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Behavior and insight on this holiday season’s mobile shopper

Our two cents:
It’s certainly no surprise to learn of the compound growth rate of research and purchases for mobile shoppers. While some retailers made early bets in mobile that have in some cases yielded 20% increase in online sales, most are still trying to define an overall mobile strategy. So when the IBM says things like “Retailers are going to have to do a really good job in targeting their messages and promotions for mobile users” we can’t help but shed some light on what exactly that means for most retailers. Below are a few key points to “getting it right” for any retailer:

  1. Remember that mobile shoppers are surgical shoppers. And just as importnat, remember that shopping on a retailer’s mobile site means visual shopping, especially for ESL shoppers. Therefore, keeping copy to a minimum and getting multiple (and easily downloadable) images on the site is key. With the average mobile device shopper spending about 4 minutes on a site, it becomes imperative for retailers to quickly serve up ONLY the most relevant content. Furthermore, mobile shoppers also tend to do less browsing and look at fewer products when they shop, making it more imperative for retailers to personalize messages and content. Simply put, shoppers go to websites to get ideas, but they go to mobile sites to get what they want.
  2. Use social networks to drive engagement and sales online. Social networks are an important factor in retail. According to IBM Coremetrics data, 9.2% of consumers in October that came to a retailer’s web site from a social media site made a purchase, compared to 5.5% who visited the store site directly. Retailers should not walk away from this fact thinking that adding a social networking step to the shopper journey is the right way to go. “Liking” or “following” a brand on a social network is a non-linear action for shoppers and not part of the traditional sales funnel. Therefore, retailers would be ill-advised to treat it like any other media channel.
  3. Invest in mobile search. This is one of the few silver bullets retailers have in mobile and not nearly enough of them use it. The simple fact is that everyone uses mobile search and with google now running a mobile-specific algorithm, retailers must respond with mobile-specific SEO and SEM strategies.

Read WSJ article

Gaming and Entertainment Dominating Mobile Usage [Infographic]

By  / July 28, 2011
ReadWriteWeb

The mobile entertainment industry is heating up. From gambling to gaming to music and video, there is a lot that can be done with a smartphone or a tablet these days to keep consumers occupied. And the money is rolling in.

In 2010, the mobile entertainment industry was a $33 billion industry,according to research from Juniper in March 2011. It is expected to be a $54 billion industry by 2015. Gaming now takes up a great portion of people’s time on mobile devices. In part, that is due to the rise of the “female gamer” according to research in a new infographic from the folks at smartphone niche site Geekaphone. Females make up 53% of the mobile gaming market. Angry Birds, in all its various incantations, has been downloaded 140 million times and 58% of app developers are making games for multiple mobile platforms. Check out the infographic below for some interesting details on the state of the mobile entertainment industry and gaming.

Apple’s iOS has approximately 333,214 applications available, against 206,143 or so for Android. But you are out of luck if you are a BlackBerry owner as the BlackBerry App World only has 26,771 and 46% of BlackBerry have games on their phones. That is partly due to the enterprise nature of Research In Motion’s clientele but you would think that they might have at least one or two simple games to play while waiting in the airport during business trips.

Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello recently told according to tech blog Tuaw that its biggest growing platform is the iPad.

“Consoles used to be 80% of the industry as recently as 2000. Consoles today are 40% of the game industry, so what do we really have? We have a new hardware platform and we’re putting out software every 90 days. Our fastest growing platform is the iPad right now and that didn’t exist 18 months ago.”

Take a look at the infographic and let us know what you think.

Grow social communities directly form search results using Google +1

In case you haven’t heard, Google has rolled out their +1 service that allows internet retailers, e.g., BestBuy to add a little button to their sites allowing anyone to “like” a certain product, similar to the way facebook does now. The advantage here is that these +1′s show up in search results. This allows shoppers to use the collective wisdom of the web to make better shopping decisions when using search. The benefit to brands and retailers is that they can leverage the same power of user recommendations further upstream in the shopping process. Unfortunately, Google does not provide the +1 service yet for mobile devices, which for shoppers would be even more valuable. No news yet on when Google plans to release a mobile version. Twitter has also released a similar offering.  Read more

Stats on Shared Content

Analyzing more than 7 billion sharing signals during March — and zeroing in on 300 million monthly users across ShareThis’ top 1,000 publisher sites — Starcom and ShareThis conclude that “marketers should consider sharing to be a sign of ‘in-marketness’ and a prime audience for advertising. People are most likely to be sharing and clicking while brand consideration is still forming, so sharing offers the relevance of search and remarketing, but at scale.

Specific findings included:

•10% of Web site visits come from sharing — half as much as from search. Sharing also accounts for 31% of referral traffic.

• Facebook is the largest sharing channel, accounting for 38% of all shares. Twitter and email are next, tied at 17%.

• Shared links are clicked on 4.9 times each, on average, across all sharing channels, “so content shared by large groups of people reach a wider audience than content passed along from others.

• Instead of one person being universally influential on a wide range of topics, many people are influential on only one or two topics.

Starcom MediaVest and ShareThis said the study, titled “Sharing, More Than Just Friends, Fans and Followers,” was the first in a series. It is part of a new ongoing partnership.

People who follow celebrities are more likely to follow a brand

from Nielsen, March 14, 2011

There’s no doubt that a celebrity endorser is a valuable asset to a brand – during this year’s Oscars telecast, 4 of the 10 most-watched commercials featured a celebrity spokesperson. On the Internet, this trend continues as advertisers increasingly leverage social networking and celebrities to attract consumers. On  Twitter and Facebook, celebrities can have fans and followers in the millions – actor Charlie Sheen, for example, recently joined Twitter and in just three days set a new record for fastest to reach a million followers – further proving the power of celebrity.

