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It is a mistake to only focus on the location awareness aspect of mobile as its potential goes much deeper.

Mobile is a very personal device, the PC will often be shared but the mobile phone tends to enjoy a personal and monogamous relationship. It tends to be kept in close proximity at all times. A PC is turned on when needed a mobile phone is typically permanently on.

Whilst the web was about users surfing between brands, mobile offers the opportunity for a tighter, more valuable, relationship.

Search is replaced by one-off selection in an App Store. Organisations can now reach users at their point of need, pushing information outwards, and delivering services that are valuable at that precise time.

But the digital industry appears divided. Some argue that providing a web application tuned for mobile, accessible across many different handsets, is the most efficient and manageable solution. That is correct, it is, for the organisation.

Others understand that the future of mobile web is likely to lie in custom applications that the user chooses to download (thus removing future attention going to your competitors) and, crucially, fits in with the user experience of the handset.

A prerequisite to engaging the mobile consumer, is to provide an experience that is useful to them in their given context and fully meets their expectations in terms of usability.

The key to mobile engagement is to satisfy their needs immediately- by focusing on delivering utility and making life a little easier, better or more enjoyable.

Today we do see some blunt, early attempts at using geo-awareness. Websites and applications that try to combine the popularity of social media with the rudimentary functionality of recording where a user is, through the user checking in. Some, offer the potential for issuing reward vouchers based on location and other criteria.

Perhaps an interesting starting point, but hard to see how such applications really add value to the end user beyond a passing novelty. From an organisation’s perspective there is an intermediate brand now involved in the communication. This is undesirable and largely unnecessary.

So what could be done and what kind of applications really would drive deeper consumer engagement?

A typical application for a restaurant, today, will probably offer the ability to reserve a table combined with a location map and some generic content about the brand. But this does not really drive significant user interaction or show any thought for the end to end process.

Before arriving I would of course want to be able to book a table. But I also want turn by turn navigation to help me find the venue, or better somewhere to park. If I am delayed I would like the restaurant to know, automatically, so they can hold my table.

Once I have arrived at the restaurant I want the same application to become my menu, complete with specials for the specific restaurant that I am in, recommendations from my friends and actually, why not just let me order through it when I am ready?

Perhaps I would like to see what other dinners thought to the different menu choices in real time.

I want all of this through just one application.

That application now goes with me everywhere, and can receive notifications. This opens up a range of new ways for the relationship to develop, which may easily extend to beyond a place I just go to eat at occasionally.

Boarding the train of the future I anticipate my complimentary newspapers to be available online whilst I am on the train (yes they can pay for the subscription as part of my season ticket benefit). Before I board the train I would like to pay for my parking with a single press of one button. Payment can be taken via my pre-registered credit card.

The phone already knows where I am and when I return, so I can just pay for the time I use. Of course the same ‘train’ application is my season ticket, ad-hoc travel ticket, travel information and electronic concierge. One application extends and redefines my relationship with what was once just the train carrier.

Before I even arrive at the train station there are other new relationship opportunities. I may need fuel, a fact that surrounding service stations may find interesting.

The day of a real time reverse auction at individual consumer level is not far away. I would like my travel application to inform me of the best price that it has agreed for me.

Who provides the application? The manufacturer of my car, the petrol company, my mobile phone provider? The answer is who ever wants to own an ongoing relationship with me around supporting my travel. A very different, but viable, model that requires us to think differently about what engaging the consumer through mobile really means.

There are countless other examples; when the consumer is at home, at work, in a shopping centre, playing golf even! It is also important to remember that consumers maintain relationships with local authorities and other public services.

Mobile engagement provides opportunity for the public sector to improve efficiency.

The technology and the consumer are ready and waiting, how will your organisation engage them?

From: http://www.mycustomer.com/topic/customer-experience/engaging-mobile-consumer/107563?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mycustomer%2Fall+%28MyCustomer.com%29

Communicating with mobile consumers needs fresh thinking and new strategies- thus businesses need to appreciate why the mobile platform is different.

The mobile internet, and associated m-commerce, has been around for over 10 years.

Technologists have been trying to persuade consumers that internet on the move is real for many years. Do you remember WAP?

But despite the best efforts of marketers the consumer remained unconvinced. They spotted that using the internet (let alone websites) on their mobile phones was an even more painful experience than the internet that seldom answered their needs.

