A couple fun and digestible bits of digital content were shared with me today. Infographics and well edited videos seem to be used increasingly as a great form of self promotion but at the end of a day I’m a sucker for well presented stats and figures.

Check out the video below which reflects the latest update to the ‘Social Media Revolution’ series.

The visual above, created by Go-Globe.com, reflects the following:

• Search engine Google serves more that 694,445 queries
• 6,600+ pictures are uploaded on Flickr
• 600 videos are uploaded on YouTube videos, amounting to 25+ hours of content
• 695,000 status updates, 79,364 wall posts and 510,040 comments are published on Social Networking site Facebook
• 70 New domains are registered
• 168,000,000+ emails are sent
• 320 new accounts and 98,000 tweets are generated on Social Networking site Twitter
• iPhone applications are downloaded more than13,000 times
• 20,000 new posts are published on Micro-blogging platform tumbler
• Popular web browser FireFox is downloaded more than 1700 times
• Popular blogging platform WordPress is downloaded more than 50 times
• WordPress Plugins aredownloaded more than 125 times
• 100 accounts are created on professional networking site LinkedIn
• 40 new Questions are asked on YahooAnswers.com
• 100+ questions are asked on Answers.com
• 1 new article is published on Associated Content, the world’s largest source of community-created content
• 1 new definition is added on UrbanDictionary.com
• 1,200+ new ads are created on Craigslist
• 370,000+ minutes of voice calls done by Skype users
• 13,000+ hours of music streaming is done by personalized Internet radio provider Pandora
• 1,600+ reads are made on Scribd, the largest social reading publishing company

If the typical Indian business owner thinks the much talked about smartphone revolution does not concern their business then they should think again. Given the rapid growth of the smartphone market, it is only a matter of time till Indian consumers get their hands on one of the new generation mobile phones. This presents a great opportunity for Indian small businesses that know how to capitalize on this trend to gain competitive advantage.

Although India boasts to have the 2^nd largest telecommunication network in the world after China (with 771 million mobile lines in service) and over time internet usage has surged (currently standing at aprox.  50 million active monthly internet users on PCs and phones), consumers in India have historically avoided mobile internet. The reason was the slow speed of the connections and an overall poor experience on feature phones. This is about to change.

India’s telecom providers are now driving consumers towards a new wave of inexpensive smartphones that will be powered by their new next generation 3G mobile networks, which should be fully rolled by 2012. According to IMRB and IAMAI the total number of mobile internet users in India in 2010 was 12.1 million. In 2011 the number is expected to reach 30 million. A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group has predicted there could be as many as 237 million mobile internet users in India by 2015, up from the current estimate of about 11 million. This not only implies exciting times for telecom companies but also presents a unique opportunity for businesses that are ready to deliver rich mobile content, games, and useful ‘apps’ to consumers and businesses hungry for great experiences on their new smartphones.

Smartphones, for many Indian consumers in cities and rural areas alike, will represent the equivalent of their PC, opening the flood gates to reaching the previously untapped consumers throughout the country with compelling digital experiences. Consumers, who had been previously limited to retail businesses in their local area, will now have full access to online commerce sites. Since historically e-commerce sites have not been formatted for mobile devices, India’s future presents a perfect opportunity for small businesses to serve this new need, while avoiding global players as competition.

In the future, consumers will also have full access to ‘apps’, the latest hot trend in mobile, that will allow for businesses to provide experiences that move well beyond the capability of the mobile browser. Free, for sale or designed to drive awareness of their business, applications will provide businesses with a permanent foothold on consumers’ devices. In a recent report, Gartner forecasts that global sales of apps for the iPad, iPhone and other portable mobile phones and devices will exceed $15 billion in 2011. It also predicts that this year 17.7 billion apps will be downloaded, the revenue from which will exceed the mobile app revenue generated in 2010 by 190%.

 Though digital technologies are yet to conquer the Indian market, the country has already set out on a path to its digital future. Smartphones will bring rich digital experiences to the masses, which they will not only desire but will come to expect – and entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of such platforms will reap the benefits.

]]> http://takemetoyourleader.com/2011/05/09/the-future-rise-of-smartphones-in-india/feed/ 4 http://takemetoyourleader.com/2010/11/02/will-the-desktop-be-the-next-marketing-battleground/ http://takemetoyourleader.com/2010/11/02/will-the-desktop-be-the-next-marketing-battleground/#comments Tue, 02 Nov 2010 05:58:09 +0000 Freddie Laker http://takemetoyourleader.com/?p=1566
I love apps on my mobile devices. Some might argue I have an app addiction with literally 15 to 20 apps being bought a month between my iPhone, HTC Desire, and my iPad. Since apps are reviewed by the app stores I don’t worry about my devices crashing and if I don’t like them they’re easy to uninstall so I’m always to try out apps by businesses and brands a like.  In fact it’s pretty normal fair these days for brands to be creating apps and games and distributing these (typically free) brand experiences through the app stores. In fact I find they tend to make their way into almost every digital pitch these days.

Why then did desktop applications as brand experiences never take off?

Adobe Air made it easy for Flex and Actionscript developers to create multi-platform desktop apps and yet the world of desktop apps as marketing experiences never went mainstream. There are so many clear benefits including being an ongoing engagement with consumers on one of their most personal devices that they might spend hours and hours a day on.

The reality is that I think there is a natural hesitation to install anything on your desktop as you never really if your computer (which for many of us is holy ground) would survive the experience due to malware, viruses, poor coding, etc. For most the risk just wasn’t worth it – which is exactly why I’ve always recommended to creative teams that they avoid installable desktop apps at all cost because the drop off rate would be too high and stick to in-browser experiences whenever possible.

We’re in a new age though, an age chock full of apps that do pretty much everything, an age when consumers trust the concept of apps and an app store.  Apple’s recent announcement that they will start selling desktop applications through an App store is a major opportunity for marketers. It has an excellent chance to bring in the age of the desktop as a favorite place to provide app based brand experiences and the feared drop off rate might finally plummet.

There is no doubt that apps on mobile devices are here to stay and I think this is the beginning of a major trend in desktop experiences. Mobile devices have been able to install applications for quite some time before the current generation app stores existed – it was just difficult and cumbersome for your typical user.  Expect the same revolution to happen to happen on the desktop and start preparing for a whole new wave of specialists to help agencies and brands alike.

For marketing experiences to be successful on the app store I think we should look to guidance from the successes of apps on mobile devices. Expectations should move away from large blown out applications and games that some might expect on a desktop machine and think about lightweight, focused, and sometimes “disposable” experiences. Consumers have reset their expectations around low risk, short-term, experiences that serve one function very well.

Application developers and marketers alike should be looking at the functionality of desktops and thinking what can I do here that I can’t do in a browser or via streamed content. I expect a lot of more advanced uses of cameras, processing power, your local computer content, and “always on” experiences to be fertile territory for brands to create memorable moments for consumers. These are areas where browser based experiences still struggle and the desktop offers a chance for new creative approaches.

It’s time to challenge our selves to ask “how can brands bring value to the (mac) desktop?” as it’s just about to become another great battleground for the hearts and minds of consumers.

Creative directors are not the key to delivering amazing creative ideas. We hold them up in high regard for their creative brilliance and original thinking but they are not the white knight sent in to solve all our great challenges.

Winning and delivering great work comes from a culture of creative excellence. It’s a unified desire that spans your creative, strategy, account, production, and amazingly even your business development teams.

Creative types are rewarded within their agencies for their creative excellence. Account types are typically rewarded for the size of their business and the associated profit margins they keep. Business development people are typically rewarded based on the amount of revenue they generate of any kind. These differences highlight a fundamental flaw in aligning an industry (or an agency) to deliver excellence for it’s clients and elevate the overall quality of work.

If your business development people can’t communicate your passion for amazing creative work at the earliest meeting the opportunities will never arise. If your account and project management teams can’t constructively and positively challenge stumbling blocks from clients, partners, or even operational issues then your ideas will always be watered down. But most importantly if they’re not incentivized, trained, or inspired to think differently they will never want to develop the necessary skills to create a culture of creative excellence and fight to do great work.

I recognize it feels impossible to change the legacy of an industry sometimes but this is a revolution that each agency can work on individually and in the process give them something unique to separate themfrom the competition. There are infinite approaches but I’d consider looking at a mixed structure that makes each group take multiple factors into judge their own success. Each project/campaign/relationship that a person is involved could be graded with multiple factors including quality of work, results, profitability, and potentially an extra bonus category for anything that receive special accolades or press.

This drives each individual to think across multiple dimensions of their work and will help align them with their peers. Yes – it’s more complicated for accounting. Yes – business development will fight to only be paid on their sales results. Yes – it will cause a backlash with some of your staff. Backlash will only help you to identify who is more interested in their own agenda and who is dedicated to being part of a team to define their own success.

Less radical approaches could start with testing out a theory like this on an individual project as opposed to re-inventing your entire business approach. You might find it interesting to see who volunteers.

The path to greatness is typically not the one besot with the least amount of challenge.

