Mobile WiFi Usage Up, Steady Growth Continues

JiWire, remains the leading mobile audience media company leveraging currently serving 20 million unique users monthly via 30,000 high-traffic, premium Wi-Fi hotspots.

JiWire is the leader in reaching business travelers, affluent families and trendsetters in an online environment with high quality receptivity and response, and leveraging the effectiveness of reaching an on-the-go audience.

DMB’s Sheila Shayon spoke with David Staas, senior vice president of marketing at JiWire, in March. Today, after five months of additional research, DMB is following up as JiWire releases its latest Mobile Audience Insights report.  Q2 findings reveal granular and comprehensive data about location-based ads: the preferred types of ads and audience segmentation and engagement preferences.

The report sampled 2,260 randomly chosen JiWire customers and data from 315,000 public Wi-Fi locations. Every ad request between April-June 2010 from North America’s 30,000 hot spots was recorded and analyzed.

The top end results are: 39% of mobile users find location-based ads with coupons the most appealing; mobile users want to discover stores in close proximity to their location and review those ads on location-based apps.

More than 50% of the ‘on-the-go’ audience will share their location in order to access more relevant ads. Gender differences are minimal, with 42% of women amenable to location disclosure and 54% of men.

“People today are demanding much more localized content as they spend more time on the go, creating a great opportunity for advertisers. Just as brands were challenged with how to ‘socialize’ themselves in the social media space, today brands need to think about how to ‘localize’ themselves with their consumers,” says David Staas.

DMB asked Staas what the top 2 or 3 things a brand can do to ‘localize’  with their consumers:

Include Local Messaging and Content.  Don’t just run a national ad with the same message in every location.  Adapt the creative itself to include location relevant messages that better engage consumers in their own market.

An example: Microsoft ran a campaign for Microsoft Office that included customized local messages in each ad based on the users location.  For example, and ad in Denver would show a local landmark and customized call to actions such as “A PC without Office is like Denver without the Rockies”

Ceate a Local Call to Action:  Brands can localize themselves especially if they have a local presence.  Calls to action that provide store locations and directions, or specific offers and promotions at nearby location help a brand become much more localized.  Rather than click-through to a corporate site, have each local ad click-through to the local store’s website.

Leverage Context of a Location:  With people spending more time on the go, the context of their location becomes extremely important.  Creating campaigns that speak to people differently when they are in a coffee shop vs an airport for example, recognizes the unique mindset of that person of that point in time, and allows brands to be far more effective.

How much does the actual device effect consumer behavior?
We are seeing people spending time on multiple devices. In fact, 24% of people said a Smartphone, netbook, iPad (non-laptop) was their primary device to connect on. The key for an advertiser is to develop a cross channel approach to engage with their audience across all devices. It’s important for advertisers to organize campaigns around audience instead of distribution paths like out-of-home, online or mobile.

Someone on a mobile phone might be in-store doing research on a product; whereas, someone on a laptop in a café might be looking up the closest locations for a nearby store.  Understanding the context of the location were people are connecting is what’s most important, and then make sure you can reach them however they choose to connect.

Additional highlights include:

• Thirty-six percent of mobile users want to receive location-based ads about nearby stores;
• Over half are interested in location-specific advertising;
• Forty-seven percent of men and forty percent of women are most likely to engage with mobile ads that are hyper-local to their location;
• Thirty-seven percent use location apps where they live as much as when they are traveling.
• World-Wide Public WiFi locations have grown from 132,080 in 2006 to 310,732 in Q2 2010, an increase of 135%.

Q2 Ranking of Top Ten Location Usage:

• United States
• China
• France
• United Kingdom
• Germany
• Russia
• South Korea
• Japan
• Sweden
• Taiwan

Q2 Ranking of Top Ten U.S. Cities:

• New York
• San Francisco
• Chicago
• Houston
• Brooklyn
• Los Angeles
• Seattle
• Bronx
• Atlanta
• Portland

WiFi usage has grown by 17.3 percent in the past quarter, with 55% of U.S. locations now offering free Wi-Fi, a 12.6 percent increase from Q1 2010.

Hotels, airports and cafes are the top venues, while universities and transit grew by 11 percent.

