Mobile, Trends over time

Apple mobile users out-surf RIM bunch

I just reviewed  HandsetDetection’s monthly site updates on mobile web access stats, showing handset type, manufacturer/telco service, and percentage of web surfing traffic emanating from each, worldwide, by country.

This is important if you are wondering whether – and how – to format and test your company’s product and service offerings for mobile handset users, be they Twitterati or full blown cloud computing users.

Curious, I crunched the Nov 2009 and Sep 09 US data and found the following aggregate trends.

  • Apple:  45% (up from 34% in September)
  • RIM:    23% (down from 34% in September)
  • 12 others*: 32% (same as September)

* (Danger, generic, Google, HTC,  LG, Moto, Palm, Samsung, Sony, SonyEricsson, TMobile)

Upshot: Clearly, Apple just eclipsed RIM in Q4 ’09 for mobile web access via handset.

It will be interesting to see what kind of traction newcomer Google (Android) gets in the coming months.

What does this mean for mobile marketing?  How might this affect your own plans?  Comment below.

~Ed

demand management, lead generation, sales 2.0, sales training

Buying and Selling 2.0: the High Performance Model

Rapid technology advancements have benefited buyers and sellers alike.  Buyer-accessible information and buyer-controlled technology help buyers research, evaluate, discuss, recommend, check references, review pricing, and even negotiate purchases.  Sellers, meanwhile, have access to new tools and information that help them to engage their communities, nurture buyers, identify high potential prospects and guide the sale, while keeping the broader community appropriately engaged.

The biggest challenge for buyers and sellers now is filtering and managing all that information.  Buyers have more reference material, and sellers have more data to aggregate and analyze from a broader array of touchpoints.  Which inquiries are ultimately worthwhile?  How can you nurture them all over time to identify worthwhile prospects, nurture the buyer community, maximize your success, and avoid costly mistakes?

A complicating factor is organizational transparency.  Buyers demand it, and can now interact with Marketing and Sales at will, often vacillating between the two, making it difficult to determine who “owns” the relationship at any given point in time.  As a result, Sales and Marketing must collaborate like never before and jointly own the relationship – integrating their efforts, sharing data on a common technology platform, and tightly managing roles, responses and responsibilities – to help manage the discontinuous, often backtracking buyer relationship.  If done poorly, the Sales Funnel sprouts “leaks” which often manifest later as lost sales, customer dissatisfaction, damaged reputations and inter-departmental friction.  Done well, the sales funnel becomes better managed, and the process of qualifying sales leads, concentrating on high potential buyers and nurturing the broader community is enhanced.

All of this is only possible with an integrated technology platform and an aligned organization.  The sheer volume and complexity of buyer activity is too great and too nuanced to manage otherwise, and the impact on the buyer and the seller is too important to neglect.

In sum, both buyers and sellers have heightened expectations these days.  Buyers gravitate to sellers who provide consistent, reliable treatment with every contact.  Selling organizations require tighter integration of sales and marketing functions to effectively provide that consistent treatment, guide each buyer’s journey, and nurture the community at large.  With the strategic guidance and alignment of roles and resources, the marketing and sales organization can collaboratively make significant gains in performance and measurably improve overall results.  When the sales team spends more time in high potential sales meetings and less time prospecting, you know you have successfully tuned your organization to the higher performance model.

How have these new realities affected your role and your organization?

What challenges have you overcome?

Love to hear your stories.

~Ed

adaptive marketing

Is the Customer Really in Charge?

The 2009 Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report summarizing an August survey of 1,000 “connected consumers” opens with the conclusion: “Experience matters”.  

When consumers engage with brands online, that online experience influences their buying decisions – a whopping 90+% of the time.  Apparently actions speak louder than advertising, whose conversion rate is comparatively paltry by any standard.

Are Facebook, MySpace and Twitter becoming the Outlet Malls of Tomorrow?  The report highlights how consumers are turning first to the Internet – not surprising for those of us who did their homework online before hitting the Black Friday sales in November. 

Equally influential, the study points out, is that this demographic called the “connected consumer” has become the New Mainstream of consumerism, with only 18% of the surveyed population qualifying as “laggards”.

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Commentary

Who’s in charge here? 

While providers of inbound marketing solutions urge marketers to adopt those data-driven marketing solutions under the premise that the buyer is in control, implying that that business must engage online or bust, this Razorfish study points out that marketers have a huge opportunity – nay, obligation – to influence the consumer experience online.  Sounds like a partnership to me. 

Who’s in charge of your customer experience?  How can you tell?  What would you change?  Love to hear your thoughts on this, readers.  Comment below.

~Ed

social media, Trends over time

The Customer has Spoken – twice: 2 reports on social media business benefits

For the organization still trying to decide whether social media is a trend or a fad and therefore useful for business, consider the following two studies.

From Business.com: The 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study

Ben Hanna, Ph.D. recently authored and published via http://www.business.com this 45-page study, which provides insights into business social media usage provided by nearly 3,000 North American business professionals.  The report covers utilization by individuals as well as adoption by companies.  Here are a few of its observations.

1. Nearly half of all US adults now participate in social networks, and regularly use these networks to find business-relevant information such as product information, peer reviews, and product support.  So many people regularly use social networks that it is impractical to pigeon-hole them demographically and therefore imprudent to dismiss your customers and prospects as not likely users.

The top 3 most popular social networking sites, not surprisingly, are FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  Ironically, according to Robert Half International, 54% of company CIOs surveyed ban the use of Facebook and Twitter at work – similar to how they once banned Internet surfing and personal email.

2.  Nearly 65% of respondents reported using social media as part of their normal work routine, including reading blogs, visiting business profiles, or using Twitter to find information and communicate about business related matters.

3.  The most popular use of social media resources for business are:

a – accessing product and service information

  • attending webinars or listening to podcasts (69%)
  • reading ratings/reviews for business products or services (62%)
  • visiting company or product profile pages on social media sites (61%)

b – communicating about product and service information

  • participating in online business communities or forums (51%)
  • reading or downloading business related content on 3rd party content sharing sites (50%)
  • asking questions on Q&A sites (49%)
  • subscribing to RSS feeds of business related news or information sites (35%)
  • Participating in discussions on 3rd party sites (29%)
  • Using Twitter to find or request business related information (29%)

One interesting statistic ought to pop out above: over half of all survey respondents participate in online business communities or forums.   In other words, it is highly likely that your customers and prospects are talking about you, your customers and your competition right now.
 

From MarketingProfs.com: 11 Twitter Success Stories

This paper, available at http://www.marketingprofs.com , provides detailed case studies on 11 companies who measurably achieved their ROI objectives using Twitter as a communications channel.

Examples include building community, managing customer services, selling, prospecting, raising branding and awareness, and fund raising.

The paper is prefaced with a very useful how-to guide called “Essential Twitter Tools” for making use of Twitter-related tools, gadgets and resources to get the most out of Twitter.

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Have you read these studies?  Are you attaining business benefits through social media?  What results are you getting?   Reply / comment below.

~Ed

Trends over time

Technology destroys and creates

In his Nov 16 2009 Forbes article titled “Churn, Baby, Churn”, http://bit.ly/1aZr0o Brian Wesbury, chief economist at First Trust Portfolios L.P. notes that while unemployment in November 09 is at a 26 year high, the market is much healthier than that statistic would imply.  Here’s how.

Expanding companies and new business starts added 27.9 million jobs in 2008. Contracting companies and business closures cost 31.4 million jobs.  Unemployment claims, the headline-grabbing statistic, is by far a much smaller figure – on the order of 250,000 jobs monthly (annualized rate: 3 million).  The pain, of course, is real if you are among that statistic.

Some of unemployment is due to the recession, and some can be blamed on panic, but technology is wrecking entire companies unable to adapt, while building new ones that can.  That huge jobs “displacement”, while excruciating in terms of its human toll,  is necessary for growth.

Technology eventually wins.  Highway construction jobs created by the recent stimulus plan will not.  They may release pent-up demand similar to the Cash for Clunkers program (which constricted the vehicle supply for Demolition Derby drivers), but that is short-lived.  In the long term, service industries like financial, legal, health care and leisure will be engines of growth – – but they will be delivered in a much more tech-savvy way.

Mr. Wesbury concludes: “Technology is the biggest source of churn – and, in the long run, the greatest source of hope”.

Commentary:

Look at what change technology has wrought for professional occupations like sales, marketing, PR, customer service, and product development.  Crowdsourcing, social media communities, all are indispensable; they make it easier to connect directly for improved results.

Your customers, partners, buyers and employees are on social media.  FaceBook and Google are among the top 5 most heavily trafficked web sites in the US, and in the top 20 worldwide.

Your challenge is to meet up online – in a conversational tone, not marketspeak.  Your customers are out there online, looking for you – and they’ve probably found you and made up their minds already.  Your new challenge is to meet them, listen, learn and adapt.

Will you get found and, if so, what will their impression be?