Fascinating: Consumers most likely to use mobile coupons: New Mobile Possibilities Force Marketers to Check Into Local

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New Mobile Possibilities Force Marketers to Check Into Local

Location-Based Services Provide Digital Tools That Drive Consumers to the Point of Sale, Capture Campaign Data

by Greg Sterling
Published: September 13, 2010

For at least a decade, the internet's "local opportunity" has been "emerging." But while it remains elusive and unrealized from an advertising standpoint, from the perspective of consumer behavior, "local" has been the most important but least understood phenomenon online.

Source: Opus Research, Valassis/NCH, Cellfire, Coupons.com, Valpak
--> Marketers haven't seen "local" clearly or known how to address it. But the rise of mobile and location-based services (LBS) is starting to reveal the importance of local and is helping marketers better understand -- and track -- the already existing online-offline connection.

Check-ins and mobile loyalty programs are giving marketers tracking tools they've lacked previously, and companies such as Foursquare, Gowalla and ShopKick are showing new possibilities to national and local businesses. But they by no means define the local-mobile opportunity.

Forrester Research recently published a survey that found "only 4% of U.S. online adults have used location-based applications." That kind of data argues that location-based "check-in" services are a sideshow in mobile -- an over-hyped phenomenon with limited reach and impact.

But the fact that most people aren't "checking in" obscures and distracts us from the larger online-offline consumer-behavior pattern at the heart of the local opportunity. Discussions that focus on local advertising are important, but they often obscure this profound consumer-buying pattern: Local is ultimately about the point of sale. And mobile brings the internet to the point of sale.

Marketers spend roughly $100 billion a year on traditional media to reach consumers in specific geographic markets through direct mail, newspapers, directories, cable and outdoor. That spending is dominated by "national-local" entities (e.g., retailers, franchise brands) and largely excludes the $50 billion that U.S. small businesses spend on marketing annually, per Magna Global. Meanwhile, consumers drop almost $4 trillion in retail spending each year, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, and more than 95% of it is offline. Between 80% and 90% of consumers routinely consult the web before making purchases in physical stores. All this varies by category, but the internet's influence over offline buying is unmistakable.

Where you at? (From top): Foursquare app on BlackBerry, Gowalla on Android and ShopKick on the iPhone.

Where you at? (From top): Foursquare app on BlackBerry, Gowalla on Android and ShopKick on the iPhone.

--> Mobile and LBS give marketers new digital tools that drive consumers, literally and figuratively, to the point of sale and capture data on the efficacy of campaigns. Retail check-ins (ShopKick, Loopt) and loyalty programs (Placecast, CardStar) take the traditional newspaper circular and provide a closed-loop tracking capability.

Local marketing online has really never had that "search to store" visibility.

Local-mobile ad networks such as Where, LocalAdXchange, Chitika and IAC's CityGrid report response metrics that exceed online and traditional media, sometimes dramatically. For example, coupon redemption rates in print hover around 1%, while online can often hit 10% or more. Mobile coupon redemption rates can exceed 20%.

Location adds relevance (and personalization) to advertising and especially mobile advertising, which is why response rates are much higher.

Chitika analyzed more than 5 million searches and found that local queries on the PC generate 38% more click-throughs than non-local queries. On mobile devices, local-search users clicked through 64% more often.

Part of this also has to do with the immediacy of mobile consumer needs. Microsoft reported earlier this year that 70% of users begin and complete a search-related task on the PC in about a week. On mobile devices, that time frame compresses to one hour.

Despite these compelling metrics, marketers are just starting to experiment and figure out where mobile fits in the mix. However, audience fragmentation and limited reach is a barrier to mobile adoption at the national level. And small businesses don't see mobile as a priority; they still haven't figured out online yet.

For the foreseeable future, there's little danger that mobile will "cannibalize" other media. Ultimately, mobile is a powerful complement to other marketing, not a substitute.

Location on mobile devices is about the point of sale. But will brands and local businesses recognize it? And, this time, will they do a better job of aligning their efforts with how consumers are actually behaving?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Greg Sterling is an analyst who covers the search, mobile and local marketplaces. He writes about all these topics on Internet2Go, Screenwerk and Search Engine Land.

