Posts Tagged ‘marketing’
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
Technology news site Arab Crunch posted some interesting Facebook statistics yesterday from InsideFacebook’s most recent Gold Report (read the ArabCrunch story here). According to InsideFacebook, Facebook’s Arabic language interface is now the fastest growing language version inthe world, growing by 18% per month. According to Spot On’s research, Facebook’s Arabic platform in the Middle East & North Africa added about 1 million new users during the past three months (accounting for about half of all new users in the region) and the momentum that the Arabic platform has is changing the Facebook demographics for countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt for ever.
Language preference of MENA Facebook users (as percentage)
As expected, the language bias for Saudi Arabia’s Facebook users has now switched from English to Arabic. During the past three months the percentage of Facebook Arabic users in Saudi Arabia has crossed the 50% mark and now stands at 53% of total users of the platform. It’s a change of a few percent, but it’s going to be increasingly important for marketers as Facebook reaches new demographics of users, perhaps previously put off by having to user its English language interface.
Numbers of Facebook users by country (in millions)
Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Morocco added the most new Facebook users during the past three months, with Egypt adding 641,000 new users. Egypt also added the most Arabic language users during the past three months, which accounted for 57% of its total new users added to Facebook. However, 81% of all new Saudi Facebook users were adopters of the Arabic platform. At this rate, we could well be looking at a 60:40 percent ratio of Arabic to English Facebook users in Saudi by the beginning of next year.
Overall, Facebook users in the Middle East and North Africa grew by 15% over the past three months adding some 2.2 million new Facebook users and bringing the total MENA Facebook population to 17.3 million.
Want to read more?
If you liked reading this post MENA Internet users, you might like our other Internet demographics and habits surveys:
Media consumption & habits of MENA Internet users (July 2010)
15 Million MENA Facebook Users – Report (May 2010)
Twitter & Customer Service Survey (March 2010)
Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (2009)
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If you would like to receive reports like this by email click here to join Spot On PR’s mailing list.
Tags:Arab World, ArabCrunch, Arabic, Carrington Malin, communications, digital marketing, Egypt, Facebook, InsideFacebook, Internet, marketing, MENA, Middle east, Morocco, Online marketing, research, Saudi, Saudi Arabia, social media, social networking, statistics, UAE, United Arab Emirates
Posted in Facebook, General, Internet, Internet research, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, research, social media | 3 Comments »
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Scroll down the page for survey download links
The figures in our new Media Consumption & Habits of MENA Internet Users Survey simply confirm what everyone involved in the Middle East’s growing digital marketing industry has already been talking about for the past year or two: Internet connectivity has become pervasive amongst many of our key target audiences and is now a significant part of their daily lives. The new research survey conducted by Effective Measure in conjunction with Spot On PR, underscores that the Internet opportunity is not just something that exists in the USA or Europe, its right here in the MENA region too. It’s not just a rich thing. It’s not just a youth thing. (And its not just a Facebook thing either). The Internet’s reach is now much broader than that and its influence in the Middle East and North Africa is now truly rivalling its traditional media counterparts and providing marketers with real (and highly measureable) alternatives.
Here are some of the survey’s key findings:
- MENA Internet users now spend more time browsing the Internet than they do watching TV.
- 88% of those surveyed stated that they access the Internet daily
- 71% of those surveyed stated that they watched television daily.
- Most traditional media have peaks and troughs in attention. Radio and newspapers achieve peak share of audience in the morning. Television audiences peak in the evening. However, the Internet holds audience attention fairly consistently throughout the day and well into the night.
- 28% more respondents watched TV during peak viewing hours than when viewership is at its lowest, at 7%),
- 20% of respondents stated that they use the Internet at any time-period surveyed, peaking at 33% in the evening (just 13% higher than the lowest period).
- Predictably, 73% of the survey’s respondents cited email as the activity they most often carried out online, ranking abover all other online activities.
- Social networking and search activities followed as the next highest ranking online activities for MENA Internet users, all coming it at about 40%.
- 54% of Internet users surveyed used mobile applications daily.
- 79% of Internet users surveyed spent up to three hours per day updating their social networks. 20% spent more than three hours updating their social networks.
- Internet users were more positive to companies and brands using “Internet marketing” than they were towards companies and brands using “social media marketing”.
- Most responses to our survey showed little variance between male and female respondents. However, there were a number of notable differences between the genders in their stated experiences with social media.
Survey Downloads
Download the full survey report (PDF)
Download the press release (English, Word doc)
Download the press release (Arabic, Word doc)
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Media consumption & habits of MENA Internet users by Effective Measure and Spot On Public Relations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Want to read more?
If you liked reading this post MENA Internet users, you might like our other Internet demographics and habits surveys:
15 Million MENA Facebook Users – Report (May 2010)
Twitter & Customer Service Survey (March 2010)
Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (2009)
Sign-up for more reports
If you would like to receive reports like this by email click here to join Spot On PR’s mailing list.
Tags:communications, demographics, digital marketing, Effective Measure, Egypt, Facebook, habits, Internet, magazines, marketing, media TV, MENA, Middle east, Netlog, newspapers, North Africa, radio, research, Saudi Arabia, social media, social networking, Spot On PR, statistics, survey, Twitter, UAE
Posted in Applications, Facebook, General, Internet, Internet research, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Mobile, Newspapers, Online marketing, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, research, social media | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
The promise of behavioural marketing is a wonderful thing. After hundreds of years of mass media advertising that targets broad audiences with the same advertising message (whether they like it or not), the technology is now becoming available to advertise very specific advertising offerings targeted to reach only those that are likely to be interested in them. It’s a concept that excites both advertisers and consumers, since advertisers get to market to specific consumer audiences in the most profitable way and consumers only see the ads (and other types of content) that are directly relevant to them. However, as with many good things in life, there is a price to be paid by consumers and the currency is information. As the old English proverb goes, one can’t have one’s cake and eat it.
The cake is particularly delicious one. The Internet promises to tailor its audio, video, text, links and other content specifically to suit your individual preferences. Advertising is obviously leading the charge here, by investing in campaigns that are more closely targeted to consumer needs. However, the technologies can be just as useful to provision any kind of content over the Internet. Just imagine a web site, where every story, video clip, link, recommendation or advert was exactly according to your preference, not only in terms of content, but delivery, frequency and style too. Ultimately, it has the potential to become your own personal Internet, just the way you like it and as you discover new websites and services they automatically change to suit you.
Now here’s the catch. In order for behavioural targeting to be effective, it needs to know your preferences and behaviours, and update them in real-time. This includes data on the websites you visit, what you search for and where you spend your time whilst online, plus information like what devices you use to access Internet content, via what browsers, from what locations etc. It raises a plethora of privacy issues, and does so at a time where consumer attitudes towards privacy and knowledge of privacy issues are changing rapidly. Many thought little of putting all their personal details on Facebook a year or two ago, but recent media coverage of user reactions to changes in Facebook’s privacy settings has given many Facebook users pause for thought. A year or two ago it became quite common to find out that ‘all’ your friends were suddenly on Facebook. These days it’s quite common to know someone who’s quit Facebook entirely.
A new survey undertaken by Real Opinions highlights that there is enthusiasm for behavioural targeting and concern over privacy issues in almost equal measure. Consumers appear to appreciate efforts to provide them with more relevant content, but don’t want to control access to their personal information and behaviours online. The survey found that 60% of Internet users in the UAE favoured behavioural targeting for customised advertising and Internet content over less targeted means. However, 76% of UAE Internet users would prefer that behavioural data was only collected with their express permission, given in advance. In the fullness of time, it’s likely that users will have access to more and more tools to control their level of privacy online. In the short term, the likelihood is that new technologies are going to offer opt-in/opt-out options for Internet users. In other words, you’ll need to choose whether to enjoy your cake today or save it for later.
Tags:advertising, behavioural targeting, consumers, Content, data, demographics, Facebook, Internet, Internet marketing, Internet users, marketing, online, Online marketing, privacy, UAE
Posted in Content, Facebook, Internet, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Newspapers, Online marketing, Publishing, social media, strategy | No Comments »
Monday, May 31st, 2010
You don't need a magic lamp either
To our delight, more and more Middle East brands are looking seriously at using social media in their communications and making efforts to plan, structure and invest in strategic activities. It’s no secret that Spot On PR is a big fan of social media and actively recommends that all organisations pay attention to the irreversible changes that social media are bringing to business communications. However, no two companies are the same and we have no ready-made proposals for what social media tactics organisations should use and we would caution company’s against trying to copycat as an alternative to proper planning, particularly if your organisation is a large one. Learning from others social media efforts can be extremely valuable, but not as a replacement for having your own strategy. Equally, beware of one-size-fits-all social media campaign solutions. Here are some common social media myths that are worth being aware of.
1. Social media is cheap.
It certainly can be, but as with many things in life and business, you get out of social media what you put into it. Low budget, low effort social media campaigns have their place, but success usually means more audience engagement and more engagement means that more management and resources are required. Scale is obviously a key factor in influencing costs if you already have a large audience online, don’t expect an intern with a new Twitter profile to be the best way of managing conversations, enquiries and complaints: you’re going to need to have a system in place.
2.You have to be on Facebook!
There are lots of good reasons why it might make perfect sense for your organisation to have a Facebook fan page. However, bear in mind that Facebook is littered with the inactive pages of companies that started a Facebook page because everyone else did. If you can’t think of a good reason why your customers would sign-up for your Facebook page, or what you could post on it beyond company press releases then your brand may be better off without one.
3.You have to be on ‘X’ (where X is a social media platform).
Social media platforms will come and go. Whether they make sense for your business will depend on whether your brand can engage effectively with relevant audiences on them or not. Finding out where your key audiences spend time online is a good first step for any campaign.
4. More connections = more success.
This is obviously partly true, but there are limited returns in investing in indiscriminately increasing the number of social media connections that your brand has. There are many ways of enticing social media users to connect or sign-up for pages, but real engagement is about how audiences interact with you, not passively remain connected to a page or profile they never visit. Focus on making the connections that matter.
5. You have to be ‘cool’.
Of course, everyone likes a cool brand. However, if you’re providing a business-to-business product or service, don’t expect teenage SMS-style messages to resonate with your target audiences. Communicate with your brand’s stakeholders in the way that they expected to be communicated with. Don’t translate all your communications into SMS, MSN or Twitterese!
6.You can automate everything.
Beware of “experts” telling you how to automate your whole social media campaign. Plans are good. Social media tools are good. Any tools to help with content management are good. Frameworks and policy documents are good. And you will find some time-saving practices. However, at the end of the day, people respond best when communicated with personally. If your customers, partners and other important audiences expect to communicate with a real person, don’t give them an RSS feed that SPAMs them thirty times a day instead. If you’re not continuously in dialogue (versus simply broadcasting your messages), then you’ve sort of missed the whole point of social media.
7.You have to have a blog.
A blog is a communications tool like any other. Blogs can be very useful and a provide a cost effective way of publishing information and getting feedback. However, not every business has the content or writing skills to maintain a blog to quality, and many businesses still need to cater for less Internet-savvy audiences that are more reliant on the press, broadcast media and email for their information. Invest your social media efforts where you’re going to be able to drive the best results. If a blog makes the most sense from a content, audience and a resource point of view, then blog away!
8. Social media campaigns replace advertising.
For sure, the open access to information, viral nature and sharing capabilities of social media are forcing significant changes on the world of advertising. Advertising is having to shift its focus from broadcasting brand messages to creating platforms for dialogue with consumers. However, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here! Don’t mistake resistance to advertising for resistance to irrelevant advertising. Social media hasn’t replaced email marketing either, but you’re only going to get an increasing tide of negativity if you insist on spamming your audience over and over in an effort to increase your email response rates.
9. If you have budget, you don’t need to do it yourself.
Agencies can play a pivotal role in helping your brand leverage social media platforms within the scope of your brand’s communications (but then I would say that, wouldn’t I!). By their very nature agencies gain insights into how different campaigns are implemented for different clients and so can provide useful third party advice for brands planning campaigns. Your agency should be able to help you plan, focus and manage your social media activities for maximum returns, but subcontracting the running of your social media profiles, blogs and other social media tools to your agency in their entirety is a short term fix at best. Your customers think they’re connecting with you, not your agency. Even if your campaign is heavily agency-assisted, plan on being directly involved day-t0-day.
10. It’s not all about “the conversation”.
Thanks to the Cornwall SEO blog for this one. Taking your brand onto social media should take place within a pre-defined framework that allows your brand to both promote itself and take part in conversations with key audiences. Being part of “the conversation” on any social media platform, knowing how to engage other users and being, well, social is a pre-requisite. However, being part of the conversation probably isn’t your most important objective. So, while you’re tracking your followers, conversations and social media engagement metrics, try to remember your original objectives. How many people have you reached? How many sales leads have you generated? How many customers have you engaged with? How many customer service issues have you solved? How many new visits did you drive to your website? That was the whole point, right?
Useful links (external)
Social Media Myth No. 1 “It’s about the conversation” (Cornwall SEO Blog)
Debunking Five Social Media Myths (Socialmediatoday)
4 Myths About Social Media and Business (Mashable)
Want to read more?
If you liked reading this post about social media campaigns, you might also like:
Are you engaging with the right fans? (May 2010)
The coolest agency in the world (February 2010)
Social media measurement (November 2009)
Social media isn’t socialist media (November 2009)
Social media takes time (November 2009)
Tags:advertising, agencies, blogging, blogs, Carrington Malin, communications, Content, conversations, CRM, customer service, direct marketing, email, Facebook, Internet, marketing, marketing communications, myths, online, planning, public relations, social media, social networking, strategy, Twitter
Posted in CRM, Content, Customer care, Customers, Facebook, General, Internet, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, SEO, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, social media, strategy | No Comments »
Monday, April 19th, 2010
Things are looking up for the online marketing community. Recent surveys and media reports widely credit the region’s online advertising spend to be growing fast and becoming increasingly important to more and more people. Although last year was a difficult one for many, some believe that this gave big advertisers pause for thought and time to re-look at where online marketing fits in with their overall spend. Meanwhile, the social media revolution that has forced many businesses in other parts of the world to rethink how they interact with customers seems to finally be making its presence felt in the region with Facebook’s user numbers in the Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia rivaling traditional media audiences. The likes of Facebook, Google and Yahoo! have also all commented during the past year about the Arab world’s Internet coming of age and opening up opportunities for developers, advertisers, governments and others stakeholders across the region.
That’s the glass-is-half-full story.
The other half
The empty half of the glass is that the numbers of advertisers, developers, web ventures, educationalists and government departments using the Internet effectively in the Middle East is still remarkably small. Online marketers are all too often siloed in their own disciplines such as online advertising, website development, e-commerce and lately social media. Businesses very often see their online as a bolt-on to their traditional media campaigns and their website as an elaborate company brochure: and their view of the online world can be equally siloed. Sales might see the value in direct response from websites and email campaigns. Marketing may favour banner ads. Public relations may want to do social media, but marketing and IT are probably in disagreement over that. And customer service is often the elephant in the room, being largely ignored because online budget is owned by marketing.
Businesses across the region have been challenged over the past 20 years to reinvent themselves from being importers and sales agents to being marketing brands that are associated with providing customer value. Today the Internet is challenging Arab businesses to reinvent themselves again and become more open and more customer centric. The divide and rule school of business development no longer works, particularly on the Internet. With the arrival of Web 2.0 customers, non-customers and other key audiences can all be affected by the actions of marketing, sales, PR, customer service and technical support. Marketing can’t send an email to new contacts without existing clients knowing about it any more than customer service can expect customers who have had a bad brand experience not to talk to anyone. This calls for a much higher degree of planning and coordination of communications than Middle East businesses have been used to. And businesses are scared.
The good news: you don’t need to be a wizard
However, as with many new trends, much of the fear, uncertainty and doubt felt by business about Web 2.0 and Internet marketing is due to a lack of knowledge. Sadly, the online industry doesn’t help itself much here. Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t need to be a member of the magicians union to know what PPC, PPV, CTR or CPC are, you don’t need a special qualification to use Google Analytics and there’s no secret handshake required to become a social media marketer! In fact, your organisation probably already has much of the expertise required to plan, execute and manage a successful online communications campaign, because the central and most important consideration in this campaign should be your customers and other important key audiences.
Coming late to the party also has its benefits. Organisations across the region can now learn from a wealth of knowledge, example campaigns and online case studies from around the world whilst developing their own online campaigns. Furthermore, many brands, across many business sectors still have the opportunity to be first movers in developing online campaigns for their particular markets.
Introducing Digimedia.ME
Spot On PR is supporting a first-time conference next month called Digimedia.ME. The conference was born out of an idea to showcase and help explain the range of online communications disciplines to the business community. We’re excited about Digitmedia.ME, because a real effort has been made to rope in many different voices from the region’s online business community and the cost of attending has been kept very affordable, making it easy for business people to attend. So, if you want SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, brand protection, online PR or brand monitoring demystified, we hope that you’ll join us there.
Spot On Public Relations is a supporting partner of Digimedia.ME 2010. Digimedia takes place in Dubai on 5th and 6th May 2010. See the Digimedia.ME website for more information: http://www.digimedia.me
Tags:Conference, cust, customer service, Customers, digimediame, digital, Dubai, Internet, marketing, MENA, Middle east, online, online advertising, Online marketing, social media, Spot On PR, UAE
Posted in CRM, Customer care, Customers, General, Internet, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, SEO, brand marketing, competition, public relations, social media, strategy | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
"By Zeus, I was sure that old grain of wheat gag was one of mine!"
The story appears to be apocryphal – I’d always thought it was Archimedes but apparently there’s also the inventor of the chessboard (an Indian bloke, according to certain online sources that can’t be used in scholastic research) and a Roman geezer. Everyone has done the old ‘one grain of wheat on the first square, two grains on the second and so on doubling with each square’ trick.
The exponential growth of figures through the 64 squares of a chessboard results, of course, in more wheat than could be grown in the kingdom – 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, to be precise. I do like the version of the story that has the ruler agreeing to the impossible bargain, but insisting the mathematician count each grain of wheat individually to be sure the ruler wasn’t cheating him.
The same mathematics potentially applies to the humble retweet, of course. It’s one reason why news can travel so astonishingly quickly over Twitter. If I find something interesting and share it with my followers on Twitter, they can in turn share it with their followers. If we assume for the sake of simplicity that each of my followers has 100 followers of their own, then if five followers RT my Tweet, we’ve just reached the eyeballs of 500 people, as well as the original audience of followers.
If five of their followers RT the Tweet, we’re looking at 2,500 people. And if we play that scenario again, 12,500 people. One last time gives us 62,500.
That’s pretty impressive – and it doesn’t begin to take into account the potential for average growth of a Tweet – which would be more likely based on a percentage than an absolute five number. The percentage would, of course, be based on the broad appeal of the Tweet or the link it contains. In other words, a Tweet can quickly reach large audiences of tens of thousands of people – millions, if it’s big news.
A more realistic everyday example would look at the thousands mark – and Tweets can easily reach audiences of thousands – and generate significant traffic to links, too. As the Internet’s current ‘go to’ darling, Twitter is great at allowing people to ‘discover’ stuff and share it with followers – I recently Tweeted a link with ‘This is funny’ and saw over 250 people hit the link within minutes.
It’s actually hard to track Twitter traffic in absolutes because people will tend to use their own link shorteners and so on, but you’d have to agree that any tool that can generate 250 views on a Website within minutes – in return for an investment of three words – is pretty powerful.
An analysis of random Tweets by a team at Microsoft found that 11% of Retweets contained a Retweet. At 11%, by the way, my ‘test tweet’ above (which would have to be, obviously, pretty sensational!) would in four steps reach over 2 million people. Which is slightly scary, isn’t it?
