A quarter (25.9%) of consumers in the big five European Union countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) now browse the Internet via their mobile phones.   This is according to comscore’s MobileLens survey (via Marketing Charts), which shows that the rates of mobile Internet use range from 36.7% in the UK to 20.4% in Germany.

The UK also leads in the % that accessed news (36.5% compared to the European average of 29.7%) and accessed a social network while on their mobiles (23.8% vs 14.9%).   It’s Italy however that has the highest rate of Smartphone users (33.6%), while Spain (56.1%) has the highest number of 3G subscribers.

It should be said that the UK figures are a little different to Ofcom’s recent Communications Market Report (summary here), which showed that only 18% of Brits access the Internet via their mobiles – however comscore’s figures come from June, while Ofcom’s report is a comprehensive year in review and so draws data from Q1.

Comscore says that the number of mobile music users has grown by 10% over the past year, meaning that there are now 54 million consumers in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain who listen to music via their mobiles – or 23.8% of the total.

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• UK citizens flocking to the mobile web (v3.co.uk)
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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.

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• Ofcom: multi-tasking media junkies on the rise (channel4.com)
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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.

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Or at least that’s what the majority of (US) 18-34 year old’s say according to the National Retail Federation and BIGresearch (via Marketing Charts).   51.4% now want Internet access on their mobile / cell phones, up from 44.6% in October 2009.

However, while it stands to reason that Generation Y now expects the ability to be online on the go, it is worth looking at the stat for 35-54 year olds.   Almost half (47%) now want to access the Mobile Internet – less than a year ago in October 2009 that statistic was just over 1/3.

Indeed, back in March metrics firm Nielsen found that 36% of mobile social network use is done by 35-54 year olds, 34% by 25-34 year olds and 16% by 18-24 year olds.  As I said in a post at the time, it could well be that many people aged 35+ are supplied a Smartphone as part of their jobs and so get introduced to it as a consumer tool by using it for business first.

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Symbian, a name you don’t hear in the news that often, yet according to Comscore it’s still be far the most popular platform for smartphones in Europe, being included on both Nokia and Sony Ericcson devices.

In the five major European markets (Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy and France), Comscore says that Symbian phones have a 61% market share with Apple trailing in distant second with 14.5% – though Apple performs better in both the UK (20.5%) and significantly, France (29.9%).

Meanwhile the UK has the highest no of smartphone users at 11.1 million.  That means that in the UK, smartphone penetration stands at 22.6% of the total (ie 3/4 of the population still uses a plain old mobile), while 3G penetration stands at 41.7%.

31% of people in the UK browsed the Internet on their phones (22% in Europe as a whole), 18% accessed social media (11% in the EU5), while 13.7% of UK mobile phone users accessed the news.

In other words, the nay-sayers who point out that the vast majority of mobile phone users as yet do not use their phones for many of the things they use their PCs for, are of course right.   However, at the same time, the trend is moving in only one direction, with smartphone adoption increasing by 70% in the UK over the past year.

It’s also worth noting that US smartphone usage is very different to that in Europe, with RIM (blackberries) having 41.3% of the US smartphone market, compared to 8.3% in Europe (and 18.7% in the UK).   By comparison, Symbian doesn’t feature in the top five US smartphone platforms.

(Source, Marketing Charts)

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The other day I posted about Nielsen’s stats showing that the over 25s (and over 35s in particular) are the most active on mobile social networks, as opposed to teens.   The other giant metrics firm, Comscore (via Marketing Charts), has now produced figures about the growth of mobile social networking in general.

Looking at the US, Comscore worked out that access to Facebook via mobiles grew by 112% over the past year, while mobile Twitter access went up 347%.

At the same time, MySpace continues to decline on mobiles as well as on the Web, with 7% less users accessing it via their mobile devices.

Unsurprisingly, the growth in mobile social networking comes from smartphone users – hence the over 35s that Nielsen talked about who are both more likely to be able to afford one and also get one via their jobs.    30.8% of smartphone users accessed mobile social networks, compared to just 6.8% of more run of the mill ‘feature phone’ users.

Despite a previous Ofcom report showing that for (UK) 16-24 year olds the mobile phone was the second most essential piece of media behind the TV and ahead of the PC, metrics firm Nielsen says that it’s really people aged 25+, and in particular 35+, who are most likely to be going online via their mobiles.

36% of mobile social network use is done by 35-54 year olds, with 34% being done by 25-34 year olds.   By comparison, 18-24 year olds only account for 16%.   One reason for this could in fact be that smartphones are still fairly expensive and out of the reach of many 18 year olds.   And a lot of people aged 30+ will be issued a blackberry or other smartphone as part of their jobs.

On the Web as a whole, women tend to dominate in social media.   Last year Rapleaf did a study all about women having more friends on social networks than men, while Royal Pingdom looked at 19 sites and found that 53% of users were female.   Nielsen says that this trend is replicated on mobiles – 55% of users are women while 45% are men.

Are mobile marketers getting it wrong?   Rather than trying to aim their mobile campaigns at 19 year old students, should they be turning their sights to 35 year old female business executives?

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Over the past two years there’s been a raft of research out showing how 30+ Internet users are steadily getting to grips with social media.  Despite that I still hear occasionally comments like “that’s not for us, we’re not cool”, when talking social networks with brand managers – the perception that older consumers still surf the Internet much as they used to five years ago (in a fairly functional way) still holding true.

Leigh Householder (Advergirl), puts these myths to rest once and for all by looking through the latest Nielsen numbers.   Certainly in the US, “even when you take out our work lives, adults 25-44 are the heaviest users of the Internet”, browsing 34 hrs per month at home compare to 10 for teens.   This age group is also more likely to embrace ‘newer’ things such as watching video online.

The one area where this isn’t the case is on mobile phones, where teens watch six hours of video footage a month on their phones, more than twice as much as the 35-44 year old audience (even here I am surprised the ratio isn’t higher).   This ties into the Ofcom research that shows that while computers+Internet is the second most essential media for all age groups 25+, for 16-24 year olds its mobiles.

Leigh also shares this excellent diagram with us about how different age groups use social media.   In Leigh’s words, “while we’re boldly networking with everyone from our high school sweethearts to someone we met at a conference the other day, they’re (teens) typing with the same people they sit across the lunch table with.”

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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

Nielsen has published a ‘pocket guide to social media and kids’ (thanks to Erin Lamberty for sending it to me), it’s a US stats digest, and one that mirrors a lot of what’s been published in the UK, Australia et al.

In particular, Nielsen looks at the theme that “to adults, cell phones are a communications device. To children, they are a lifelines” – or as Synovate found out recently in a global study, they are increasingly ‘remote controls for life.’

The following chart shows that 13-17 year olds significantly over-index in mobile Internet use when it comes to social networking, music, games and videos / music. At the same time, the average age in which kids first use mobiles / cellphones has gone down over the past year from 8.6 to 8.0 years.

As Nielsen says, “the next time you hear ‘everybody’s got one’, the fact is, that classic ploy may be true.”

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