77% of Tablet Users Say the Device Replaces PC Actions

When asked whether they used other connected devices more often or less often since purchasing a tablet, 35 percent of tablet owners who also owned a desktop computer reported using their desktop less often or not at all, while 32 percent of those who also owned laptops, said they used their laptop less often or never since acquiring a tablet, according to the Nielsen Company.

Those findings do not necessarily settle the issue of whether a tablet can completely replace a PC. That will be true in some, perhaps many cases over time, especially as tablets become devices that work right out of the box and do not have to rely on a PC for configuration or updates.

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A Content Curation Case Study

sme_bw2010_adam_ostrow_v1 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.
Content curation (assembling content produced by third-party sites) has become a hotter topic lately, as more brands move to more active roles in content marketing. Here's an analysis of how "Mashable" succeeded by curating lots of content.

Casual News Users Referred by Google, Other Search Engines; Facebook a Factor Sometimes

A new report by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism provides new evidence of the role Facebook now is playing in driving traffic to media sites. "Casual users" who are those more likely to be drawn to major news stories now make up the majority of the online news audience.

Google is still the main outside entry point, driving on average 30 percent of a news site's traffic. About 60 percent to 65 percent of visits are from direct traffic.

In 2010, all but one of the top sites for which there was referral data derived at least some of their audience through Facebook.

Facebook ranked as the second- or third-highest referral source for six of the largest 25 news sites, with Huffingtonpost.com getting the biggest share of traffic from the social network, at eight percent. NYTimes.com got six percent of traffic from Facebook. Despite its growth, Twitter still isn't a major factor in sending visitors to news sites.

Of course, that last tidbit has a nuance. Heavy Twitter users are more likely to be driven to news sites than heavy Facebook users, one would suspect. Some Twitter users might not be heavy Facebook users, for example, so more of those user redirects would come from Twitter than Facebook. The Pew study might simply be reflective of the bigger Facebook user base.

Facebook Driving Traffic

Half of Consumers Say Fraud Detection is a Reason to Allow Tracking

Privacy, like most other issues, has a dual character. It can provide user benefits and danger. A survey by the Ponemon Institute revealed the majority of consumers are comfortable with online behavioral tracking for fraud prevention purposes, but remain hesitant around advertising and promotional purposes.

About 74 percent of consumers expressed some level of concern about online advertisers collecting and using their information for future promotional activity.

But the survey also showed that half of respondents think it is acceptable to use information about their online behavior as long as it’s used to detect potential fraudsters.

Some 24 percent said they don’t think behavioral targeting in any form is appropriate, whereas 26 percent said it is okay for online businesses to use their information to either send them ads or monitor potential fraudsters.

Tracking Online Behavior: Three in Four Consumers Say Using Their Information For Fraud Detection Purposes is ‘Okay’

Apple The World's Most-Valuable Brand

Apple is the world's most-valuable brand, Millward Brown's 2011 BrandZ study of the most-valuable global brands now shows. Apple ended a four-year run by Google at the top of the brand ranking.

Click image twice for a larger view.

Google now is the second most-valuable global brand, followed by IBM, McDonalds, Microsoft, Coca Cola and AT&T, the top-ranked telecom brand. Vodafone ranks 12th and Verizon 13th. All those telecom firms rank ahead of Amazon.

Apple Ends Google's Four-Year Run as Most Valuable Brand

Rogers to officially become a "4G" Provider

Purists might gnash their teeth, but users mostly won't care that Rogers will change the nomenclature of its HSPA+ "3G" network to "4G" on May 9, 2011.

Effective May 9th Rogers will call its HSPA+ network, technically 3G, a “4G HSPA ” network.

Rogers says this “is simply a network name change” to align with the International Telecommunicaitons Union standards and also to “bring up on par with Bell and TELUS and close the perceived gap”. In other words, the mobile broadband access market has shifted. Despite the fact that most consumers likely could not tell the difference between a 4G and an HSPA+ 3G network, the marketing platform around 4G has become important.

TELUS announced their new “4G” network in February and Bell closely followed in March 2011. Soon after SaskTel and MTS both declared their networks were also being marketed as a “4G” network.

Rogers simply has to keep pace, in the marketing wars. Of course, that also creates another problem, namely how to market 4G in its Long Term Evolution variant.

Verizon Wireless can fairly clearly make an argument that its 4G network differs clearly from its 3G network in terms of speed and latency. It will be a bit harder to draw the distinction between a good HSPA+ network and an LTE network, in many cases, since field tests show an HSPA+ network can offer experienced speeds as high as some LTE networks.

Rogers to officially become a "4G HPSA " network on May 9th | MobileSyrup.com

The Impact of Display Advertising

One mistake easy, in fact, almost impossible to avoid when evaluating the return on investment of display advertising is to attribute buying actions to the "last channel" a customer uses when making a purchase.

By that logic, the best channel a retailer has is a cash register at a store or the ordering function of a website. That's the "channel" we can measure as registering a sale. What is difficult, nearly impossible to measure is all the other influences that have lead up to a purchase. Those influences are, by definition, indirect in the sense that all of them, or some of them, have had a rule in moving a particular buyer to purchase activity.

Some will argue that channels play different roles, at different parts of a buying cycle. Display advertising, word of mouth, recommendations and online content do the "heavy lifting" early in the consumer decision-making process of driving awareness and consideration.

The argument is that prospects often have initial exposure in the research phase that later produces a "buyer." A late-stage visit often gets credited to search marketing, when a user already has made a decision, and is looking for the actual sales channel.

So the temptation is to credit the entire sale to the search channel. That's a mistake of attribution. It can be unknowable how any particular prospect became a buyer, but it likely is the case that multiple information or advertising and promotion channels played a role.

The Impact of Display on Search | ClickZ

"GrouponLive" to Sell Event Tickets

Groupon and Live Nation have a formed a joint venture to develop a new online ticketing deals channel called "GrouponLive."

GrouponLive will serve as a local resource for Live Nation events and clients of its global ticketing business, Ticketmaster.

The site is intended to help consumers to find high-value tickets to concerts, sports, theater, arts and other live events, while serving as a timely and effective way for merchants to sell more tickets.

The new effort will launch in time for the summer concert season, the companies say. One way to look at Groupon is that although it provides a promotional vehicle for retailers, it also is becoming a retail channel in the ticketing business.

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Bandwidth and Revenue: What Does History Suggest?

Service provider executives often worry about a restricted future role in the Internet ecosystem, largely captured by the phrase "dumb pipe." Somewhat oddly, you sometimes hear people complain that the phrase exists at all, as though anything at all would be different did the phrase not exist.

Left unsaid is the truth behind the existence of the phrase. Bandwidth is not the only product that has experienced dramatic effective cost reductions, with large societal and economic benefits, as troublesome as those price changes might have been for producers in the businesses that experienced the changes.

The so-called "robber barons" of the late 19th century generally made their fortunes by drastically changing the price curve for new technologies, grabbing market share by undercutting rivals.

Cornelius Vanderbilt cut the price of rail freight 90 percent, Andrew Carnegie slashed steel prices 75 percent and John D. Rockefeller cut oil prices 80 percent between 1870 and 1900.

Malcom McLean, Sam Walton and Michael Dell did roughly the same for container shipping, discount retailing and home computing a century later. Such radical changes often are unwelcome by the producing community, though the consuming public benefits.

Something of that same process is likely to play out in the bandwidth business as well, no matter what one thinks about the term "dumb pipe."

Cheapening Technology WSJ.com (subscription required)

Groupon, Living Social Skew Urban

Demography might not be destiny, but it is close. The places there are lots of people are the same places there are lots of small businesses, lots of mobile phone users, lots of everything, in fact.

As is the case for just about anything else related to people and business, the places there are dense concentrations of buyers are the places there are equally-dense concentrations of suppliers.

For that reason, the typical Groupon and Living Social user, in fact, is about 13 percent more likely to live in a metropolitan area with a population of more than 400,000 people, according to Nielsen Co. data, and about 10 percent more likely to live in a city with more than three million people.

Those aren't huge disparities, or even surprising. Where are the places it will make most sense for a local retailer to pitch offers at people? Where are there enough retailers to support a business offering coupons and offers?