Tags:Alexander McNabb, Archimedes, buzz, communications, Internet, marketing, mathematics, news, online, social media, tweets, Twitter, website, word of mouth
Posted in Content, Internet, Online marketing, Twitter, public relations, social media | 1 Comment »
Sunday, February 14th, 2010
Marketers can no longer expect this reaction to every new tech product
In my thirty-odd years of involvement with technology, my favourite acronym remains TWAIN. In an industry so littered with acronyms, that’s some achievement. You may well recognise it if you’ve ever used a scanner hooked up to your computer – changes are that you’ll have been told you’re using a TWAIN driver. To my continued amusement (so I’m puerile, sue me) it stands for Technology Without An Interesting Name.
However, this is about as interesting as technology gets these days. We’re no longer wowed by operating systems or ooh-aahed by CPUs (if many of us ever were). We tend to get excited about iPhone apps or new smartphones, but we don’t actually tend to spend hours poring over hardcore technology – we want it to do what it says on the box, simply and consistently. And beyond that, we don’t actually want to invest a huge amount of energy or emotional commitment into the technology we use – unless, say, we run data centres as a day job.
Alongside this change in consumer attitudes to technology comes a series of changes in the way in which people inform themselves of new things. That information flow, which used to take place across magazine pages or at exhibitions, now takes place online 24/7. The technology publishing market, once artificially inflated compared to the publishing seen in other vertical market sectors, has shrunk to virtually a handful of titles.
This commoditisation of technology is something of a challenge for the marketers tasked with trying to make it relevant to all of us. We don’t care about it most of the time and we’ll serve ourselves with the information we need from online resources when it comes to decision time. There are all too few publications that reach consumers – and broader business titles, say, tend not to buy technology stories.
What’s the solution?
Companies that are recognising that their technology isn’t perhaps the most important thing in the world to their customers are coming up trumps. In recognising this, they are able to take a realistic approach to what is important to customers and how they map to those priorities, provide content that is relevant to consumers and position themselves appropriately within that content. By maintaining an ongoing relationship that is based on providing content that customers actually want (as opposed to just saying whatever you’re doing is what customers want) and also by being ‘valued members’ of communities, these companies are standing in the wings when customers actually do say ‘I’m interested in you today.’ It’s a sea-change for marketers used to buying the right to access customers with dollars – increasingly they’re having to use a different currency.
This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.
Tags:advertising, campaign, CampaignME, Carrington Malin, Internet, iPhone, marketing, online, product launch, technology, TWAIN
Posted in Content, Customers, Internet, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, Publishing, public relations, social media, strategy | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Campaign planning is the easy part!
The coolest agency in the world can’t execute brilliant social media campaigns if the client doesn’t want to invest in the idea – not just of using social media as a megaphone like an advertising replacement, but of actually changing things around to make open social communications a long term investment. That investment necessarily takes a number of forms, too.
It’s not just about assigning a budget, by any means. The investment in time and effort required from the client in executing sound social media campaigns is nearly always greater than that required by advertising campaigns. Engaging with customers over social media platforms can mean some pretty big changes at the client’s side. They don’t all have to happen at once, but it’s important to map out some of the expected change points and commit to them in order that a long term programme of value is created, not just a tactical ‘quick hit’ with potentially negative consequences.
Is your management ready?
You have to ask if your company is structurally ready to undertake social media engagements – a process that involves some difficult questions. Do the management and reporting structures you have in place map to social media? Can you escalate issues quickly and effectively to all your different departments? Can you guarantee to respond quickly? How do your current HR policies map to social media? Who is responsible for that unhappy customer on Twitter – marketing or customer service? And how are you going to resource manning your social media engagements? (because if you think the agency is going to take the full 100% of the load and handle it, you’ve got another thing coming! If your agency says that you don’t have to be involved day-to-day, get another agency fast. Really.)
The next investment comes before you ever tweet a tweet or book a face. It’s in defining your social media guidelines, working with HR to make sure that these are embedded as a core element in the company’s process. Next up it’s making sure that staff are aware of what those guidelines are and, ideally, have the chance to question them or clear up any areas which appear difficult to understand or apply to a given person’s situation.
Now there’s a process of defining roles and responsibilities – who owns what platform and what are the internal processes and ownerships?