Percentage of Change from Q1-Q2 in Venue Visits:

• Hotels +22.5
• Airports +22.6
• Cafes -1.8
• Other +11.0

As for most popular WiFi devices, the iPhone and the iPod maintain top positions with the iPad emerging as third most popular gaining 5% of all mobile device ad traffic in its first quarter. Closely following are the HTC Droid Incredible, now the most popular Android device, followed by the Motorola Droid.

The full Q2 JiWire Report can be found on the company’s website.

Dell Uses Social Media to Promote Brand

By Dave Fidlin

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, companies had one primary method of connecting with consumers, and that was through advertisements within the traditional forms of media: print publications (newspapers and magazines) and broadcast outlets (television and radio). The Internet, of course, has altered the playing field, and social media has become a prevalent method many companies have been using to reach out to new and existing customers.

Computer manufacturer Dell is among the companies that have been embracing social media to market new products. In fact, the company employs a chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, who is responsible for a swath of sites under the banner name Direct2Dell.

DMB’s Dave Fidlin recently spoke with Menchaca, a 17-year Dell veteran, about social media, and how the method will continue to shape the company’s marketing and outreach efforts in the future.

Can you explain your role as chief blogger for Dell?
My role is to keep things moving with our external network of blogs. Direct2Dell now exists in five languages. Direct2Dell is our main corporate blog. Beyond it, we have 7 additional blogs. Our latest is Direct2Dell India, which focuses content on one of our fastest-growing countries in Dell’s business.

How is Dell marketing beyond established, traditional methods? Is the company getting the word out about its products through such avenues as Facebook and Twitter?
Yes, very much so. We have two main pages in Facebook — Facebook for Home, which focuses on product and service information for consumers and Facebook for Business, which focuses on reaching business customers there. We’ve been very active on Twitter as a company since 2007. We use Twitter in 4 main ways: 1) to keep our customers informed 2) to engage our customers from different areas of our business 3) to sell to our customers who opt in to sites like @DellOutlet and 4) to support our customers. We now offer 24/7 support to customers on Twitter via @DellCares. See Dell.com/twitter for more details

Aside from the two big companies — Facebook and Twitter — how else is Dell using social media?
Our core strategy in social media is to go where our customers are. That means we maintain a Dell presence in many other social sites like LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, Scribd and outside the US in Sina’s microblogging service. Beyond our own blogs, our forum site and all of our presence on outside social networks, we’re also focused on responding to comments on other places on the Web, like third-party user forums or blog sites.

Can you quantify, percentage-wise, how much of Dell’s marketing and outreach efforts go toward social media (versus traditional marketing) in 2010?
Our social media marketing budget is very small compared to our traditional marcom spend. Outside of some ad credits to drive awareness to the Dell Facebook for Home pages and drawing attention to some of our social media efforts via Dell.com, we spend very little to promote our social media activities.

Do you have an idea of what the ROI (rate of return) is for Dell’s social media efforts?
Yes, we do, and that’s an area where we are still working on. In the early days, we measured social media’s impact on customers’ perceptions and found a pretty strong correlation—at the low point in 2006, about 48 percent of what was said about Dell was negative. We were able to get that into the low 20+ percent range. Today, we’re able to track all the basic traffic numbers you would expect, but beyond traffic, we’re looking at things like reach, engagement, brand reputation and more. We’re also starting to use more of the same tools on the social media side that we’ve been using to measure Dell.com like Omniture. There’s still more work to be done, but we’re making progress.

Where, in your opinion, is social media heading into the future, and how is Dell going to stay on the pulse of this still-growing method of communication?
I really think over the next several years, social media will become an integral part of how companies in many industries will do business. To me it’s a natural progression to add from things like telephones, e-mail, the Internet, chat and beyond. Just like many other aspects of business, it all comes down to execution. In my view, companies who learn to use social media to really connect with their customers will have a huge fundamental advantage over companies who don’t.

Do you envision a day when social media might completely replace traditional marketing methods, or is that an extreme statement?
No way do I think that social media will ever replace traditional marketing methods. I do think that social media can and will continue to augment traditional marketing methods. I think social media will make companies smarter in how they market to and engage with customers, and I think that’s a good thing. Like many others in social media today, I’m glad to see the era of one-way push marketing giving way to something different – a place where customer feedback shapes the direction of the company.

Will WAC Unite Cellphones?

