Small Business Sees Web Site Investments as "Advertising"

In 2008 small and medium-sized organizations spent $6.7 billion on online advertising and will increase that spending relatively slowly between now and 2013, according to researchers at Borrell Associates.

By 2013, SMEs will be spending about $7.4 billion on online advertising, representing relatively slowish growth of nine percent over a five-year period, an annual growth rate of a bit more than 1.5 percent annually.

That might surprise you, if only because the rate of growth is slow slow it might be considered "flat." But Borrell suggests something else is happening. SME spending on Web sites will grow about eight percent a year.

You might not consider Web site spending as advertising, but Borrell Associates says this is precisely how SMEs think about the matter. It isn't so much a shift of advertising from traditional methods, including telephone directory listings and direct mail, to the Internet. It is that small businesses see their own Web sites as a form of "advertising," perhaps a functional substitute.

Consider this a sort of shift to "earned media" (awareness gained through promotional efforts rather than paid advertising). The other angle is that small businesses rightly see their Web efforts as partly a direct sales channel, partly direct marketing and partly a substitute for other sales activities such as printing and distributing flyers, postcards and other direct marketing messages.

60% of Twitter Users Do Not Return the Following Month

Twitter’s unique audience exploded over 100 percent in March 2009, meaning it likely has reached an inflection point of some sort. But there are issues: Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, says David Martin, Nielsen Online VP.

That means Twitter’s audience retention rate, the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is about 40 percent.

To put that in perspective, it is roughly the equivalent of turning over 100 percent of the user base every three months. Such a churn rate is unsustainable.

"It is clear that a retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure," says Martin. "A high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite."

There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones, at some point.

When Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high, says Martin. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitter-quitters-post-roadblock-to-long-term-growth/

CableVision to Offer 101 Mbps, Claims Blagging Rights

Cablevision Systems Corp. plans to sell a new 101 Mbps service (with 15 Mbps upstream) for $99.95 a month. The service also will include free access to Cablevision's metro Wi-Fi service, beginning May 11, 2009.

These days, such really-fast services are more a matter of marketing rights than revenue. Earlier this year, Tom Rutledge, Cablevision COO said the company didn't expect much financial impact from any of the really-high speed services in 2009, at least where the consumer market is concerned.

To the extent actual sales will be happen, they are more likely to be generated by small business users. 

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/cablevision-goes-for-us-broadband-speed-record/

Are IP Telephony Suppliers Off the Mark?

Are VoIP retailers "failing to rethink their products aimed at small and medium-sized business owners?

It's hard to argue with this argument in favor of simplicity, savings and support. On the other hand, there arguably are other issues. Demand, for example.

Recent surveys conducted by Savatar Research over the last couple to several years consistently have shown relatively high awareness of IP telephony but flattening sales. Quarterly SME adoption rates of IP telephony have been falling since the third quarter of 2006, Savatar notes.

Since it is hard to think of any IP telephony provider that is not acutely aware of the need for simplicity, savings and support or extreme ease of installation so support isn't necessary, there still is some buyer resistance, apparently.

Savatar surveys also show fairly high awareness of new features IP telephony makes possible. About 38 percent of managers or executives at firms with up to 500 employees already believe IP telephony will save them money, says Savatar. At firms with less than 100 employees, as many as 42 percent of prospects might already believe IP telephony will save them money.

About 18 percent of prospects might be expected to believe that IP telephony offers a more innovative set of features, Savatar says.

Of course, some providers would argue they have cracked the code on IP telephony, and do not have any need to "rethink" how they are packaging and selling their products.

As Savatar says, SME buyers just want to be sure they are buying a phone system that works. Unified communications, software as a service, hosted and managed services, cloud computing and mashups are interesting to lots of us. Small organizations and businesses are unlikely to be so inclined. They just want a phone system or service that works.

Phone.com Debuts Consumer Service

Phone.com has introduced a "Virtual Number" service, allowing one primary phone number to function as the gateway to all of a user's mobile, landline, or VOIP phone numbers and devices.

Address books can be uploaded from most major email programs, and those entries can be used to program call routing based on caller ID, to enable click-to-call, call blocking or other functions.

The Phone.com Virtual Number essentially is a consumer version of the firm's business service, and will include voicemail, free international calling to popular destinations, send fax, call routing based on a time schedule, call recording, caller-id routing, SMS voicemail notification, email delivery of voicemail as a .wav file. Voicemail transcription is also available for a small additional fee, as are other upgrades.

Prices and plans range from $4.88 to $18.88/month (plus taxes) for unlimited minutes.

http://www.phone.com/

Mobile Web Sites 30% Slower than PC-Accessed Sites

Mobile Web sites are 30 percent slower than PC-based Web browsing, say Gomez, a provider of Web application experience management and web performance benchmarking, and dotMobi, the mobile domain registrar. 

Mobile Web applications and sites do not yet match the performance levels of “traditional” Web applications, the firms say. Among the five metrics not measured and monitored by Gomez are "discoverability," how readily a consumer can find the mobile Web site using different URLs.

"Readiness" measures how well the mobile Web site renders on popular mobile devices. "Availability" measures the percentage of successful transactions or the availability of a Web page.

"Response time" is a measurement of  how long each page takes to download and the duration of an entire transaction.

"Consistency" looks at how well the mobile Web site performs on different mobile carriers, in different geographies and time frames.

http://www.gomez.com/news_events/releaseview.php?prid=142

Lots of New Voice Apps are Fairly Subtle

Lots of new voice apps are fairly subtle, and many are related to call center or business-to-business applications, which is one reason one gets the impression (not unfounded) that innovation is voice is pretty limited.

As is typical, many are driven directly by customers with a specific problem to solve. Consider a new call screening feature developed by Stage 2 Networks, a provider of hosted PBX solutions, and BroadSoft.

The firms have developed an "Enhanced Call Screening" feature for Stage 2 Networks' hosted PBX service.

Stage 2 had a customer requiring that any inbound caller's name to be announced, even when the system identifies the 10-digit phone number as "Anonymous" or "Private".

A typical call screening feature provides a prompt to a caller to "please say your name," allowing the recipient to hear who is calling when caller ID displays block such information.