Wireless: Where We are Going

There weren’t any surprises in the Federal Communications Commission’s recent report on wireless competition, but one tidbit, already made available by the National Health Interview Survey, is an indicator of where things are going.

The number of adults who rely exclusively on mobile wireless for voice service has increased significantly in recent years. According to the January to June 2010 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), 24.9 percent of adults, or one in every four, lived in households with wireless phones only during the first half of 2010.

In its most recent study, the NHIS found that 30 percent of respondents only used mobile phones during the last half of 2010, an increase of three percentage points since the first half of 2010. In addition, about 16 percent of respondents indicated they received all or almost all calls on wireless telephones despite having a landline phone in the home as well.

More than half of adults aged 25 to 29 (54 percent) lived in households with only wireless telephones. This rate is greater than the rates for adults aged 18 to 24 (46 percent) or 30 to 34 (44 percent), according to the NHIS survey.

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Tablets Are Changing User Behavior

Today’s early tablet adopters are using print media, PCs, and other devices less often than they used to, according to Sarah Rotman Epps, Forrester Research analyst. Some 31 percent of tablet owners surveyed report they are using their PCs less, while 26 percent are using their notebooks or laptops less.

Of the tablet owners surveyed, 23 percent reported using their portable game player less, while 20 percent said they are using their iPod or MP3 player less. About 15 percent reported using their mobile phone less than they used to.

E-reader use seemed to be lower in about 11 percent of cases, while nine percent reported lower use of their game consoles. Some nine percent say they use television less.

Tablet early adopters, though arguably different from tomorrow’s mainstream adopters, nevertheless seemingly are changing their content habits as well, not just their hardware habits.

Of tablet owners surveyed by Forrester Research, 32 percent reported that their tablet use has been accompanied by less use of print newspapers. About 28 percent say they have reduced use of printed books, while 23 percent indicated they use print magazines less.

Tablets Are Changing User Behavior

Mapping the Mobile Commerce Ecosystem | www.payfone.com

Here's another look at the developing mobile commerce ecosystem, with payments and banking being viewed as parts of the broader mobile commerce landscape, produced by Mooreland Partners.

Payfone | Mapping the mCommerce Ecosystem | www.payfone.com

Google Sites Goes Mobile

Google has added a new feature to "Google Sites" that allows small businesses and others to create mobile sites themselves. Google Sites "mobile landing pages" allows retailers and companies to create professional-looking mobile home pages without any coding experience.

Google has been offering the Google Sites program to give businesses and consumers a way to quickly build their own websites with no HTML knowledge required, making it relatively easy for anyone without a technical background to build a simple website. Until now, the platform has not had a mobile component.

Google Sites "for mobile" allows users to pick a template that suits the consumer’s needs, such as an e-commerce template for users who want a mobile site to sell products using Google Checkout. Google also offers customer mobile templates for local businesses, restaurants, lead generation and social.

On these mobile sites, businesses and users can include the ability to integrate their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and other social accounts.

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Will Google+ Succeed?

I have no idea whether Google+ will be success. But I would say it seems as though Google has a shot at creating a social network experience that fixes a problem many people routinely encounter with Facebook, namely that it is indiscriminate. The whole idea of "Circles" is that real social networks come in "real" groups, not imaginary "communities." There's your family, your extended set of friends, your high school or college buddies, the circle of your business associates and then the various other groups you have in life. See Read more here.

Nobody seems to think Google+ will replace Facebook, and that's probably healthy and realistic. The issue is whether Google can tap something new, such as the fact that Facebook "friends" are a jumbled mess of all kinds of people from all kinds of natural groups, and increasingly also includes people you don't even know.

"Not all relationships are created equal," Google says. "The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food—wrapping everyone in “friend” paper—and sharing really suffers."  Read more here.

Among the obvious problems Google says Circles will fix include the fact that "we only want to connect with certain people at certain times, but online we hear from everyone all the time." Because every online conversation (with over 100 “friends”) is a public performance, so we often share less." And there is no ability to account for important nuances in real social relationships.

43% of U.S. Firms Use Social Networks for Customer Acquisition

According to a new survey by Regus, 43 percent of firms are successfully using social networking to win new customers, up eight percentage points from last year’s survey. The research also reveals more firms are using social media to engage with existing customers than a year ago

About 50 percent of businesses in the United States use applications such as Twitter to engage, connect with and inform existing customers, says Regus.

In the United States, 55 percent of firms encourage their employees to join social networks such as Linkedin and Xing. Also, 38 percent of U.S. companies dedicate up to 20 percent of their marketing budget to business social networking activity.

Globally, the survey reported a seven percent increase in the proportion of businesses successfully recruiting new customers through social networks such as Facebook.

43 Percent of U.S. Businesses Using Social Media, Social Networks to Win New Business

An Explosion of New Types of Content

Just about everything is changing in the video business, including the ways advertisers do video content and messaging. As video on demand is a reflection of increased demand for video wherever people are, using whatever devices are available, so video advertising now is changing to reflect the increased ability consumers have to simply ignore the messages.

Advertising and public relations are two different ways of accomplishing the business goal of communicating value to external constituencies, prospects and potential buyers. Owned media, content marketing or custom publishing are other ways to achieve many of the same objectives. So it might be revealing that practitioners from the "advertising" start talking about an "absolute explosion of new types of content from brands."

So says Chris Schreiber, director of marketing at social video advertising company Sharethrough. A leading expert on social content strategy, Chris recently presented a two-hour workshop on viral video at the Cannes Lions festival.

Simply, more "storytelling" is going to happen, with much more investment in content creation. In advertising as well as elsewhere, pushing messages at people doesn't work as well as it used to. These days, people have to be enticed to come check something out, hang around and then share.

5 Ways the Advertising Industry Is Preparing for a Digital Future: