Social Media Works for Small Business

A survey of 3340 largely small business managers and owners finds the respondents believe social media has helped them close business. Some 72 percent  of marketers who have been using social media for more than three years report it had helped them close business. More than half who spend 11 or more hours per week also believe they have gotten the same results.

Of course, that likely is a self-selecting sample. Almost by definition, a business that continues to invest energy and time in social media believes it works.

About 48 percent of the self-employed and small business owners with two or more employees believe they have closed business because of social media.

Even with a minimal time investment, the vast majority of marketers (81% or higher) indicated their social media efforts increased exposure for their business. Owners of small businesses (2 to 100 employees) were more likely than others to report greater exposure was a direct result of using social media. (89 percent of respondents reported benefits).

By spending as little as six hours per week, 52 percent of marketers reported lead generation benefits with social media.

Small businesses were more likely than others to strongly agree that qualified leads were generated (21% strongly agreed, compared to 14% or less with other types of businesses).

Also, a significant percentage of participants strongly agreed that overall marketing costs dropped when social media marketing was implemented. The self-employed (59 percent) and small business owners with two or more employees (58 percent) were more likely than others to see reductions in marketing costs when using social media marketing.

The largest group who took the survey was self-employed (33 percent) followed by people working for a company with up to 100 employees (30 percent). Some 19 percent of people taking the survey worked for businesses with 100 or more employees.


Social Media Marketing Industry Report 2011 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.


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netTALK "DUO" Now on Dell.com

netTALK.com's Voice over Internet Protocol service is now being sold at Dell.com. As with some other appliance-based approaches, the device plugs into a router and derives VoIP service directly, without requiring use of a PC. The service offers free nationwide calls to any phone in the U.S. and Canada from anywhere in the world.

The suggested retail price for the devise is $69.95, including the entire first year of phone service and only $29.95 each year after.

I'm not among those who think voice now is a true commodity, like sugar, flour or unleaded gasoline. Most of us can point to instances where we use one form of voice rather than others, to communicate with different people, with whom we have different relationships, in different places, about different things.

A unit of one true commodity is literally interchangeable with a unit of that same commodity produced or delivered by any other entity. Skype video between Asia and North America is not interchangeable with mobile service used locally or within a single nation. Both of those usage modes are different from a desktop business phone using IP telephony between various global locations, or a consumer's home phone used mostly in "inbound" mode.

All of those use cases are different from a Facebook or other web app that is enabled with voice.

Nor are the revenue cases similar. A minute of use on a high-end telepresence system might not cost any more than a simple peer-to-peer Skype video session. But the total cost of ownership is quite different. A minute of mobile voice does not generate the profit margin of a minute of domestic landline voice, in most cases.

That said, it might be hard to find an observer who really believes voice services, overall, are high-margin products anymore. They can be, but the overall trend is towards less margin. A mobile customer with a 400-minute monthly bucket, costing $40,. who only uses 100 of those minutes has an effective cost per minute of 40 cents a minute. That would be a high-margin product.

A user on a prepaid plan with calls to India at one cent a minute would be paying less, after adding in any per-call charges, and depending on the length of any particular call.

netTALK DUO Now Available on Dell.com

S&P lowers US debt rating

S&P has downgraded the outlook for US government debt to negative, from stable, while reaffirming the current AAA rating. In plain English, the rating agency is telling the U.S. government to get its fiscal house in order, pronto, or face a downgrade that will materially affect the interest it has to pay to get people to buy its debt.

“We believe there is a material risk that U.S. policymakers might not reach an agreement on how to address medium- and long-term budgetary challenges by 2013; if an agreement is not reached and meaningful implementation is not begun by then, this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns.”

The downgrade does not make the United States Greece, or Portugal, not yet. But it is a step in that direction, as hard as it might be to conceptualize. In other words, the S&P downgrade is a warning to cut spending and deficits yourself, or have it done to you, against your will.

S&P lowers US debt rating

Top Smart Phone Attributes, Ranked by Smart Phone Owners

Lots of things are important to smart phone buyers. In addition to operating system or device ecosystem, itself a change from past value, buyers say they care about the application variety and device features. Other issues, including device price, are of lesser concern.

There are lots of potential reasons why price is not a bigger factor, probably chief among them the availability of device subsidies. Most users also can figure out that the cost of service over two years far outweighs the investment in a device, and most often, those devices are subsidized in any case.

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Samsung Galaxy Tab 10 Video

This video, from the Vietnamese tech blog Tinhte.vn, shows the Galaxy Tab 10.1 running Honeycomb. It's in Vietnamese, of course. But you get a feel for the user interface.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10 Video Leaks

HP TouchSmart Tries to Bridge PC and Tablet

Flip, BlackBerry Playbook and Kindle

Smart Phones Displacing Cameras, Flickr Data Indicates

Smart phones are displacing cameras as the devices used to take photos uploaded to Flickr, data from Flickr indicates. In fact, the iPhone 4 might soon become the single most-popular device used to take photos uploaded to the site.


The data in all likelihood understates use of smart phones, though. The graphs, Flickr says, are only accurate to the extent that Flickr can automatically detect the camera used to take the photo or shoot the video (something possible about two thirds of the time). Since that is not always possible with camera phones, therefore they are under-represented, Flickr says. In other words, the Apple iPhone 4 might already have become the most-used device.

There's another interesting angle here, namely the connection between social software and e-commerce. Since Flickr is tracking the devices used to take photos, it also can become a site where potential camera buyers can find out what devices other people are using, and get links to information, or buy those devices.

