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Posts Tagged ‘time’

Well, since we are in the official year of mobile (it is really the actual year of mobile right?) it only makes sense to start to truly predict just how much will now be spent in the future of mobile. One of the most obvious uses of mobile marketing is for couponing. Being able to provide a coupon at the literal point of purchase at the time of purchase has implications for sales that could be significant. MediaPost reports on a study done by Borrell Associates that shows some projections that if they are believed indicate growth that is makes a “hockey stick” growth pattern look like the new flat. Borrell goes on to say Text-based coupons are the fastest-growing and most obvious mobile marketing application, and the easiest to implement, says the report. Redemption rates for mobile coupons are 10x that of mail or newspaper distributed coupons. The report summarizes the future by noting that a restaurant in Texas pays $37 to send out 500 text messages for a “buy-one/get-one-free burger” offer and gets 60 people to walk in the door, for incremental revenue of $1,000 per day. There are many reasons for this type of anticipated growth with the biggest being the fact that the “install” base of mobile phones is already significant (80%) and the rise of smartphone usage (now at 31% of mobile phone users) doesn’t appear to be waning either. As a result, customers already have the delivery vehicle for these offers. Many just need to get used to the idea that their phone, and even their smart phone, is a mobile Sunday paper coupon section of sorts. This is intriguing because the report also points out that in the mid 1990’s when the commercial Internet was truly getting traction only 8% of households had a modem enabled computer. Not having the technology slowed the adoption of the medium but in 15 short years it is poised to take over many traditional media in its level of importance. Mobile marketing doesn’t have to wait for people to purchase the means for getting their messages. They already have it. Now it’s a matter of behavioral adjustments which seem to be taking less and less time as people adjust to the new media world we live in. So maybe this year is the year of mobile. Your take?

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Mobile Couponing Set to Explode?

Yahoo’s earnings are looking up already from the MicroHoo deal. Microsoft and Yahoo have managed to remind investors by “ finalizing ” the deal every quarter since its announcement. This time, however, it was the DoJ that gave them that boost when it finally approved the deal in February . Along with the beginning of reimbursement payments, it looks like the deal was enough to persuade investors and advertisers alike. Reports CNET : Revenue in the first quarter was $1.6 billion, up just 1 percent from the first quarter of last year. Excluding traffic acquisition costs, net revenue was $1.13 billion, or roughly flat with analyst expectations of $1.17 billion. Revenue from display advertising on Yahoo’s site grew 20 percent compared to the prior year. Net income was $310 million during the quarter, but that included several unexpected benefits, such as the sale of Zimbra and the beginning of reimbursement payments from Microsoft under the terms of the search deal finalized in February. Excluding those items, Yahoo’s earnings per share during the quarter were still 15 cents, ahead of estimates of 11 cents. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz agrees—”Large advertisers came back,” she said in the conference call. She also said they finally recovered—well, stabilized—from the decline in their stocks that began when the deal was announced in July. CNET also reports on the long-term benefits of the deal vs. the short-term gains: Yahoo provided some clarity during the earnings call on how the Microsoft deal will affect its bottom line this year. The company saw a one-time benefit during the quarter of about $43 million related to transition costs, but will also see cost reimbursements from Microsoft for continuing to operate Yahoo’s back-end search organization during the transition, said Tim Morse, Yahoo’s chief financial officer. These operating cost reimbursements totaled just $35 million in the first quarter, but are expected to fall between $75 million and $85 million a quarter over the remainder of the year, he said. What do you think? Will Bingahoo save Yahoo? Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

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Yahoo Earnings Up On Search Deal Hopes

In a move that went somewhat under the radar a month ago, Ning’s co-founder and CEO Gina Bianchini was replaced by COO Jason Rosenthal. This signaled the end of the of a few things: at the time, Bianchini’s long time influence on the platform. Then yesterday, the end of Ning’s free offering and the end of many jobs at Ning. TechCrunch reports One month after long-time Ning CEO Gina Bianchini was replaced by COO Jason Rosenthal , the company is making some major changes: It has just announced that it is killing off its free product, forcing existing free networks to either make the change to premium accounts or migrate their networks elsewhere. Rosenthal has also just announced that the company has cut nearly 70 people — over 40% of its staff. I have started my own Ning network on the free side so this news is not the best. I was getting ready to pay to have the ads removed from the network but not quite yet. I already pay to have my own domain used for the community. My concern is what will the fees be moving forward? Also, no one ever likes to get used to a certain way of doing things then have the rug yanked out from underneath them in one fell swoop. So until the fees are made known and a decision needs to be made there isn’t much to do. The company has said through its Creators network that the changes will be known in the next two weeks. To get the full scope of what Ning is doing here is the e-mail that was sent to the staff. On a side note, I wonder if these e-mails are written as more of a press release than an actual sentiment since it seems that they will not stay inside the corporate fence for very long. Here’s Ning’s version of the “Things Are Gonna Change But It’s Gonna Be Good” e-mail from CEO Jason Rosenthal. Team, When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success. My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us. So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy. As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people. As hard as this is to do, I am confident that this is the right decision for our company, our business, and our customers. Marc and I will work diligently with everyone affected by this to help them find great opportunities at other companies. I’ve never seen a more talented and devoted team, and it has been my privilege to get to know and work with each and every one of you over the last 18 months. We’ll use today to say goodbye to our friends and teammates who will be leaving the company. Tomorrow, I will take you through, in detail, our plans for the next three months and our new focus. Thanks, Jason Rosenthal So it’s probably not a good day to be one of the Ning little guys that is not really driving much traffic is it? It’s a bad day to have a good idea that can bring specific groups together and enjoy many of the functions that small groups couldn’t have in the past. The days of free are looking like the days of the past for many things in the online space. Your take on this move?

