Are you looking for mobile video ad opportunities? The mobile video search site blinkx, will soon offer advertising and sponsorship opportunities. Blinkx claims to deliver more content than Google and is the world’s largest single index of rich media content on the web.
How do you access their mobile search site?
On your phone, go to http://m.blinkx.com/ in your web browser. If you phone can play MP4s, you can use the site to search, browse and play millions of videos from a wide range of broadcasters. So far, Blinkx has indexed more than 35 million hours of audio, video, viral and TV content. Their technology is based on a combination of conceptual search, speech recognition and video analysis software. Learn more at Blinkx.
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Want to make your mobile life a little bit easier? Nokia is releasing a collection of add-ons called NokiaBots that run in the background of mobile devices operating the Symbian operating system. These bots collect data on your usage behaviors and patterns. After a while, these bots will get a sense of your daily routines and will automatically start to reconfigure themselves to provide a personalized experience by reorganizing applications, suggesting alarm times, and automating tasks for you.
These bots – ‘Profile Bot’, ‘Alarm Bot’, ‘Shortcut Bot’, and ‘Battery Bot’ follow your habits to understand how you use your device. For instance, ‘Alarm Bot’ will get an idea on what time you usually wake up and suggest alarms to you before you go to sleep. It will also switch your phone profile to silent so you don’t get disturbed during the night. ‘Shortcut Bot’ monitors which apps you use most, and will put them on your homescreen for quick access. Wow, technology making things simpler for us, even how we use our mobile phones!
The center of the smartphone industry did not always exist in Silicon Valley. Before Google or the iPhone, one could say that Finland was the home of smartphones because of Nokia or maybe Canada, home of Blackberry. However, things have changed significantly in the just the past couple of years. Google and iPhone are leading the way in terms of smartphone technology and innovation. It just so happens that they are headquartered in Silicon Valley – Mobile Valley.
It’s not just Google and Apple in the area that are making smartphones. Hewlett-Packard recently bought Palm whose headquarters are in Palo Alto. These three Giants are expected to increase their share of the smartphone market while the percentage of phones sold with Nokia’s Symbian operating system is decreasing. Even Hakan Eriksson, chief technology officer for Ericsson, is planning to move to his company’s San Jose office because according to him, U.S. companies are at the forefront of new trends in mobile communications. If this doesn’t tell you that Mobile Valley is the center of mobile communications, then I don’t know what will.
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If you have ever used TNS to try and figure out how much your competitors are spending on online advertising, you know that the numbers can be way off. Moreover, you don’t have access to their web analytics tool so you don’t know how many unique visitors they are getting every month either. I like using Compete.com because you can pull traffic data on your website and your top 4 competitors based on a sample that Compete collects.
Compete is a very powerful tool that can help you track the competition and online sov. In addition to providing website traffic, it will also tell you what keywords are popular for all brands, what affiliate links, and more.
Back to analyzing online sov, I not only like to compare competitor unique visitor data for my clients, but also show an estimate of how much money the competition is spending online (since we know that paid search and online display have the highest correlation with website traffic). By pulling unique visitor data from Compete, we can show the percentage of ‘online share of voice in the market’.
From looking at the example above, we can see that recently Budlight.com has been increasing its online share of voice the past couple of months. How is this helpful? Tracking this will provide a benchmark as to how much share of online voice you have with your online advertising budget. This is just one of the insights you can get out of Compete.com. There is much more insight you can pull especially when it comes to paid and organic search.
Well what about Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers? “My brand has more fans than my competitors, but we have a smaller online sov?” Good question. My suggestion is that you ‘weight’ a Facebook Fan and Twitter Follower. To be more specific, a Facebook Fan can equate to 50 unique visits. Why 50 and not 1, 10, or 100? It doesn’t matter how you decide to weight a fan or follower, the important thing is to keep it consistent across your brand and your competitors. Again, I am not saying a Facebook Fan is worth 50 unique visitors to your site, I will leave that discussion to other analysts and social media experts.
[By the way, did you know we have directories of Mobile Analytics, Mobile Ad Networks and more at FoneGigs.com? Download them now for free!]
What kind of ctr mobile should you across mobile devices?
Based on a study in Oct-2009 by Chitika, overall average CTR for mobile across five major smartphone operating systems is 0.49%. Here is how the mobile ctr resulted for each system:
· Other (Blackberry, Symbian, Nokia, and HTC combined) 0.89%
· Palm 0.89%
· Windows CE 0.61%
· Android 0.45%
· iPhone 0.30%
In April 2008, another research company, Bango, reported that mobile ctrs were between 2-8%. Obviously this is a huge difference. The likely reason is that in 2008, people were probably not used to seeing ads on their mobile phones and were curious to click on them.
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What happens after the mobile click?
According to mobile analytics firm Amethon (June-2009),
on average consumers view 1.53 pages when visiting a m0bile ad site
Only 33% of consumers make it past the first page
Movie campaign sites performed the best, averaging 1.65 page views and attracting 21% of the audience
Content downloads like branded wallpapers or videos don’t improve engagement much.
Here is a look at popular check-in appss that let you know where you and your friends are. Also, they are a great way to earn points and rewards from participating local businesses.
Tagwhat is a check-in application that allows you to create and share location based messages and content on-line or in mobile augmented reality. What? Think of Tagwhat like this – Twitter meets Foursquare. You can check-in, create digital tags or upload digital pictures using this check-in app. Check out the video below or read about Tagwhat here.
Gowalla is a location-based mobile and web app that encourages people to share their favorite places with their friends. With your Smartphone, check-in apps Gowalla and Foursquare (which we will discuss in a minute) allow you to share your places of interest with friends. These check ins can be shared on the web with Facebook and Twitter.
Not yet released, but highly anticipated, Facebook is planning on launching a check-in functionality for the social site. Supposedly, a mobile version of Facebook will grab your location information from your phone and on the Facebook page there will be a list of places around you where you can check in.
Taken from their LinkedIn profile – “Foursquare is 50% friend-finder, 30% social cityguide, 20% nightlife game. We wanted to build something that not only helps you keep up with your friends, but exposes you to new things in and challenges you to explore cities in different ways.”
Recently Foursquare announced that it is improving their algorithm for serving up “places” when users open its check in apps to check-in. The new algorithm takes into consideration time of day, proximity, and popularity of the venue in deciding which places to show you.
Now if you want an app that gives out real-world rewards, you should check out Loopt. It is integrated with Facebook and works something like this. For example, if you check-in Ferragamo a couple of times, Ferragamo can instantly give you a 20% discount. (Marketing Manager from Ferragamo, hope you are paying attention because I want some new shoes, but don’t want to pay the full price). I don’t need to be the Mayor of a Ferragamo store, I want discounts and this is why there is a big reason to use Loopt. Brands can adjust rewards based on location and time of day. This is awesome!
Out of all these check-in apps, which one do you prefer? Comment why…
Thanks!
Eric Melchor, Founder – FoneGigs - The FIRST job board dedicated to Mobile Marketing and Mobile Application Developer Jobs.
For all you business owners who are open during selected times, soon you will be able to sell merchandise 24 7 by simply displaying your products in your store window. In fact, a boutique in New York is already doing this through ScanLife technology which also allows people to scan bar codes on merchandise and obtain details about the clothes through videos.
5 Easy steps to implement a QR Code campaign – click here.
Now imagine stepping foot into a store and immediately you receive real-time mobile coupons based on your shopping history. This is what IBM is currently testing with their new product Presence. Shoppers who participate will have their spending habits and browsing time spent in various departments tracked which will help the system suggest which items might interest you and entice you with coupons. They are calling it predictive analytics – predicting what they think you might want based on what the software already knows about you.
Cisco, generally known as a supplier of networking equipment, is also creating a system that will be able to connect smartphones to retailers’ wireless networks. This is interesting because a grocery shopper can type peanut butter into his/her mobile phone in order to find its exact location in the store. For those of you who shop in huge stores like Wal-Mart and Krogers, this could be helpful.
Motorola is working on a system that will allow retailers to implement their loyalty programs on shoppers’ cellphone instead of loyalty cards. That is clever as I know we all get tired of putting these cards in our wallets and keychains and half the time we forget them at home. They are also working on kiosk systems that enable consumers to summon a clerk to a particular department or fitting room when needed.
The one mobile technology that is giving retailers nightmares is RedLaser. Shoppers’ can simply download the app and immediately compare prices in a physical store to stores on the web by simply just scanning the product barcode. This is scary, a brand does so much work to get a cutomer into the store, and then the consumer picks up the product and before purchasing, decides they want to check if they can get the product significantly cheaper somewhere else online. Bam! All of a sudden you lost a sale.
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Thanks!
Eric Melchor, Founder – FoneGigs – The FIRST job board dedicated to Mobile Marketing and Mobile Application Developer Jobs.
So do we have any hard data that shows what the average price is for an iPad application versus an iPhone application? Yes. Based on a report from mobile app analytics provider Distimo, iPad apps are 22% more expensive than iPhone apps or an average of $4.67 compared to $3.82.
See list of iPhone and iPad Application categories here.
The report also includes more interesting information such as the top 20 most popular paid and free apps for both the iPhone and iPad. Feel free to download the report here.
Which types of mobile devices receive the most mobile advertising impressions? Based on data from Mobile Ad network Millennial Media, Smartphones account for approximately 45% of mobile ad impressions for the month of March 2010. What is also interesting is that 21% of overall impressions were served to devices other than phones such as the iPod touch, iPad, Sony PSP, and Nintendo DS.
Among Smartphones, it is no surprise that iPhones receive the most impressions, however Android phones are gaining ground. See the full article at eMarketer here.
Find all the latest Mobile Marketing and Mobile App jobs at FoneGigs.com.
Thanks!
Eric Melchor, Founder – FoneGigs – The FIRST job board dedicated to Mobile Marketing and Mobile Application Developer Jobs.
Most people would agree that the Apple App store has the coolest and most useful apps in the market. However, the Global Intelligence Alliance (GIA) predicts that the next-generation web applications will eventually be more popular and overtake single-platform native applications that can be downloaded from:
