More stats from the 377 page (UK) Ofcom Communications Markets Report, in particular ones that reinforce the fact that TV-led campaigns or properties are very often more effective when combined with online.     Three findings in particular (with graphs)

1 – Live, scheduled TV carries a low attention threshold. Compared to other forms of media, consumers are least likely to give live TV and radio their undivided attention.     Social media and print have medium attention scores, while games and downloaded video content rank best when it comes to consumer focus (hence the wisdom of spending money on in-game promotions).

2 – We’re now more likely to ‘media stack.’ 20% of media time is now simultaneous – very often involving TV + the Internet and mobile phones.  Among the under 25s that proportion rises to 29%.  16-24 year olds managed to fit just over nine and a half hours’ worth of media into a little  over six and a half hours of actual time.

3 – The most popular YouTube channels are variations of mainstream media properties. It’s a myth that we want to spend our time on YouTube watching home made ‘world’s funniest animal’ type videos.   Instead, much as we do on TV, we want to see content with high production values, involving recognisable names.

Where’s the proof that TV + online work in tandem works?  Here are three random examples:

1 – PHD and Medialets developed a True Blood iPhone ad to support the last series.   Though we can question whether HBO’s 38% increase in viewers was down to the mobile campaign, the best click-through rate of 8.73% that the campaign achieved was way beyond the usual display ad rate of 0.02%.

2 – Speaking of click-throughs, Coke achieved one of 6%, when it ran a Promoted Tweets / Twitter World Cup campaign.   Running a World Cup promo while people were tweeting about matches made sense – Twitter saw a clear spike in activity, including a record for the number of tweets per second during the recent tournament.

3 – One of my favourite examples is this one:  US broadcaster Oxygen piloted a “real time viewing party” called Oxygen Live around one of its hit shows – Bad Girls Club.   This pulled in comments and conversations from several networks such as Twitter into an online hub while the show was airing.

Oxygen Live kicked off 30 mins before each show started, meaning that it was trending on Twitter 5 mins before each episode and there was a consistent increase in viewers over the hour.   In fact in the US West Coast when they *didn’t* run Oxygen Live, ratings were up 9% among women aged 18-49.   Once Oxygen Live launched that ratings then saw a much bigger increase, up to 57%.

And as far as a successful example of integrating TV advertising and an online campaign goes….Old Spice anyone?

As a final point, it’s worth noting that two of the new social networks that have created a buzz over the past few weeks, Miso and Glue, have a model that’s directly related to people checking into entertainment events and TV programmes, as opposed to locations.

We’ve got a more detailed summary of the Ofcom report in the latest (agency) Rabbit feed, the html version is here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Ofcom: multi-tasking media junkies on the rise (channel4.com)
• TV viewing increases despite internet (guardian.co.uk)
• The media: how is it affecting our lives? (newstatesman.com)

An addition to that last post on Android phones leapfrogging iPhones in popularity and Gartner’s stats on the global mobile market growing by 13.8% – Ericcson has released stats showing that global mobile traffic has tripled over the past year.

Though data subscriptions only account for 10% of the total, the Swedish handset manufacturer says that data traffic is growing 10x as fast as voice traffic.

Ericsson says that global mobile data traffic stood at nearly 225,000 terabytes per month in Q2 2010.

(Source, Memeburn)

A watch-out to those of us living in an iPhone bubble comes from Gartner, which has published data about the growth of mobile phone sales worldwide.

The global mobile market continues to grow, up 13.8% in Q2, but Android phones are now more popular than iPhones with a market share of 17.2% vs 14.2%.   A year ago, iPhones had 13% of the smartphone market compared to 1.8% for the then still relatively new Android platform.

One in five (19%) phones sold worldwide are now smartphones, an increase of 50.5% compared to the same time last year.   That smartphone figure is of course almost certainly higher if you look at different areas of the world.   According to Comscore in April, 22.6% of mobile users in the big five European Union countries use smartphones.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Android shipments surpass iPhone shipments for first time (edibleapple.com)
• Tumblr Sneaks Out Android App (blogherald.com)
• Android sales worldwide pass iPhone totals for Q2 2010 (tuaw.com)

According to analyst group Gartner, this year consumers will download 4.5 billion mobile phone applications worldwide from places such as the iTunes apps store.    And though 82% will be free, total sales will still reach $6.2 billion (£3.8 billion), increasing to $29.4 billion (£18 billion) by 2013.   By 2013 ad-sponsored apps are additionally estimated to account for 25% of mobile application revenue.

Gartner says that though high end users are happy to shell out cash for apps now, when the market widens, it will be these advertising funded applications that start generating cash when the mass of consumers start downloading free ones on their iPhones.    According to Gartner’s Stephanie Baghdassarian, “growth in smartphone sales will not necessarily mean that consumers will spend more money, but it will widen the addressable market for an offering that will be advertising funded.”

Though Apple’s iPhone is currently making the most noise, for Gartner’s predictions to come true, smartphones as a whole will obviously need to increase in popularity and a survey in the US by ChangeWave Research (via Marketing Charts), shows an uptake in phones using Google’s Android system.

While in September 2009, Android tied Palm as the least preferred operating system, by December US respondents who said they had an Android phone shot up by 200% from 1 to 4%.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Android Usage Increased 200% Over Past Three Months (readwriteweb.com)
• Smartphone Wars: Android Phones Close in on iPhone (blogs.abcnews.com)

According to US mobile messaging company Tekelec, the over 45s in both Europe and the States are starting to use SMS, with as many as 60% using text on a regular basis.

What does this prove?  Text messaging is the first baby step before using your phone for other things, such as surfing the web on your mobile.  And if 2010 really will be the year of the mobile Internet, it will only be so if it stretches across more demographics than 20 something iPhone or android users.

As a result, “brands will miss out if they only market their mobile campaigns to younger generations” says Tekelec’s Roland Cornelisse.

Among all consumers, 32% said they preferred SMS as a method of communication, compared to 33% who preferred email.   The 32% score is based on people liking the immediacy of text messaging.  If services like Twitter and phone Twitter applications gain mass appeal, it would be interesting to see to what extent they replace texting – personally I’ll always DM someone on Twitter first and text second.

Again, thinking about Twitter, 16% of the under 35s use SMS to vote on reality TV.   With ‘social TV‘ becoming more of a phenomenon and TV networks utilising social media to drive live audience engagement, you wonder whether SMS + TV will soon be redundant as well.

Image – Kiwanja

Related articles by Zemanta

• Are Women More Engaged Online Than Men? (socialwebschool.com)
• Voice-Activated Internet: Text-Free Tweeting, Blogging & More (readwriteweb.com)
• Pastefire: Launch iPhone Tasks From Your Desktop Browser (readwriteweb.com)
• Paywall for Guardian iPhone app? Wired hits back over Guardian denial (onlinejournalismblog.com)

The other month a report came out from Harvard Business School showing that 10% of users create 90% of tweets (or – the alternative I tend to use from Sysomos, a core of 5% accounts for 75% of activity).

It received a fair amount of attention, but some of the other findings around how we use social networks are worth looking at.   In particular, according to academic Mikolaj Jan Piskorski:

We’re by and large visually led.   “Seventy percent of all actions are related to viewing pictures or viewing other people’s profiles”

The latter also shows an element of voyeurism, in particular by men towards women on social networks.    The biggest usage categories are men looking at women they don’t know, followed by men looking at women they do know.    In fact, women get 2/3 of all page views.

This includes men in existing relationships looking at women they don’t know.   According to Piskorski, “it’s an easy way to see if anyone might be a better match.”

MySpace snobbery?
Finally, the findings on MySpace are interesting.   MySpace has been written off as a dying social network, despite the fact that it still has 70 million regular users in the US alone.

Pisorski raises the question of whether a lot of the negative press coverage stems from the fact that media and creative types like ourselves no longer use it:

“The fascinating answer, acquired by studying a dataset of 100,000 MySpace users, is that they largely populate smaller cities and communities in the south and central parts of the country.” Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Florida.

In other words, “MySpace has a PR problem because its users are in places where they don’t have much contact with people who create news that gets read by others.    Other than that, there is really no difference between users of Facebook and MySpace, except they are poorer on MySpace.”

