Today we posted a another article to top ten Ad Age marketing blog Social Media Examiner. The post, How To Create a Viral Sweepstakes With Social Media, examines the concept of a viral sweepstakes from both an economic and practical perspective.
And, in case you missed it, please also check out our previous post on Viral QR Codes and social and mobile opt-ins. If you have comments on either article, please post them below or to the SME site.
2011. Come and gone just like that. It’s been an amazing year and I hope everyone has an awesome holiday with their families.
As I was getting ready to say goodbye to 2011 this morning, three articles caught my eye. Again, these are the last pieces of mobile news 2011:
The first article polls mobile phone use across 21 countries. The findings? 75% use text messaging, vs. 50% who take picture and video and 23% who browse the internet, globally. In the US? 67% text versus 57% snapping pics/video and 43% using the internet. How about social media? 50% penetration in the U.S. My conclusion after reading the article, is pretty much summed up verbatim by the article itself: “the study notes the value that marketers can provide through SMS, which can be an important tool for reaching as wide an audience as possible via mobile and engaging in a one-to-one dialogue with new and existing customers.”
Key takeaway from the second article (which references the third) is clear: “Most interestingly, however, is the switch from browsing to application usage. In the three studies prior to this current study, more people, 42.1 percent, used their browsers to get information compared to the 41.6 percent that used apps. Now, however, applications have taken the lead by .5 percent.” For the author, it’s suggested that apps eat up mobile web time. But for me, I see it as consumers becoming more efficient in how they use their phones. Finding something on the mobile internet vs. app is becoming a matter of “what’s better for this task”, not “where do I want to spend my time.”
The third article has extremely useful data about smartphone penetration and mobile usage. Among the most notable findings is that RIM has declined almost a full percentage point in its share of mobile subscribers and more than 3% in share of smartphone subscribers in just three months. Second is that text messaging has increased its penetration into the US market by 2%, with Apps and Mobile browsing experiencing similar increases.
Note the common theme. With 2012 upon us, SMS holds significant mind and market share. Maybe it’s time to reconsider my Heisman trophy pick.
See you in 2012!
The Buzz Awards are back! It’s that time again to take a look at the Art Of The Call To Action gallery to see which calls to action are sparking people’s interest. And again, for those who haven’t checked out the Art of the Call To Action, a complete description of the site appears in an earlier blog post.
To refresh your memory, buzz is tracked in the form of “Notes,” which are reposts or likes of each call to action. This means that Notes can denote both positive and negative feedback from the Art of the Call to Action viewers.
Here are the top five calls to action right now according to “buzz”:
What I find interesting about this list is that two transportation-related calls to action occupy the top two spots. Clearly mobile has huge relevancy for travelers who live by that mobile device accompanying them wherever they go.
Stay tuned next month to see which calls to action receive the most buzz, as we had considerable turn around from last month (only John Deere’s online sign up remains from last month’s top five). New calls to action are added to the site every single day.
Be sure to check out artofthecta.com to buzz about your favorite (or least favorite) calls to action. We also encourage you to leave any comments or Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down on those posts which you think are particularly effective or ineffective.
And, as always, if you have or have seen calls to action that you want to see hit the buzz awards, please submit them!
Two stories I wanted to share real quick that I think are pretty cool in the way they illustrate mobile’s place in the marketing world:
First is a voicemail left on our company’s support line recently. Here the text verbatim (with names/etc. removed):
Hello, I’m calling about your campaign. I wanted to know if you have any type of carry bags or t-shirt or caps so that I can wear the message – also where I can make a donation. I do not have an email address, but you can reach me on my mobile at any time. I think it’s a wonderful thing you are doing and I support it 100%. Please let me know how I can help. Thank you.
So just so we are clear, this is a person who is moved to action by a campaign, but without email or any other point of contact other than a mobile phone. Despite what many would call “being unplugged,” the person still took the time to find out how to wear a mobile call to action on behalf of the company running the campaign.
Second is a famous Twitter feed that has over 2.9 million followers, Shi*t My Dad Says. Hilariously funny, but literally none of the Tweets could be uttered verbatim on live television due to their, well “word choice.”
Anyway, as I was perusing through the feed, one tweet caught my attention:
So again we have a similar situation. We have a person who makes us laugh due to his hilarious take on life that stems from telling it exactly like it is, even to (or at the expense of) his son.
Amidst all of that, this gentleman took a second to note a mobile call to action, think it was noteworthy, realize the potential of his son’s technology “doohickie” and ask him to get people involved. To me that says, that this person realizes that anybody could support Haiti using mobile quickly and efficiently.
Awesome.
Happy holidays everyone.
As you may have seen, Robert Griffin III won the 2011 Heisman Trophy on December 11th. Big ups go out to him on his outstanding season.
