First of all, I find the figure of 2.7 hours to be remarkably — perhaps even implausibly — high. Sure mobile Internet use is popular, and getting more popular — anyone who goes to a media conference can’t fail to notice that. But 2.7 hours per day?

My god, where is everyone doing this?

Imagining a half-hour commute each way, plus half an hour at lunch, that’s still just 1.5 hours on the mobile Internet. Do people then go home and spend another 72 minutes on the mobile Internet? Frankly, I am skeptical about this number, especially since according to Nielsen the average American spends a total 68 hours on the Internet per month, or about 2.3 hours per day. Either Nielsen was off by over 50%, or something else is amiss.

Any statisticians or demographers out there care to speculate about what the issue might be?

However, setting aside the hourly numbers, the Ruder Finn (I’m picturing a belligerent Lapp) study seems more plausible in suggesting the usage patterns for the mobile Internet, and specifically the intent of the user — meaning, their goal in getting online — which was the study’s main thrust anyway. In this area it’s interesting to note the large number of people who use mobile Internet to get on social networks to post comments (45%) or “Connect to people on social networking sites” (43%).

In a way this makes perfect sense, as mobile devices are above all designed for communication on the go, and human beings are naturally social animals (well, except me). But given all the issues which unfortunately still seem to attend mobile Internet — dodgy coverage, slow connections, compatibility problems — it’s a testament to the draw of social media that nearly half of people will get online with the main goal of posting comments on a social network site.

Here’s our future according to Gartner:

* By 2012, 20% percent of businesses will have no ownership of IT assets. Fueled by technological developments in 2009, such as virtualization and cloud computing, there’s a movement toward decreased IT hardware assets and more ownership of hardware by third parties.
* By 2012, India-based IT companies will represent 20% of cloud service providers in the market. Gartner attributes this to companies leveraging their market positions and R&D efforts in cloud computing, resulting in cloud-enabled outsourcing options.
* By 2012, Facebook will lead the pack in developing the distributed, interoperable social Web through Facebook Connect and similar mechanisms. The interoperability will be critical to survival of other social networks.
* Other social networks (including Twitter) will continue to develop with focus on greater adoption and specialization. However, they will all revolve around Facebook.
* By 2014, building on server vitalization and desktop power management as savings in energy costs, more organizations will be driven by the need to be responsible for carbon dioxide emissions and will include carbon costs in business cases. Vendors will have to provide carbon lifecycle statistics for their products.
* In 2012, 60% of a new PCs total life greenhouse gas emissions will have occurred before the user first turns it on. In its lifetime, a typical PC consumes 10 times its own weight in fossil fuels, but around 80% of a PC’s total energy usage occurs during production and transportation. Buyers will be paying more attention to eco labels.
* Online marketing by 2015 will control more than US$ 250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.
* By 2014, mobile and Internet technology will help over 3 billion of the world’s adults to electronically transact. Emerging economies will see increase in mobile and Internet adoption through 2014. Worldwide mobile penetration rate will get to 90%.
* By 2013, mobile phones will replace PCs as the most common device for Web access.

http://www.dfactory.gr

The study of 1,000-plus marketers shows 54% of marketers said they will boost budgets for email marketing, and about 66% in social media (even though about 80% of those acknowledged the difficulty in tracking ROI in the medium).

Delving deeper in social media, the research showed the medium is the “fastest growing digital marketing channel.” That includes venues from Facebook pages to blogs.

More than 70% are boosting spending on so-called “off-site” social media offerings such as Facebook and Twitter, and about 65% in “on-site” areas such as “blogs or ratings and reviews.”

Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy, stated: “Social media marketing is the area where companies are most likely to be spending more money during 2010, but areas such as search engine marketing and email marketing will remain buoyant.”

Fifty-one percent said they plan to increase paid-search budgets, and 56% in mobile marketing.

