Tablet shopping poised to take off

by Josh Bernoff

At $176 billion last year, eCommerce already represents 8% of US retail. What do you think tablets will do to that?

Huh? Tablets affect eCommerce? Step back a moment, and let's take a look at some facts and projections, as described by Forrester analysts Sucharita Mulpuru and Sarah Rotman Epps in a piece they just published called "Why Tablet Commerce Will Soon Trump Mobile eCommerce."

• Already, 9% of the people who shop online have a tablet.
• Tablets are taking off -- Forrester projects that 82 million Americans will own one by 2015.
• The average retailer we survey says that 21% of the mobile commerce on their sites comes from tablets already.
• According to a survey conducted jointly by Forrester and Bizrate, 47% of the tablet owners have bought something on their tablets, and another 13% have shopped with the tablet, even if they haven't bought yet.
• Half of the tablet owners shop more on their tablets than on their smartphones (and nearly all of them have smartphones).

This all adds up to a huge shift in eCommerce. Tablet owners use them in a more relaxed way than the way they use either PCs or phones -- the most common place to use a tablet is in the living room. And tablet apps can display retail content in a way that resembles a catalog (far more attractive, with a fun interface), not a Web site or a utilitarian smartphone app. eCommerce sites replaced catalog shopping, but they didn't replace catalogs -- tablets can do that.

What does this mean for marketers? First -- among the splinters that make up the ever-fragmented splinternet, tablets are going to be huge, not just for browsing but for shopping. The more you sell an impulse item, the more you need a big, sexy tablet app. Tablets have the right interface, the right use model, the right capabilities -- they can seduce like television, impress like print, and sell like the Web.

If you haven't shifted some of your eCommerce budget to tablets yet, it's time to start paying attention.

Photo by Tony McNeill via Flickr.

Why, how, and when to jump on the mobile app bandwagon

by Josh Bernoff

Mobile hype has reached a feverish level. There appear to be two poles: "You have to do mobile!" and "Mobile is just a fad." But smartphones are certainly no fad. Forrester forecasts 100 million smart phones in the US by the end of 2011; worldwide Google activates 400,000 Android devices a day.

What's different here for marketers is not just mobile devices, but the context-based experiences they deliver -- as described in Julie Ask's just-released report "The Future Of Mobile Is User Context." 

Too many apps built today treat the smart phone as a little PC. That's the wrong way to think about it. Mobile experiences make up for their interface limitations with knowledge. When a phone knows where you are, what you're doing, your identity and history, and even potentially your attitudes -- based on what you've done in the past year and the past five minutes -- it can help predict and deliver what you want right now. This is the context that makes mobile devices more intimate and completely different from traditional Web experiences.

Jump ahead a few years. Based on our interviews with device manufacturers, it has come clear that what's in today's iPhone or Android phone -- GPS, accelerometers and compasses to detect orientation, high-res displays -- will be in everybody's phones very soon. The advanced phones will know if you're indoors, what other connected devices are nearby, and (with dual cameras now coming) what your surroundings are like in three dimensions. Combined with interface improvements based on voice and gesture, these advances will make smart mobile devices even smarter about what you want -- a development marketers must anticipate.

 Rather than chase this technology, marketers should build a roadmap to integrate with it in four stages.

1. Master the basics. Half the companies we interviewed for the report haven't gotten beyond the "help you find the nearest store" type apps. If you've got products or services to deliver, build up the data around those items to make it easier to deliver them based on context.

2. Layer in intelligence. Use data and context to create more engaging experiences, like reminding you when a flight is late and suggesting things to do while you wait.

3. Break from PC contexts. Create experiences that are distinctly un-Weblike, based on knowledge of who the customer is, her history, and her complete context (like who else is with her right now).

4. Embrace motion as a control mechanism. The most engaging apps right now respond to actions like shaking and bumping phones. What's the appropriate action for your customer?

Where you are on this path depends on your company. If you're competing by differentiating, have retail locations, or work in mobile-forward industries like gaming and media, you must move aggressively to deliver these new levels of mobile experience -- your customers will demand it, and your competitors are already working to deliver it. If you compete based on cost in a slower-moving industry like insurance or business services, start with stage 1 and know where you're headed. Focus on your consumers' pain points and behavior, not just on what information you can fling into a mobile app. But failing to get on this path -- or failing to notice it at all -- is a big mistakes right now. Mobile is the future of interactivity -- you'd better prepare for the future of mobile.

Tomorrow (Tue 27 Jun) at 2PM eastern, join our Tweetjam about Splinternet challenges

by Josh Bernoff

I've agreed to join our interactive marketing research team for a TweetJam on Tuesday, 27 June at 2PM. The hashtag is #IMChat. 

If you're concerned about managing the explosion in new mobile and social platforms -- we call it the Splinternet -- we'd love to have you join the discussion.

Here are some of the questions we'll be discussing:

1. How has the explosition in mobile platforms and social networks created a challenge for you to manage?
2. How do you decide which platforms and networks to support or target for marketing?
3. Do you worry about the rules that owners of these platforms (like Apple and Faccebook) impose on those who use them?
4. How do you measure and compare results on these platforms?
5. Do you think the future will be characterized by more common standards, or by more and more incompatible platforms?

To participate, just follow the #IMChat hashtag at 2:00 p.m. If you’d like to learn more about the rules of engagement, visit this community discussion on The Forrester Community For Interactive Marketing Professionals. To read some past archives, visit the documents section of the same community.

Looking forward to hearing from you at 2 p.m. tomorrow!

 

Take our survey, score your HERO project (social media, mobile, or other tech)

by Josh Bernoff

That social media project you are working on. Is it worth it?

The iPhone app -- is it going to pay off, or just drag your job into the toilet?

Our new book Groundswell HEROes is about highly empowered and resourceful operatives (that's you, if you're considering, building, or managing a technology project that touches customers). As we reviewed these projects, we realized that people often have difficulty up front in identifying just what they are about to get themselves into. It's not just the value for customers that's in question, and it's not just the technical effort. It's the political effort -- all the people who have a stake and try to stop you or help you (or "help" you).

We devote a whole chapter to this, and we've also developed a tool for measuring projects. Answer a few questions, and then the tool tells you if the effort is in line with the expected value, and whether you've generated a cute little idea (class 1) or a major "shadow IT" effort (class 4). We call it a value-effort evaluation (VEE score).

The tool is in beta. I'd like your help in testing it. Here's what to do:

1. Click on the "TRY IT" button below to take the survey and see how your project stacks up. It works for projects you are about to undertake, or ones you are in the middle of, or ones you have completed.
2. Please take notes while taking the survey, if you see something that seems wrong or missing or confusing.
3. At the end of the survey, we'll provide you with a screen that shows a little insight into your project and the challenges you will be facing.
4. Please help make the tool better. There's a little box at the end of the survey, you can include feedback there based on your notes. Or add a comment on this blog. Or email me at jbernoff at forrester dotcom.

I think the tool will be helpful in clarifying the path you are on. I know you can help us make it better. Look for a much nicer version of this once the book is done.

Note: because the survey tool costs a small but nonzero amount of money per completed survey, we may have to shut this down if more than a thousand people take it. Unlikely but possible. We'll let you know.

Proof the Splinternet is real

by Josh Bernoff

Since I published the post about the Splinternet Tuesday, a lot of discussion has been flying about. See the comments on that post, the post on Advertising Age, and my interview with Kai Ryssdal on Marketplace.

First, let's be clear. It's the Internet applications that are splintering, not the Internet itself. The most splintered of these applications is the Web, but there are others (tried running Skype on your iPhone lately?).

Second, it's wonderful that standards like HTML5 are coming along, but that won't change some things. Apple will still decide what apps can run on its iPad. Facebook will still require a login and much of its content won't be visible to Google. And the iPhone screen will still be a lot smaller than most Web pages expect. This creates dilemmas for site and application developers -- new decisions to be made. HTML5 will not miraculously cure that.

To clarify what I mean, let's invent the "Splinternet Index". This is purely notional (you can't accurately  measure most of these things), but ask yourself the following questions:

1. What proportion of all Web page views on all connected devices yield an experience that isn't even close to what its creators intended?
2. In absolute numbers, how many Web page views yield a page that doesn't render the way its creators intended?
3. What proportion of content owners time (this includes content sites, marketers, anyone delivering interactive content) is spent deciding which platforms to support and customizing content for those platforms?
4. What proportion of content owners' delivery of content goes to platforms for which standard analytics tools don't exist yet?
5. What proportion of content owners' interactive budgets is spent on delivery to platforms where content is controlled by the platform owner (e.g. iPhone/iPad apps, Facebook applications, Xbox content)?
6. What proportion of "interesting" Web content (content that the majority of people might reasonably be seeking) is hidden behind a login and inaccessible to search engines?

I contend that all of these numbers are the highest they have been since 1995. I also believe that they will be higher two years from now than they are now, regardless of what standards may become accepted. That is why the Splinternet is here to stay.

Photo credit: Lars Plougmann via Flickr

What Will Be In GROUNDSWELL HEROES

by Josh Bernoff

For several months now we've been researching "Harnessing the GroundswellGroundswell HEROes", the followup book to Groundswell. The focus is on both empowered customers (think "United Breaks Guitars") and empowered employees. In both cases, the empowerment comes from the pervasive social, mobile, video-enabled, cloud-propelled technology available to them.

A funny thing happened during the research, though. We found that all the employee examples were in marketing, sales, and customer support. Why? Because those customer-facing departments have both the budgets and the desire to connect with customers using the new technologies. And they are moving forward, in most cases without much involvement from their own IT departments.

In fact, it's the urgency created by empowered customers that's driving the employees to build their own solutions. So we came to this principle:

If you want to succeed with empowered customers, you must empower your employees to solve their problems.

Whether it's Zappos, Best Buy, or Intuit, staff are building solutions to help their customers, and not just in customer service. THAT is what the new book is about. (It's a relief to have figured this out, believe me.)

Based on this, here's a revised table of contents. Look for the book next year from Harvard Business Press.

HARNESSING THE GROUNDSWELL: Empower your employees to solve customer problems

GROUNDSWELL HEROES: Harnessing the Power Shift in your Workplace and Marketplace

by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler

PART I: THE TREND

Chapter 1. Empowered people and what to do about them. How customers got so much power. Four forces: mobile, video, cloud, social. Empowering staff to solve customer problems.

PART II: YOUR CUSTOMERS

Chapter 2. Customer heroes. A new metric on the value of your customers. Customer word of mouth and media.

Chapter 3. Reimagining customer service. Customer voice. Service is now marketing. Social CRM.

Chapter 4. The mobile imperative. Pervasive information empowers customers. Using mobile information to create loyalty.

Chapter 5. Mobilizing fans. Amplifying promoters and blunting detractors. Efficient ways to enable fan voices.

PART III: YOUR PEOPLE

Chapter 6. Employee heroes. What empowered staff can do. Technology projects -- matching effort to results.

Chapter 7. Is your organization ready? Measuring employee empowerment. Do your staff feel they have permission? Are they ready to solve customer problems?

Chapter 8. Helping people work together. Collaboration and innovation tools. Social technology for the enterprise.

Chapter 9. Leadership for constant innovation. What management can do to encourage innovation and empower employees.

PART IV: YOUR TECHNOLOGY

Chapter 10. How IT can empower your people. How to say yes. Select, scale, and socialize.

Chapter 11. Empowering people safely. When to say no. Empowering people while managing risk.

PART V: YOUR FUTURE

Chapter 12. The future of the groundswell.

***

Now all we have to do is write it. Look for case studies and lots of data in the coming posts.

Note (12/21): We changed the title around the concept of HEROes (highly empowered and resourceful operatives).

What are the best (corporate) mobile applications?

by Josh Bernoff

Mobile is a big part of our new book "Harnessing the Groundswell". To that end, I'm looking for your suggestions for the best mobile applications.

It's my contention that consumers are surrounded by more information, with more immediate access to it, than ever before. Mobile Internet access (but also mobile email and SMS text messages) are a big part of that. Mobile applications can get access to location, a camera, your identity, your phone number, and SMS messages, not to mention the plain old wonderful real-time Net. This changes things. As a marketer or other corporate staffer, your best action is to provide mobile customers as much information as possible, as instantly as possible.

So in the comments here, or by email, I'd like to hear your suggestions for mobile apps to go in the book. The best examples for this purpose:

• Empower consumers with instant access to information.
• Are of long-term value, not just for a short-term campaign.
• Can be iPhone apps, but I'm also very interested in Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, and SMS apps.
• I have a bias toward corporate, government, or non-profit apps, vs. startups.

Think of this as a contest. If your favorite application "wins," it gets profiled in the book. Looking forward to hearing your ideas.

Don't Screw Up Your Mobile Marketing Opportunity

by Josh Bernoff

From my Marketing News column.