By Linda Broughton

The Wholesale Application Community (WAC) is an “open global alliance” that seeks to “unite a fragmented marketplace” through providing an open industry platform for developing applications for mobile devices. The platform would enable application developers to more easily write an application that could then be immediately distributed across a number of mobile devices, most obviously cellular phones.

In an analyst and journalist update, Tim Raby, WAC’s interim CEO, discusses how WAC will benefit the mobile device application ecosystem – made up of app developers, handset and hardware providers, users and operators. WAC aims to offer developers a common software development kit (SDK) for creating apps, along with network and device application programming interfaces (APIs) that will enable developers to “write and submit once, deploy and sell everywhere” rather than the more common “write once, debug everywhere”. Users of apps developed via the WAC platform will not only have more choices in apps, they’ll be able to access their favorite apps from different mobile devices. (At the moment users are normally limited to accessing apps according to their chosen mobile device’s current Operating System or OS – that is Google, Apple or Windows.) WAC claims that mobile device distributors using WAC-made apps will save money, benefitting from consistent operator requirements and specifications. Operators like Google, Apple and Windows will be able to offer more apps and still be able to customize apps for their customers.

Communication giants including AT&T, Telefonica, Vodafone, and Orange have already contributed their support and several resources to WAC. WAC plans to begin publishing documentation for developers and holding developer events in September and November 2010. WAC will be a non-profit, using all its revenues to cover its operational costs.

So why are some developers still skeptical?

Carl Corcoran, owner and operator of TridentLoop, LLC, a software consultation company operating in North America and the European Union, is skeptical of the initiative. He notes “Different technology platforms seem to do about the same thing, but crossing between them seems to be an enormous hurdle for developers. If you had to re-learn how to drive a car every time you switched makes, then the natural reaction is to wish for standardization.” However, Corcoran goes on to point out that while standardization of mobile device applications may increase the audience capable of accessing an app, standardization may also compromise the app’s sophistication. Standardization can limit the developer’s use of the unique features offered by the different platforms currently available. App developers select platforms in which to develop in order to create an app specifically geared towards users of that platform. Standardization would remove this customization.

Moreover, Corcoran notes that mobile devices are less powerful and less flexible than desktop computers, meaning that any extra platforms and services provided via a mobile device are thus more limited. Adding a layer of “translation” between a mobile device app and its hardware can reduce the app’s available functions.

Lastly, Corcoran calls into question the interest that mobile device developers have in standardization. Microsoft, Corcoran explains, is promoting their own platform (.NET) and would most likely prefer to highlight their platform’s special features rather than invest more in yet another standard.

A Good Chew: Orbitz’ Dirty Shorts Go Viral

By Ken Liebeskind

Product integration is the technique used to incorporate a sponsor’s product into branded videos, but the Wm Wrigley Jr. Company has gone over the top with the product inserts in the Orbit Gum Dirty Shorts, which debuted June 10. The Prom Date, a five minute video starring Will Arnett and Jason Bateman, incorporates the gum into the humorous video as it’s passed from the characters on numerous occasions, sparkling at one point to indicate an attitudinal change that prompts the parents to accept their daughter’s vile teacher as her prom date.

Actually the product integration in the dirty video is emblematic of the brand, which has been “cheeky and over the top on purpose,” according to Jeff Adkins, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Energy BBDO, the agency that has incorporated the dirty videos into its campaign for Orbit. “It breaks the fourth wall and allows you to have fun in the story, making the transition from a dirty situation to a clean one. It’s goofy fun.”

Prom Date is the first of three dirty videos for Orbit that will star Arnett, Bateman and other comedy stars. They are produced by Electus, Ben Silverman’s new media company that is partnering with celebrities to create branded content. Arnett and Bateman formed DumbDumb, the production company that created the Orbit videos.

The videos are playing at Youtube and Collegehumor.com, with 196,099 views recorded so far.

The dirty shorts are the first branded videos from DumbDumb and represent a driving force in contemporary marketing. “Major brands recognize that the media landscape is changing quickly and their success relies on their ability to expand well beyond traditional advertising,” said Drew Buckley, COO of Electus.

Adkins said Orbit gum is a favored brand among teens and young adults, so branded videos should be popular. “We’d been hoping to do something entertaining with Orbit for online content. We’ve done 25 TV commercials over the past nine years. This was the way to extend what we do in long form stories.”

Cloud Computing Forecast Bright

By Sheila Shayon

Ford is the first carmaker to make Google Maps a standard in-car feature.  Their SYNC system sends a destination location from your home computer to your car - one turn at a time.

Google Maps has become the lead tool for travel - claiming 15.50% market share, followed by MapQuest with 9.24%, and Expedia at 3.24%. (May Experian Hitwise)

Gizmodo tech blog summarizes it thus:  “It works by pulling Google Maps information from Bluetooth phones, with the navigational directions read aloud for safer driving. While you could just use your in-car sat-nav system instead of syncing with Google Maps, it’ll come in particularly good use if someone emails or texts an address, and you’ve pulled up the map already on your phone.”

This latest addition to the Ford company’s cloud-based architecture brings together titans in the automotive and digital communications industries - a burgeoning crossroads of collaboration.

Available by June, all 2010 Ford models will be equipped with the capability which is powered by Microsoft software. The information is sent via Bluetooth in Google Maps to the cars through an app called Sync Traffic, Directions, and Information.

“It’s obvious that Google wants to be known as a service that consumers can access not only through PCs, tablets and mobile phones, but also in their cars. They are emerging not only as a discovery tool, but rather points of interest for local search. Think of it as pay per action vs. pay per click,” comments Trip Chowdhry, managing director at Global Equities Research.

Ford isn’t the only automaker jumping into the cloud. The field is beginning to rain apps.

Audi is collaborating with Google on its MMI System in the Audi A8 2010 model which offers 3D navigation powered by Google Earth. Next up is the capability to equip cars with local search.

OnStar subscribers can access Google Maps to search and locate destinations via the Turn-by-Turn Navigation Service in their cars, available in all GM vehicles starting with the 2006 year model. OnStar has 24/7 communication between a car, the OnStar backoffice and Android phones. Dana Fecher, OnStar EV Lab manager, told MediaPost, “Most of the features we will focus on in the future include location-based services and constant connectivity. We’re just getting started.”

As for the general state of the cloud industry, a recent article in Tech Crunch suggests we are leaving the Cloud 1 era and moving to Cloud 2:

Cloud 1 ————->Cloud 2

Type/Click————>Touch
Yahoo/Amazon———->Facebook
Tabs————–>Feeds
Chat————–>Video
Pull—————>Push
Create————–>Consume
Location Unknown———>Location Known
Desktop/notebook———>Smart phone/Tablet
Windows/Mac———->Cocoa/HTML 5

Cloud + social + iPad- is predicted to enable a new generation of cloud applications with substantial market clout and social effect.

Following are examples of companies with a solid foothold in the space…if that’s possible in a cloud.

Cloud Sherpas, a cloud computing systems integrator and application developer. Cloud Sherpas is a Google Apps Authorized Reseller and leading Google Enterprise partner. Their expertise is in legacy, on-premise messaging systems (Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise), and a proven record of delivering change management, deployment, support and development services. In May they received $1M in Unattributed funding.

Zumodrive, stores data in the cloud for easy access from any device. File stream capability is comparable to a local drive, and files most needed are stored locally for offline use. This product is tailored for notebooks and mobile devices with smaller hard drives.  Zumodrive  has expanded its mobile offerings with free apps for Android and Palm. In December 2009, The Wall Street Journal proclaimed ZumoDrive “a harbinger of the new world of cloud computing, and it is worth a look.”

Zoho CloudSQL, enables developers to interact with business data stored using SQL language, Structured Query Language, a database language designed to manage data in relational database management systems (RDBMS), and based on relational algebra.

It can handle data query and update, schema creation and modification, and data access control.

Socialtext, has partnered with Ping Identity to integrate its enterprise social software platform with PingFederate. Single Sign-On solution enables companies to manage user identities across all of their cloud-based applications including Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, ADP and Socialtext.

Service providers ThinkFree, and 37 Signals have been in the cloud business for several years and they epitomize the shift occurring as businesses adapt to new platforms and technologies to better data management.

Comparative newcomers, focused on the travel vertical include iCloud, Myfax and Pipeline Deals.

As enterprise systems migrate to the cloud, hybrid apps that bridge desktops and smartphones will continue to evolve and user confidence in cloud services will also augment - at a rate equal to the development of secure environments.

