who is no more than a foot away from their mobile phone at all times. The person who’s cell phone is an extension of their personal brand. Find that person. That is the key, then tie that person into THAT specific offer. A 1:1 offer that makes sense to that person.

With more than 70% penetration of mobile use in urban areas. The last great frontier of marketing to consumers is mobile. It’s only going to get better and the potential will be endless. Opportunities exist for marketers in the form of text to win campaigns- the most pervasive and common currently, as well as consumers using their mobile phones for everything from purchasing tickets, mobile video, searching for pricing, searching for coupons, downloading music through wifi, and or interacting with billboards.

What marketers needs to know is that, yes it’s not too late to get in the game and yes it’s a game that everyone is eventually going to be participating in to a certain extent. Bear in mind that not only are theur savvy marketers and companies out there, but the consumer is becoming more hip and more comfortoable with the technology, and thus the bar will keep getting raised in regards to consumer expectations. Always keep in mind that the phone is merely an extension of or a conduit for entertainment. Whether its music or video or chat or sufring the net. Consumers like to be entertained and with the continous advances in pushing the content out, the opportunities to piggback enetertainment are just as viable as a text to win campaign.

Along with text campaigns that keep spiffing up the offers, another aspect to keep in mind is that search will become more of a viable optiion with mobile as well. So you the marketer need to be aware of and prepared for your mobile web offerings to be compliant and search engine friendly to mobile search. Yes there is a lot here, but if you start doing your homework now and start small, you will be well ahead of the game and more comfortable with what is thrown at you and what you can bring to clients.

How far does mobile marketing extend? Here’s your last example. Virgin mobile has a mobile campaign that allows users to interact with ads in exchange for free services. How old is the target market? 13-34 year olds. 13. How many registered users are there up to this point? Almost 700,000. Your goal, figure out what the consumer wants and deliver a mobile solution.

Generation Transparent: Exhibitionistic-Voyeurs

Posted on April 15, 2008 by marc meyer

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and he told me would be with the same company in 5 years. I said, to quote my favorite tv spot of the moment: “dude”… “no effin way”. I said, don’t you realize how fast things are moving? There is no way to really know what you will be doing in 5 years. Which made me think about…oddly enough, how fast things are moving. Generation C, user generated content, and the art of self promotion seem to be growing at an exponential pace leaving one to ask, “what could possibly be next at this rate?”

Generation T, for Transparent

Let’s face it. A lot of people, and I mean A LOT, are interested in gaining fame, fortune, notoriety and all the entrapments that come along with it, any which way they can get it. One of the fastest and most effective and most viral ways that this can be achieved is through the internet. Namely social media aka social networks. Awhile back, Rohit Bargava had written an interesting post entitled Using Blogs for Personal Marketing that essentially maps out how one can market oneself through social media. What Rohit failed to recognize back then, were the lengths and the extremes that people were willing to go to and utilize to extend their personal brand. Putting shame, morality, ethics and common decency aside, today’s generation of online users now try to leverage their “me” brand by any electronic means available. From creating videos for You Tube, and Flickr pages devoted to last night’s party, to developing first person-“if it bleeds then it leads”-content with a mobile device to creating inflammatory blogs. The amount of tools available for content creation today almost exceed the possibilities that exist in which they can be used. And that, is a scarry thought.

Coupled with these personal branding tools as we said, are the possibilities, and given todays culture of laying it all out there-on the bleeding edge, the only limitations to content creation seem to lie in the acceptable moral boundaries of the viewers of said content and the creators imagination. The FCC notwithstanding, what can be found in cyberspace can boggle the mind in regards to not only user generated FREE content but also paiud content. Amazingly enough, all of this content can be guaranteed of having some type of audience. Because of the notion that everyone wants to get paid, and everyone is willing to pay, would be auteurs are coming out of the woodwork with content that continues to push the envelope, try the patience, test the boundaries and skirt the law with their home grown submittals of what they think can fly online. . Where does it end? I have bad news for you, it has only just begun.

Generation E as in Exhibitionist

2 years ago in The Washington Post, Robert Samuelson had written that the Internet had unleashed the greatest outburst of mass exhibitionism in human history. This was 2 years ago! If This is when MySpace and Facebook had truly exploded, what are we to make of todays social networking state of affairs? Sure they were hot, but now, today, at this moment, what we have seen is the explosive growth of niche social networks and numerous other ways to put yourself out there for all the world to see, 24-7-365. As Samuelson states:

“People seem to crave popularity or celebrity more than they fear the loss of privacy. Some of this extroversion is crass self-promotion. The Internet is a cheap way to advertise ideas and projects. Anyone can post a video on YouTube, free; you can start a blog free (some companies don’t charge for “hosting” a site). “

If that was 2 years ago, then what we see now is the explosion of tools and sites and networks that help people exploit themselves to no end. In some instances this has come back to haunt some people who have tried to get jobs only to be denied because recruiters had accessed their MySpace page and saw suggestive photos or comments.

