Social Software Still a Developing Art

Typical users should not have to care about "understanding" social applications or how brands and businesses might want to use social software to run their businesses.

But it still is true that most businesses and brands are just starting to experiment with, and use, social software and social networking.

It should come as no surprise that brands and businesses are unsure about whether such tools are effective. Nor should it come as a surprise if lots of those entities are disappointed with the results.

It might be fair to say that all enterprises are subject to the temptation of believing that any new tool is a magic bullet.

We should not be looking for such things.

It always takes time for people to learn how to use important new technology.

And social software, many believe, will ultimately be transforming. But it will take time.

http://exploringsocialmedia.com/social-media-bridging-the-gap-infographic/

Social Media and the End of CRM.

"It is not too soon to call the end of the business process known as CRM as we have known it, says Michael Maoz of Gartner. "It is the “management” part that kills it, he says, referring to the centralized way CRM tends to work.

Those will not be welcome words for firms that sell customer relationship management solutions, but does indicate how social media and networking are changing the context within which enterprise sales, marketing and contact management processes might be changing.

Simply, there are simply too many moving parts for traditional CRM applications to provide the promised value, he argues.

Enterprises and brands are exhorted to monitor, listen, poll, create and monitor feeds, tweets, posts, support mobile platforms, tablets and forums. Brands are urged to crowd source, support voting and other ways of gathering consumer insight. All of that is at least partly unstructured data that has to be processed in more structured ways to provide insight. But it is nearly impossible to do that within the scope of traditional CRM.

Businesses are attempting to add the new tools and processes, keep the legacy efforts for marketing, sales and customer service, while moving all of the business applications supporting the existing customer initiatives to the cloud.

That represents a lot of moving parts. So organizations have come to the tacit (not stated, not explicit) conclusion that they cannot accomplish the goal of managing the customer relationship centrally, he argues.

Just as certainly, CRM will become part of a wider set of activities; it has to.

Social Media and the End of CRM

Mobile Apps Mostly Used for Games, Social Networking

For the first time ever, daily time spent in mobile apps surpasses web consumption, according to a new analysis by Flurry. It has taken less than three years for native mobile apps to achieve this level of usage, driven primarily by the popularity of iOS and Android platforms, Flurry says.

The average user now spends nine percent more time using mobile apps than the Internet. In 2010, the average user spent just under 43 minutes a day using mobile applications versus an average 64 minutes using the Internet.

As is the case for tablet devices, new form factors and user interfaces are surfacing user behavior habits that might have been partially obscured in the past As it seems to be turning out, most users, in their work or consumer roles, do not typically need many of the "content creation" capabilities PCs provide, with the exception of simple ability to post photos, annotate content or create short text messages.

In a similar manner, mobile or PC app usage shows that apps most often are used to play games, not to interact with content or information on the web.

Games and social networking categories capture the significant majority of consumers’ time. Consumers spend nearly half their time using games, and a third in social networking apps.

Combined, these two categories represent 79 percent of consumers’ total app time. Consumers use these two categories more frequently, and for longer average session lengths, compared to other categories. Tablets really are content consumption devices, primarily, with text-based communications, photo posting and content sharing representing most of the remaining usage.

Growing at 91 percent over the last year, users now spend over 81 minutes on mobile applications per day. This growth has come primarily from more sessions per user, per day rather than a large growth in average session lengths.

Time spent on the Internet has grown at a much slower rate, 16 percent over the last year, with users now spending 74 minutes on the Internet a day.Facebook has increasingly taken its share of time spent on the Internet, now making up 14 of the 74 minutes spent per day by consumers, or about one sixth of all Internet minutes.

The predominant content consumption and social networking profile appears to a growing business issue as well. Beyond Apple's preference for apps, and Google's preference for native web access, other application providers seem to be angling for more control as well.

It appears the "app versus web" issue is becoming a matter of control for Facebook. Facebook’s "Project Spartan" is an effort to run apps within its service on top of the mobile Safari browser, thus undermining Apple's attempt to maintain control over its app experiences.

Still, the intriguing insight is how new devices and application formats are highlighting what users really want to do, and therefore require, from their apps and devices.

Mobile Apps Put the Web in Their Rear-view Mirror

21% Want Mobile Payments or Mobile Wallet

Here's a marketing question for you: if you conducted a survey about a product almost nobody has ever used, using terms they've never heard, and 21 percent of survey respondents said they would buy it, is that encouraging or discouraging?

As it turns out, 21 percent of 1,000 polled consumers indicated they already were waiting for a mobile phone with near field communications features that allow them to use the phone as a payment device in retail locations. The survey, sponsored by Retrevo, also found that 79 percent of respondents are not interested in mobile wallets or don’t know what a mobile wallet is.

You might wonder how valid a survey can be when it asks people about something they don't understand, or haven't experienced before. One might wonder what the results would have been if respondents had been asked whether they were interested in an "easy to use" mobile phone," as if Apple had asked respondents (it never did) whether they were interested in an easy to use personal computer.

Some might say the fact that 21 percent actually want a phone that can function as a payments vehicle, with no other features indicated, is a high percentage of users. Some might say the additional value of a contactless mobile payment app or service is actually fairly low.

You can argue it saves time, and it might do that. But credit or debit card swipes don't take too long, either. and a few seconds at a checkout counter is hard to quantify, in terms of additional value.