The cloud genie is out of the bottle and mission critical apps like Ford’s ‘Send to SYNC’ are the tip of the iceberg as to what the cloud will yield. A harbinger of things to come: “Printing paper directions from a website is a relic in our digital age,” said Doug VanDagens, director, Ford Connected Services Solutions Organization. “With Send to SYNC, you can map a destination at home, at work - wherever you have connectivity - and when you get to your car, it already knows where you want to go. It’s convenient and it eliminates the waste and distraction of paper maps, conserving resources while helping drivers keep their eyes on the road.”

Keep your eyes on the cloud. It’s seeding our digital future.

Apple Surpasses Microsoft

By Barbara Gengler

Microsoft, which has been slow in responding to Apple’s advances, was recently taken by surprise as Apple edged past the software giant in market capitalization.

Recently, Apple emerged with a market value of roughly $222 billion compared with Microsoft’s $219 billion. Apple spearheaded into the second highest-valued American company directly behind Exxon Mobile, which was valued at $278.6 billion.

Enderle Group analyst Rob Enderle says against Microsoft, Apple funded better, executed at a higher level and marketed the benefits of the product more successfully.

“Microsoft actually had what should have been a more attractive service, retailers liked them better and Microsoft had a more robust product, but Apple out executed them on marketing to an incredible level,” Enderle says. “Oh and Microsoft chose to fight Apple on Apple’s turf by bringing out a hardware device and that is always a really bad idea.”

The Mac vs. Windows campaign directly targeted the Vista launch problems, kept them front of mind even after they were fixed, Enderle claims, adding that Microsoft’s failure to market the improvements drove the positive result for Apple.

“Apple’s marketing program took reports of problems with Microsoft Vista and blew them out of proportion in an attack worthy of a first-tier political campaign,” Enderle says.

The Mac vs. PC campaign ran directly into the Vista launch and is recognized as being one of the most effective of its type. Apple not only helped slow sales for Windows, but Vista also never really recovered while Apple tripled their market share, according to Enderle.

Apple competes hard, likely knows more about many internal programs going on in competitors’ firms than related executives do and has the ability to develop and execute a strategy that is repeatedly successful against these competitive threats, he says.

“The iPod, AppleTV, iPhone and iPad were all big risks and only the AppleTV didn’t meet expectations and they haven’t stopped funding or developing it,” Enderle says. “Microsoft, on the other hand, takes few big risks, tends to under resource those it does and then wonders why these smaller risks are unsuccessful.”

He pointed out Mira was ignored, Origami was unfinished and Windows Media Server was crippled and underfunded as was Media Center, Media Extenders, Portable Media Center, Windows Mobile, Zune and Chrome Effects. And while Microsoft has often come up with ideas first, Apple generally executes better and walks away with the benefits.

“Apple enjoys lower customer churn, higher margins and owns the most profitable segment in the PC market,” Enderle says. “When Steve Jobs brought out the iPhone, retained control and drove the same customer focus, subordinating the needs of the carriers to the needs of the phone users, Apple became the most profitable vendor in this segment.”

Microsoft has increased the complexity of its customer mix and often seems unable to differentiate between the conflicting needs of users, IT shops, retailers, OEMs and government buyers, Enderle says, adding the end result is that the related products have a tendency to miss the needs and expectations of all groups because there is no real focus on any one group and users’ needs and expectations are often in conflict.

“If Microsoft wants to move ahead of Apple again, they have to cease accepting failure as an acceptable outcome and either resource efforts to levels where they can’t fail or recognize that if you aren’t going to play to win, there isn’t much point in taking the field in the first place,” Enderle says.

Separately, he gave the example of how Apple actually torpedoed the HP MP3 player by licensing the iPod to HP and then reneging on all of the promises they had made.

“They underpriced the HP product, wouldn’t let HP use any color but white, and wouldn’t allow transcoding even though they had indicated all of these were possible initially to close the deal and the contract locked HP out of doing their own player until Apple had locked up the market,” Enderle says, adding it was “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen HP do and one of the smartest from Apple. If Apple were to do something similar today they’d have anti-trust problems up the wazoo (technical term).”

While Microsoft still leads Apple in sales, there is every likelihood that Apple’s income could surge past Microsoft’s in the next few years.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage during the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in early June. Jobs previewed the successor to its smart-phone line, the iPhone 4, which features a faster processor and videoconferencing, which the company calls FaceTime and includes a bigger battery and two cameras. As it continues to deliver its innovations, Apple has become the dominant technology company of this decade.

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