What we have seen and are seeing is a ship that is steering towards an even shorter attention span and demanding more of a punch line or a money shot. Now people expect to see a video that pushes their buttons quicker. Like wanting the porn without the acting. Gone will be the 22 minute sitcom. Gone will be the 9 part mini-series. Goodbye Roots, see ya later Rich Man Poor Man. It’s bad enough that “24” has the audacity to have a 2 part series. We have become a society that wants to see “rea stuff” real quick. Remember when reality tv shows like Survivor were the rage? Well now, what plays well in Peoria is real YouTube video consisting of a 3 minute clip of either someone being humiliated, hurt, or embarrased or of someone we idiolize being put into a compromising position (Britney anyone?) or who is out and out being spied upon.

Our fast food nation now wants it, no, demands it’s content the same way. But the flip side is now we can create content that a) showcases ourselves, b) shows someone being humiliated, c) someone getting their ass kicked, or d) showing off some bizarre backwoods talent, or even more, e) blatantly spying on someone, or even more extreme, having sex with someone else.And for what? All for the benefit of our perceived audeince and it’s insatiable thirst for this type of programming. Privacy has never meant less than it does today. But what this desire to show and share people our world has created, is the last piece to this new generation and that’s the Gen V public. The Voyeurs. The people that like to watch; and the portion of the public that has fueled the desire to put oneself out there.

Generation V as in Voyeur

Nic brisbourne offers up this blurb in his post titled Mediated Voyeurism in which one of the comments on just what social networking has become states:

“The most prevalent use of Facebook was as a social activity – students reported using Facebook with friends to view and discuss other people’s profiles. Essentially, Facebook appears to operate primarily as a tool for the facilitation of gossip.

“…the consumption of revealing images of and information about others’ apparently real and unguarded lives, often yet not always for purposes of entertainment but frequently at the expense of privacy and discourse, through the means of mass media and Internet.”

So essentially we have become and I beg anyone to truly refute this, a society of watchers. What would most people do if they could not talk about others? Part of the activity of social networks is the ability to access the content of others, to watch the content created by others, and to share that content with others. Thus not only in online social networks but also offline, we want to share that voyeuristic moment with others. The bottom line is again, we are a society that loves to watch, and now we have become a society that loves to watch content created by our peers. It’s raw, or so we think, it’s real, so we think, and it’s created by people that could be our next door neighbor and thus it has more value, more of a believe-ability factor than something created by Hollywood. It’s personal and some might agree that it’s private, which makes it that more “fun” to watch. Think about it, why do you think Americas Funniest Videos is so possible and successful? Because it captures video moments, for the most part, that are spontaneous and brace yourself, might be less than one minute. Amateur genertated content brought to you quickly and without makeup. And America absolutely has embraced it. Would be filmographers, would be actors on a stage for all the world to see, all thinking the same thing.”Maybe I’ll get discovered”!

The Mobile Social Generation

If you wanted to know where to look next for what might be on the horizon for sociological trends it would be no more than a foot away from you at all times. Thats right your cell phone. Within you hand held device is a social community. You just don’t know it yet. Mobile social communities are sites where mobile subscribers can communicate with groups of like-minded individuals. They mirror traditional online social networks. These sites are growing in importance as more users of online social sites discover similar communities that they can reach via their mobile phones. Recognizing that there is a growing demand from consumers to access communities, many major online social networking sites are moving to mobile as well.
Thus, the newly formed, quickly evolving mobile social networks will be the next big extension of user generated content. As soon as more sites become more mobile social friendly, look for more mobile friendly social content to be cranked out as well. Has it already happened? yes. To what degree? We have not even hit critical mass in regards to the type or amount of content that will eventually make it there. Furthermore, there are more and more mobile web sites that are coming onboard daily, that are creating compelling content and grabbing eyeballs. Lastly and you knew they would be mentioned, amateur mobile content creators will eventually dominate the space. Accoring to Businessweek: “Before long, everyone’s cell phone might make space for MySpace “. Thats not an if. Thats a when.

So what are you? Are you a social media voyeur? a social media exhibitionist? Or are you Transparent?

2% of the world currently uses a mobile social network

Posted on February 28, 2008 by marc meyer

Guess what? If you’re a marketer or an advertiser or even someone who wants to get some skin in the game. There is still time. According to Informa’s latest report entitled “Mobile Social Networking: Communities and Content on the Move,” the number of mobile social networking users exceeded 50 million. Which is roughly 2.3% of the worlds mobile user population on December 31st, 2007.

The research company argues that with only low investments from mobile network operators, the growth in users and community registrations will continue at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 30-50%, depending on the type of community and the region. So think about it, low-ball figures still put the CAGR at 30-50%

So in less than 4 years, there will be between 12.5% penetration of mobile social networks among mobile users globally in the most conservative scenario and approximately 23% in the high growth scenario.