Mobile advertising has been the coming thing for so long that some of us gave up on it. Now it’s here. In a Forrester Research survey of 176 interactive marketers in March, one in three were currently using mobile marketing, and another third were planning to do so. Of those who market with mobile, 47% will increase their budgets this year.

Mobile is so close to the customer (in her pocket!) that it’s pretty powerful if you do it right. It’s also dangerous to your brand if you do it wrong, especially since consumers are very aware that they pay for mobile phone and data services. So rather than just be a cheerleader, I’ll put down some advice here based on successful marketing campaigns.

Let’s start with adoption. As you might guess, the interest in mobile is driven by the adoption of Web browsing phones from Apple, RIM, and others. Around 26 million people, 15% of the mobile phone customers in the US, use the mobile Web at least once a month. That’s a juicy, young, affluent segment, and it’s growing. So it’s no surprise that marketers have gotten moving in reaching them.

And mobile marketing isn’t just mobile Web sites. It also includes banners on other mobile sites, short codes (like the codes you send text messages to when voting on American Idol), ads in phones’ video programming, and even little two-dimensional codes (like bar codes) that send mobile customers to Web sites when photographed.

Just as in developing social technology strategies, we recommend using the “POST” method (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology – and note that the choice of technology comes last). As my colleagues Julie Ask and Charles Golvin explored in a recent report called “The POST Method: A Systematic Approach To Mobile Strategy,” you have to start by assessing the mobile technologies your customers use. Even if you don’t have access to Forrester survey data, you can still learn from your customers’ behavior. For example, Sears found traffic from mobile phones to its sites growing, but those customers were bouncing off because the sites weren’t designed for mobile. If your site doesn’t recognize and reconfigure itself for mobile, you’ll see the same thing. As soon as you can prove that a significant number of your customers are mobile Internet users, you should do what Sears did, and build a mobile site.

After people, think about objectives – and note that mobile can serve a variety of different ones. For example, after Jiffy Lube used mobile coupons to drive foot traffic at one of its franchises, 50% of its new customers at that franchise came from the mobile promotion. Ford had a different objective; it wanted to generate awareness for its Ford Flex and used banners ads on mobile sites to generated 3.5 million impressions and a 1.4% click-through rate.

Your strategy and tactics will vary based on your target. Take AXE, Unilever’s personal-care brand for 18-to-24 year-old guys. AXE advertised on MTV and suggested a short code. Texting to the short-code generated a link to a site on “hair crisis relief.” That’s a tactic that works great with young men, but don’t try to get business executives texting –or you’ll find the yield is a whole lot lower.

So, how can you not screw this up? First, keep it simple. The more complex the process, the fewer the people who will follow it, and the less success you’ll have. The diversity of tools in mobile is tempting, and that’s the problem – you can get sucked into the technology and leave the marketing behind.

For example, in a recent case study, Neil Strother, Forrester’s expert on mobile marketing, describes how simple banner ads helped RIM sell more advanced BlackBerry devices. They started with ads on mobile sites for Yahoo! and The Weather Channel, since those mobile sites had experience with generating and dealing with large volumes of mobile usage. The banners were formatted automatically for the customer’s current device and one click led to RIM’s mobile-enhanced site. When RIM found success was correlated to those who clicked on the mobile store-locator page, they used that as a key metric for the program. Simple plan, simple execution, and simple measurement led to a successful campaign.

Second, integrate it with other media. Media can drive texting; if you’re advertising, think about how mobile could boost the engagement of your customers who took the time to read the ad. And if you’re a mobile marketer, ask yourself how your campaign fits into the overall media picture.

Third, follow the rules in the Mobile Marketing Association’s Code of Conduct to stay on the right side of the privacy line. You’re about to interact with people on a device they feel very personal about, so you’ll need a framework for treating their data right.

Finally, make sure you think a little longer-term than the average advertising manager. The advertising manager wants to think of mobile as a new medium to tap, and that’s fine. But the database marketing manager is lusting over the new contacts she can make with short codes and opt-ins. Unless both get what they need out of the campaign, you’ve wasted your mobile opportunity.

The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air

by Charlene Li

On Monday, I gave the kick off speech for the Graphing Social Patterns West conference on the topic, “The Future Of Social Networks” (slides are available on SlideShare, summaries available on News.com, ReadWriteWeb, and allfacebook.) Note that this is still ongoing research, so I welcome your comments.