But things are different now. The mobile “phone” has become the convergent box of technology and the computing choice of the masses.

The internet is established in people’s lives. They have become dependent on it and expectant of the services it provides. It is a trusted source of news and a conduit for communicating personally and professionally in increasingly novel ways. Consumers use the internet without giving it, or the technology, a second thought.

Technology has moved on. A device that was once just used for making telephone calls is now perceived as something quite different. Bigger, colourful touch screens, keyboards, and faster connections has resulted in a plethora of new applications that feed the consumers craving for simpler ways to enhance their lives.

In return, consumers share ever increasing amounts of information with organisations and enter into new types of relationships with them.

Whilst consumers are keen for innovation and creative ideas, many brands and organisations seem slow to respond. Trying to repurpose websites and using outdated marketing techniques is insufficient. Organisations need to realise that mobile is different, the user is in a different context and web-like experiences simply won’t do.

For why- and what to do- please see Dr Search‘s next post.

Mobile marketing is now considered to be the 7th largest element of the marketing mix after online, TV,  newspapers, magazines, radio and cinema.

So what’s the best way to approach marketing to users of mobile devices? Today and for the next few posts Dr Search will be outling your best approach.

A brief history of mobile marketing

Marketing to mobile devices is widely believed to have started during the “dotcom” boom in the year 2000 with text message/SMS news services that were free but sponsored by advertising.

This evolved into mass promotion of events and alerts with even recent claims of “more than 100% response rate” by Marc Hyatt of Txtlocal, thanks to the viral effects of users forwarding messages to others.

SMS advertising, like forms of email marketing, can often be obtrusive and annoying, with the added inconvenience of costing users money based on their mobile service’s inbound SMS rates.

As such, it remains more effective as a “pull” medium rather than a “push” one, such as a means for polling or voting for programs like American Idol or Dancing with the Stars.

Mobile applications also began appearing in 2000 from Handmark. But apps didn’t really become mainstream for in-application advertising until Apple’s App Store for the iPhone arrived in 2008.

Android, Blackberry, Symbian, along with the iPhone and iPad have advanced mobile web browsing to near mainstream use as the Q1 2010 Nielsen Mobile Report found there are now over 72 million mobile web users in the United States.

Next Big Thing or are we there yet?

Mobile has been touted repeatedly at conferences over the past few years as the next big thing for marketing years. However, most predictions were based on traffic charts and pretty graphics with gaudy numbers, while ROI and tangible mobile marketing results were often missing from these chipper forecasts.

So where does this leave marketers in getting any real value with such a limited viewing real estate on mobile devices, often less than 4 inches?

Here are some of the main services a business can use to implement a mobile marketing strategy:

Google has announced its plans to turn Google Editions into a gateway for consumers to buy digital books.
Google has said that it will expand its Google Editions product later in the summer so that customers can click through to buy entire digital copies of books and read them in their web browsers. Crucially, the service will not focus on individual devices, instead aiming to be available on a wide range of products.

That move will put the search giant in direct competition with established digital book retailers such as Amazon’s Kindle Store and Apple’s iBook Store.

The new service was announced by Chris Palma, Google’s manager for strategic-partner development, at a publishing industry even held in Random House’s Manhattan offices, entitled: “The Book on Google: Is the Future of Publishing in the Cloud?” He said that partner websites would also be allowed to sell Google Editions and keep the bulk of the revenue from any sales.

“This levels the retail playing field,” Evan Schnittman, vice president of global business development for Oxford University Press, told the Wall Street Journal. “And as a publisher, what I like is that I won’t have to think about audiences based on devices. This is an electronic product that consumers can get anywhere as long as they have a Google account.”

Google hopes that retailers will advertise the service, and that users will click through to buy books from the company’s Book Search product. The company did not comment on the timing of European availability.

New gadgets such as the Blackberry and iPhone are ruining womens’ sex lives because their husbands are too distracted in the bedroom.

More woman claim they are having less sex because of the technology

More than a quarter of women (28 per cent) claim that email and internet are disrupting their love lives, with hand-held devices particularly to blame.

Other factors which prevent couples enjoying intimacy include long working hours (cited by 55 per cent of women), tiredness (83 per cent) and being too busy (74 per cent).