In 2006, mobile social networks made more than US $1.5 billion and that amount more than doubled in 2007. Though revenue growth will accelerate in the next two years much depends on mobile network operators’ policies and the interests of users after that to determine whether the growth will be sustained, flatten out, or decline.

By 2012 revenues generated from all business models in this industry is forecast to reach US$28.9 billion in the most conservative scenario and $52 billion in the high growth scenario.

What is safe to say given the ramp up by all arms and legs of the Entertainment industry is that the biggest community segment revenues will be seen within this market. Look for entertainment to overtake all other industries in some regions by 2010, If they have not already.

Other community segments — like those focused on productivity, fame and social shopping — are beginning to emerge on mobile platforms, diversifying their offers and attracting different kind of users… Thus expanding the social awareness and acceptance of mobile social networks.

Mobile, Social, and Search. Quick hits.

Posted on February 22, 2008 by marc meyer

In a quest to pare down my already slim posts, I’m going to fire off a couple of quick blurbs for everyone to chew on until the next post:

Aside from Microsoft not backing down in it’s quest to buy Yahoo, AT&T and Yahoo have entered in a multiyear deal to share revenue from advertising on Mobile phones. Yahoo will provide search and display advertising for AT&T customers. I’m shocked that Google did not get there first.
Speaking of Microsoft, the Wall Street Journal just cut a deal with them in which the WSJ’s paid search and contextual advertising services will be provided by Microsoft. Not to sound redundant but, I’m shocked that Google did not get there first…
Social media giants Facebook and Myspace will become application hubs and launch pads for niche based “smaller” social networks. Alot of this is the residual effect of Facebook opening its platform last fall.
Word of Mouth marketing is the new mode of marketing on the cheap. It’s also just as effective as traditional forms of marketing and has much more of a “buzz” factor.
Magazines drive more than 50% of online searches, followed by reading an article in a magazine and lastly by seeing something on TV.
According to Anderson Analytics, 32% of the 1700 marketing executives polled cited “Green Marketing” as an important emerging concept along with it being considered the trendiest marketing buzzword.
The hottest demographic that you need to be marketing too, but are probably ignoring are the hispanic and baby boomers.
According to Informa’s latest report entitled “Mobile Social Networking: Communities and Content on the Move,” the number of mobile social networking users exceeded 50 million, approximately 2.3% of the global mobile user population on December 31st, 2007

Mobile Marketers can fail and still succeed.

Posted on February 19, 2008 by marc meyer

Mobile advertising is projected to generate revenue somewhere between $1 billion and $24 billion within four years. However, at the moment they(analysts) still do not know which business model or marketing approach will be successful in tapping into that money.

So you’re saying,”Well how can they come up with those projections then?” They can come up with those lofty projections the same way analysts said that one day the internet would be really really big. The upside and the potential are so great, that even those numbers are skewed on the side of conservatism.

To put it in perspective you have to understand that nearly everyone including your average 10 year old and up is now carrying a cell phone. If you want a hard number, think north of 2 billion users worldwide. With that device is the real estate to market and advertise to a captive audience. With that device and it’s associated burgeoning high speed browser comes the ability to search, use the internet or access email. Currently in the US, there are almost 35 million users of the mobile “net”. So what comes with search? contextual advertising. What comes with surfing the net? Advertising. Or using email? Get the idea?

But see that’s the easy side to marketing on a mobile device. The challenge for marketers and advertisers will be how to create stickiness not only for search results for instance but also to geotargeted results via a mobile device. In other words, how are you/they going to create the mobile call to action?

Some of the other questions will also be; How intrusive can you as a marketer be on a mobile device? Do the devices need to also have micro-java apps for pop-ups for instance? Can a marketer hone in on perhaps using SMS alternatives or opportunities until a more solid marketing platform is developed? When you think about it, it really is wide open.

The answer is yes to all of those questions, and the best part about it is the result can be a complete and utter failure and thats ok. So now you’re saying, “what do you mean it’s ok to fail?” Well it’s ok to fail because the user has no preconceived notion or expectation as to how it’s supposed to be. And because they don’t know what to expect, they will be willing to accept, for now, whatever comes down the pipe.

But marketers and their brethren will only be allowed to fail x amount of times before the user a) finds another solution that best meets and exceeds their intial expectation or b) becomes completely frustrated by the lack of performance. And trust us, they will find it. Either through another marketer letting them know that their is a better solution out there, or they will find it virally.

Until the bar is set, mobile marketers will have a grace period to get it right. The unknown is how long the grace period will be. The unknown is who will set the tone? Who will establish the way things are done in the mobile world? Because at the moment the canvass is blank and anything can be tried and ANYTHING can be successful. In the end the ultimate judge will be your average consumer, or your average 10 year old!