Whether it is driving results, inspiring consumers, orbuilding icons we all have our reasons for being in our creative industry. For the lucky ones it will boil down to creating great work that you can be proud of (for any number of reasons). It’s this very reason that has always made me think passion was the number one quality to look for in any team member, as it’s the easiest thing to align people around to drive a common goal.

Each agency is different though and not all are driven by a common passion. It’s time to develop a new reward structure that drives people to a common goal of creating top quality work that produces results for the client and is still developed profitably.

How does your agency do it?

If you’re not aware, the term Internet of Things refers to the interconnection of everyday objects (large and small) via an array of sensors and radio tags that would allow for a vastly “smarter” world empowered through technology. The amount of information that would be generated is staggering, but innovators will find opportunities to leverage this data (in conjunction with data from your social profile) to create amazing experiences in every day life delivered through this new found insight.

Imagine how a person’s lifestyle enhanced through digital experiences might change if devices, applications, or even marketing experiences were able to pull from a massively expanded pool of data delivered by understanding the current state of things they interact with such as their car, their personal electronics and appliances, the buses their kids go to school on, all the items in their refrigerator, and even their clothing. If each of these items were tagged and at minimum reporting their “identity” and location but potentially even sharing their operating status, power consumption, fuel level, capacity, current activity, or history of use computer logic could understand and make intelligent and highly relevant recommendations based on these factors that could be used to enhance any digitally enabled experience.

Let’s re-imagine a great marketing as a service example from recent memory: Fiat’s Ecodrive. Fiats’s brilliant Ecodrive system allowed your car to monitor your driving behavior and via their website was able to make driving recommendations on improving your driving style to increase fuel efficiency. Unfortunately it wasn’t real time or wirelessly driven but it did demonstrate a clear value to consumers and marketers how rich insight into your behaviors could create valuable experiences. Now imagine if experiences like that were all around us and operating in realtime without the need for thumb drives etc.

In a future world consumers with Internet of Things enabled appliances and products could benefit from always knowing the contents of their refrigerator with brands potentially providing services that make recommendations on replacement purchases or new products.

If all clothing was tagged, identified, and classified applications could be developed that could even recommend clothing based on occasions, the weather, or even what to pack for a trip based on your related travel booking and itinerary.

Anyone who thought the speed at which internet based business and marketing is evolving has slowed down since the hay day of the late 90s and 00s is clearly mistaken. The last couple of months alone have indicated that we’re achieving realization of the semantic web and now China premier minister Wev Jaibo has announced a plan to commit fully to national Internet of Things plan.

I’ve been talking about hyper relevance a lot lately. The concept that through your social profile and location based services respectively marketers understand who consumers and where consumers are in a way that’s never been possible before and this is allowing us to deliver hyper relevant advertising. If the Internet of Things came to bear we would also understand what people were doing and how they were doing it in a way that isn’t currently possible. Again our ability to deliver relevant experience only extends exponentially yet again. Amazing, yet probably spooky, experience await all of us as technology continues to develop along these lines.

The Reality of Internet of Things

Unfortunately the IoT is as revolutionary as it would be hard to implement. It would require universal adoption to achieve the type of world changing effect that is possible. These types of changes would require masses of corporations to work in conjunction or the support of a government with enough to conviction to push through massive innovations in a short period of time.

I believe that time is upon us. The Internet of Things reflects the next great evolution of the internet after the semantic web. We’ve just started to see further wide spread adoption of the semantic web and now China will be the country that has the conviction to lead this next great innovation. In 2015 not only will China reflect the world’s biggest internet community, but they will likely be leading the innovation of the web and the west will look to them for inspiration.

Ironically for a marketer that was “born digital” I have always had a thing for classic advertising. Prints ads from every era have lined the walls of our agencies especially if they were a current client. I have always particularly enjoyed classic ads launching “new” technologies, but today I want to take a moment to celebrate the best of the worst ads of the 50s. They’re offensive, degrading, absurd, and in many cases totally sexist. I’m thankful we’ve moved past this (for the most part) in today’s society, but we might as well be able to look back at them with a sense of humor now.

Which one do you like or hate the most?

Mad Men fans might as well take a peak!

Special thanks to Patti for the tip on this one…

Baffling.

In an increasingly global world, it’s not unreasonable to believe that some tactics used in developed markets will be successful in China. But it’s also important to recognize that new trends or even new uses of familiar tactics make every market different, a fact I was reminded of after moving to China three months ago.