The other problem is that we don't yet know what set of values will ultimately prove attractive enough to make NFC-based payments highly popular. Some will argue, and with good reason, that other values, including discounts and other rewards, will be the drivers for wider adoption.

As you likely would expect, younger users express more interest. Some 28 percent of respondents 18 to 35 were interested in mobile payments.

About 75 percent of respondents 50 or older indicated they did not want to use their mobiles as payment devices.

The Retrovo study does also indicate that, at the moment, consumer notions of "logical providers" of mobile payments services are mixed. Application and device providers, credit and debit card companies or banks, and mobile service providers all are seen, within fairly close ranges, as suitable providers of mobile payments services.

iPhone Owners Ready For Mobile Wallet, Will Apple Deliver? | Retrevo

What Will LightSquared Deal with Sprint Mean?

LightSquared reportedly has reached a 15-year deal with Sprint Nextel Corp. to share network expansion costs and equipment for the planned wholesale LightSquared Long Term Evolution network.

The deal, valued at as much as $20 billion over the length of the contract, would provide revenue for Sprint, a faster buildout for the LightSquared national LTE network, and also makes Sprint a wholesale customer of LightSquared as well. Early reports had suggested that Sprint would receive both cash and capacity on the LTE network as part of the deal. Read more here.

Beyond the important tactical considerations (revenue for Sprint, faster buildout at lower cost for LightSquared), there are potential strategic angles as well. The deal immediately confirms that Sprint will migrate at least some of its services to the LTE air interface.

But that also raises more questions about the fate of its Clearwire investment and strategy. See Report: Sprint consummates LTE network-sharing deal with LightSquared - FierceWireless.


There is some growing speculation that Clearwire is getting ready to sell itself in any case. So what might that mean? Would Sprint abandon Clearwire and work with LightSquared instead? Would Sprint acquire the remainder of Clearwire it does not already own?


And would any such moves signal that Sprint, facing formidably large competitors in an AT&T fortified with T-Mobile USA's assets, plus Verizon Wireless, again try to create a bigger presence in the wholesale LTE market?


>Both Clearwire and LightSquared have formal wholesale business plans, while Sprint arguably has been the most willing of the national mobile carriers to explore wholesale business models. There are some indications Clearwire intends to sell itself. Sprint already owns 54 percent of Clearwire. Would Sprint acquire the remainder of the firm?


Or is there some way for Sprint to leverage both Clearwire and LightSquared in some way to create a pre-eminent LTE or 4G wholesale role in the market? In the past, Sprint has been willing to forge multiple partnerships with cable operators, for example, embracing wholesale in a way that neither AT&T nor Verizon Wireless have preferred.


Might Sprint once again try to become the carrier of choice for "all the rest of us" in the competitive space? If the AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile USA is approved, Sprint will have to do something more dramatic. Riskier moves, or innovative moves, are what underdogs typically can be expected to try, in just about any market.

RIM, Nokia Show inflection Point in Device Market

A decade ago, it would have been hard to imaging Nokia being in the shape it now is, abandoning Symbian and losing market share. Five years ago, it would have been quite difficult to imaging the situation Research in Motion now is in, losing share rapidly. Both developments likely indicate that an inflection point of some sort has been reached in the handset market.

Perhaps one common thread here is that ability to offer a superior web and application experience drives growth. One issue for RIM is that BlackBerry was conceived as an integrated system for handling email communications. But lots of us would say BlackBerry's web browser experience has been poor. When a company optimizes its experience for an important application (secure mobile email) and a particular customer segment (enterprise), and those are key user drivers, a company wins.

But if end user requirements change, the optimization can become a drag. These days, one might argue, it is the web experience, or at least the application experience, which has become key. The change has been coming for a while, but most changes in technology-related businesses tend to take a while to transform a business. RIM's market share issues, along with Nokia's might signal the inflection point at which the new order rapidly becomes established.

If that is the case, then rapid market share declines and expansions always are possible. Nokia's position is different than RIM's, to the extent that Windows Phone 7, matched with Nokia's manufacturing prowess, could change Microsoft's share of the mobile operating system market in dramatic ways many might have thought unlikely.

But it is clear that the Symbian gambit has failed Nokia, and RIM might face a similar fate with its email-optimized platform.

The Business Implications of an "Open" Mobile Ecosystem

One way of illustrating the complexity of the mobile broadband ecosystem is simply to take a look at the ecosystem visually. Econsultancy has a new "infographic" that includes a bewildering array of industry segments and roles. Download the chart here: http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/7649-mobile-stats-and-trends-at-a-glance. iuiui

If you routinely spend a lot of time following developments in the access provider space (telcos, cable), the first thing you will notice is how much of the ecosystem now exists outside the actual ownership of the access providers themselves.

A huge amount of activity now happens in the formerly distinct advertising, applications, content, publishing and commerce realms. Much of the activity occurs in realms allied to the access business, but still separate, such as mobile apps and devices.

Access providers are not just providers of "access to the Internet," of course, and if they have anything to say about the matter, increasingly will find new roles that build on the access role. But it might be striking to see an illustration of the mobile ecosystem where the "access" is such a tiny part of the overall fabric.

But that tells you quite a lot about the new and more open ecosystem that is the future of the access business.

The Mobile Ecosystem: An Overview