The research by pharmaceutical firm Bayer also shows that many women are missing their sexual peak by a decade.

More than one in two feel sexiest during their 30s, yet two in three have the most sex in their 20s.

One in ten women say their fear of pregnancy inhibits them in the bedroom, with one in five women admitting they shun contraception.

The survey found that on average British women have sex 1.4 times a week, but six in ten women aged between 25 and 34 would like a more active sex life.

Fifty-one per cent of women believe they reach their sexual peak in their 30s, but 66 per cent say they had their most sex during their 20s.

Two in three women (65 per cent) say their partners do not make enough effort in the bedroom, however, one in three women never initiate sex and always let their partner make the first move.

Four in ten women say it only takes a compliment to put them in the mood for sex, while one in three saying having more time to themselves would boost their sex life.

Perhaps disappointingly, more than a third of women say they have not felt sexy for at least a month and 14 per cent claim they have never felt sexy.

Facebook is facing growing criticism of its privacy policies after yet another embarrassing technical error exposed users’ private conversations to others.

The social networking site, which has more than 400 million users worldwide, was forced to suspend its “chat” feature for a number of hours while engineers fixed the bug in the software.

Private chats between some users were briefly viewable on a privacy settings feature that allows a user to see how their profile will appear to other users.

By manipulating the “preview my profile” feature, people were able to view their friends’ private chat messages and pending friend requests. The glitch was first reported by the TechCrunch blog.

The mistake happened as Facebook comes under increasing scrutiny from privacy campaigners.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in the US, said the privacy slip-up emphasised the need for greater scrutiny of the company.

“Our view is that the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] needs to act on consumer concerns about Facebook’s sloppy privacy and security practices,” he said.

Facebook changed the way users’ personal profile information is treated last month. It now requires that data about an individual’s home town, education and hobbies be tied to public pages devoted to those topics.

At an event in San Francisco the company also released new software tools and plug-ins that website developers and designers can add to their sites which will allow internet users to see personalised versions of websites they visit – but only if they are Facebook members.

By adding a new “like” button to their web pages, websites will be able to customise the experience for users based on the list of Facebook friends, favourite activities and other things users have shared on their profiles.

In effect the “identity” of Facebook users will follow them whereever they roam on the internet, as long as they are already logged in to Facebook.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group, has criticised the changes, alleging that they reduce control of an individual’s personal information and fail to offer an easy “opt-out” preference.

Four US senators wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, last week to take issue with some of the changes.

Candid Wueest, from the internet security firm Symantec, said: “For any organisation, whether you are a social networking site or not, privacy breaches are worrying.

“Unfortunately, this isn’t the first privacy breach of its kind to plague a social networking site. Other high-profile sites have also been affected with similar problems.

“Privacy settings lead people to be a little freer in the content they share on social networking sites, as it enables users to have control over who can see the content posted.

“It is therefore important that all social networking sites regularly review the policies in which the privacy settings sit.”

An ongoing disagreement means hundreds of millions of Apple customers are unable to watch an estimated 75 per cent of online video on their cutting edge mobile devices.
With the iPad’s arrival in the UK imminent, the fallout has escalated, with significant implications for the future of the internet.

Almost all online video embedded in websites requires a programme called Adobe Flash Player to work. Despite the pervasive presence of Flash on the internet, Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, long ago barred it from working on his company’s iPhones, iPods and iPads.

In February, Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, accused Mr Jobs of building a “walled garden” around his products, arguing that the restrictions on Flash were part of a plot to ensure that Apple customers could only use software bought from the company’s own online store.

Others in the technology industry have accused the company of monopoly building.

But last week, Mr Jobs hit back. A 1,600 word post entitled “Thoughts on Flash” appeared on Apple’s website, in which he said the two companies had “few joint interests”, adding that “Flash has not performed well on mobile devices” and that “we also know first-hand that Flash is the number one reason [Apple's desktop computer] Macs crash”.

He added that Flash had a poor security record and that “we don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash”.

“Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers,” he wrote, before adding: “Adobe should focus more on creating great… tools for the future, and less on criticising Apple for leaving the past behind.”

Apple has reiterated its disapproval of Apps using a third-party development tool like Flash. The reasoning behind it is that development platforms target the lowest common denominator. Jobs writes “we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms”.

