1 Facebook fan = 20 additional visits, says Hitwise

For retailers, each new fan acquired on Facebook is worth 20 additional visits to a brand website over the course of a year," says Hitwise. If true, that is one of the best data points I've seen yet about the return on investment from Facebook campaigns, at least if you assume sales are related to traffic on Facebook and other sites.

Our data shows that for the top retailers, even if they have no Facebook fans they can still expect to receive on average 62,000 visits from Facebook each month, says Hitwise.

Facebook is the second most visited website in the United Kingdom, after Google, and is now the second biggest source of traffic to other websites as well, Hitwise says. That is one reason Facebook likely has to be part of any brand's content marketing strategy.

About one in every six page views from U.K. Internet users goes to a Facebook page, and 20 million hours are spent on the website every day from UK users alone.

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2011/06/1_facebook_fan_20_additional_v.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+hitwise+%28Hitwise+Intelligence%29

Social Gaming Grows

Social gaming has become a mass phenomenon for Generation X and millennial adults, according to research from Saatchi & Saatchi and Ipsos OTX MediaCT.

Consultancy eMarketer believes U.S. social gaming revenues will pass $1 billion in 2011, and a May 2011 survey of US internet users ages 18 to 44 found that half play social games every day.

Among tablet owners, two thirds reported gaming each day, and more than half of smartphone owners said the same.

Parenthetically, one of the elements I do see "missing" from most discussions of mobile wallets and payments is the element of "fun." Granted, payments, credentials and wallets are serious matters requiring a sober approach. But fun tends to be associated with apps that "go viral."

Web Users Welcome Brands to Social Games - eMarketer

Google Tests own NFC Base Statiions in Japan

Google has launched a near field communications experiment in Tokyo, creating NFC base stations that people can use to quickly and easily share their opinions about various locations in Tokyo.

When users tap the base station with their NFC-enabled phone they can immediately leave a rating or review for the place where the station is located. They can also star the place for later or share it with friends and get recommendations about other similar places.

Japan might provide interesting insights, given the high percentage of NFC-equipped handsets already in use, as well as the proclivity for using new mobile capabilities.

Note the emphasis on content, annotation of the real world and local business angle. That is part of Google's perspective on why NFC is is important: it creates new channels and venues for growing the mobile advertising, local advertising and local promotions and social shopping businesses.

Connecting Business Owners and Customers in Tokyo - Google Places Blog

Google Wallet Will be Ported to iPhones

If iPhones get near field communications, Google will port its Google Wallet to iOS, says Eric Schmidt, Google executive chairman. Google Wallet now is a service that runs on Androids, but there is no reason in principle, or even strategically, for Google to limit the reach of its Google Wallet service based on operating system or even handset dimensions.

Apple hasn't yet clarified what it believes its own role will be in the ecosystem, but it does not appear that Apple and Google are targeting the same spots within the business. Google is going to chase the local advertising and promotion opportunity. Apple might decide to leverage iTunes in some way. http://www.mobilemarketingandtechnology.com/2011/toppost/google-mobile-wallet-who-ultimately-controls-the-credentials-process/

The only regularly available NFC-aware smart phones in the US are the Nexus S and Nexus S 4G, but a number of companies have indicated they are moving forward with the feature.

All of RIM's upcoming phones, like the BlackBerry Bold 9900, will have it built-in. Nokia's N9 and possibly its Windows Phone devices will have the short-range wireless. LG and Sony Ericsson have pledged their own support using Android. Apple has been rumored signing on but has seen contradictory rumors that it might wait until 2012.

But one the big issues,, namely the question of which entity controls loading of credentials into the phones, remains unsettled. Both carriers and handset manufacturers have their own reasons for wanting to control the process. See

http://ecommerceblog.fastpivot.com/mobile-store/is-googles-new-mobile-wallet-payment-app-a-sitting-duck/.

