Do You Have A Small Business Mobile Strategy? 46% Of Mobile Users Are Waiting For You

WOW – Nearly half (46%) of American adults are smartphone owners, is your website properly viewable on a mobile devise? Most small businesses do not have their website optimized for mobile.

Smart Phone Owners

Approximately 63% of “C” level executives use a smart phone, they are the decision makers when it comes to B2B purchases and partnerships, we encourage you to optimize for mobile. Here is a fresh Pew study on mobile devises supporting the increase of mobile smart phones use. Nearly half (46%) of American adults are smartphone owners as of February 2012, an increase of 11 percentage points over the 35% of Americans who owned a smartphone last May. Two in five adults (41%) own a cell phone that is not a smartphone, meaning that smartphone owners are now more prevalent within the overall population than owners of more basic mobile phones. If your business sells to the B2C market then you should prepare your website for mobile viewing now!

Urban And Suburban Cell Owners More Likely To Look Up Reviews Of Products They See In Store

The rise of in-store mobile commerce The latest Pew Internet Survey found that More than half of adult cell phone owners used their cell phones while they were in a store during the 2011 holiday season to seek help with purchasing decisions. During a 30 day period before and after Christmas: 38% of cell owners used their phone to call a friend while they were in a store for advice about a purchase they were considering making 24% of cell owners used their phone to look up reviews of a product online while they were in a store 25% of adult cell owners used their phones to look up the price of a product online while they were in a store, to see if they could get a better price somewhere else Taken together, just over half (52%) of all adult cell owners used their phone for at least one of these three reasons over the holiday shopping season and one third (33%) used their phone specifically for online information while inside a physical store—either product reviews or pricing information.

Google Promotes Google+ and Youtube With Free Wireless

Google has begun to promote its free wireless in India in an attempt to encourage new user awareness.

PSFK reports that, the service which is provided by O-Zone Networks, will run for an initial three months, and will allow unlimited usage of Google+ and 10 minutes of free access to YouTube per week, but any other websites can only be accessed by paying for minutes.

Image:PSFK

India currently has approximately 10% internet penetration. Google’s marketing of its mobile devices in India has been very successful, and the company states that it has 40 percent of its searches and 67 percent of its e-commerce coming from users on devices. This marketing effort hopes to increase mobile internet usage and create additional users of Google+ and YouTube on users’ portable devices at work and leisure.

Pew and Harvard Study Finds Charity Via Mobile Is Growing

Pew Internet: Real Time Charitable Giving – reported on January 12, 2012, by Adam Smith Pew Study finds that charitable donations from mobile phones have grown more common in recent years. Two thirds (64%) of American adults now use text messaging, and 9% have texted a charitable donation from their mobile phone. And these text donors are emerging as a new cohort of charitable givers. The first-ever, in-depth study on mobile donors—which analyzed the “Text to Haiti” campaign after the 2010 earthquake—finds that these contributions were often spur-of-the-moment decisions that spread virally through friend networks. Three quarters of these donors (73%) contributed using their phones on the same day they heard about the campaign, and a similar number (76%) say that they typically make text message donations without conducting much in-depth research beforehand. Yet while their initial contribution often involved little deliberation, 43% of these donors encouraged their friends or family members to give to the campaign as well. In addition, a majority of those surveyed (56%) have continued to give to more recent disaster relief efforts—such as the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan—using their mobile phones. These are among the findings of a new study produced by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet & Society, in partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the mGive Foundation.

Crowd Sourcing A Pictorial Essay:The Political and Cultural Events of 2011

Do the following images show the effects of successful crowd-sourcing events? Yes, by relying on a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call to create and build a rich human interaction. Crowd sourcing can be ignited by political or cultural cause, emotional trigger, social media, public stage, and user control to share personal feelings with the world. These public demonstrations also display social experiment and work of art.

By engaging with your audience at a unique place, creating a two-way conversation, and not exclusively relying on digital technology, your social media efforts have a better chance of succeeding.