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Ning Free Rides Coming to an End

The quest to decipher just how many actual users there are of Twitter continues. Yesterday at the Chirp conference being held for Twitter developers, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the group that the number of registered users (let’s call them accounts) is 105 million. That is considerably more the 65 million that comScore has estimated the number at. Macworld reports Twitter has 105 million registered users, with 300,000 new users signing up every day, Stone said, opening Twitter’s Chirp conference at the Palace of Fine Arts before an audience of just shy of 1,000 developers. That user figure is more than a recent estimate from comScore, which pegged Twitter’s user base at 65 million. The Twitter API (application programming interface) fields 3 billion requests per day, Williams said. “That’s bigger than all but a couple of Web sites in the world,” he said, claiming it makes Twitter “about the same size as Yahoo.” He said the service has grown 1,500 percent each year on average since “Twitter Inc.” was founded three years ago this month. The service is also fielding about 19 billion searches a month, Williams said, which compares to about 90 billion for Google. Those are big numbers for sure. The question is just how many of those registered users represent actual active Twitter users. I know of many accounts that sit dormant to protect a brand or have been abandoned by people who caught Twitter fever then determined that there was no value in the service for them. I like to caution in these instances that the hyper usage levels that are seen my social media “experts” and “gurus” and (gulp…) “ ninjas ” are not reflective of how much the service is used by folks that are not in the industry. Then there is the question with regard to using Twitter as to how much traffic is seen directly on the Twitter site vs. third party apps like TweetDeck etc. Conventional wisdom has been that the traffic is a 50/50 split but Stone stated that it more like 75/25 with the larger number representing those who do not use the Twitter site to use Twitter. You would expect him to make the numbers appear that way to show how much potential growth there is for the actual site traffic thus giving advertisers the impression that the future is much brighter for sure. Other tidbits revealed at the conference include the production of an Android app, the 100,000 downloads of Twitter’s official Blackberry app (which is pretty good, I must admit) and the purchase of a one man company which created what will be the basis of the official iPhone app that is on the short term horizon as well. Since this was being said at a developer conference the Twitter execs who were speaking tried to put nervous Twitter developers at ease. A Reuters report says Twitter sought to reassure independent software developers at the conference that the company’s moves to add its own home-grown features and versions of the service would not shut out the more than 100,000 third-party programs that have been built to work alongside and enhance Twitter. “Twitter is truly a collaboration and that is not changing,” said Williams. But Stone said Twitter would continue to fill in holes it sees in the main product by developing new features and acquiring companies. “I anticipate a few more” acquisitions this year, Stone said. “I don’t know if we’re going too crazy. But there’s certain things that we need to get done and we want to get done fast, and there’s certain things we can take our time building.” Maybe those in attendance started setting their eyes on being like that one-man show that was purchased by Twitter. Of course, with over 100,000 developers out there trying to cash-in maybe a lottery ticket would be just as effective to generate income.

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Twitter Accounts Cross the 105 Million Mark

Everything about the Internet is about sharing. Not necessarily sharing in the singing “Kumbaya” around the campfire sense although some social media wants this result. It’s more about simple information sharing. Knowledge transfer. Schedule updates. Not the sexy stuff but actually the basic and most critical stuff. Yesterday at Google’s Atmosphere event CEO Eric Schmidt said that these very basic needs are what pose the greatest challenge to the brains behind the Goog: the engineers. GigaOm tells us more Schmidt made two specific comments about resource allocation, saying that the hardest and most pressing engineering issues facing Google today are around sharing and mobile. He further built on the sharing concept by using the following example. Of course, this wouldn’t be an E. Schmidt production if there wasn’t a shot fired across the bow of one of Google’s major competitors. This time Microsoft was the target. I think of calendars as incredibly boring, but I’m wrong, calendars are incredibly interesting because they’re incredibly shared. So from a computer science perspective, all of a sudden we have our top engineers who want to build calendars. I’m going, what’s wrong with you guys? But in fact it’s a very interesting example. Spreadsheets are similar, the most interesting spreadsheets are highly, highly interlinked, something I didn’t know, and was not possible with the previous technology — Microsoft technology made it very difficult because they were not built in that model. As for mobile, Google is all about this and Schmidt urged the crowd, which consisted of Google Enterprise Apps users and prospects, to make sure your top talent is addressing your mobile infrastructure moving forward. If you haven’t figured this out yet, Google has decided that the mobile web and the accompanying apps and more is where the future is. As the mobile Internet becomes central for both consumer and corporate users, the core product questions are interoperability, security and safety, Schmidt said. “What’s important is to get the mobile experience right, because mobility will ultimately be the way you provision most of your services,” he added, saying that Google considers phones, tablets and netbooks mobile experiences. Based on the experience of the past I predict that most businesses are going to wait too long to pay the appropriate attention to their mobile requirements of the future. When you are driven by the cash flow and revenue generation of today, it can often create a vacuum of innovation. Look at how many companies are finally starting to figure out search after all these many years. Mobile will be the same way. Of course, the many years of industry pundits proclaiming that “This is the year mobile…..really” has created a certain “The pundit who cried mobile!” reaction. Trouble is, if Eric Schmidt can’t stop talking about Google’s concentration in the area then that means this is not a mobile fire drill. Companies will need to step up now if they want to hit the crest of this wave. As a parting shot of sorts, Schmidt also echoed a similar tune to his buddies in Cupertino when he proclaimed Lastly, to make good mobile, web and diskless computer (aka Chrome OS) apps, Schmidt had a platform recommendation as well: “From our perspective the single most important development has been the arrival of the HTML 5 standard.” Bad day to be Adobe holding the Flash card, don’t ya think?

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Sharing and Mobile Provide Greatest Challenges for Google Engineers