Several of us on a panel were asked recently how long it would take for NFC to be adopted. It's a harder question that you would think, in part because you have to decide what "adopted" means. It is one thing to ask how long it will take for most phones to include NFC as a feature. It is another question to ask how long before 20 percent of devices in use have NFC.

My own take at the moment is that adoption is going to take longer than people think. Over the next five years, for example, there will be slower progress than innovators need to scale their offers. At some point after that, possibly in another five years, an inflection point could be reached. Again, the issue is what dimension of NFC deployment we decide to focus on. Availability of the feature will arrive sooner than "ubiquitous and daily use" by consumers.

Even harder to predict is which firms might ulitmately lead the market, or key segments of the market, and why. I used the analogy of 1995 and Netscape to illustrate where we are in the developing business. In 1995, if you used Netscape, there were not a lot of things you could do. Most corporate sites consisted of simple "brochures online."

You couldn't really communicate with other people in real time, within the medium. You couldn't interrogate data bases. You couldn't buy anything, listen to music, watch movies or post photos. Sometimes you could not comment directly within the context of the site visits. You couldn't make or change a reservation.

But that's where we are today. It isn't possible to predict with certainty what will trigger the massive end user and retailer value that causes the capabilities to "go viral." It isn't possible to predict the future leaders for the same reasons. Remember that Netscape was eclipsed. And if you look at all the ways people now use browsers, it would have been hard to predict in 1995 what the level of usage might be, what the apps would be or who the leaders would be.

Google: we'll bring Wallet to iPhone if it gets NFC | Electronista

Google’s Schmidt Predicts Contactless Terminal Rollout | NFC Times New – Near Field Communication and all contactless technology.

Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt reportedly predicts that one third of U.S. point-of-sale terminals would accept contactless payment within a year, a penetration rate that he said would be “sufficient” for widespread adoption of NFC-based mobile commerce.

But upgrading a third of the terminals in the United States within a year would be a tall order, given that, at present, only about 2% of the roughly 7 million card-accepting merchant locations in the United States have been equipped with contactless POS terminals since the U.S. contactless-payment rollout began seven years ago. And many merchant locations have multiple POS terminals.

And all of that assumes a clear value proposition for consumers, retailers and other participants in the ecosystem. Many believe it is unlikely all that will come together so quickly.

Google’s Schmidt Predicts Contactless Terminal Rollout

Tablets Emerge as Movie, Full-Length TV Platforms

Tablets are said to be “content consumption” devices, and a new study by The study, conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates., which surveyed 2,482 people, between the ages of 8 to 64, backs up that contention. 

The study found that tablets are preferred to PCs for virtually every form of content consumption.


The study also found that long-form video is preferred over short clips, on tablets. 

That should ultimately have important implications for providers of online video services, as it establishes the suitability of the tablet for long-form video of the sort sold by multichannel video providers and Netflix.


Fully 55 percent of respondents watched full-length movies on their tablets and 56 percent watched full-length TV shows.

Some 87 percent of U.S. tablet users alao are accessing content and information on their devices, the dominant activity for tablets, says the new study sponsored by the Online Publishers Association (OPA). You might also say tablets are “app consumption” devices.


A copy of the study’s findings is available at www.online-publishers.org.

35% of Deals Customers are "New Business"

It's a reasonable question whether consumers using daily deals and social shopping services represent new business, or simply attract regular customers while cutting profit margins.

A new study by ForeSee Results suggests that 35 percent of daily deals shoppers are actually new business for the retailers using the deal programs.

According to ForeSee, 38 percent of the people purchasing daily deals were already frequent customers of the merchant in question, 31 percent are brand new business, and four percent were former customers, which translates to 35 percent new business.

Furthermore, since the remaining 27 percent are described as "infrequent customers," you could even argue that, in total, 62 percent of daily deal buyers are the people merchants are most keen to reach.

New Data For The Daily Deal Value Debate: “1/3 Of Buyers Are Brand New Business”