Social Media and The KeystoneXL Pipeline: Has It become a Social Strategy?

A multi-billion dollar controversial oil pipeline, and a little social media lobbying, that is what we saw in August of 2011.  Some fake Twitter accounts and tweets with fake links to materials in support of the project.

Brant Olson, a campaign director with the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) noticed the tweets. Olson discovered that the Twitter accounts traced back to Keith Brockmann, a paralegal in a law firm run by a registered lobbyist for the Nebraska Energy Forum.

Three months later, social media forces are growing, with environmental groups suggesting that this one issue will decide if they support Obama in his run for a second term.

Here is a look at the social media activity as of December 21, 2011, surrounding the KeystoneXL pipeline. I down loaded these KeystoneXL conversations from a social monitoring tool earlier today.

KeystoneXL Pipeline Social Media Activity

KeystoneXL Pipeline Social Media Activity

According to NPR, Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman said it would create “more than 100,000 American jobs.”

And earlier Wednesday on the Senate floor, Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas said the project “promises 20,000 immediate jobs and 118,000 spin-off jobs.” They all seem to be getting their numbers from the same source: TransCanada Corporation, the company behind the project.

One of several environmentalists concerns is that the pipeline could spill into Nebraska’s aquifer that supplies it with water.

If you follow these digital conversations going forward, you will likely find that social media and the presidential election will play an important part in shaping Obama’s and other presidential candidates decisions about the KeystoneXL project.

Have You Ever Wanted to Know What Everyone Has Been Searching For On Google? Now You Can!

Everything Google -the  annual Google  Zeitgeist report,  a look at how the world searched in 2011.

Digital Strategy and Social Media

PSFK Image
The fastest rising search trends list is as follows:

1. Rebecca Black

2. Google +

3. Ryan Dunn

4. Casey Anthony

5. Battlefield Three

6. iPhone 5

7. Adele

8. 東京 電力 (TEPCO)

9. Steve Jobs

10. iPad 2

Where Are People Getting Information About Restaurants and Other Local Businesses?

People looking for information about local restaurants and other businesses say they rely on the internet, especially search engines, ahead of any other source.

Newspapers, both printed copies and the websites of newspaper companies, run second behind the internet as the source that people rely on for news and information about local businesses, including restaurants and bars.

And word of mouth, particularly among non-internet users, is also an important source of information about local businesses. – Pew Internet

Can Parents Effectively Monitor and Reduce Bad Behavior On-line?

Pew Internet Study: On-line Behavior

Image: Rexi Media

The latest Pew study finds that even when parents friend their children on social network sites (39% have done so in this current study), it does not necessarily head off problems on those sites. Fully 87% of parents of teens are online and 67% of those online parents use social network sites.

And of those social network site-using parents (who have children who also use social network sites), 80% have friended or connected with their child via social media. That translates into 45% of all online parents of teens and 39% of all parents of teenagers who are “friends” with their children on social media sites.

Parents who have friended their child on social network sites are more likely to report using parental controls.

Teens who are social media friends with their parents are also more likely to report that they had a problem with their parents because of an experience on social media.

A notable number of teens also engage in online practices that may have the potential to compromise their safety online.

Close to half of online teens have said they were older than they are in order to access a website or online service, and a third have shared a password.

44% of online teens admit to lying about their age so they could access a website or sign up for an online account. Social network site-using teens are twice as likely as non-users to say they misrepresent their age online in order to gain access to websites and online services (49% vs. 26%).
30% of online teens reports sharing one of their passwords with a friend, boyfriend, or girlfriend.
47% of online girls 14-17 say they have shared their passwords, compared with 27% of boys the same age.

Read Entire Pew Internet Report

Google research

Google research shows that mobile based searches tend to be localized; they are also valuable in the conversion of customers to a location or product purchase.

Mobile Purchase Conversion Rates