More than 10 reasons your digital strategy should focus on #mobile

/

Last week [during a client workshop] I proposed a website renovation to address 3 key consumer insights;

  1. Mobile traffic to the current website has doubled in the last 2 years to 30%
  2. Time spent on the website from mobile users is less than 1 minute compared to over 5 minutes from desktop users. 
  3. 25% of all Google search requests for their products are from a mobile device.

We're not proposing to build a mobile app. We're recommending to rebuild the website with a responsive design and a Mobile First UI. 

The expectation is that by making the website mobile friendly we'll make the product information more accessible to mobile users, increasing purchase intent.

In my report back I included these references and resources:

10 top reasons your digital strategy needs to be mobile first.

  • One-third of web traffic to The New York Times is mobile ( Source: 3dissue )
  • Mobile internet usage is projected to overtake desktop internet usage by 2014. (Source:Microsoft Tag)
  • 46% of consumers are unlikely to return to a mobile site if it didn’t work properly during their last visit. (Source: Gomez)
  • 91% of all smartphone users have their phone within arm’s reach 24/7 – (Morgan Stanley, 2012)
  • 70% of all mobile searches result in action within 1 hour. 70% of online searches result in action in one month. (Mobile Marketer, 2012)
  • 9 out of 10 mobile searches lead to action, over half leading to purchase. (Search Engine Land, 2012)
  • 61% of local searches on a mobile phone result in a phone call. (Google, 2012)
  • More than half of the U.S. smartphone population used their phone to perform retail research while inside a store in 2011 (comScore 2012)
  • There were a total of $241 billion mobile transactions in 2011.
  • 28% of Internet usage comes from a mobile phone.

    • This Exact Target report is a useful resource. Called Designing for the Mobile Inbox they say "marketers can no longer afford to think of email messages in terms of “mobile” and “non-mobile.”

    So what's the difference and how do you spot mobile friendly websites?

    So we're aiming to develop a responsive site that works on any device. This will help us keep users on site for longer, make the information more easily accessible on any device and hopefully result in greater purchase intent and leads to retailers.

    This new #App Chirp sends a message to everyone listening

    /

    Jen shared this new app with me today called Chirp. Essentially it lets you share a picture, link or a note to anyone else that has the app open and is nearby.

    Chirp is designed for quick and easy sharing between people in the same place. Unlike Bluetooth, Chirp doesn't require you to pair devices. Unlike email, you don't need to type in anyone's address. Unlike instant messaging clients, you don't have to add recipients from a buddy list. And so on. To share stuff, you don't need to be friends on Facebook, or to follow each other on Twitter, or be connected on LinkedIn. None of that is needed. Just press the big yellow Chirp button, and anyone running the app can 'hear' the data.

    The possibilities are endless. Conferences, concerts, press announcements, parties. Just don't share anything you wouldn't want a random person to see. It's public and at this stage you can't select specific friends to message.

    Mapping Twitter's Firehose - More stories from your data

    /

    On FirstMonday.org a journal was published last week called; Mapping the global Twitter Heartbeat: The geography of Twitter. The stories and visualisations from the data share fascinating insights.

    The study analysed 1.5 billion tweets sent by 70 million users in one month to work out where people were. On average, it found, people who mentioned or retweeted each other's messages were 750 miles apart.

    From 12:01AM 23 October 2012 through 11:59PM 30 November 2012, the Twitter Decahose from GNIP streamed 1,535,929,521 tweets from 71,273,997 unique users, averaging 38 million tweets from 13.7 million users each day.
    All Exact Location coordinates in the Twitter Firehose 23 October 2012 to 30 November 2012.

    All Exact Location coordinates in the Twitter Firehose 23 October 2012 to 30 November 2012.

    The average tweet is 74 characters long and consists of 9.4 words. In all, this dataset encompasses just over 0.9 percent of all tweets ever sent since the debut of Twitter and 35.6 percent of all active users as of December 2012

    Remember that old 80/20 rule?

    Twitter’s content stream is dominated by a small number of users. The top 15 percent of users account for 85 percent of all tweets, while the top five percent of all users account for 48 percent of all tweets and the top one percent of all users (just 720,365) account for 20 percent of all tweets.

    A very small number of core users thus drive the majority of Twitter’s traffic. A quarter of users active during this period tweeted just once, while half tweeted between one and four times. Roughly 30 percent of users were active a single day (sending one or more tweets that day), while half were active one–three days, and 75 percent of users were active 10 days or less. The top 10 percent of users were active 24–39 days, with about one percent of users active all 39 days.

    The strong presence of Twitter in the United States is reflected in the fact that six of the top 20 cities are from the United States. Jakarta alone accounts for nearly three percent of all georeferenced tweets, illustrating Indonesia’s outsized presence on Twitter, while New York City and São Paulo are nearly tied for second. Texas stands out in that two cities, Dallas and Houston, both make the top 20 list, with a third city, San Antonio, at number 42, with 0.32 percent.

