Mobile Banking: Tangible Benefits in Africa

"It may seem unlikely, given its track record in technological development, but Africa is at the center of a mobile revolution," says a report published in the Guardian. The most dramatic example of this is mobile banking.

Africa's mobile economic revolution

Google Sites Makes It Easier to Build a Mobile Site

"The Google Sites mobile experience also got an upgrade. We added five new mobile site templates to make it easy to build and launch a site that looks great on the small screen. This video explains how.

Official Google Blog: Google Apps

How Coca-Cola Sees All Media Efforts

Coca-Cola may have far more budget and resources than most companies.  


One of the key parts of the Coca-Cola approach to media is the use of three domains: paid (advertising), earned (social media), owned (brand events, sites) that in many cases overlap.



As Wendy Clark, SVP of Integrated Marketing and Communication for Coca-Cola will tell you, media is viewed as paid, earned, owned, and shared. 


This is not at all unique to Coke, but certainly sets the stage for understanding how the company views and segments its overall marketing. Read more here.



In past decades, earned media would primarily have been seen as “stories in newspapers, magazines, on radio or TV.” Notice the change: all the “earned” exposure is earned on social media.

Coca-Cola’s concept of “liquid” means the company’s content is produced in a framework of dynamic storytelling that has a natural affinity to go to the furthest points possible. They are thinking strictly in terms of how the content they produce will be shareable, how it will relevantly flow across networks, cultures, and personal touch points.



Also, part of the thinking is profoundly social, in the sense that brand advocates are among the desired outcomes. Joe Tripodi, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer of Coca-Cola, says that “awareness is fine, but advocacy will take your business to the next level.”



“I used to think that loyalty was the highest rung on the consumer pyramid until I became the CMO of Allstate Insurance,” he says. “There, I saw clearly that so much business was driven through personal referrals and advocacy by individuals for their agent.”

The Social Media Bubble

Venture capital king Ben Horowitz, who apparently engineered Skype’s $8.5 billion sale to Microsoft, says there is no Internet investing bubble, for a number of reasons. “With costs 100 times lower, programmer productivity 10 times higher, and the market 50 times larger, it stands to reason that many more Internet businesses will work today than the last time around,” he argues.

Moreover, “software is eating the world,” transforming or obliterating industries like print publishing, music distribution, radio, and direct marketing, he notes. With so much new business right around the corner, he argued that the high stock prices attached to social media “have not become completely divorced from any rational thought."

What happens in bubbles is that people come up with all kinds of reasons why valuations that seem out of whack really are not out of whack.

The Social Media Bubble

Why Google is Great for SEO

"Having done some digging with the rest of the team at PR company Punch to find out a bit more about how it works, we found that Google is a great source of links that can be used for SEO benefit," says Alex Smith at Punch Communications. "Google has opted to allow links that pass page rank in contrast to the other major networks such as Facebook and Twitter which only allow links that Google’s spiders can’t follow, and I think it’s likely that this could be part of the Google project strategy to grow as big as the two social media giants."

Why Google is Great for SEO

Bad Tweets Can Cost an Enterprise $4 Million

Symantec's 2011 Social Media Protection Flash Poll shows how expensive leaked information on social media really can be and a bad Tweet can cost a company as much as $4 million.

The typical enterprise experienced nine social media incidents, such as employees posting confidential information publicly over the past year, with 94 percent suffering negative consequences including damage to their reputations, loss of customer trust, data loss and lost revenue. http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=20110721_01

Social media incidents cost a typical company $4 million over the past 12 months, Symantec estimates. More than 90 percent of respondents who experienced a social media incident also suffered negative consequences as a result, including:
reduced stock price (average cost: $1,038,401 USD), litigation costs (average cost: $650,361 USD), direct financial costs (average cost: $641,993 USD), damaged brand reputation/loss of customer trust (average cost: $638,496 USD) and lost revenue (average cost: $619,360 USD).

The survey found the top three social media incidents:
Employees sharing too much information in public forums (46 percent),
The loss or exposure of confidential information (41%).
Increased exposure to litigation (37%)

Bad Tweet = $4Million Loss

The Top Sites for Social Media Marketing Trends

Where do 230 brand managers, executives, and marketing professionals turn for information on social media?

The Top 10 Marketing Sites for Social Media Marketing Trends

Google+ Isn't Ready for Business Accounts, Google Says, and Means It

Google says its Google+ service still isn't optimized for business accounts, and apparently means it. Google removed pages set up by Sesame Street and Ford Motor Company, Mashable and Search Engine Land. The reason, Google manager Christian Oestlien later explained in a post and a YouTube video, was that the “platform at the moment is not built for the business use case.” He promised that the company would continue to disable such profiles until the network rolled out a business option in the “next few months.”

Spat of the Day: Google Removes Business Profiles (subscription required)

Google "Doesn't Get Social"?

Is Google Finally a "Social" Company?

One Way to Explain What You Do

Accedian probably gets asked quite a lot what a "NID" is.

9% More Time Spent in Mobile Apps Than Internet

People are spending more time inside mobile application on average than they are on the web, according to Flurry. Playing games and social networking represent 79 percent of people's time, according to Flurry. The rest is news, entertainment, and other apps.

9% More Time Spent in Mobile Apps Than Internet

Do Daily Deals Work?

For some businesses, use of daily deal sites might help boost sales and increase new customers, while for others, it might not. Restaurants, for example, seem to be a great fit for these daily deal sites, whereas other businesses might not benefit as well.

Deal Site Statistics

Google+ Reaches 20 Million Users

Say what you will about Google+ chances at getting Google into the social networking space in a big way, but it certainly has gotten adoption fast.

Read more here.

Verizon Second Quarter Results: 63% of Revenue is From Wireless

Over the last year, Verizon wireline voice revenue has dropped from 17 percent of total revenue to 14 percent. Wireless revenue grew to 63 percent of total revenue, up from 61 percent a year ago. FiOS services, which includes some voice contribution, contributes 14 percent of total revenue, up from 13 percent a year ago. Read more here.

As was the case for AT&T, fixed line broadband service revenue was up substantially, growing 21 percent, year over year. FiOS-based revenues now represent 57 percent of total fixed-line consumer revenues.

But one might wonder, given the huge investment Verizon has made in FiOS, compared to its huge profile in wireless, how valuable that investment has been. Nobody would question the need to have made the broadband upgrade, though some might still wonder whether another,less expensive design would have been sufficient. The contrary view is that Verizon might have done less well had it chosen not to upgrade to a full fiber-to-home network.

And some will argue the upside lies in the future, as bandwidth demands continue to increase. But cannot escape notice that AT&T gets half its revenue from wireless, while Verizon gets 63 percent from wireless. As policymakers continue to urge service providers to invest more, the question of financial return looms especially large.

Fixed-line network revenue continues to drop as a percentage of total, for both AT&T and Verizon. That is not the environment most conducive to the notion of aggressive investment.