Celebrities can be valuable to advertisers, but so too can the people who follow them on social media websites. According to The Nielsen Company, 64 percent of adult U.S. Internet users who follow a celebrity also follow a brand – this means the celebrity follower is four times more likely to follow a brand than the average U.S. adult online.  Additionally, Nielsen found that such fans are also more likely to offer advice and opinion to fellow online consumers. This is particularly the case when it comes to entertainment topics where 32 percent of celebrity fans online provide advice on movies (making them 44% more likely than the average online user to do so), and 28 percent provide guidance on music (56% more likely) and television programs (34% more likely).

Fans of celebrities are also valuable consumers in other areas of online – particularly when it comes to transactions or purchases.  One quarter also used the web to conduct personal banking transactions and manage their credit card accounts, more likely to do so than the average adult online. Top online purchases among these online fans included clothing/shoes/accessories (18.2%), music (13.8%), and books (13.6%).

Top online activities among fans of celebrities included emailing, paying bills, and of course, social networking.  Of these top online activities, celebrity fans were significantly more likely than the average adult online to comment/post on social networking sites (86% more likely), view consumer generated video (83% more likely), visit a social networking site (67% more likely) and play online games (45%  more likely).

Note: Nielsen’s findings are based on data from @Plan Release 4 2010. @Plan is a quarterly survey of approximately 36,000 U.S. Internet users age 18 and older fused with Nielsen’s NetView Internet usage from 3rd quarter 2010.

Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010: Highlights from comScore’s Mobile Year in Review

Below is a summary of what we see as the top ten overarching mobile trends of 2010:

  1. Phones Keep Getting ‘Smarter’: Smartphone adoption continues to increase across the U.S. and Europe, with most markets surpassing 25-30% market penetration for smartphones. The proliferation of new devices hitting the market in 2010 – including the iPhone 4, Blackberry Storm 2, and Motorola Droid X – has given consumers strong smartphone options across wireless carriers that is helping this segment of the market gain traction.
  2. iPhone Dominates Device Sales: The top two devices sold in 2010 in both the U.S. and EU5 were the iPhone 3GS and iPhone4, respectively. The #3 device in the U.S. was the Blackberry Curve, while the #3 device in the EU5 was the Nokia 5800 – XpressMusic.
  3. Android Storms Smartphone Market: 2010 saw Google’s Android platform grab hold in the mobile marketplace in a big way. In the U.S. alone, Android’s share of the smartphone market jumped from 5% to 29% in just one year, and it leapfrogged Apple to become the #2 smartphone platform after RIM. The number of different smartphones running Android certainly helped accelerate this trend, as did the desire for many consumers on Verizon to opt for a smartphone with a strong app economy.
  4. The App Ecosystem Blossoms: iPhone paved the way for the app ecosystem to emerge as developers create new and interesting apps for consumers every day. While most early apps were developed primarily for the iPhone, we are now seeing vibrant app ecosystems for Android, Blackberry and others.
  5. Email Shifts to the Mobile Phone: 2010 saw usage of PC-based email decline, particularly among teenagers, and it appears that much of that email activity is moving to people’s mobile devices. While Blackberry was once in a league of its own in terms of email functionality, many other devices have since caught up, and consumers are responding. Email now exists across media and mobile devices will continue to be a growing part of that trend.
  6. Location is Everything: Location-based check-in services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places all entered the digital lexicon in 2010 and have begun to gain consumer adoption. Other GPS-enabled apps like Google Maps and Garmin have also proved to be among the most popular and widely downloaded.
  7. Social Owns Mobile: Social media is one of the most prevalent and fastest-growing activities on the mobile phone. In the U.S. the number of mobile social media users grew 56% to lead all content categories, and in the UK Facebook accounts for 40% of all time spent on mobile sites.
  8. Mobile Commerce Readies for Lift-off: Mobile commerce, or m-commerce, has yet to gain traction in a significant way, but as smartphone adoption accelerates, technology has begun to facilitate mobile transactions. The next phase in m-commerce will be the emergence of the “mobile wallet” with direct payments coming from the mobile device, with Starbucks leading the way among merchants in installing the technology for such payments.
  9. iPad Redefines the Mobile Landscape: Apple’s blockbuster launch of the iPad in early 2010 set the stage for a completely new category of device to emerge, as several other tablets and e-readers hit the market by the end of the year. As a reasonably sophisticated computing device that is also mobile, the iPad has given new definition to the types of behaviors in which consumers will engage in the mobile environment. The iPad is also causing time-shifting in how and when consumers engage with content, with the iPad showing a high percentage of activity late at night as people wind down for the evening.
  10. Mobile Advertising Market Takes Shape: As mobile media consumption increases, it was only a matter of time before the mobile advertising boom began to take shape. Apple got into the act with the introduction of the iAd, which has already attracted many of the top brand advertisers like AT&T, Citi and Disney. Expect to see more and better quality ad units alongside mobile media content in 2011.

You can see from this selection of highlights that 2010 was another outstanding year, and this year promises to shine even brighter. If you haven’t already downloaded the 2010 Mobile Year in Review, you can do so here. We hope you enjoy and that it gives you a few things to think about on your way to success in 2011…

Top Mobile Activities in the U.S.

Text messaging lead as the top mobile activity with 68 percent of Americans texting in December 2010, while more than half took a photo with their mobile device (52.4 percent) and 39.5 percent of subscribers accessed news and information. Although application usage continued to grow in 2010, slightly more Americans (36.4 percent) used their mobile browser than accessed applications (34.4 percent).

Twitter VS. Facebook Stats