I set my time frame for the long term – five, even ten years out. That’s because unless we know where we want to end up, how could we ever craft a strategy to get there? For inspiration, I thought about my grade-school kids, who in ten years will be in the midst of social network engagement. I believe they (and we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to “be social”.

Instead, I believe that in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be. And also, without that social context in our connected lives, we won’t really feel like we are truly living and alive, just as without sufficient air, we won’t really be able to breathe deeply.

There are four components of what I’m calling this idea of “ubiquitous social networks”: 1) Profiles; 2) Relationships; 3) Activities; and 4) Business models. These aren’t new -- I wrote about the first three in my original report on social networks back in May 2004. But in the context of ubiquitous social networks, they will develop into the following: 1) Universal identities; 2) A single social graph; 3) Social context for activities; and 4) Social influence defining marketing value. For more detail on each of these components, see the extended post (warning: it's really long!).

The ubiquitous social network isn’t going to happen overnight – in fact, it’s going to take five+ years to come to fruition. This is part of the continued evolution of open platforms, starting with walled garden services like Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL that evolved into the major portal aggregators like Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL. This gave way to the “search era” where Google et. al. made all of the Internet easily accessible. Today’s social networks are a throwback to those early closed platforms, and they will be opened up by new “entrants” into the social space – namely, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, and AOL – who will leverage their deep, daily relationships with online audiences.

In the end, there are two essential things that have to present for this all to happen. The first is technology -- ubiquitous Internet access and the servers to enable real-time social graph access. Given the pace of technology development, I'm pretty sure this will happen. The second is much harder -- trust has to be present, between people, between social networks, marketers, and developers. This is what is going take a lot of time, effort, and patience, but the optimist in me thinks that it will come. That's because people will press for it, demanding that sites and applications adhere to a Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web.

So what is a social network, marketer, or developer to do? Here are my recommendations:

• Create linkages between services based on individually-controlled identity federation
• Compete on creating the most compelling social experience, not social graph lock-in
• Develop social applications that have meaning
• Integrate social networks into existing activities
• Design business models that reflect the value created by people’s social network

In the extended post (click on "More" below) is a more detailed explanation of how I see each of the four components of ubiquitous social networks developing.

As I mentioned above, this is ongoing research and I'm far from done. So if you have ideas, comments, criticisms, or examples, let me know via comments below or email at cli at forrester dot com.

Google goes mobile - what it means

by Charlie Golvin

(Note: My colleague, Charlie Golvin, covers wireless devices and services, and he was kind enough to provide his insights on Google's latest mobile announcements - Charlene)

The Android platform that Google and its partners in the Open Handset Alliance announced today will significantly impact the mobile market — eventually, but the time for this impact to play out is lengthy.

Android is most impactful on handset vendors because it provides a very cost effective software solution that can reduce their licensing, development, and maintenance costs. The greater the portion of their portfolio that Android makes up, the more true this is.

Android holds a similar promise for developers, reducing the complexity of their development efforts that currently span multiple platforms and multiple versions within those platforms. Paradoxically, Android will increase complexity for developers initially since it represents yet another platform to support. But the platform also promises more flexibility in distribution and business models, more akin to the Net today.

Carriers have the opportunity to benefit by virtue of the innovation among developers Android will help spawn. Also, carriers now in search of business models that extend beyond subscriptions and pay per use have a greater chance of succeeding with partners that bring the necessary skills to make ad-based models succeed (try to think of one).

But there are some things Android won’t change — like the distribution model for handsets in markets like the US where carriers are in control. Those of you dreaming of low-cost unlocked handsets sold at retail along with flat rate access plans should sit back, take another hit off your bong, and mellow out. Not gonna happen, not just by virtue of Android’s presence, anyway.

Oh, what’s in it for Google? Reach to an audience that is larger than Net users on the PC, and growing larger, plus relevance for the next billions of Net users, the majority of whom will only experience the Net on a mobile phone, not a PC. And the opportunity to sell ads to anyone who wants to reach them, on any of these new Net-powered mobile apps or just on the mobile Internet through a browser.

(Note this goes nicely with the OpenSocial effort, since all those widget developers won’t have the tolerance for the complexity of today’s mobile environment but definitely want to be able to extend out to phones.)

Tags: Google, Open Handset Alliance, Android, mobile,  Forrester Research, Groundswell

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