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Messaging Tops Smart Phone Usage

A recent three-week study of how 150 smart phone owners use their devices shows that the users spend an average of just over 94 minutes a day using their phones, and more than a third of that time, or as much as 28 minutes, is spent reading, writing and responding to email.

The aggregated time spent on all downloaded add-on apps, including Facebook, WordswithFriends and Pandora, is the second largest, totaling just under 11 minutes. Voice calls represent 13 minutes a day worth of usage.

Yankee Group Research Report

Smart Phone Users Consume 24 Mbytes a Day, 1/2 on Wi-Fi

A study of 150 smart phone users over a three-week period finds that panel members consume an average of 723 MBytes of data a month, an average of 24.1 MBytes of data a day. Of that, 21.5 MBytes is received, while only 2.6 MBytes is sent. Those figures include both wireless network and Wi-Fi consumption.

Looking only at data sent over cellular networks, the average data transfer is 12.1 MBytes a day, with Wi-Fi representing the remaining 12 MBytes of daily usage.

The data was gathered from Feb. 9, 2011 through March 2, 2011. Some 83 of the respondents use Android phones, 57 are iPhone users and 10 use RIM BlackBerry devices.

Yankee Group Research Report

Banks Cautious on Mobile Payments?

Thirteen of the 15 financial institutions surveyed by Forrester Research on behalf of Fiserv have a mobile banking offering of some sort.  In addition to account access, the most commonly offered services are transfers between accounts, ATM and branch locators and bill payment.

All of the 13 financial institutions with a mobile banking solution offer the service to retail banking customers. Just more than half offer some type of mobile service to small business customers.

But the majority of bank and credit union executives interviewed are struggling to build a business case to support mobile payments, and many are waiting for market changes to serve as a catalyst for additional investment.

So what would make mobile payments more interesting? The first, and most obvious motivator is competition from other providers, especially other financial institutions as well as technology and payments companies. Some more certain evidence of consumer demand also would prompt the executives to move faster.

Many of the survey participants would like to see another company provide more concrete evidence of the financial model for mobile payments, as well.

Device and process standards also continue ot develop, and most of the executives wanted more stability on the technology front before they would move faster.

Banks and credit unions view merchant enablement as key to the adoption and success of next generation mobile payments. Once merchants are actually set up to receive mobile payments, financial institutions will be more inclined to invest additional time and money in mobile payments.

When building a business case, respondents considered the impact mobile payments would have on multiple business processes and outcomes. Customer retention and profitability are lead concerns.  A study by Fiserv found the retention rates of Millennial consumers using a mobile channel improved from 85 percent to 93 percent.

In a separate study, Fiserv found that increased payment interactions deliver increased customer engagement and profitability. For example, consumers who routinely pay their bills electronically through their bank or credit union have almost twice the number of products (5.34 versus 3.21), deliver more than twice the annual profitability of the average retail customer and
are 3.5 times less likely to churn.

While costs associated with processing checks and cash payments vary, it is well understood that electronic payments – including those carried out through mobile phones – have a direct positive impact on the cost structures of payers, payees and financial
institutions, Fiserv says. By shifting customers away from more expensive payment forms such as cash and checks, banks and credit unions can reduce their cost to serve.

One of the big unknowns, though, is the degree to which new competitors will displace the current suppliers of credit, debit or bank accounts, or work with the established entities.

Still unknown is the extent that ultimately will be played by cross-selling and customer service aspects of mobile payments.
Banks and credit unions also envision unique opportunities (money and fraud management, authentication and customer service, for example) as possible benefits.

Eight of the 15 financial institutions surveyed now enable access by mobile browser (WAP) and six enable SMS (text) banking.

The majority of banks and credit unions surveyed support smartphones today. Notably, support for Google Android is the top priority moving forward.

In contrast to mobile banking, though, very few of the surveyed financial institutions have clear mobile payment strategies in place, Fiserv says.  And while all of the respondents currently offer or plan to offer mobile payments, they are split between being a driver (seven of those surveyed) or a facilitator (six of those surveyed) of mobile payments.

Mobile payments are seen to include bill payment, person-to-person (P2P), remote retail (including social media) and point-of-sale (POS) or contactless payments. When asked how they have prioritized each of these mobile payment methods, banks and credit unions indicated they are most focused on bill payment and P2P with the other methods receiving less focus, Fiserv says.

Read the white paper here.

Personalized Billboards? Well, at Least Customized

Billboards that change messages based on environmental factors, such as who is looking at the billboard and the level of ambient noise, are coming, one company hopes.

FCC Chairman Talks About Need for More Mobile Spectrum

Domino’s Pizza Claims Check-In Grows Revenue 29%

Domino's Pizza says a number of different mobile initiatives are helping the company grow sales. Domino's says its check-in program, based on Foursquare, has grown the company’s online revenue in Britain 28.6 percent increase to $17.5 million Euros. "We offered a specific offer both for anyone who checked in and the mayor of each store, says James Millett, Domino's U.K. multimedia manager.

Mobile ordering also has grown to nearly 10 percent of all e-commerce sales through the Domino's mobile website, web app and iPhone app.

Domino's also recently launched PayPal payments capability on its web and iPhone app platforms. That means customers can order a pizza with an e-mail address or telephone number and PIN on mobile.

Domino’s Pizza Foursquare

TelChina and China Mobile to Create Mobile Payment System

Telnic Limited, the registry operator for the .tel top level domain says its regional partner TelChina and China Mobile, one of the world's largest mobile phone companies, have entered into a strategic relationship to develop mobile payment services.

TelChina and China Mobile to Build Mobile Payment Solution