Innovative marketing and social media blog: 2012

Thursday 20 December 2012

Phizzle Identifies Top 2013 Digital Marketing Trends

The leading technology provider of advanced mobile marketing products and digital advertising solutions

“We believe that brand marketers are embracing all of the innovative possibilities for mobile and digital marketing as the technology continues to advance. We are poised for large growth over the next few years," stated Ben Davis, CEO of Phizzle.

Phizzle, Inc., a leading technology provider of advanced mobile marketing products and digital advertising solutions, today announced the company’s predictions for mobile and digital marketing in 2013.

Phizzle has identified the top emerging trends from technology, business innovation, creativity and brand measurement based on the company’s experience in connecting millions of mobile users with many top-name brands in the sports, entertainment and retail industries. Trends to watch in 2013 include: active content, mobile analytics, augmented reality, HTML5 adoption and mobile loyalty solutions.

The year 2012 has proven to be a pivotal one for the mobile industry, marked by a near-doubling in smartphone ownership, consumers' growing appetite for mobile and social content and tablets emerging as a formidable fourth screen. Mobile marketing has grown from an optional component in a company’s marketing mix to a vital role in a brand’s success.

2013 is expected to bring decisive changes to the mobile industry. According to a recent mobile statistics report released last month by comScore, the leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics, ‘by 2014 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common web access device worldwide.’

“The year ahead brings great potential as integrated digital marketing campaigns continue to evolve and mature. We’ve come a long way since the early days of using a mobile phone as a communications device; even since we built Phizzle in 2005”, said Ben Davis, Chief Executive Officer of Phizzle. “Focus on developments such as real-time data aggregation and mobile analytics are making digital marketing more measurable than ever before. Most brand marketers will be intently focused on CRM as the critical component in determining ROI in mobile campaigns in 2013.”

Mr. Davis continued, “We believe that industry credibility has now been achieved and brand marketers are embracing all of the innovative possibilities for mobile and digital marketing as the technology continues to advance. We are poised for large growth over the next few years.”

Five key trends for 2013 identified in this release are:

Content is King

Mobile is a behavior; it is not just a device. It is a lifestyle and people are increasingly using their mobile devices to manage every aspect of their lives. Brand marketers will have the opportunity in 2013 to deliver relevant content that yields a much deeper and meaningful engagement with their customers. In order to accomplish this, brands will need to focus on not just the content that is created but disseminating it to the masses in a variety of forms. Using multiple platforms, from blogs and video to Twitter and SMS, the delivery of content will need to be accessible in all forms, through all channels and at all times. One of the most impactful ways to do this is to incorporate visual platforms such as video and augmented reality.

Augmented Reality

Emerging technologies such as augmented reality will take a lead in 2013. “Augmented reality enables the delivery of content in real time,” observed Mr. Davis, “QR codes were big in 2012, but companies didn’t have mobile versions of their Web sites and when consumers scanned the mobile bar codes, the content they received wasn’t formatted for their devices. Augmented reality content has to be form fitted for the phone or it won’t work. And the challenge is educating marketers - then the consumers - about the technology that is available.”

Augmented reality is the perfect digital marketing tool. By turning a users’ camera on their device into a real world browser, augmented reality will quickly become the newest form of digital storytelling by turning any real world object into a piece of dynamic and engaging content, all while measuring and monetizing the interaction.

Data, Data, Data and More Data…

The evolution of mobile marketing has enhanced the value of the data available to marketers. Understanding the available data and targeting the audience with the right content at the right time in the right place is becoming easier. With much of the emphasis in 2013 on big data, chief digital officers will be keeping close tabs on mobile metrics. They will be striving to understand how the analytics relate to overall business performance – the bottom line - and they will be eager to adopt the mobile and social opportunities derived from a more robust data-driven environment. CRM, once the cornerstone for legacy computing systems, will now shift to MRM, mobile relationship marketing, becoming one of the most crucial aspects of integrated digital marketing campaigns.

As data analysis becomes more cost efficient, brands will increasingly be able to predict customer behavior, leading to tailored offers and communications. ‘Predictive Personalizatio n’ will gain traction in 2013 and will begin to replace paid local search. Driven, by real-time analytics, mobile marketing will be measured by how well brands can deliver instantaneous results predicated on consumer behaviors.