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The Kickstarter Blog - Diaspora Opens Up

Diaspora Opens Up
Posted by andybaio

Everyone loves an underdog.  Just ask the four NYU students behind Diaspora, and the 6,479 people who believed in their quest to build an open-source, privacy-conscious alternative to Facebook.

They were only shooting for $10,000, but with the help of a New York Times cover story, their dream went viral and they raised 20 times their original goal, rocketing them to the top of our Hall of Fame.

But the extra money and attention created a huge amount of pressure on the team, and we’ve quietly been rooting for them as they worked hard to deliver on their promises to backers by summer’s end.

Last week, to the surprise of many skeptics, Diaspora released its source code to the public right on schedule.  This first release, while very early in its development, was a huge milestone.

Since then, it’s broken into open-source host Github’s top 10 most popular projects, with hundreds of developers forking the source code to collaborate on making it better. 

The project’s still in its infancy, but it’s a powerful example of collective action at work — from funding and promotion to development and adoption. 

The Diaspora team, seconds after releasing their code. Photo by Henrik Moltke


The Diaspora team, seconds after releasing their code. Photo by Henrik Moltke.

We talk a lot about “stories” around here, for good reason.  The projects that do the best are the ones that people can connect with.

The Diaspora team had a great story: four passionate students fresh out of college, trying to take down Facebook on a very short timeline.  And they were doing it as a free, community-driven, open-source project.

Their story moved us, as it did for the media and thousands of supporters, including Mark Zuckerberg himself. ”I see a little of myself in them,” Zuckerberg told Wired. “It’s just their approach that the world could be better and saying, ‘We should try to do it.’”

We’re excited for them and wish them the best.  If you’re interested in Diaspora’s progress, follow along on their blog and Twitter.

Why Environmental Activists Embrace Social Media | Fast Company

EnlargeBP, Social Media, Oil Spill

R.J. Matson


EnlargeBP, Social Media, Oil Spill

Oh No, You Didn't! Leroy Stick, on stage at TedxOilSpill, has led a Twitter battle against BP. | Photograph by Kris Krug


@BPGlobalPR We regretfully admit that something has happened off of the Gulf Coast. More to come. 3:07 PM May 19th via web

A young comedy writer awoke one morning a month after the Deepwater Horizon explosion and caught a video of the Coast Guard ordering reporters off a Mississippi beach. "It made me angry," the man now known publicly as Leroy Stick tells Fast Company. "It was just so clear to me that BP cared more about saving their brand than they did about saving the Gulf of Mexico. So I decided to make fun of their brand and their PR efforts on Twitter."

That first tweet opened lesson 1,001 in an ongoing course titled "In the Age of Social Media, You Do Not Control Your Brand." @bpglobalpr quickly picked up more than 190,000 followers, while the company's own account, the hastily started @bp_america, languished at a tenth of that. As the company made ham-fisted attempts at spin (Photoshopped helicopter, anyone?), Stick and his team provided a much-needed outlet for the public's outrage. Stick stayed in venal, clueless, and often hilarious character online, in the media, and in public appearances. "Comedy can be a great tool for telling the truth just because there aren't any rules," says Stick, who still declines to reveal his real name. "You can use satire to raise real awareness." With the well finally capped and Tony Hayward relieved of his CEO post at last, the big takeaway for corporations may be, to quote a BPGlobalPR -- created T-shirt: forget your brand. Tweets are cheap; it's what companies do, not what they say, that really matters.

Activists have donned suits in mockery at least since 1967, when Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies tossed dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. More recently, the Billionaires for Bush bird-dogged the RNC, and the Yes Men, a pair of pseudonymous activist-pranksters, starred in two documentaries in which they impersonate reps from Halliburton, the WTO, and Dow Chemical. (Stick shares a lecture agent with the Yes Men and calls them "rock stars.")

These days, venting anti-corporate anger is as easy as retweeting a joke, Photoshopping a parodic BP logo with an asphyxiating sea turtle, or creating a YouTube video called "BP Spills Coffee" (which has tallied more than 10 million views). Satire can help hold the powerful accountable when the public's attention threatens to wane. "It really comes down to storytelling -- if you don't tell your story well, someone else will tell it for you," says sustainability expert Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com. "BP is an example of how companies' misfortunes are going to unfold going forward with all the tools and weapons the Internet and social media afford."

BP presented a burlesque of corporate hypocrisy that not even Hoffman could have conjured: The oil company with the worst safety and environmental record of the Big Six is also the author of "Beyond Petroleum," one of the most successful green-rebranding campaigns ever seen. The real problem here was not that BP made PR mistakes; it was that their PR was too good. "Companies screw themselves when they let perception get ahead of reality," Makower says. "BP did a fabulous job with 'Beyond Petroleum,' but less than 1% of their revenue has ever come from renewables."

Ann Hand, who was BP's SVP of global brand and marketing during the heyday of the green-starburst campaign, later left to become CEO of Project Frog, which makes prefabricated high-tech green buildings for schools, health care, and retail. "With the Internet, I think branding is probably harder because you need to make sure that you're backing it up in the marketplace, that you have a culture that supports it and consistently lives up to that brand," she says. "It's been enjoyable for me to come to a company where we have measured results and happy customers." Better metrics -- millions paid in restitution to fishermen, acres of wetlands restored, and new dollars invested in green energy -- will be key if BP is to have any hope of regaining an estimated billion dollars in lost brand equity and immeasurable public trust.

Activists, for their part, hope that public scrutiny doesn't start and end with the click of a button. "I like the term 'slacktivism,' " says Nate Mook, the software entrepreneur behind TEDxOilSpill, a grassroots conference of scientists, environmentalists, and clean-energy advocates that featured Stick as a speaker. Mook argues that there must be more paths created for ordinary people to get involved, whether by donating money or by stirring interest with contests such as the Oil Cleanup X Challenge, a $1.4 million prize backed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt's wife, Wendy. "That's where you see social media being powerful," Mook says, "when it connects people to bring about real change."

Related Stories:

    Topics:

    Technology, Leadership, Management, Magazine, BP, deepwater horizon, social media, Joel Makower, GreenBiz.com, Ann Hand, project frog, tedxoilspill, Leroy Stick, BP plc, Fossil Fuel Energy Production, Abbie Hoffman, Nate Mook

    Best Transmedia 'discrete: subtle: organic' YES!: Post from Storycentral Digital on 'Transmedia Transmafia? hype & hyperbole or buzz and b******t'

    Transmedia Transmafia? hype & hyperbole or buzz and b******t

    19 09 2010

    There seems so be some confusion on Twitter lately about transmedia, what it actually IS and WHY it’s so important and the RT’s are coming thick and fast…

    andresfox said, “@storycentral who cares about #transmedia an convergence culture, it is just a trend subject?

    helionetto asked “Transmedia Storytelling? WTF?”

    and fakebaldur stated, “I hate the word ‘transmedia‘. It’s an overblown, pretentious and self-indulgent buzzword. It’s hypertext, damn it. Just like everything else” and followed up with the only difference between ‘transmedia‘ and ‘hypertext’ is in the amount of hyperbole, gas and hot air being emitted”.

    And they all have a valid point.

    Transmedia is in danger of becoming a buzz word (if it isn’t already).   And never mind about the PGA accrediting the term ‘transmedia‘ – I’ve checked 3 online dictionaries to find that the word isn’t even acknowledged by the English language yet!

    So, going back to our Twitterers, they have a point.  What IS transmedia?

    A noun? A name of something?

    transmedia /tra:ns, -nz  mi:dia (noun) (commonly used as a mass noun with a singular verb)

    or is it more of a verb? An experience, something you ‘do’?

    transmedia /tra:ns, -nz  mi:dia (verb)

    Either way, it’s in danger of becoming a victim of its own success because of the buzz.  In the same way that anything that is overly hyped without amy commercial evidence of success, transmedia is being talked about a lot, but showcased very little in the public/commercial domain.

    The amount of ‘transmedia producers’ that are popping up all over web 2.0 on a daily basis astound me!  I’ve been researching Transmedia Storytelling for nearly 2 years now for my PhD and still wouldn’t really consider myself a fully fledged ‘producer’ – doesn’t that come with experience over time?   I was recently invited to be a guest at Seize The Media’s Transmedia NEXT 3-day workshop there were delegates already working on transmedia projects and yet, it seems the hype, the analysis and the buzz are still bigger than the sum of it’s parts.