Once the job of deciding the niceties is out of the way, things like the naming conventions you’re going to use, building the graphical elements of your ‘social identity’ and deciding on the tools you’re going to use, you’ll need to work together with your agency on selecting platforms based on your target audiences, planning the use of those platforms and their rollout. Part of that process would include working out which platforms your key audiences frequent and what you can contribute to the communities you’re joining – what their informational preferences are and how you can help to improve things for them.
In fact, the key challenge that social media poses for companies, particularly those that consider themselves to be ‘customer centric’ is that they have to re-think their processes in order to be truly customer-centric via social media.
Tags:advertising, Alexa, Alexander McNabb, campaigns, communication, Content, CRM, Facebook, guidelines, HR, marketing, public relations, social media, social networking, the coolest agency in the world, Twitter
Posted in CRM, Content, Customer care, Customers, Facebook, Internet, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, social media, strategy | No Comments »
Sunday, January 24th, 2010
I’ve been listening to technology pundits predict each new year to be the year of mobile for many years now. Some have written so many annual opinion pieces heralding “The Year Of Mobile” that it almost defies belief that they can still write about it with the same conviction. I might be forgiven for filtering this year’s predictions with a little skepticism, but also for pointing out that actually we have been moving ahead, year after year, with the adoption of mobile platforms and the increasing capability of those platforms and the networks that serve them. So, is it “The Year Of Mobile”? Or not?
Jared Reitzin, CEO, mobileStorm Inc., blogging on Mobile Marketing Watch, believes that it is now safe to say 2010 is the official year.
Blogger, ex-Forrester Research analyst and managing director of Dachis Group Peter Kim too blogs “2010: The Year of Mobile”.
Joe Marchese, president of socialvibe, says in his Mediapost.com “2010, The Year Of Mobile — Finally” saying in his piece that “2010 will be the year mobile marketing begins to realise the promise marketers have imagined for so long”.
Even The Times seems to concur that 2010 is “The Year Of The Mobile’ and quotes from December’s Morgan Stanley mobile Internet report, which says that “the mobile Internet is ramping faster than the desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices rather than desktop PCs within 5 years”.
Peter Kim credits better mobile phone functionality, growing choice of applications and increasing access via 3G and Wi-Fi hotspots with helping to boost the value that consumers get out of their mobile platforms (and new opportunities for marketers). We happen to agree over here at Spot On. We’ve seen social media adoption ramp up in direct relation to the availability of broadband Internet and a decrease in cost of broadband services. And so it stands to reason that an upswing in mobile broadband and Wi-Fi access has got to be good for mobile Internet adoption and mobile marketing.
It’s no secret that the arrival of Apple’s iPhone two and half years ago really stirred up the smart phone market and, among other things, showed device manufacturers, developers and carriers how to make networked mobile applications appealing. Today, Apple, Google, Nokia, RIM and others are all focused on helping to create easier-to-use, more content rich mobile services platforms that have mass consumer appeal. Innovations like Google’s voice search for mobile, new applications based on location based services and m-commerce consumers services using barcodes all point to mobile phones playing an increasing pivotal role in our day-to-day lives.
There’s arguably no “Year Of Mobile”, but an ongoing trend that is changing the communication game. However, if 2010 is the year when we will come to recognise the need to bring that platform into our thinking as marketers, then perhaps it could be, at last, the year! As Peter Kim says, mobile is fast becoming another check box for integrated marketing. As with social media platforms, mobile is going be become increasingly important to marketing and the only decision that marketer’s need to make is when the time is right to go mobile. We’ve already decided and so you may already be reading this blog post on our mobile site http://m.spotonpr.com
Some interesting links
2010: The Year of Mobile (Being Peter Kim)
2010, The Year Of Mobile — Finally (Mediapost)
2010 IS The Year of Mobile (Mobile Marketing Watch)
2010: the year of the mobile (The Times)
The Mobile Internet Report (Morgan Stanely)
Video: Mobile Apps Roundtable at Le Web (Ustream)
Tags:apps, broadband, Internet, marketing, Mobile, predictions, Spot On, spotonpr, VAS
Posted in 3G, Applications, General, Internet, Marketing, Mobile, Online marketing, VAS, public relations, social media | No Comments »
2010 Spot On Public Relations