Groupon, Living Social Are Skewing Urban

16 Million Mobile LTE Subscribers by End of 2012

Currently 12 countries have commercial Long Term Evolution fourth generation services, and according to ABI Research VP of Forecasting Jake Saunders, by the end of the year there will be some 16 million subscribers using LTE mobile devices, globally.

But there might be 264 million LTE subscribers on frequency-division LTE networks by 2015, and another 158 million time-division network customers by 2015, according to Heavy Reading.

16 Million Mobile LTE Subscribers by Year’s End

17% of Smart Phone Users Checking In

About 17 percent of mobile users appear to use social location-based apps such as Foursquare or Facebook Places, according to a study commissioned by digital agency Beyond.

More than half of mobile users who do use checkin apps (54 percent) said they are motivated to share their location when discounts are involved. About 21 percent said the ability to earn badges and status rewards were enough motivation for them to check in.

About 48 percent of respondents who say they do not use mobile check-in apps indicate privacy is their primary reason for not doing so.

About half of respondents were unable to do so because they do not have a smart phone.

Early adopters are more likely to check in at locations that sell food or drinks. The top places are restaurants (53 percent), coffee shops (40 percent), hotels (38 percent) and bars (36 percent).

Mass consumers check in most frequently at the homes of friends and family (35 percent) and restaurants (33 percent)

Why Mobile Users Aren't Checking In

Can You Measure Social Media ROI?

There's nothing wrong with trying to quantify the return on any investment, including social media, even if the analysis is relatively difficult to assess. The danger might come from trying to be too quantitative.

For one thing, the measures are proximate, not direct. It would be very difficult, most likely impossible, to quantify the volume or number of sales or revenue that social channels directly convert. We can track web traffic, click through rates, and follower/following ratio. But none of that explains real "influence."

Social media isn't the only channel with those sorts of issues. It is difficult to assess the actual value of trade show events, as well, since "sales" tend to come some time after a contact at a trade show.

The methodological dangers are fairly clear, as well. "If you utilize offline social events as advertising channels, two things happen," argues Joe Hall at Marketing Pilgrim. "You don’t make any friends" and "you don’t create any customers."

"This happens because instead of coming across as the cool girl or guy that everyone wants to do business with, you come across as the annoying jerk passing out postcard adverts."

There will always be management pressure to justify the effectiveness of campaigns and channels. When using social media, the great temptation is to rely on proxy measures too heavily. What you are after is "influence." That can be tough to measure.

Social Media ROI?

Local Mobile Marketing Spend to Grow 2.5X by 2015

Total U.S mobile promotional spend in 2010 shows a pronounced focus on national., rather than local, campaigns, according to Mobitrove. Almost $2.9 billion of $3 billion worth of "promotions" spending was for national promotions, or about 97 percent of mobile promotional dollars spent in 2010.

One suspects that is going to change over the next several years, as social shopping capabilities and focus starts to grow. The changes might be quite gradual for the first four to five years, as typically is the case when a new business segment gets traction.

After five years, growth is likely to be substantial, as retailers learn how to use local promotions with location services and social networking.

Mobile Marketing Spend to Sextuple 2010-2015:

Over the Air Updates: Ecosystem Implications

Just about everything in the mobile ecosystem seems to have business model implications. Consider the way mobile devices get updated.

Apple has used the iTunes to push updates to its iOS mobile devices. When a new software update is available, users have to tether to a PC to load the update onto their mobiles.

When an update to Google’s Android operating system or HP/Palm’s webOS is released, users are provided an update notification and can update the software right on their phone.

You might argue that the "tether to PC" model was forced by the relatively primitive nature of the iPod, which established the practice. On the other hand, lots of people have noticed the curiosity of the need to connect an iPad to a PC to configure the tablet.

Oddly, Apple has been saying the iPad "is not a PC." Requiring a PC to activate every tablet might illustrate that in a sort of negtive way: the tablet update strategy isn't smart enough to allow a natively mobile device to update over the air.

But Apple appears to be readying over-the-air iOS updates, starting in the fall of 2011, for updates to iOS 5 devices.

The business model implications of the over-the-air updating are that it appears Apple has to come to agreement Verizon Wireless and AT&T about how to support the wireless updates.

That points out the subtle, but real gatekeeper functions mobile service providers continue to possess in the mobile ecosystem.

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