Loyalty to Motivate Brand Engagement

With the proliferation of new technology including near field communication (NFC), as well as Apple’s Passbook, consumers are going to become more comfortable – and more trusting – about making purchases using their mobile devices in 2013.

Designed to incentivize faithful customers, both SMB’s and Fortune 1000 companies will implement mobile-enabled loyalty programs. Sophisticated data analysis will underlie every mobile solution so that brands can better understand consumer behavior. Mobile and digital marketing campaigns will be designed to deepen fan loyalty and increase advertising revenues.

While brands are gravitating towards mobile, marketers need to understand that mobile is not just a device anymore. Mobile is a behavior. By implementing trackable elements or installing loyalty solutions to mobile engagements, brands will be able to measure behavior and award fans for their role in being brand ambassadors in social spaces - any time and in any place.

HTML 5 and the Mobile Application

As HTML 5 capabilities expand, there will be a growing trend towards the development of HTML 5-based applications. Although native apps, hybrid apps and the like will still remain prevalent, the growth of HTML 5-based apps will dramatically increase in 2013. HTML 5 applications provide the “build once and deploy everywhere” mentality which relates to substantial cost savings. With Windows 8 supporting HTML 5, these apps will provide the same compelling user experience as native apps and Windows will become a relevant mobile OS in 2013.

As Apple, Google and Microsoft continue to push for HTML 5 mobile applications, it is only a matter of time until HTML 5 becomes the standard for mobile app development.

Davis added, “These are a few of the key topics we think will be consistently discussed during the conferences and industry events in 2013. We look forward to engaging our industry peers and business partners in the discussion; and to the ways these shifts and innovations will impact the next phase of mobile and digital marketing.”

About Phizzle:
Phizzle, Inc. is a leading technology provider of advanced mobile marketing products and digital advertising solutions. Phizzle redefines how brands effectively use digital and mobile marketing tools to deliver revenue and results. Serving as a mobile channel for brands to navigate through the digital landscape, Phizzle enables clients and partners to deploy targeted mobile campaigns delivering real-time results and creates new inventory to drive sponsorship revenue. For more information about Phizzle, please visit us at http://www.phizzle.com or call 877-744-9953 or text “Phizzle” to 74499.
Join our Facebook community at https://www.facebook.com/phizzleinc or follow us on Twitter @phizzle.

Media Contact:
Beth Trier
Phizzle, Inc
http://www.phizzle.com
btrier(at)phizzle(dot)com
415-285-6147

Wednesday 19 December 2012

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Friday 14 December 2012

Google reveals 2012's top net searches in the UK

"The Olympics" may have seemed like a safe bet for the top search term in the UK this year - but, according to Google, it was eclipsed by "Euro 2012".

"Olympic tickets" came second in Google's annual zeitgeist report, which lists 2012's most searched-for terms.

London was the most searched-for city in the UK, while Rio, host of the next Summer Olympics, was the most searched-for travel destination.

Skyfall reflected its box-office success, as the top trending movie.

Singer Whitney Houston, who died in February, was the most searched-for person, followed by "Kate Middleton", the Duchess of Cambridge.

The people list looked very different on rival search engine Bing, which revealed its top 2012 searches a few weeks ago.

Topping its global list was reality TV star Kim Kardashian, followed by singer Justin Bieber. Kim Kardashian also topped Yahoo's most searched-for list.

Tuesday 6 November 2012

Why Pundits And Politicians Hate NYT Election Forecaster Nate Silver

GREGORY FERENSTEIN

Tuesday, October 30th, 2012

213 Comments

The New York Times election oracle, Nate Silver, who in his fivethirtyeight blog correctly predicted 49 of 50 states in the last election, predicts that Obama could breeze to victory with a 75 percent chance of winning. Despite his relatively simple method of averaging polls to predict winners, he’sbecome a punching bag for pundits and politicians who label him a fradulent snakeoil salesman.

Why does Silver, who is really just an apartisan puzzle-solver, inspire so much loathing? Because his results reveal a psychologically disturbing fact: we live in an uncontrollable, unpredictable world. Obama is a moderately popular incumbent running against a relatively uncharismatic one who’s not that well likedeven among conservatives. A rainy election day and upswing in the economy could do more to affect the small slice of undecided voters in swing states than all the newspaper endorsements and billion-dollar campaigns put together.

“Both sides understand that it is close, and it could go either way. And anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they’re jokes,” said MSNBC’s hotheaded morning political pundit, Joe Scarborough, in a pointed rant against the humble New York Times statistician.

Buzzfeed thinks that Silver’s critics target him because he favors Obama. Washington Post Blogger, Ezra Klein, takes a more therapeutic interpretation, pointing to a caustic op-ed in Politico to argue that Silver threatens the very existence of pundits, since the success of his models make their opinions an antiquated information source.

Speaking as one of the few journalists with an advanced degree in mathematics, I think the most telling reason why so many criticize Silver was plainly stated by Democratic Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, whenDaily Show host Jon Stewart asked her last week how she felt about Silver’s prediction that the House of Representatives would almost certainly be controlled by Republicans again. “That’s why we have elections,”she said dismissively.

Yet, Silver is most likely right about the House and it implies that Pelosi, as well as campaigns and all the well-paid political pundits, can do little to change the outcome.

Uncontrollability

Campaigns and the media do very little to nudge voters, especially for federal elections. For instance the alleged “youthquake” of young first-time voters Obama allegedly inspired though an unprecedented use of social media in 2008 was a big fat myth. Census results later revealed that the entire presidential circus only boosted youth turnout by a meager 2.1 percent, so little that ““If no one under the age of 30 had voted, Obama would have won every state he carried with the exception of two: Indiana and North Carolina,” wroteChuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser in How Barack Obama Won.

Indeed Obama was locked in a thrilling neck-and-neck race with McCain right up until the economy tanked in the fall of 2008, a factor completely outside either senator’s control.

Elections are decided by a disturbingly slim margin of the population: a combination of partisan couch potatoes who need encouragement to go vote and undecided voters residing in a few swing states who are over the age of 18, eligible to vote, can make it out on Election Day, and actually have their ballot counted. (For a hilarious take on this fact, watch the SNL clip below.)

Campaigns do matter, but far less than we imagine. Indeed, looking at the fivethirtyeight.com forcasts since June, predicting Obama’s win looks much like it does now, despite the rollercoaster ride in between. And, the factors we can’t control can mean much more than those we can. As a species primed to believe in free-will and in control of our destiny, that’s a very disturbing fact.

Moderation And Uncertainty

“The thing that people associate with expertise — authoritativeness, kind of with a capital ‘A’ — don’t correlate very well with who’s actually good at making predictions,” Silver told TechCrunch. Celebrity pundits make their careers carefully tracking daily polls and offering bold headline-catching interpretations as to why the American electorate is turning away from a particular candidate.

In reality, the most surprising polls of the day are usually the most inaccurate. A poll’s margin of error, usually around +/- 5 percent, means that out of every 100 polls, around five will show results much higher or lower than the actual population. Given the inherent volatility in prediction, Silver always expresses his prediction in terms of a probability rather than a grand “yes” or “no” prediction. It’s difficult to make a TV career on humility.

Moreover, he bases his predictions on polls themselves, with relatively less influence from variables like the state of the economy or political beliefs of the candidate. As he argues in his new book, The Signal and the Noise, even the smartest political scientists have failed miserably at predicting elections based on anything we know about human behavior and political preference. If polls are still the only reliable source of prediction, then it proves how dumbfounded we are with voter behavior, making pundit forecasting little more accurate than monkeys rolling dice with catchphrases.

Silver gets guff for the same reason I do when I call out tech companies for using poor research; when sound statistical methods are employed, the results are almost invariably tiny and there’s more left unknown than known. In a world where certainty is a tradeskill, statisticians reveal how little we definitively know about the world — a threatening concept indeed.

Twitter votes for Obama

By Quentin Fottrell

Obama beats Romney on the social media site, a new study shows.

