Hard to Top Apple, Really

Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, has been named the Financial Times "Man of the Year."

“Steve’s the last of the great builders,” says Roger McNamee, the prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist. “What makes him different is that he’s creating jobs and economic activity out of thin air while just about every other CEO in America is working out ways to cut costs and lay people off."

Put simply, Apple under Jobs has created markets, not "taken market share." That's a big deal.

One can only hope McNamee is wrong about that last assessment.

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Skype Outage Continues

Skype's service outage continues into its second day. Skype says that traffic is running around 30 percent of what typically is expected.

Skype - The Big Blog - Status update on downtime

Android Market Gets AT&T Carrier Billing

Android users who are customers of AT&T now can use AT&T "Direct Carrier Billing" for purchases from the Android Market.

The move shows the role a mobile service provider can play in mobile payments for digital goods, even though carrier billing has been available for decades.

Some firms using carrier billing from a number of carriers say the payment method can be expensive without volume, but Android Marketplace should not have a "volume of transactions" problem.

Android Developers Blog: More Payment Options in Android Market

Google Makes Comparison Shopping Easier

Google has introduced a new feature for product searching in the United Kingdom, called "Nearby Shops."

Nearby Shops shows stores in a user's vicinity that sell what a user is searching for. As you can well imagine, this is going to help steer users to "stuff" they want, but also could lead to an increase comparison shopping behavior, since it will be easy to find other locations that might have the same items, in case a user decides a price or other item elements are not right.

Google Launches Nearby Shops In UK | jatiN mahindrA doT coM

"Getting" Social Media Takes Work and Time

We might generally agree at this point that social media tends to work better for consumer brands than for business-to-business brands, though at some point that is likely to change.

What is harder to contest is the issue of what it takes, not to understand, but to use, social media such as Facebook. A new study by A.T. Kearney illustrates some of the issues. The study found that 89 percent of consumer replies on company’s Facebook pages remained unanswered. To be sure, not every post requires a reply. But A.T. Kearney points out that Gucci didn’t reply to a single thread in the last three months.

That appears to be a common problem that mostly is "budget" related. Though it doesn't necessarily "cost" much to use Facebook, replies imply monitoring, and that takes people and time. And if the volume of replies and comments is large, then the labor to monitor and reply is going to be significant. Few large firms seem prepared to create entirely new staffs to handle this function, and perhaps few small firms can do so.

Even when marketers responded, only 15 percent of their posts “invited further conversation” and 17 percent actually “addressed the consumer by name. That is arguably tougher in a business-to-business setting, because many, if not most posts in such settings are "anonymous," suggesting that a poster needs or wants to keep an identity hidden. That's not so useful.

Firms that were a bit more friendly and responsive on Facebook averaged a consumer-to-company post/response ratio of 3:1. Most, however, had a 1:4 ratio. If you think about it, that's probably reasonable, since not every post does require a substantive reply.

Read the full study here: http://www.atkearney.com/index.php/Publications/socially-awkward-media-volume-xiii-number-2-2010.html

Read an analysis here: Why Some Of The World’s Biggest Brands Still Don’t Get Facebook - Elaine Wong - Media Geek - Forbes

Users Appear to Prefer "Do Not Track" Rules

Most people do not seem to like the idea of advertiser tracking of their online behavior, and with the Federal Trade Commission looking at tracking, it seems likely some new "do not track" program is coming.

The ironic facet of the issue is that refined tracking, conducted with permission, would mean a much-higher chance that most of the ads a user sees over the course of a day might actually be relevant, interesting and valuable.

Some forms of tracking, such as "remember me" functions, also are highly useful, and represent one way of maintaining "permission" status for any tracking programs.

Newspapers Stream More Video than Broadcasters

With the caveat that usage and bandwidth are not direct proxies for "revenue," Brightcove and TubeMogel report that newspapers surpassed broadcasters in total minutes streamed for the first time in the third quarter of 2010.

Brightcove suggests that newspapers are rapidly adopting and producing video content for what was once a print business. Of course, broadcasters probably figure they are "streaming" (broadcasting) all day, so online might not be so important to them.

Online media properties (which includes pure-play Web properties and blogs) also had a strong growth quarter in player loads (127 percent growth) and titles uploaded (23 percent growth), suggesting that video adoption and production activity is on the rise across the growing media category, Brightcover says.

Perhaps significantly, game consoles such as the Wii and PlayStation lead in viewing time with an average
of 2:45 minutes watched per view, compared with online video averaging out to just under 2:27 minutes per view.

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