    English is by far the most common language on Twitter, accounting for 38.25 percent of all tweets and 41.57 percent of georeferenced tweets. Yet, just 2.17 percent of all English tweets are georeferenced, indicating that the vast majority of tweets in the language do not carry native geographic information. Spanish is the second most popular georeferenced language at just a quarter of English, but for georeferenced tweets, it is tied with Japanese.

    In all, there were 485,941,182 links to 223,712,255 distinct URLs from 4,816,802 different Web sites (tweets can contain multiple links). The top six domains with the most links are twitter.com (16.8 percent), instagram.com (13.3 percent), facebook.com (11.9 percent), youtube.com (6.2 percent), ask.fm (3.2 percent), and tmblr.co (2.9 percent).

    Looking just at georeferenced tweets, there were a total of 8,943,092 links to 7,331,672 distinct URLs from 113,389 Web sites. The top domains were foursquare.com (45.5 percent), instagram.com (17.5 percent), twitter.com (15.3 percent), myloc.me (3.5 percent), path.com (2.2 percent), and youtube.com (1.8 percent).

    What's the impact of location in shared content and engagement?

    The average minimum distance between user and the geographic focus of the article across all 18,650 news stories was 1,151 statute miles, in keeping with the large average distances seen in retweet and reference pairings among users in the previous section. Examining the distances more closely, just over a quarter of all links (26 percent) were to stories about the same city the user was located in, 37 percent were to events within a 100 mile radius of the user, and 47 percent were within 300 miles. At the same time, a nearly identical proportion (46 percent) were to stories about events more than 600 miles away, meaning that tweeted news stories were nearly evenly split between events near the user and those far away. This indicates that not only do users not preference communicating with users physically near them from those far away, but they discuss nearby and distant events at equal levels as well. This suggests that geography may play an even lesser role in social media than previously thought. 

    What about Klout Scores? Based on data from georeferenced tweets we can see Indonesia has the highest concentration of mid-high range Klout users [37-57]. Why the report failed to include the top klout brackets I'm unsure.

    There is massive variation by hour in the percentage of tweets matched by the geocoding system. From a peak of 68.9 percent of all tweets geocoded at 1AM PST to a low of 15.9 percent of tweets at 7PM PST, the textual geographic density of Twitter changes by more than 53 percent over the course of each day. This has enormous ramifications for the use of Twitter as a global monitoring system, as it suggests that the representativeness of geographic tweets changes considerably depending on time of day.
    Percent of Twitter Decahose tweets geocoded by hour 23 October 2012 to 30 November 2012 (PST).

    Percent of Twitter Decahose tweets geocoded by hour 23 October 2012 to 30 November 2012 (PST).

    Check out the rest of the report here, it's full of interesting scientific analysis. 

    I've got these domain names for sale.

    /

    The average value of brand fans has increased 28% to $174.17 #report

    /

    Syncapse have released their 2013 report highlighting increases in the value of brand fans for key consumer categories and a few other interesting insights.

    So what are the key drivers of fan growth?

    Liking a brand is driven by two main reasons;

    1. To get a coupon or other price discount or reward like enter a competition
    2. To show their support for a brand and receive regular updates

    On average it's the emotional connections that beat the practical ones as Fans are looking to express themselves through the brands they like rather than expecting discounts from brands they would chose to shop with anyway.

    Research like this highlights that it's almost impossible to ascertain the value of your fans without offline focused interviews. No matter how many calls to action or loops you close with unique vouchers you'll never really understand what value your social media fans bring the business vs no fans without research like this.

    Download yourself a copy of the report here.

    Turning "Cheers" to a Friend Request for #Budweiser fans

    /

    It's got bagged for making the Friend Request process too easy but I kind of like this application from Budweiser. 

    Certainly when you meet people in a bar and get along with them it's common to look them up on Facebook and send them a friend request, and/or when you get home.

    Even if you do Friend Request someone you'd rather not have it's pretty easy to unfriend them later or change the connection settings so they can't see too much from you.

    Watch the video and let me know what you think...

    5 ways businesses can enrich stories with video content

    /

    This is a guest blog post by Neil Davidson.

    Neil Davidson is the Founder of My Web Presenters, who are a leading web video production company specialising in video spokesperson videos. They work with businesses of all sizes to create and market compelling and emotive videos. They also write a video marketing blog regularly so please check it out.

    In this article I am going to share some of the best ways that bloggers and businesses can leverage video effectively and to their advantage. 

    At MWP, our approach is rooted firmly in a belief that creating online video is about having an impact and creating measurable business benefit. Whether a small start-up or a multi-million dollar company, a strategic approach is completely appropriate. Bloggers can benefit from embarking upon the creation of new content with strategy in mind. 

    Don’t let the word ‘strategy’ intimidate you. The following tips are accompanied by examples of businesses that have used the particular video types meaningfully, rather than simply as a token gesture. It doesn’t have to be complicated. I hope the cases illustrated give you some inspiration for using video in your blogs. 

    1 Using video to compliment text based posts

    Embedding video in text-based blogs can compliment your story or your argument. It may be that you use video you have created, or you may want to use videos created by others. Either way, it will add another dimension to your post and is easy to do – simply cut and paste the embed code.   

    The Simply Business Guide to Wordpress has creatively integrated video into their guide. If a visitor clicks ‘no’ to any points on the flow chart, they are offered further advice – sometimes video based advice, sometimes text based (signified by icons representing the different media). 

    Wordpress guide for small businesses

    Wordpress guide for small businesses

    2 Screencasting

    If you are still too afraid to leave the comfort of your desktop computer, screencasting videos are a great way to create videos without even leaving the room. 

    Screencasting software such as Screenflow or Camtasia allows you to capture all, or a combination, of the following: your screen, a video camera (connected to your computer), a microphone and your computer audio. This facility can be used to demonstrate how to use particular software, a website or an application. You can also use it to create presentations and training sessions. 

    Here is a screencast walk-through of Google presentations:

    3 Using smartphones

    One of the biggest barriers to creating video content has always been the need for professional equipment. This no longer applies in a world where you can record HD video on your mobile. There are a range of ways that bloggers can utilize smartphones to create blog content. Impromptu interviews at events are a great example. Maybe you are networking and meet someone who is of interest to your audience. This is the perfect opportunity to ask a question that you know your audience will want the answer to. Record. Upload. Easy. 

    My Web Presenters created this ‘vlog’, which includes interview footage that was recorded using a smartphone: 

    4 Google Hangouts 

    Google Hangouts are another example of how you can create valuable video content without leaving your desk. However, this time it will need to be in collaboration with other people. 

    A Hangout is a particularly special form of video conferencing. Special for the following reasons:

    • You can have up to 10 people involved at once
    • In addition to your 10 people, you can broadcast your video live to people all over the world
    • Hangouts are recorded as they happen and are immediately saved to your YouTube channel 
    • You can edit your recorded Hangout in YouTube or in your own editing software

    Hangouts can be used for meetings, product demonstrations, live music events, promotional events with celebrities to name but a few possibilities. As a blogger, you can maximise the usefulness of the content generated by your Hangout by creating a podcast, a text transcript or a blog post based on what happened at the Hangout.

    Max Minzer has made name for himself in the SEO community through a series he has created using Google Hangouts. He organizes weekly Hangouts (Max Impact) about SEO, social media, online marketing and other related topics. He invites experts from all over the world to participate in the Hangouts, making for very informative Hangouts for viewers. 

    5 Vine 

    Vine is a recent addition to the world of online video. It is an app which creates what can only be described as ‘video tweets’. Each video lasts for six seconds because this is supposedly how long it takes to read the average tweet. It is simple to use. You can record six straight seconds of video or you can record in fractions of seconds to create a sequence or animations for example. 

    Cavendish Hotel (London) caught on to a creative way to use Vine. They launched a competition asking followers to create a romantic themed Vine video in advance of Valentines Day. The prize was an overnight stay at their hotel, a romantic meal for two, pre-dinner cocktails, and a full English breakfast the next morning. See the winning video, which was announced via Facebook, below.

    See VinePeek for Vine videos as they are being uploaded to the net, in real time. 

    Marketing and distribution 

    Other than technical skills, the other skills needed when dealing with online video are things that the average blogger should be familiar with. Marketing and distribution are the main areas to think about and bloggers have an advantage because they already understand the Internet and how to share, swap and be seen. 

    In terms of maximizing the reach of your video content, the same techniques used for sharing traditional blog posts will prove useful. Collaborating with other relevant video bloggers widens audiences immediately. Sharing content on social media platforms, with interested parties is essential to getting it shared. Tricks of the trade include using platforms such as Oneload where you can upload once to many different platforms. 

    The opportunities for video are growing all of the time. Especially as video is becoming an even bigger part of how we use the Internet. In fact, 51% of Internet traffic is viewing video. Bloggers will do well to jump on board the video train and use it to their advantage.

    If you would like to be a guest blogger, sharing your thoughts on social strategy, digital marketing tactics, examples or case studies please register here

    Put your sales team in their store.

    /

    Social Networks and Social engagement lets your sales people inside your competitors stores.

    People ask questions on Twitter or Facebook all the time.

    "Where do you go for car servicing?", "Which bank should I use?" etc

    When brands are either not using social media, not actively listening or just slow to respond, competitors have the opportunity to convince and convert.

    'Listening with intent' is one part of any social media strategy. Brands aren't just listening for brand mentions or specific product related questions but wider questions, conversations and topics that a brand can help solve, share advice and be useful.

    Brands that fail to answer questions and involve themselves in conversations online run the risk of becoming less relevant.

    A strong social presence and daily dialog is one part of a social strategy that helps a brand maintain relevance.