Archive for the ‘Digital communications’ Category
Increase Your Speed to Market with Mobile – SDL Bemoko webinar
April 14th, 2013
I had the privilege of moderating an excellent webinar last week where Phillip Clement, Marketing and Sales Director of SDL Bemoko presented some great ideas and data how to increase your speed to market with mobile.
Phillip focused on ways to manage customer experience across multiple channels, dealing with the rapid pace of change in technology, the blurring of real with digital worlds and the imperative to control budgets.
The presentation deck was lengthy and packed with excellent info so there is only space here to touch upon some of the themes but you can download it through a link at the end of this post.
Phillip advised on practical ways to simplify mobile and tablet delivery, for marketers to adapt more quickly their campaigns for mobile faster, to manage customer experience across multiple channels and respond to the rapidly changing needs of customers.
He explained that “Doing mobile” is not the challenge; rather the challenge is delivering against expectation, keeping pace with change and breaking down traditional silos – marketing and IT. This necessitated the deployment of the right technology, empowering IT staff, reduce cost and complexity of delivery, speed commercial innovation without compromising resilience and ensure that businesses were always ahead of customer adoption
Phillip advises: “Traditional methods will bog down progress and increase cost, when you are trying to control budgets effectively.”
He believes that early adopters and late to market businesses are now on a level playing field but that customers’ expectations are high and businesses with agile technology platforms will succeed and grow faster than their competition.
Multi-channel or omnichannel marketing is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for brands of all sizes, and the technology engagement layers within these are becoming more complex, including wearable web devices, even “sentient tattoos”.
This is why marketers and IT professionals within companies must find new, more agile ways to communicate.
You can download the SDL Bemoko deck here.
Newspaper sales continue to decline, as online growth builds
March 20th, 2013
2013 has been a difficult year for the newspaper industry with press regulation post-Leveson enquiry and falling sales, but online growth offers a ray of light.
As we await the latest ABCs, a look back at last month’s figures show a sharp contrast in the outlook for newspapers online and offline.
Overall, total national daily circulation was down 8.32% to 8,240,400 over 12 months:
- The Times suffered the least with circulation down just 0.94%
- The Mirror fell 5.91%
- The Daily Mail lost 5.97%
- The Telegraph was down 6.52%
- The Guardian shrunk 10.37% putting it below 200,000 circulation
- The Sun fell by 11.63%
- The Star dropped by 13.19%
- The Independent reported a 28.56% fall
The one winner, i was up 12.7%, helped by a 20p cover price.
However, online it’s a very different story.
In brief:
Mail Online added nearly 1 million daily unique browsers month-on-month to end up with nearly 8 million – a new traffic record. The Mail site recorded a 13% rise compared with December to reach an average 7,977,039.
Guardian.co.uk also set a new traffic record with 4,319,370 average daily unique browsers, an increase of 17% month-on-month, helped by record video views that rose 40% from December to January to 11.3m across the month.
Telegraph.co.uk was up 11% month-on-month to 3,129,599 average daily unique browsers.
Sun.co.uk and Mirror Group Digital recorded 1,816,106 and 1,064,924 average daily unique browsers respectively, equivalent to month-on-months rise of 16% and 24%.
Independent.co.uk reported a 25% increase from January to 1,214,144 average daily unique browsers.
In terms of the free papers, The Evening Standard saw daily average browsers increase 45% month-on-month to 207,484 and Metro.co.uk recovered after a traffic dip in December following the launch of a more mobile-friendly site. Average daily browser numbers bounced back to 260,119.
We wait to see how the current figures look, but my bet is the trends will be much the same with online continuing to build and offline looking decidedly shaky.
Tablets will fuel the next stage of the mcommerce revolution
March 7th, 2013
I picked up a great infographic on mcommerce this week from Intela, a global provider of database marketing solutions (not a client) that showed, to me at least that tablets will fuel the next stage of the mcommerce revolution.
You can click on the infographic clip to see the full version. Very impressive!
It seems pretty clear from the graphic information Intela have shared that people in their millions are happy to use mobile devices to shop, despite the usability issues, which I think are pretty insurmountable in the case of smartphones.
Smartphones are not the easiest of shopping assistants. It’s about size – from the screen to the keypad to the connection.