ReutersEnlarge Image

U.S. President Barack Obama reacts after tweeting at his first ever Twitter Town Hall in Washington, July 6, 2011.

Tweets and Facebook FB +0.33% posts about President Obama and Mitt Romney tend toward criticism more than praise. But when a candidate is getting cheered on social media, chances are, it’s Obama, according to a new study.

Twitter users don’t pull their 140-charcter punches. Of all the tweets about Romney posted in the eight weeks ended Oct. 21, 58% were negative, according to an analysis of nearly 2,500 online conversations by the Pew Research Center. That’s compared with 45% of Obama-related tweets. “On Twitter, the conversation about the campaign has consistently been harsher for Romney than for Obama,” the study says.

Obama’s Twitter traffic suggests he’s holding the support of female voters, experts say. Female Twitter users outnumber males by 53% to 47%, according to one recent analysis by a social media firm, and the average user is a 28-year-old female. “Given Romney’s pro-life stance, I can’t imagine he’d fair very well among women in their 20s,” says John Bonini, content marketing manager of Impact Branding & Design.

Click to Play

Election 2012: Who wins the social media race?

Barack Obama receives more positive and less negative comments than Mitt Romney across Twitter, Facebook and blogs, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center. While both candidates receive more negative comments overall, Obama has a much greater lead among the Twitterati. Quentin Fottrell reports on the News Hub. Photo: Reuters.

Trends are similar on Facebook. Roughly 62% of Romney posts and 53% of Obama ones were negative, Pew says. Many Facebookers cut Obama some slack after the first debate, the Pew study says, even though the mainstream media was highly critical of the president’s performance. On Facebook, Pew says, the tone actually improved for Obama throughout October.

Of course, Obama and Romney remain neck-in-neck in official polls. Obama leads Romney 48% to 47% — a difference of just seven voters among a pool of 1,475 surveyed, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll. But Twitter and Facebook cannot be dismissed entirely, says Michael Cornfield, acting director of the Political Management Program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “You can be sure both campaigns examine social media metrics to see how well their messages are circulated,” he says.

Friday 2 November 2012

Apple admonished by UK court for Samsung 'apology'

Fri, 2 Nov 2012 | By Lara O'Reilly

Apple has been admonished by the UK Court of Appeal, which has said the statement the technology company was ordered to place on its website acknowledging Samsung did copy the iPad’s design is “non compliant” because it lacked prominence and included additional “incorrect” information beyond what the judge had ordered to be published.

In July the court ruled that Samsung’s Galaxy tablets did not infringe Apple’s registered designs for the iPad and ruled that Apple must publish advertisements in British newspapers and on its UK website to that effect. The advertisements have not yet appeared elsewhere beyond its own site.

Apple put up a statement on its website last week - accessible by a small link at the bottom of its homepage - which acknowledged the ruling but also included the High Court judge’s comments from the lawsuit in July that Samsung is “not as cool” as Apple.

It seemingly criticised the High Court’s decision by adding that in a case tried in Germany regarding the same design patent, Samsung was found to have engaged in “unfair competition” by copying the iPad design and that in the US Apple was awarded $1bn in damages after Samsung was found guilty of infringing its patents.

The UK Court of Appeal has ordered Apple to remove the statement by the end of today (2 November) and move it to the website’s homepage, using a larger font. It also must remove and acknowledge the previous “inaccurate” comments.

Apple yesterday (1 November) made a request to extend the time allotted to make the change to 14 days, but this was rejected by the court.

Commenting on the ruling, Michael Gardner, head of intellectual property at London law firm Wedlake Bell, says if Apple “do not get a grip” it could find itself in contempt of court, which could see executives being imposed with fines or even prison terms.

He adds: “The notice as published by Apple is completely against the spirit of the Court of Appeal’s ruling and appears to be in breach of it. Apple was ordered to report the fact that their claim had been dismissed and that there was no injunction in place in Europe against Samsung’s Galaxy tablet. Instead, Apple have inserted quotes from the original High Court judgment which described Samsung’s product as ‘not as cool’ as the iPad. Also, Apple have accused Samsung of copying the iPad and referred to a German injunction that the Court of Appeal held had been wrongly granted.”