Two-Thirds of iPhone Users Now Use Location-Based Services at Least Once a Week
While services like Gowalla and Foursquare still haven’t become household names outside of the early adopter market yet, the technology behind these apps is now solidly mainstream. According to a new survey by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), about two thirds of iPhone owners now user location services at least once a week. Taking all cell phone users into account, 22% of adults between 25 and 34 use location services at least once a week, mostly to locate nearby points of interests, shops and services. Sponsor Focus: Location-Based Apps and Advertising The survey also asked users how likely they are to take action on location-based advertising on their mobile devices. According to the MMA, about half of those users who noticed ads in location-based apps took some action. On the other hand, only about 37% of respondents who noticed ads while sending or receiving text messages took any action based on these commercial messages. For those we noticed ads while browsing the web, this number was only 28% (which still seems rather high to us). Given that most people use location-based apps when they are already looking for a certain store or product, it makes sense that these users are more likely to respond to ads than people who are just browsing the web. Are Users Really Willing to Let Apps Track Them Passively in Return for Discounts? “Consumers are interested in allowing their phone to automatically share their location in exchange for perks, such as free use of mobile applications and mobile coupons.” Interestingly, the MMA survey also notes that “consumers are interested in allowing their phone to automatically share their location in exchange for perks, such as free use of mobile applications and mobile coupons.” While mobile coupons and other perks are definitely interesting to consumers, passive location services that track consumers in return for discounts have never really been tested in the wild. These services may sound good on paper, but the privacy implications of using these apps are hard to neglect and it remains to be seen if users are actually willing to give up their privacy in return for a 10% discount at Crate and Barrel. Chances are that we will see more of these passive tracking services once the iPhone 4 operating system arrives later this year. The current generation of the iPhone’s operating system doesn’t allow apps to run in the background and track your location, but this will be possible in the next version of the iPhone OS. Discuss
To Be (a Brand) or Not To Be (a Brand)
Although securing and promoting your company’s brand is an important step when starting a business, and although protecting that brand can be an ongoing concern, the question of what it means to associate a person with a company brand is a lot more complicated – a fact made obvious in light of Tiger Wood’s sex scandals. The companies that featured Woods in their advertising had sought to latch onto Tiger-Woods-as-a-brand – an image crafted to suggest his tenacity, reliability, skill, and success. Sponsor The gulf we now see between Tiger-Woods-as-a-brand – “the perfect role model” – and Tiger Woods as a flawed human being points to some of the potential dangers in associating your company’s brand with a person. Of course, few startups are in the position to build a brand based on a celebrity’s image or reputation. Instead, if there is a person associated with the startup’s brand, it is likely someone from within the company. Tiger Woods serves as a cautionary tale, obviously for the businesses who endorsed him but also for individuals who seek to promote themselves as a brand. Despite concerns about people as brands (branding is, after all, what we do to cattle ), the power of brands continues to be a way to quickly identify a product or service or idea with your business. For many entrepreneurs, developing a brand isn’t merely a matter of creating a company brand, but of also crafting a personal brand. The idea of a personal brand is hardly new, often traced back to a 1997 article by Tom Peters, “The Brand Called You” : “To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.” It may be that some of the fallout from the Tiger Woods scandal has made the idea of personal branding seem trickier – people are people, after all, not objects and not cattle. As Doc Searls has argued in two recent blog posts, brands are ” boring ” at best and ” bull ” at worst. Technological innovation has made personal branding easier, in some regards. Registering a domain name under your own name has become an incredibly straightforward and inexpensive process . Having a domain name is a simple step in helping make sure that content you produce is readily associated with your name. And services like Google Alerts can be useful to monitor the Internet for mention of your name. The rise of social media has made creating an online presence quite simple, but signing up for social media networks or having a LinkedIn profile for example, is not necessarily sufficient or suitable for crafting your personal brand. As the information available online about all of us increases, it is likely that our ability to create and maintain personal branding will become more difficult. Undoubtedly, building trust is fundamental to business success. Maintaining reputation is crucial, whether or not you want your name to be synonymous with a product, a service or a company. What are your thoughts on personal branding? Has it become impossible? Or has it become ubiquitous? Discuss
Quicktake Analysis: What Twitter’s “Promoted Tweets” Means To The Ecosystem
The Altimeter Group was pre-briefed by Twitter COO Dick Costolo last week about this upcoming launch, we’ve had some time to think over what it means to the industry. Help your boss fight through the clutter, send them this post. Summary: Twitter has launched Promoted Tweets, combining paid and organic media. Brands can now advertise promoted tweets on search pages, however the community has power over which tweets will appear measured by Twitter’s new metric called “resonance” which factors in behaviors like the retweet, at, hash, avatar clicks. Brands can now purchase CPM based ads to promote these popular tweets at the top of a Twitter search term –even in categories they aren’t well known in, influencing awareness. Marketers beware: unlike traditional advertising or social marketing this is both a combination of earned media and paid media. For Twitter this experimental move makes sense as it taps into deep pockets of online advertisers without jeapordizing sanctity of the community as users will self select which tweets will resonate and thereby become promoted ads. How it will work, a likely use case scenario: Twitter users will continue to interact with each other, and popular tweets will receive a high ‘resonance’ score from Twitter. Some of these Tweets will be created by brands, and some by the users themselves. Tweets with heavy resonance can be purchased by advertisers in a CPM basis to appear as the first ’sponsored’ Tweet on a search term. The sponsored tweets will be clearly labeled and have a different background color. These promoted tweets will only stay if users continue to resonate with them, those that don’t will disappear and a different tweet with resonation will appear. Matrix: What Twitter’s Promoted Tweets Business Model Means to the Ecosystem This has several implications to the ecosystem as a whole, we’ve broken down the impacts to the various players in this matrix: Player Direct Impacts What They Will Do What No One Tells You Twitter Finally gets a business model beyond search deal partnerships with potential to scale. Taps into deep pockets of online advertisers. Experiment. Expect black and gray hat marketers to try to game this system, in order to obtain resonance. Twitter will constantly tune algorhythm like Google does. Expect this to cascade to their partners and grow into the ecosystem as Twitter aggregates resonation on other 3rd party sites Twitter Users Have power over which promoted ads will stay visible Initially be shocked by changes, then learn they can help self select tweets that will be promoted.. In the real time resonace world users have a lot more power Power tweeters like celebs and digerati will be targeted by marketers to engage and resonate tweets. Twitter users that retweet tweets may be surprised to see their promoted tweets in search engine results ads. Social Marketers The conversation is now being monetized, with changes to the outcomes of whats expected of the online conversation and engagement. Educate traditional marketers. These folks will try to increase resonance of tweets by interacting with community. Will build an inventory of top promotable tweets Don’t go overboard, make sure you think of this in the larger context of integrated marketing. Avoid shiny tool syndrome. Must pay close attention to what terms are resonating with community to build inventory Direct Marketers and Advertisers Finally traditional advertisers and direct marketers have skin in the social game in a way they know. Flail. Many will try to buy their way in and obtain resonation without asking why a tweet resonates. Will fight over top searched terms in Twitter, expect a lot of contests to promote tweet engagement. Expect tension between this marketer and the social marketer if education is not completed. Developers and Agencies A clear goal (resonation) has been put forth, with opportunity to get a cut of the incoming advertising dollars. Developers are waiting with baited breathe for Chirp developers conference this week to see how this will be tied in. Twitter has indicated that promoted tweets will spread to clients, expect revenue sharing to be offered Don’t buy the first ‘resonation solution’ that comes around, expect half a dozen vendors and agencies to approach brands in the next quarter offering the ability to increase ‘resonance’ and case studies will show increase in resonance. Competitors and Search Engines A new player being in town a new form of advertising is afoot changing the game. Expect nervous deals to come to the table on how search engine results can factor in Twitter’s resonance. Expect players like MSFT and Yahoo to quickly launch their version of defining how the social web should be categorized. They will have the advantage of built in ad base of advertisers and millions more users. Expect existing Twitter partners Google Search and Microsoft Bing will fold this in and reward resonance and combine with page rank, or will create their own metric to reward social engagement For Resonation, Brands Must Pay Closer Attention To Users –This Isn’t Traditional Spray And Pray. Power continues to be in the hands of the users, however brands that pay attention to why tweets resonate will have a leg up. here’s how you should approach this new space: Change your mindset, as organic and paid merge: This is a combination of organic and paid ads, you’ll need skills from both worlds to be successful. Direct marketers should educate social marketers, and social marketers should explain how resonation occurs in the conversational web. Remember, this gives top tweets staying power beyond the constant stream of chatter. In the end, remember that users have power over which advertising inventory will be created, chosen, and allowed to stay as a promoted tweet. Remember Twitter users have power over which promoted Tweets will work: Remember that users they get to choose which tweets can be put into the advertising inventory as their interaction will self select which tweets can become promoted. Secondly, promoted tweets that don’t yield community engagement will also fall off the stream. is that in the real time resonance world users have a lot more power. Brands must analyze what works for users first before promoting tweets. Then, carefully pick tweets to be promoted by analyzing the conversation: First, monitor which tweets are already resonating with your brand, take note of what is causing it to resonate and in what context. Secondly, recognize that these tweets should have long term impact, not a daily special as the tweet is promoted, users will interact with it, forcing it into a viral loop. For best results, experiment with promoting tweets from your customers –not just those that you create. Recognize that ‘Resonance’ is the page rank of microblogging: Advertising agencies and social marketing agencies will come out of woodwork with “resonance solutions”, yet most will do it wrong. Instead, look for a sophisticated partner that knows the value of social conversational marketing to create an inventory and the long term experience of an advertising agency. Expect resonation to also cascade to other social networks like Facebook and even community platforms and content management systems to derive what content should surface. Twitter has made nods to new dashboards to appear, expect your agency partners to align around resonation as the new ROI. This post is the result of the collaborative efforts of the Altimeter team including Charlene Li (Leadership), Alan Webber (Web User Experience/Government), Michael Gartenberg (Mobile and Devices) and Christine Tran (Customer Strategy Research), learn more about the Altimeter Group . For more news, see Twitter blog , AdAge , and NYT for details . > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >
Why iAds Could be Bigger Than iPads
Apple unveiled the 4.0 version of the iPhone operating system yesterday and a big part of the announcement was about a new advertising platform called iAd . Apple will soon provide an easy way for app developers to put advertisements in their mobile apps and keep 60% of the revenue. Tech financial analysts are going bonkers over the news , with one headline-grabbing prediction putting the opportunity at $4.67 billion per year for Apple. Why? Because the platform has the potential to change online advertising like nothing else has in a long time. Sponsor Cullen Wilson offers this explanation on the Austin Startup Blog : The reason iAd has a chance to change how users interact with ads is simple: The fear and unknown of clicking on an ad is gone. Apple is throwing its brand behind an entire ad network to create the perception that if you trust Apple, you can trust these ads too! Worried about installing malware from clicking on that ad? Hate that ads open up a new window? No problem, Apple has solved this by keeping these ads within the app itself and vetting all of the ads on their network. iAd reminds me of two ad networks I’m already a fan of, The Deck and Fusion Ads . Their ads are well designed, they advertise in applications I use and love, and they vet everyone on the network before accepting them. If you’ve ever used the free Twitter clients Tweetie or Twitterrific, you’ve seen these ads. If Apple can convince its users that it’s safe to click anything with the iAd logo they will have single handedly changed the perception users have of ads, resulting in more clicks and more money made by both Apple and developers. They will have done this by taking advantage of a closed system, their own brand, and a platform that their users already love (the app store). The iPad is clearly changing peoples’ experience with computing – take one out around non-geeks and you’ll see strangers clamor to get their hands on it. But if Apple can transform mobile advertising from an annoyance to a trusted, appealing experience – that would be huge. The iAd platform could impact advertising more than the iPad impacts computing. It may very well generate more revenue, too. Wilson points out that though many people complain about the closed nature of the App Store, this is the other side of the coin and is worth considering. One question I have about this is how scalable vetting such a huge ad platform could be. Where there’s money to be printed, there must be money to pay ad examiners, though. If the platform can prove effective and make app building all the more financially viable, then we as users can cheer for a new world of apps that will be built in the future. If Apple can deliver a high-quality experience on the iAd platform, then we as users can cheer for a less grating experience than a wild west of mobile advertising would likely deliver. There is something a little frightening about Apple’s end-to-end control over the platform though, isn’t there? What do you think about iAd? Do you think it will be effective? Revolutionary? Do you think it’s fair? Discuss
Google Introduces Search Funnel, Ad Innovations
Today Google introduced two new elements to its popular advertising system, a Search Funnel and something it is calling Ad Innovations . The company’s VP of product management, Susan Wojcicki, described the Search Funnel as a “set of reports describing the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion.” Sponsor The idea is that users of the Sales Funnel will, over time, tighten and focus their use of Google Ads to such a degree that they will be able to sell a grommet to an Albanian from outer space. “The data you see in Search Funnels can help you understand how users search for your products before converting so that you can optimize these conversion paths.” Ad Innovations is a specialist website Google has set up to “work closely with advertisers on what comes next.” They intend to use the space to debut ad-tech ideas and solicit user feedback. Photo by Danny Sullivan. Discuss