    I feel the confusion is possibly because of the lack of commercial transmedia experiences.  Go to your local pub, wine bar, coffee shop or school gates and ask who knows about The Art of the Heist, The Truth About Marika or Head Trauma.  Check out who’s aware of Cathy’s Book or Level 26.

    I can see the blank expresssions already.

    That’s my point.

    The fabulous transmedia projects are still relatively ‘niche’ – still firmly rooted in ARGs and are so subtley rolled out, so fabulously supported by a strong architecture of strategy and knowledge of audience behaviours, that they aren’t trumpeted about as ‘The Next Transmedia Project’.

    They are discrete.

    Subtle.

    Organic.

    I am pointed toward ‘new’ transmedia experiences on a weekly basis, often accompanied with a PDF or some kind of instructions offering ‘how to enjoy this transmedia experience. Click here to find out HOW’.  Isn’t that like taking years to build a maze, only to supply a map?

    One of the huge challenges of scripting and storybibling great transmedia lies in the triggers that move audience from platform to platform seamlessly.  There’s heaps of analysis out there looking at audience behaviors, UX, UI, platforms, primary platforms and narratives and how they all mix into the pot of creating great transmedia.  The fact is that a transmedia experience will naturally move audience, progressing them across platforms – with relevance and almost subconsciously.

    The viewers/participants who entered The Art of the Heist by seeing the CCTV ‘footage’ of the Audi being stolen naturally weren’t surprised to see it reported in newspapers, featuring in car magazines.  ‘Players’ who first came across the blog site of characters in The Art of the Heist were drawn to engage with the experience through blog links and might have came across the CCTV footage later.  The point is, at no stage was a ‘map’ supplied.  At no time was the magic blitzed by heralding this as a transmedia experience.

    The difficulty, the challenge, the toughest part of scripting great, successful transmedia IS the moving of audience from platform to platform without them knowing and BECAUSE THEY WANT TO. If you’re going to cut into manhours, resources and budget to create a great transmedia experience it should stand on it’s own BECAUSE IT CAN and needs no maps or promotion as a ‘transmedia’ experience.

    That just throws cold water all over it.

    So, in an attempt to reply to

    andresfox who said, “@storycentral who cares about #transmedia an convergence culture, it is just a trend subject? I replied, “nobody necessarily. Depends on franchise, but can expand audience reach, spreadibility & engagement. Tell me more!…”

    fakebaldur who stated, “I hate the word ‘transmedia‘. It’s an overblown, pretentious and self-indulgent buzzword. It’s hypertext, damn it. Just like everything else” and followed up with the only difference between ‘transmedia‘ and ‘hypertext’ is in the amount of hyperbole, gas and hot air being emitted”, I suggested, “re #transmedia – lots of hot air, but you gotta scratch the surface to see the value. Not just buzz – ace when done right!”

    and I think for helionetto who asked “Transmedia Storytelling? WTF?”  I’ll point in the direction of the fab transmedia examples I’ve just mentioned.

    Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

    Jenni Powell & No Mimes Media behind: Webishades: An ARG About Web Series, For Web Series Fans: Video «

    Excerpt from newteevee.com

    By Liz Shannon Miller, Sep. 21, 2010, 5:11pm

    "Interactivity is a key element when it comes to successfully spreading web content, which is why the ARG or transmedia experience — which works across platforms to create a narrative that the user has to discover on his or her own — has become a much more visible part of the landscape. Enter a recently launched ARG created specifically for the web series community, one that celebrates it.

    Created by producer Jenni Powell and No Mimes Media, Webishades launched earlier this month via an article posted on Tubefilter. That article included a link to the Webishades website, which had secrets to be unlocked with phone calls, emails and ads on websites for series including The Guild, Squatters, Compulsions and The Temp Life. “It was a lot insidery, but that was part of the fun of it,” Powell said via phone."

    read more on site:
    http://newteevee.com/2010/09/21/webishades-an-arg-about-web-series-for-web-se...