Also, 13% plan to decrease their overall marketing budget, and 42% to keep it flat.

source: media post

Dfactory

www.dfactory.gr

The company’s Mountain Dew division is several stages into its DEWmocracy campaign — a plan to launch a new Mountain Dew flavor with the public’s involvement at all levels of the process, and PepsiCo also just launched the Pepsi Refresh Project on January 13th. Rather than spending money on Super Bowl television ads this year, the company is spending $20 million on a social media campaign.

Jay Baer, founder of the social media strategy company Convince & Convert, said brands are realizing they need to market for the long haul. “I do think it’s a good move for Pepsi. I don’t know if every brand can pull it off,” he said.

The Pepsi Refresh Project and the DEWmocracy campaigns are part of a crowdsourcing effort that’s part of the larger PepsiCo plan to more closely integrate consumers with the brand. “Driving consumer interest and engagement takes imagination and often a certain amount of reinvention, so it’s fair to say we’re rethinking everything we do from product development to marketing campaigns across our entire portfolio,” said Bart Casabona, a Mountain Dew spokesman.

A Closer Look at Mountain Dew’s Social Media Campaign
Leah Betancourt About 2 days ago Leah Betancourt 47
Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right
242Share
email
share

pepsi cans imageSocial media marketing campaigns are proving to be goldmines rich with customer engagement and insight that companies wouldn’t likely have otherwise. Companies like PepsiCo are going to extensive lengths to foster this type of collaboration with fans, and the payoff has been big.

The company’s Mountain Dew division is several stages into its DEWmocracy campaign — a plan to launch a new Mountain Dew flavor with the public’s involvement at all levels of the process, and PepsiCo also just launched the Pepsi Refresh Project on January 13th. Rather than spending money on Super Bowl television ads this year, the company is spending $20 million on a social media campaign.

Jay Baer, founder of the social media strategy company Convince & Convert, said brands are realizing they need to market for the long haul. “I do think it’s a good move for Pepsi. I don’t know if every brand can pull it off,” he said.

The Pepsi Refresh Project and the DEWmocracy campaigns are part of a crowdsourcing effort that’s part of the larger PepsiCo plan to more closely integrate consumers with the brand. “Driving consumer interest and engagement takes imagination and often a certain amount of reinvention, so it’s fair to say we’re rethinking everything we do from product development to marketing campaigns across our entire portfolio,” said Bart Casabona, a Mountain Dew spokesman.

A Closer Look at Mountain Dew’s Social Media Campaign

The first DEWmocracy campaign launched in 2007. This inaugural DEWmocracy effort let consumers choose Dew’s new flavor, color, name and graphics, and resulted in more than 470,000 people voting and an overall 1 million people taking part in some phase of the process, according to the company’s DEWmocracy media site. The winning new flavor, Voltage, hit store shelves in January 2009.

Brett O’Brien, Mountain Dew’s marketing director, said that for the first campaign a site was built for people to interact with, which made sense at that time.

Fast forward to July 2009, when the second DEWmocracy campaign launched. The multi-stage effort tasks die-hard Mountain Dew fans to narrow seven sodas down to one final new flavor that will become a permanent part of the Mountain Dew family, using social media platforms 12seconds.tv (12seconds.tv), Twitter (Twitter), Facebook (Facebook) and YouTube (YouTube) in the process.

O’Brien said that with the explosion of social networking, they felt it was best to interact with people where they are.

Flavor Nations Play a Large Role

The second iteration of the Mountain Dew campaign is fueled by the 4,000-strong DEW Labs crew, an online community of die-hard fans. The DEW Labs are divided up into three Flavor Nations for the three Mountain Dew soda finalists: Typhoon, WhiteOut and Distortion. Once the three flavors debut in April, the Flavor Nations must talk up their flavor and get people to vote for it to become the permanent new Mountain Dew soda. That one winning new permanent soda flavor will debut on Labor Day, according to the company’s DEWmocracy media site.

O’Brien said the several stages involved are really part of the normal product innovation process. He said if they were going to be totally transparent the whole time in launching a new Mountain Dew flavor, they needed their customers to be there the whole time.

Every part of the campaign involves the fans and the public — from picking flavor names, to voting on the best user-submitted ad campaign.