But all these issues fade to grey when shoppers use tablets. Functionally brilliant, designed for the future, desirable and culturally relevant, tablets do mcommerce to near-perfection.
An admission here. I do not currently own a tablet (iPad, obviously) but I know people who do own them. And they tire of me using their tablets so often, but needs must.
I hope soon to join the people who Forrester say will own a tablet. The research company released data this week that predicts tablet ownership in Western Europe is set to quadruple in the next five years.
Significantly, Forrester positions these people as online consumers and says 55 per cent of them will have a tablet within four years. Currently, the figure is 14 per cent.
The forecast is based on a survey of more than 13,000 respondents from France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.
The dramatic growth forecast is partly predicated on the fact that tablet ownership doubled in 2012, and one in seven online Europeans now owns a tablet, and these devices are most popular with 18- to 24-year-olds, with one in four owning one.
“Tablets are social devices mostly used in the digital home,” states Thomas Husson, Forrester analyst and co-author of the new data report. “Companies that want to exploit tablet opportunities need to understand they require a differentiated approach from smartphones.” Thomas blogs about the report here.
Co-author Reineke Reitsma, a research director at Forrester, writes in her blog post: “Our data shows that tablets have found their sweet spot: Bigger than a smartphone and more portable than a laptop, they have bridged the gap between these two devices, allowing consumers to entertain and inform themselves.”
Other findings from the report include:
The living room (where 62% access the Internet on their tablet) and the bedroom (where 45% access the Internet on their tablet) are the only places where tablet owners choose their tablet over their smartphone.
Tablet owners are not precious about their devices: Of those that have a spouse/partner, 63% share their tablet with them; one-third of parents share their tablet with their children. This makes tablets a far more social device than smartphones, which are much more personal and intimate.
“The European Tablet Landscape,” is available to Forrester Technographics® clients here (registration required).
This research is reinforced by IAB data, recently released that shows tablet users want to connect digitally with brands
49% are interested in connecting with brands via social networks (index vs European internet users: +30%)
•43% via QR codes you scan using a mobile (index: +25%)
•50% via location based vouchers (index: +24%)
•50% via playing games as part of advertising campaigns (index: +99%)
•44% via playing games on a brands website (index: +85%)
Tablet users made an average of 22.8 purchases in 6 months (15.1 for European internet users)
•7.7 in one month (5.2 for European internet users)
•Tablet users spent an average of 718 euros in 6 months (544 for European internet users)
•175 euros in one month (148 for European internet users)
European tablet users spend
9.3 hours a week accessing the internet via tablets
The full IAB report is worth a read
I’m saving up for my iPad. I know I will be joining the mcommerce revolution quite shortly. All being well.
Mobile World Congress starts today – awesome infographic to celebrate 31 years of cell phones
February 25th, 2013
Mobile World Congress kicks off this morning (Feb 25th) in Barcelona and you can watch the live mobile stream here. There have been a few grumbles about the relevance of MWC recently but it remains the single most important global mobile event.
To celebrate, and wish all the delegates a great show, here’s is an awesome infographic created by geek, freelance writer and graphic designer DJ Miller, a graduate student at the University of Tampa. Respect, DJ.
Click on the link image to see the full infographic. Thanks to The Next Web for sharing.
Featured image credit: Thinkstock
Ten tips from Daniel Zeevi on how to write articles that go viral
February 25th, 2013
I’ve just picked up a great post, giving excellent advice on how to write articles that go viral by Daniel Zeevi.
Daniel is a digital media strategist, web developer, graphic designer, writer and founder of DashBurst. Â His article in Social Media Today is clear, precise and full of knowledge and advice.
His comments echo what we have tried to practice and preach at Liberate Media for the past six years. We believe that fresh, quality content, with freely shared links and associated ideas will always find an audience.
It is getting more difficult to win enough of people’s attention for them to spend that most precious resource – time – in posting a comment on a blog. But, in a sense, if they share with a brief personal snippet on social media channels, then this amounts to the same thing.
I would urge you to find ten minutes to read his excellent article and share it. Just as a taster, here are his top ten tips in précis.
1. Understand Market Trends in Social Media
You should always check out what topics are hot on social media and time your post.
2. Write Longer In-depth Content
Longer content is more likely to get shared but add value, not just length.
3. Choose an Effective Title and Keywords
Choose effective keywords that will help people find the articles you write.
4. Understand Keyword Density
Do not try to overcrowd your articles with keywords simply because you want to draw in traffic.
5. Make Your Content Interesting and Emotional
Always make your content unique to help draw more people. Speak to the audience not yourself.
6. Allow Your Content to be Easily Skimmed
People read a fraction of web content – make it easier for them.
7. Don’t Stuff Your Content with Keywords
8. Under Promise and Over Deliver on What You’re Writing About
Under promise and over deliver and your articles will go viral on social media. People crave interesting and useful content.
9. Share That @#$&
Get your post out there to as many relevant social networks and communities as possible.
10. Ask For Feedback
What are your thoughts?
A deeper look at the demographics of Social Media Users
February 19th, 2013
The Pew research Center has recently releases its U.S.- focused social networking report
which highlighted some interesting trends on who’s using social media most and which social networks are most popular.
You can download the full report here:
In summary: “The Demographics of Social Media Users 2012” study found that the most frequent social media users are women aged 18 to 29. Women have been significantly more likely to use social networking sites than men since 2009. In December 2012, 71 percent of women were users of social networking sites, compared with 62 percent of men.
Overall, 67 percent use Facebook, and 16 percent use Twitter, which is especially appealing to adults in the 18 to 29-year-old category. Key demographics are charted in the images at the bottom of this post.
Pinterest has practically caught up with Twitter, with 15 percent of adult U.S. Internet users.
Pinterest, which launched in 2009, has experienced explosive growth. Women are five times more likely to use Pinterest (5 percent vs. 25 percent) and almost twice as likely to be white and college-educated.
13 percent of U.S. online adults say they use Instagram, 6 percent say they use Tumblr, and 20 percent of U.S. online adults say they use LinkedIn as of August 2012.
40 percent of mobile phone owners use a social networking site on their phone, and 28 percent do so on a typical day.
The report also looked at Creators and curators, defining them as follows:
As of August 2012:
• 46 percent of U.S. adult internet users post original photos or videos online that they themselves have created. We call them creators.
• 41 percent of U.S. adult internet users take photos or videos that they have found online and re-post them on sites designed for sharing images with many people. We call them curators.
Overall, 56 percent of internet users do at least one of the creating or curating activities studied and 32 percent of internet users do both creating and curating activities.
Interestingly, not using social media may be an elite thing. Those with a college degree are slightly less likely than those with some college education to use social networks (69 percent vs. 65 percent).
Retailers have survived the first digital coming, but what’s next?
January 25th, 2013
(This post was originally published on Mob76 Outlook as a guest post)
HMV’s recent demise was hardly a surprise. The writing has been on the wall for so long that it’s been painted over and graffitied many times since.
If we rewind ten years to 2003, the conversation around retail was focused on the importance of the web , and although not all major retailers had made the move to reinvent their web presence, it was on the agenda.
In many cases this move took some time to happen and latecomers lost market share and revenue opportunities… but those up against the online leaders such as Amazon (launched 1995) and Play.com (launched 1998) lost much more. They eventually lost a business.
To read the full post please click here Mob76 Outlook
The dream of the connected economy
January 22nd, 2013
We proceed in fits and starts in this new age, which, despite our protestations, is a part of the continuum that regulates and defines our procession towards the goals we hold dear.
Nothing can illuminate this more clearly than our current passion for mobile connectivity. At a time when large areas of the landmasses that qualify as the British Isles do not have any connection capability to the internet, we laud the rise of mobile (myself among the crowd).
But when you step back, just half a step, you see quite clearly that this new age is built on a raft of dreams.
This is not to say that the connected economy will not be built, far from it. But it will be built with more dislocations and inequalities than any other age.
To take a broad and inexact sweep from history, the Victorians with capital understood the nature of communications much more precisely than us, I believe.
They knew that to build a communications facility, a major road or railway line for example, would add value to the wealth of the nation and to them because this construction would raise the speed of production and exchange.
It is less clear in our more complex present age how the construction of new connections can benefit both the wealth of the nation and the more hidden corporate structures, rather than individuals or small groups that seek profit from the risk enterprise.
The very fact that connectivity is an extant and growing social concern is witness to the unique problems we have in making distributable money from circuits and conduits.
An expert on Victorian history could provide comparative advice on whether this is a replication of the communications inequalities of that age but I cannot.