For example, advanced analytics tools for monitoring the social media space will dramatically change the approach to social media and the value placed on it by marketers—once they arrive in emerging markets–just at they did recently in developed markets. The expansion of market leaders like CIC, a digital media research and consulting firm in Shanghai, will help drive this change.

China’s digital marketers can skip some of the mistakes made in other more established markets as they go through a huge digital growth spurt and probably develop new tools (and associated mistakes) on their own. I expect the same thing to happen with some tactics.

As a westerner living in Shanghai, I’ve certainly had to re-evaluate what I understood about China, including the way to approach digital marketing when taking on the world’s largest internet market. Here’s what I’ve figured out so far:

1. There is plenty of life beyond Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
And that’s a good thing, since these banned sites are non-players in the Chinese market. Although the social media space is fragmented, there are major players with hundreds of millions of users that rival even the biggest players.

Although a myriad of players exist in this complex social media space, start by learning about platforms like Kaixin (social network), Sina Weibo (micro-blogging), Youku (video sharing), and QQ (instant messenger). Re-learning the platforms can be challenging, but is possible for non-Chinese speakers by accessing them through Google Chrome with its automatic language translation function. The brand communications principals behind authenticity, transparency, and value in social media still apply, though.

2. Bulletin board sites (BBS) thrive in China.
BBS culture formed the foundation of the social web long before there were social networks in the rest of the world. They provide a rich and fertile digital ecosystem of like-minded people aligned around online communities, physical communities, common passions or needs, or even groups of friends or individuals. Arguably the largest social platform (in aggregate), they provide unique insight into the Chinese consumer and should be addressed in any comprehensive digital marketing campaign.

3. Forget leveraging a user’s social profile (for now).
One of the most (r)evolutionary digital enhancements outside of China in recent years was Facebook Connect (now OpenGraph) which allowed marketers to personalize digital experiences based on a user’s social profile. It allowed for new types of digital experiences that were exponentially more relevant to the consumer. This technology doesn’t exist in China yet, but keep your eye out for the first social network to release a platform like this one, as they’re sure to grow rapidly and become the darling of China’s digital marketing community. Of course they’ll still be up against the challenge of China’s internet community being wary of sharing their personal information.

4. Think mobile first for many digital users in China.
The number of people who accessed the internet on a mobile device doubled last year with the introduction of 3G services. Many of these individuals will have their first digital experiences at school, university, work, or an internet café, but their one consistent experience with the internet will be through their mobile device as opposed to a PC as they might not have the ability to own one.

5. Never underestimate the rate of change.
The rate of change is staggering and only reflective of a society that is undergoing a mind- boggling transformation into the kingdom of capitalist might while simultaneously holding firmly onto their traditional roots. China added 131 million internet users to its population between 2008 and 2009 and another 60 million by July of this year. This same staggering rate of change exists in the growth of the population and simultaneously the sophistication of the population. Expectations around the quality of digital marketing will rise more rapidly then expected.

6. Penetration may be low, but smart phones are big business in China.
Don’t base your thinking on any statistic you read as a percentage point. It’s very easy to forget scale in China. For example, China’s smart phone penetration is approaching 11%–a small number until you remember that it reflects around 180 million people. In tier one and tier two cities—the provincial capitals and main urban (and wealthy) centers—average penetration is even higher.

7. E-commerce plays a different role in China.
Mega players like Amazon and Ebay have never been able to take on domestic China offerings like Alibaba Group’s B2C e-commerce platform Taobao. China’s great rush of consumerism has driven desire for premium brands beyond the tier one cities, but consumers don’t have access to the retail outlets of top tier cities or are unable to afford their new aspirations. E-commerce players like Taobao are able to provide access to these goods across China and appear to be able to provide deep discounts not available at retail locations.

8. Don’t expect insights into people’s offline behaviors to reflect their behavior online.
In China, the internet provides an outlet for people to live an online identity that is quite different from their offline identity. Sometimes these online personas are a reaction to a repressed cultural environment due to religion, the government, or society-based traditions.

In other scenarios, it can be an opportunity to live out escapism and fulfill people’s dreams through a virtual world. Social networks in China boast games like “buying houses” and “parking lot” for example. Don’t rely on standard research and consumer insights to reach your audience as you might find unique opportunities by understanding a consumer’s online persona and how it’s connected back to their offline persona.

Digital marketing in China is at a very exciting stage in its development. It has huge scale and reach, the budgets are growing, marketers’ understanding is maturing, and most importantly creativity is emerging in new and exciting ways. Avoid some of the pitfalls and join the fray.

(as published in AdAgeChina.com)

Enjoy!

Shanghai Apple Store from Freddie Laker on Vimeo.