Collaboration With Consumers

“What we’re calling it [is] collective intelligence,” O’Brien said. “It’s less about crowdsourcing, but more about collaboration.” PepsiCo looks at DEWmocracy, which has literally been driven by word of mouth, as a way of doing business rather than an ad campaign, he said, and the most important thing to recognize is the passion consumers feel for Mountain Dew is like nothing that’s out there.

According to O’Brien, PepsiCo looks at social media as the best way to get direct dialog with their fans and for the company to hear from those fans without filters. “It’s been great for us to have this really unique dialogue that we normally wouldn’t have,” he said. “It really has opened our eyes up.”

Convince & Convert’s Baer said the DEWmocracy campaign fits with Mountain Dew’s brand and customer profile. He said giving customers ownership of the brand is a fantastic idea.

“What they’re trading off is reach for depth and they’re trading short-term impact for long-term impact,” he said. Baer sees the process of brands asking customers to craft better products or services as a trend. He pointed out that companies aren’t just soliciting customer input, but they’re putting it into practice. And some business decisions are now based solely on customer feedback.

“To me, that’s tremendously exciting,” he said. “To me, that’s the social media story.”

source: Mashable.com

While each of these techniques can provide varying results, all of them are targeted at creating the viral effect. Ultimately that is what makes the Facebook platform so appealing currently. You can rapidly reach thousands to millions of individuals in a short span of time at minimal cost. The problem with these viral techniques are that many of them will become practically useless soon after I release this post. That is the nature of viral marketing. Viral marketing techniques lose their appeal after they become adopted by the masses. While the techniques that have been used until now are far from revolutionary, I have a feeling that we will begin to see truly creative techniques in the coming months.

So what exactly are ‘bad’ links; where do they come from, why are theyconsidered ‘bad’ and how they can negatively impact your site??

Many web entrepreneurs think that quantity is the key, and start contacting all their friends, family members and co-workers asking for links as well as any other websites in the same field. This may bring in some links, but most of these folks are going to expect you to return the favor. This means linking back to them from your own site, which devalues the link that they gave you. Search engines are fully aware of ‘friends’ networks, and will sharply discount the value of these ‘reciprocal links’ when assigning value to your site.

In addition, the quality of these sites might not be up the best. This can reflect on you as well. If people assume that your site is probably only as good as the sites that link to you, then being associated with a low ranking page is not a god thing!

A very bad, very black hat option you may be tempted to try in order to obtain links for your site. This is listing yourself in an automated link management system. These sites say they will get you plenty of links, but basically consist of pages of web addresses all hyperlinked to each other.

Many of the sites will not even have any relevance to your field, and the whole setup is viewed by search engines with distrust. The engines will at best simply discount these as they really are just more reciprocal links, or at worst will label you a ‘link spammer’ and penalize you.

Taking the same view in the other direction, too many outbound links from your website to a friend’s may not be a good idea if the other site is completely unrelated to yours. You should have another site or blog for reciprocal or ‘buddy’ linking, keep your website business oriented to relevant links for the best results.

Paid links are very dangerous. There are a lot of black-hatters out there that promise to increase your links and page rank, or even guarantee a top ten spot in search results. In many cases, these are scams – they either don’t deliver or they could use banned practices that will bounce back on you. Also, scammers may offer to pay you to write reviews or testimonials for their products; never endorse the product before researching it!

Hiring a reputable ‘white hat’ SEO to oversee your linking practices is a great idea if you are feeling worried about your site’s links. They should tell you exactly what they plan to do, and how they plan to do it. If the answers shady, try another SEO! You only want to use the right linking tactics to build trust in your site and your product.

At the moment is available only for Ν97 Μini, 5800 XpressMusic, 5800 Νavigation Εdition, Ε72, Ε55, Ε52, 5230, 6710 Νavigator, 6730 Classic and X6 devices but many more will come and add up the list.

The maps cover over 180 countries and 47  different languages.

You may find more information at Nokia maps

Dfactory