Mr Narayen responded by saying the post was “really a smokescreen”, telling the Wall Street Journal that Apple’s policy of blocking Flash had “nothing to do with technology”. He also pointed out that if the programme crashes Apple devices, it had more “to do with the Apple operating system” than with Flash.

Adobe’s chief technology officer, Kevin Lynch, said the company would create a “great landscape of choice” for other, Flash-enabled mobile devices manufactured by Apple’s rivals, including Google, Nokia, Palm and Microsoft.

But for the foreseeable future, iPhones users will just have to make do with static pictures.

Senior watchdog officials spent hours viewing pornographic material on US government computers when they should have been regulating Wall Street during the worst fiscal crisis since the 1930s.

An internal report by the Securities and Exchange Commission concluded that more than 30 officials were investigated for accessing explicit images on work computers – 17 of those were senior staff earning between $100,000 and $222,000 per year.

The worst offenders were caught accessing thousands of images, spending up to eight hours a day looking at pornography and burning the inappropriate material on to scores of CDs and DVDs kept in boxes at the regulator’s offices.

Republicans accused SEC officials of being “preoccupied with other distractions” when they should have been overseeing the growing problems in the financial system.

Darrell Issa, the senior Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said it was “disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation’s economy on the brink of collapse”.

The SEC’s internal watchdog conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years. A memo, which emerged last night, says 31 of those probes occurred in the two and a half years since the financial system was destabilised by the collapse of sub-prime mortgage investments.

The memo, written by David Kotz, the SEC Inspector General, summarises some of the most egregious offences. One senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign after being investigated.

An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a single month by an internet filter that prevented him from entering pornographic websites. Despite repeated automated refusals, he still amassed a collection of “very graphic” material on his hard drive.

Another accountant — a woman — attempted to explicit websites 1,800 times in a fortnight. She was found to have 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive The number of cases at the SEC, which is responsible for maintaining stable and orderly financial markets, increased from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008.

John Nester, an SEC spokesman, said that each of the offending employees has been disciplined or is in the process of being disciplined, and some have already been suspended or dismissed.

“We will not tolerate the transgressions of the very few who bring discredit to their thousands of hardworking colleagues,” he said.

Most popular searches? According to Hitwise the most popular search term at all three search engines for March 2010 was- Facebook.

Amazing, but true. Some web searchers are going to one or more of the search engines to find a very common and well-known URL. Yes, it would make some sense that as more people become Facebook users (they have nearly 400 million these days) they might head to a search engine to find the URL.

Of course, some of those new users likely read an article, watched a television program or heard a radio show where the URL was mentioned but they still go searching for it. Some of the searches likely came from people who know the URL but don’t have Facebook.com as a bookmark or as their homepage and just want to type it into a search engine.

Of the search terms they [Hitwise] tracked on Google, 1.17% of those searches were for Facebook. Bing had more, with 2.6% and Yahoo saw 1.70%.

You might also be interested in knowing that searches for “YouTube” were #2 on Google, while searches for Yahoo and Yahoo.com were #7 and #9 at G.

On Yahoo, Google was #6, ebay #8, and Yahoo Mail #9.

In other words, searchers go to Yahoo and search to get to Yahoo Mail instead of  actually clicking on the Yahoo Mail link that’s on many Yahoo pages.

Bing? Google was #2, YouTube #6, and Yahoo.com #8.

The complete list is available directly from Hitwise.

Overall, Facebook related terms accounted for eight searches across the three top 10 lists.

Yahoo! related terms accounted for six spots while MySpace terms accounted for four searches across the search engines. Other search terms that were among the top 10 searches for all three search engines include youtube, facebook login, craigslist and yahoo mail.

We wouldn’t be at ALL surprised that these and similar terms top the most popular list just about every month.

It does show that there is still a huge role for online marketers to explain, teach, train, demo, (insert your term here) how to be more effective doing something that they likely do 365 days a year.

Plus, we think becoming a better searcher is a marketable skill and can help save you, your employer, etc. time (so precious) and simultaneously become more info literate on related issues like quality, currency, and accuracy of what’s found.

So, like many other areas of the business profession, we have so much to offer and we need to get people to listen. Once again, it’s a marketing issue.

With thanks to: http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/04/29/what-were-the-most-popular-search-terms-at-google-bing-and-yahoo-during-march/