Small business paid search spending up 43% in third quarter

U.S. small businesses spent about 43 percent more on paid search advertising in the third quarter of 2010 than they did in the same quarter of 2009.

The average spend on paid search advertising was $2,327 in the third quarter of 2010, according to WebVisible. Some might note that the rate of growth is slower than it had been in the second quarter, when spending grew 159 percent.

Perhaps that indicates firms are becoming better marketers as they gain experience. More ominously, it might mean the economic slowdown that happened in the third quarter already has affected small business ad spending again.

Paid search ad spending growth continues, but slows - Search Marketing - BizReport

Marketing On Social Networks? Add Mobile

One of the reasons marketing on social networks is so popular is that the consumers a brand can reach are largely active, vocal and willing to connect, with each other and with their favorite brands, says Forrester Research analyst Melissa Parrish.

But social networking and social media are fast becoming mobile venues as well. About 22 percent of U.S. online adults with mobile phones access their social networks via mobile at least monthly.

Already Marketing On Social Networks? Then You're Already Marketing On Mobile | Forrester Blogs

How Mature Is Your Mobile Strategy?

Only a third of 200 enterprise respondents surveyed by Forrester Research have had a mobile strategy in place for more than a year.

Online companies, media companies and financial institutions are often more advanced than firms in other industries.

Forty-five percent of respondents are just waking up to the mobile opportunity and thinking about integrating mobile into their overall corporate strategy, just like they did a decade ago with the emerging online channel.

For the majority of respondents, mobile is mainly seen as a way to increase customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.

Many respondents who think it is too early to focus on mobile tend to claim that they first need to fix the basics regarding their overall digital and social initiatives. While that makes a lot of sense, mobile quickly is becoming a key enabler for social networking and social media behavior.

Facebook’s mobile global monthly audiences skyrocketed from 65 million users in September 2009 to 150 million users in July 2010.

Sixteen percent of Twitter users now start with mobile, versus five percent in April 2010. Over the same time frame, the number of mobile Twitter users has increased by 62 percent. It is becoming increasingly difficult, in other words, to conduct social media initiatives without considering the mobility angle.

How Mature Is Your Mobile Strategy? | Forrester Blogs

In Five Years, Social Network Connections Will Be Dial Tone

“In five years, everybody will always be connected to each other, instead of the web,” says Mark Pincus, Zynga CEO. It's the sort of thing you might expect a CEO of a fast-growing social network to say.

How right does Pincus have to be to create a new dynamic for services built around what we used to call "dial tone?" Probably not completely, or even mostly right.

Most people communicate mostly with a relatively small number of people, in their roles as individuals, family members, friends or members of various social groups. Even for most people in their roles as workers, the number of people one communicates with is relatively small.

So what is a social network, especially one with "presence" features? A way of creating the equivalent of "dial tone, the ability to initiate a communication.

Pincus says he often thinks of today’s social companies as providing the equivalent of “dial tone." It's an interesting comparison.

You might think non-real-time messages are not "communications" in the same way dial tone was. But even voice communications began to change with the advent of voice mail. Where once only synchronous communications were possible (a calling party reaches a called party), with voice mail non-synchronous communications began to be possible.

Since the advent of voice mail, other non-synchronous modes also have become important, including email, text and instant messaging, which can be non-synchronous, synchronous or nearly-synchronous.

In fact, blog posts have been said to be a form of non-synchronous communication very similar to Christmas letters, newsletters or traditional media, where point-to-multipoint messages are sent.

In that sense, social connections and networks do provide features and value quite similar to dial tone.

In Five Years, Connections Will Be To Each Other, Not The Web; We’ll Be Dial Tones

Native or Web Apps?

You might not be surprised if, at the end of the day, experts conclude that there are some apps that are suited to "native" or "Web" format and some that are suitable for specially-designed mobile apps. Still, there are some guidelines, Luke Wroblewski suggests, after hearing a presentation by Jason Grigsby.

Native mobile apps and mobile Web apps are both apps. Where performance is needed, native apps will always have better access to platform and resources. URLS don’t open applications, so mobile apps are better when a specific app needs to auto-run to provide the best experience.

The mobile Web is one area where most small businesses can benefit more from a native or Web app than a mobile app, Grigsby said.

The mobile Web also is more open, with few entry costs. Developers can hope to keep 100 percent of any revenue they can generate and can do instantaneous releases.

read more here

Orange Says Europeans Prefer Mobile Web to Apps

Mobile users in the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Poland surveyed on behalf of Orange say they prefer to use the mobile web rather than mobile apps. About 70 percent of Britons prefer the mobile web to mobile apps, for example.

In France, 68 percent of users favor the browser over 60 per cent who prefer apps.  In less mature mobile media markets, there is apparently more receptiveness to app use. In  Spain 42 per cent see, to prefer apps, while 45 percent of Polish users favor mobile apps and 39 percent favor the mobile web.

In large part, those opinions might be driven by the increasing use of mobiles as an end point supporting many of the same applications people use on their PCs. Some 58 percent of U.K. users want to find the same things on their mobile as on a PC, as do 55 percent of French users, 58 percent in Spain and 72 percent in Poland.

The study also suggests that mobile use is cannibalizing some amount of traditional media use as well. Some 16 percent of mobile media users in the United Kingdom say they read fewer magazines and 14 percent say they read fewer newspapers.

Mobile Internet use does not seem to be cannibalizing either television or fixed-line PC use, however.

PC browsing increased for 25 percent of respondents and television viewing increased for 14 percent of respondents.

About 40 percent of European mobile media users surveyed also say they quickly check information on their mobiles and then spend more time with content when they are back in front of a PC.

In the United Kingdom mobile media is accessed by 74 percent of users when they are out and about. On the other hand, when at home 59 percent use their mobiles to search the Internet as well.

Fully 70 percent of respondents say they use their mobile browsers when users are on the move. In the United Kingdom, Spain and Poland, respondents browse for longer on the Internet when they are outside rather than at home.

read more here

Networks Block Google TV Access to Their Programming

ABC, CBS and NBC are blocking TV programming on their websites from being viewable on Google's new Web-TV service, illustrating the problem with all efforts to create alternative ways of viewing TV programming.

Full-length episodes of shows like NBC's 'The Office,' CBS's 'CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,' and ABC's 'Modern Family' can't be viewed on Google TV, a service that allows people to access the Internet and search for Web videos on their television screens, as well as to search live TV listings, the Wall Street Journal reports.

As always has been the case, content owners will block any effort to disrupt their existing revenue models by denying legal access to the programming people want to watch, until some tipping point where content owners believe the results are at least revenue neutral, with further upside going forward.