Watch Out America! Here Come the European Social Media Marketers!

According to a new study being published this week by Unica, European marketers trail their American cousins, when it comes to the adoption of social media marketing.

While, 58% of marketers in North America are already engaged in social media marketing, only 34% of Europeans can say the same.

That’s likely to change in the next 12 months:

Some quick math suggests that this time next year, 76% of American marketers will be knee deep in social media marketing, with an impressive game of "catch-up" played by European counterparts–hitting 64% adoption.

So what’s keeping Europe from making this a photo-finish? Well, the biggest set-back is the 20% of European marketers that don’t want anything to do with social media. Not, "we’re more than 12 months out" or "we not sure yet" but flat out "we have no plans for social media marketing."

I’d love to know what industries those marketers represent because I’d go and steal their lunch money!

Google’s Smartphone Gains Should Create Some Buzz

All the online world is buzzing about the introduction of Google’s Buzz yesterday. The competitor (or death knell) to FriendFeed has everyone wondering just how much of the social media market can Google ‘control’ by playing the intermediary. Considering how far reaching their other services are I think it looks more and more like Google could end up in the driver’s seat after all of this.

Another prong of their attack on Facebook, Twitter, Apple and the online world in general relates to the move into smartphones / mobile devices which are becoming a critical component of the social web. As more and more chances pop up to tell everyone about everything, those who feel the need will want to do this at any time so being able to use these services ‘on the go’ is critical. Google’s Android movement is now looking to be more and more important as the likelihood for Google apps to best work on, you guessed it, a Google device makes good business sense.

According to comScore and ars technica Android devices are making their move but still have a ways to go to catch up to RIM (BlackBerry) and Apple’s iPhone. My guess is that by the end of this year this chart may look considerably different in favor of Google’s plan.

Oh, by the way, a note to Palm and Microsoft. That object in your rear-view mirror that is getting bigger very fast is going to catch you so move over and start planning another route.

I have written here about my iPhone dilemma. I am a Verizon customer in the middle of a contract with a BlackBerry Storm. I am squeamish on AT&T issues but realize that greater adoption of Android devices could make Verizon’s network act like its competitor’s. While I am close to making a change on the phone (sorry BB, game over) I am more and more convinced that the Android device is the better choice. It’s not nearly as sexy as an iPhone, but considering the importance of Google to my daily existence it will be much more practical. Google has already exhibited its willingness to roll search related features out to Android devices only and my guess is that it will be a trend in the future.

We have heard from other readers about their choices in the smartphone market. In the past it has been the ‘wow factor’ that has driven many moves. If Google continues to do the things it has been doing it may be just as important to consider the ‘now factor’ which is less about being entertained and more about being efficient and effective right now.

Any thoughts on the matter?

Year In Review: Local Search & Maps

While analysts and practitioners have been prognosticating the imminent arrival
of local search for the last several years, 2009 was finally the year that proved
us right. A number of innovations
and developments in mobile search, such as the widespread adoption of the
iPhone, the release of [...]

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SMBs Abandoning Banners

According to a recent survey by email marketing company VerticalResponse, small and medium businesses are wising up to online marketing. For their 2010 plans, they’re big into SEM, social media and email marketing—but interest in banner ads is quickly waning.

54.2% of SMBs do not plan to use banner ads online next year. Of those that are currently using banner ads, less than 20% of businesses with 11-100 employees reported increasing their banner spend this year (and about 7% of businesses with <10 employees).

A few other advertising media aren’t doing so well. 23.8% of SMBs aren’t looking at paid or natural SEM. Conversely, some 96% plan to use email marketing in 2010, and more than a third of SMBs surveyed are planning to increase their email spending “by a lot” in the coming year. But the big losses come in TV and radio, which has long been a strong seller for local advertising: 79.6% are not planning to use TV, and 72.7% won’t be using radio advertising.

VerticalResponse points out that the low level of adoption is a big opportunity for vendors in the online banner ad arena (and the SEM arena, to a lesser extent). However, unless they mean display ad marketplaces, it’s tough for full-size Internet marketing companies to accommodate the budget needs of SMBs while still offering customized campaigns, advice and value for scale. (I’ve been there.)

What do you think? Should SMBs pay more attention to online banners? How can Internet marketing companies accommodate their needs?

Smartphones: Taking Over the World in 2011

We talk and think a lot about mobile marketing. But frankly, only a small proportion of cell phone users have devices that are equipped for any substantial web interfacing. But that may soon change—Nielsen predicts that smartphones will make up the majority of the cell phone market in two years.

MediaPost reports that by mid-2011, half of cell phone subscribers, about 150M people, will be using smart devices. Smartphones are already showing a marked increase—Nielsen predicts that Q4 of this year will show that 40% of new phones sold are smart devices (as opposed to the Q309, slowest quarter in recent memory with smart devices accounting for only 25% of new phones).

I think that smartphone adoption will be crucial to mobile marketing finally taking off in the US. The fact that most phones today are still incapable of real web browsing has contributed to the slow start to mobile marketing. I’ve been saying for years that a better web browsing experience, like that of a smartphone, is crucial to the success of mobile marketing. And Nielsen agrees:

Nielsen also anticipates more users paying for video and premium content on their phones.

What do you think? Will smartphones reach this much of the market in another 18 months? Will 2011 be the year of the mobile?

Will Facebook Get Us Ready for M-Commerce?

Don’t you just love how every year, someone predicts that “the mobile” will “arrive”? (Me too! I love these crazy forecasts! Must be my penchant for fiction.) Well, today, Read Write Web takes a hard look at mobile eCommerce and the challenges that stand between us and buy-anytime-anywhere.

A couple years ago, about 6 months after the iPhone came out, I sat on a panel about the mobile Internet, and the final question was something along the lines of “When will the mobile Internet arrive?” My answer was when we had large scale adoption of a browsing experience like what the iPhone provided. Well, smartphones have come a long way in technology and adoption in the intervening years, and the mobile Internet is gaining in popularity worldwide—and yet m-Commerce is still lagging behind.

Mobile Is Up; M-Commerce Isn’t

Having smartphones and a good mobile browsing experience are just one part of the puzzle. RWW cites several sources that show the continued growing popularity of mobile, and even mobile Internet and mobile TV. But mobile eCommerce is “struggling.” Two of the biggest barriers are privacy/security concerns and a lack of mobile payment providers.

It may simply take time to overcome users’ concerns about the security of mobile information—or perhaps a popular mobile app can help us out.

RWW point out that just last week, Facebook announced a virtual mobile payment deal with Zong. The mobile app will let verified users purchase Facebook credits using only their cell number (instead of, say, a credit card number, which they would have previously entered and verified).

Despite Facebook’s struggles with privacy issues, RWW says the mainstream public will be more likely to accept a mobile payments app from a site they know and trust (wisely or not). Other mobile payments initiatives are in the works from trusted names like Visa, MasterCard and Nokia.

But considering that most of the developing world can only access the Internet through mobile phones (and they do), maybe this problem is unique to the US.

Outside the US—M-Everything Thrives

Although a few mobile sectors are doing really well in the US, it’s nothing compared to the popularity of mobile everything around the world. RWW gives some examples:

In developing markets, however, where critical infrastructure like bank branches and high-speed internet is often lacking, people use mobile phones for all sorts of things including mobile banking, mobile money transfer, mobile education, and mobile medicine.

For example, one of the more successful mobile phone money-transfer services is M-PESA, a branchless banking service which has seen success in Kenya, Tanzania, and Afghanistan. Then in Sri Lanka, parts of Africa, and other low-GDP region a company called Amdocs even helps mobile users to spend their minutes like currency.

However, RWW predicts that, eventually, the mobile market will see adoption once the apps are available and useable.

What do you think? What will it take before you’ll give out your credit info over SMS or mobile Internet—Facebook or another site? Or does the future lie in systems like Facebook’s, where you can input sensitive data on “secure” lines, and keep that on the merchants’ servers rather than transmitting it?

Introducing lGoogle (The L is for Lobbyist)

We have talked on several occasions here at Marketing Pilgrim about Google’s Washington, DC connections. Some wonder if there is too much Google in the capitol while others just think it’s the normal course of big business. Either way you look at it there is no denying that Google is as much a part of the Beltway Bunch as Democrats and Republicans.

According to the Wall Street Journal Google spent $950,000 in the second quarter on lobbying efforts

The sum tops the $880,000 it spent in the first quarter and represents a 30% increase from the second quarter of 2008, when it spent $730,000.

While Google continues to raise its presence in Washington the money that they spend is still less than Microsoft ($1.9 million in Q2) and AT&T ($3.1 million in Q2).

The range of causes that Google is involved in ‘influencing’ include potential regulation related to online advertising, expanding Internet access and increasing the adoption of cloud-computing technologies. Also in the line of sight of Big G are green initiatives like renewable energy policies and firming up the electrical grid. Of course, the whole electrical grid thing is focused on the environment and not ensuring that Google and its users stay ‘energized’ to continue to make money for the search giant.

In the recent past, Google has placed so many Googlers in Washington, DC that one wonders if paying lobbyists to be there is overkill. I suppose you can never have enough feet on the street when it comes to influencing public policy to the benefit of Google all.

Report: How The Internet Has Changed Music Consumption

Music file sharing services have always been a mutant species of search, offering different tools and methods for finding and listening to tunes. Napster was one of the first and most infamous, and its widespread adoption caused the recording industry to panic, suing both the company and thousands of its users. That hasn’t stopped the [...]

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Yahoo Wants More Spam

Last week, Yahoo blogged about yet another microformat they’ll be indexing: Common Tag. Based on RDFa, Common Tag is . . . well . . . kind of like every other semantic microformat out there.

Common Tag is integrated with Zemanta, Adaptive Blue, Yahoo Search Monkey and several other services. In addition to organizing web pages by their meanings, Common Tag can also bring more related content to publishers, and possibly also greater visibility (the Yahoo connection). Yeah, it looks cool, but it’s going to take some serious time and effort before they’ll see enough widespread adoption to make a difference.

At Search Engine Land, Vanessa Fox points out that this wave of the future is still pretty far off for search engines:

Both Google and Yahoo have told me that they could use metadata in web search in the future, if it proves to be useful and they can safeguard against spamming. So far, this hasn’t happened.

She also points out that the parallels between this type of semantic tagging and an earlier version we’re all familiar with—the meta keywords tag (speaking of spamming!):

The idea of using meta data to tag web pages in order to describe them to search engines isn’t new, of course. The meta keywords tag has been around since at least 1995. And it’s easier to adopt than Common Tag. . . .

Indeed, Yahoo supported the meta keywords tag initially (and to some extent, still does), but when Google launched, they did not. It was too easy for site owners to stuff that tag with anything they wanted, rather than the true focus of the page. Search engines use smarter methods (starting with the content on the page and how external sites link to it) for determining relevance.

Vanessa also points out research that indicates that link anchor text was a better signal for relevance than even the popular tagging site Delicious.

So, seriously, why would Yahoo want to invite what might turn out to be just more spam? Vanessa wonders if they’re getting out of the consumer search business, what with all the microformats they’re pushing these days (hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, XFN, Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, RDFa, and OpenSearch). Is this indicating a move toward a structured data search or a push for third-party search engines using Yahoo BOSS? What do you think?

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Social Media and Small Business Getting Acquainted Slowly

There is evidence that small business is starting to see the value of social media for their operations. As it has been with search marketing it is likely that a majority adoption of the practice will take a considerable amount of time but it looks like the movement is underway, to a degree.

So why not announce that “Small Business is Using Social Media!”? Well, that would imply that there is widespread adoption of the discipline which, at this point in time, just isn’t true. A study conducted by Sage Software and AMI-Partners is covered over at eMarketer and while it’s interesting, it’s no coming out party for small business and social media across the board.

The study reports that 260,000 small businesses across the US and Canada are employing social media tactics in their business to one degree or another. That’s a pretty good size number but if you take it one step further and calculate the percentage of small businesses using social media in 2 countries it is a little less impressive. Assuming 25,000,000 small businesses in the US and 2.5 million in Canada, that means that just under 1% of these business are using social media. Now many will debate these figures but if you cut the number of total businesses in half, well you do the math. These are not widely adopted practices quite yet.

So what are those who are in the game doing?

Most of them used professional social networking sites such as LinkedIn. General social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook were also widely used, followed by niche communities and job sites.

Twitter has not been readily accepted as a small business tool yet but there are those who are having success using it. So why are they using any social media at all? The most prominent reasons are responding to customer questions, networking and education. What most are not doing is looking to sell through these channels which is interesting considering some of the success that can be found with a small business that gets it.

So what’s it take to get the little guy involved? Well, extra time, money and people for one. With social media being so time intensive the barriers to entry get higher as a business gets smaller. In the future it is going to be critical for small businesses to decide where they want to put their scarce resources so they can maximize their ROI. With a constantly moving target however that is increasingly difficult so the future of small business and social media will be interesting to watch.

Your thoughts?