Reminds me a little bit of a recent debate about mobile apps at the Internet Advertising Bureau, where one of the arguments against apps (and for mobile sites) was that apps are talked up partially because creative directors in marketing agencies love iPhones.
Image – Gerlos

Via Wildcat 2030

Related articles by Zemanta

• Why Social Networking Sites are So Popular (sweetbusinesses.com)
• Top 7 Disruptions of the Year (wired.com)
• Boom in URL Shorteners Equals Boom in Malware and Spyware (revenews.com)

NMA has a piece on ‘social networks ignore mobile at their peril.‘ Though most of it is behind a pay-wall, the gist of it is that social media is being accessed more and more via cellphones.

In particular, NMA talks about specially commissioned research for Nielsen and the fact that 65 million Facebook users – so more than 1/5 of the total – now access their social networks from their mobiles.

These users are apparently 50% more active than purely web based users, my guess is that this is so due to the fact that purpose built apps make accessing social media via your phone fairly easy, while surfing the Internet can be an unsatisfactory experience.

Overall, the gist of article, about the growth of the mobile Internet, is of course right and it’s worth summarising a few recent stats that make the same point, namely:

• According to UK regulator OFCOM, for 16-24 year olds, mobile phones are their second most essential media, ahead of PCs+Internet (for other age groups, its reversed)
• A report conducted by Transpera in the US showed that once someone starts graduating onto mobile video with their phone, they are hooked and use it as their main way to go online. According to the results, 62% if mobile video users use their cellphones to browse the Internet more than they do their computers
• iPhone users are richer, younger and better educated than the average. Read – early adopters and people generally ahead of the curve use smartphones
• Mobile phones are becoming our remote controls for life, 2/3 of us even take them to bed with us! More to the point, 17% of people globally (and 26% in the US, 25% in the UK) check their emails via their cellphones
• Though mobile click through rates are pretty appalling (at least in Europe and the US – here in Africa they are actually quite high), once you serve up consumers with ‘location based’ advertising, it can work. According to Navteq, 72% of consumers found location based ads to be “acceptable” (whatever that means), but 19% who recalled seeing them would click through for info on what’s nearby

Back to the NMA piece, according to 3 mobile boss Kevin Murphy, ‘there’s now an “overwhelming awareness” among consumers of the ability to use social networks on mobile.’ What’s needed now is for social networks, and indeed brands, to take further advantage of that fact.

Image – Angelsk

When it comes to getting “e-noticed”, it really is a case of less is more.

As reported by Canada.com, Epsilon, “the world’s largest permission-based email marketer”, found that a shorter subject length and the order in which you put your words, will increase the chances of your email getting opened by the recipient.

Epsilon looked at 1.1 billion messages sent by consumer facing companies between June 2007 and 2008. Shorter subject lines had a greater chance of being noticed, but more important was to front-load the most important information first and to use so called ‘power words’.

For example, Carol Panasiuk of PR agency Cohn & Wolfe is quoted in the post as saying, “I sometimes put HELP! as my subject line when I need to get my husband’s attention. I don’t really like to mislead people with come-ons but if you can make it somewhat humorous, that’s great. My cousin sent me an e-mail with the subject line: ‘Recession is over.’ I opened it up to see pictures of him having fun on vacation in Arizona.”

Moreover, there’s an incentive to getting straight to the point. According to Epsilon’s study, 57% of email recipients will only see the first 38 to 47 characters of a subject line. That’s partially because a lot of emails are now read on mobile devices like blackberries and iPhones, where not the whole message is initially visible.

Then there’s also the phenomenon of ‘power browsing’, something we’ve talked about in the past. That when presented with a detailed piece of information, research has showed that even academics won’t take all of it in.

A piece of advice I’ve always remembered from one my first bosses, that he used to give when media training clients, is to ‘speak in headlines.’ So rather than the standard narrative of beginning – middle – end, that most of us use when describing something where the punch line comes at the end, start with the conclusion much like a press article does.

Squeezing your point into those first 38 characters is something that’s worth remembering, whether that’s in terms of pitching a story to a journalist, applying for a job or trying to get the ear of someone in a position of influence. 38 characters? Makes expressing yourself in the 140 characters Twitter gives you a real luxury.

Image – TimmyGunz