What I do see is the building of a highly fragmented series of networks that do two things. First, they always, without fail, promise more than they ever deliver. Second, the companies who are building these conduits ally with device manufacturers to deflect attention from the structural inadequacies of their offerings.
This uneven development “strategy†has no benefit apart from the enormous profits, often subsidised by the taxpayer, that accrue to the builders of the new connected economy.
No doubt, my great grandchildren might look at this post and laugh aloud. I do hope so.
2012 a year in social network numbers
December 21st, 2012
As we quickly approach 2013, many people are in reflective mood as they look to round-off their year with a 2012 summary post.
I’m going to keep it simple and avoid the fluff by hitting you with some of the statistics that evidence the ever-widening reach of social networks.
So sit back and spend a few minutes taking the numbers in while we rejoice in the fact that the world didn’t end today, at least not yet:
- 25 percent of users on Facebook don’t bother with any kind of privacy control. (source: AllTwitter)
- Monthly active Facebook users now total nearly 850 million. (source: Jeff Bullas)
- 488 million users regularly use Facebook mobile. (source: All Facebook)
- More than 1 million websites have integrated with Facebook in various ways. (source: Uberly)
- 77 percent of B2C companies and 43 percent of B2B companies acquired customers from Facebook. (source: Business2Community)
- 56 percent of customer tweets to companies are being ignored. (sources: AllTwitter)
- 32 percent of all Internet users are using Twitter. (source: Marketing Land)
- Twitter is projected to make a total of $540 million in advertising revenue by 2014. (source:Web Analytics World)
- In 2012, 1 million accounts are added to Twitter everyday. (source: Infographics Labs)
- 34 percent of marketers have generated leads using Twitter. (source: Digital Buzz Blog)
- Instagram was one of the largest acquisitions of a venture capital-backed consumer Web company since Zappos was bought by Amazon for $1.22B in 2009. (source: Factbrowser)
- According to Followgram’s research, 37 percent of Instagram users have never uploaded a single photo and only 5 percent of users have more than 50 pictures. (source: Siliconrepublic)
- It took just 10 months for Instagram to reach the milestone of 150m pictures uploaded. (source: Siliconrepublic)
- 80 percent of Pinterest users are women, while 50 percent of all Pinterest users have children. (source: Search Engine Journal)
- The average Pinterest user spends 98 minutes per month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook. (source: Arik Hanson)
- The Google +1 button is used 5 billion times per day. (source: AllTwitter)
- Google+ pages appear in search results for 30 percent of brand term searches for brands with G+ pages, up from 5 percent in February 2012. (source: Bright Edge)
- 48 percent of fortune global 100 companies are now on Google+. (source: Burson-Marsteller)
- Google+ cost $585 million and took 500 employees to build. (source: Social Media Delivered)
- Google+ is expected to attract 400 million users by the end of 2012. (source: Remcolandia)
Source – Huffington Post
UK shoppers spend the most online
December 14th, 2012
The UK is leading the way when it comes to shopping online, according to Ofcom’s International Communications Market Report.
The report looks at the take-up, availability, price and use of broadband, landlines, mobiles, TV and radio across 17 major countries: UK, France, Germany, Italy, the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Poland, Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Ofcom’s figures confirm that consumers in the UK spend an average of £1,083 a year when shopping online, compared with Australia which spends the second highest at £842.
Mobile devices play a large part in the success of online retail in the UK, and we download more data from our mobiles than any other nation. In fact, 16% of all web traffic in the UK is from mobile devices, which is more than any other European country.
Outside of Europe, British mobile use still leads the way, for example; in December 2011 the average UK mobile connection used 424MB (megabytes) of data, higher than Japanese users who averaged 392MBs.
Considering the UK population’s love of mobile access, it’s not surprising that we have one of the highest penetrations of smartphones, with almost 60% of British mobile phone owners saying they have one, second only to Germany, and up from 46% in the last report.
Only 37 per cent use a desktop computer as their most frequent means of accessing the internet.
Social networks have played a key role in demand for mobile devices, with 40% of UK adults accessing their profiles via the medium.
British 18-to 24-year-olds are also proving to be the world’s top mobile social networkers, with 62% accessing their profiles from smartphones and tablets, a higher proportion than any of the countries analysed in the report.