The reason I like the Heisman Trophy is that it’s a solid example of a time capsule for each college football season. This is to say that looking over the Heisman nominees from each season, you can capture who mattered most to college football (despite anything that happened later on).
Which brings us to mobile marketing. 2011 was an outstanding year for tons of mobile marketing initiatives, trends, technologies and strategies. But only a few of these can really be considered for the Heisman. Based on an internal survey we did among colleagues and friends, here are 6 aspects of mobile marketing that had the biggest impact on the 2011 mobile marketing landscape:
1) QR Codes
2) iMessage, Android Messaging and Facebook Messenger
3) SMS Database Marketing
4) Hyper local marketing
5) Push notifications
6) Mobile Web & HTML 5
What do you think? Did we miss any other nominees? Who should win the mobile marketing Heisman? Please post your thoughts to the comments.
Today we posted the latest in a series of mobile marketing articles to the Bronto Blog. The post, “7 Last Minute Mobile Marketing Tips For The Holidays,” highlights best practices for email and mobile marketers alike.
Pop over to the Bronto blog and check out this post, along with all the other great content from the Bronto Blog. Happy Holidays!
With November coming to a close, it’s time to check in on the buzz rankings from our Art Of The Call To Action gallery. For those who haven’t scoped it out yet, you can find a description of the site here.
Each month we’ll post a list of the top five calls to action, according to buzz in the form of “Notes.” Keep in mind that Notes can represent both good and bad feedback, so the more Notes for a post the more reactions it has received. Hence “buzz.”
Given that this is the inaugural post for Art of the CTA buzz recognition, we wanted to bullet out two months, September and November 2011. Without further ado:
September 2011:
November 2011:
Check back at the end of each month for future updates and go to artofthecta.com to buzz about your favorite (or least favorite) calls to action. We also encourage you to leave any comments or Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down on those posts which you think are particularly effective or ineffective.
And, if you have or have seen calls to action that you want to see hit the buzz awards, please submit them!
The other day I came across data from a report by Portio Research, Mobile Messaging Futures 2011-2015. I thought it would be fun to break down the data and see what (if any) conclusions we could draw.
The first stat that struck me was the number of mobile subscribers across five major global regions:
What strikes me about these stats is how flat each of the lines are (except for Asia- Pacific of course). What this means to me is that mobile penetration in not just the the U.S.A. (obvious), but also in other regions is nearing full capacity. It also means that, despite significant penetration to date, there are still a ton of non-mobile citizens in the Asia Pacific Region.
The next statistic that caught my eye is the number of mobile email users:
Looks like significant growth across all the regions through 2015. That said, being a math person, when I see two numbers I like to divide them (shout out to an accounting professor of mine). Here’s what the percentages look like when we divide number of mobile email users by number of mobile subscribers:
As you can see, mobile email majority penetration in the USA is coming up quick, as in next year (non-coincidentally I suppose in line with smartphone penetration stats). That said, Europe doesn’t even look to see majority mobile email percentage until after 2015 – despite being the second most mobile-email penetrated region in the world.
Let’s do the same exercise with the next stat listed in the study: Mobile IM. (For those curious, mobile IM is sending messages via a data plan as opposed to via the carrier network). Here’s are raw figures for number of users:
Dividing into number of mobile subscribers we get:
Similar trend as before, except mobile IM doesn’t look to hit majority for any region until 2014. Clearly, mobile email will become a crucially important marketing channel before mobile IM.
Next figures on the list are where things really start to get interesting: SMS and MMS. Here are the raw figures for both messaging types:
Notice that we switched from millions to billions as our graph unit. As we have pointed out before, SMS and MMS look to demonstrate significant growth in both APAC and North America through 2015.
What’s even more striking, at least in our opinion, is dividing these SMS figures into the mobile subscriber numbers. Here’s what you get:
I was surprised too when I first did the calculation. That’s right, according to Portio Research, SMS traffic through each mobile subscriber in North America will eclipse 10,400 (per year) by 2015. That’s up from 8,717 in 2011. And MMS through each North American subscriber in 2015? 381. This is to say that in 2015 the amount of SMS traffic per North American subscriber will be 27 times that of the amount of MMS traffic. Or that SMS traffic per mobile subscriber per month will be roughly 870, or 30 per day.
Enormous opportunity exists for government agencies to take advantage of mobile. But tackling this endeavor without a roadmap can be overwhelming.
That’s why we put together our Government Mobile Marketing Quick6 LookBook. It answers three questions:
Click here to download this government mobile marketing guide. For more resources about government mobile marketing, we also encourage you to take a look at Art of the CTA for government-related social and mobile calls to action.
