reposted from: http://www.psfk.com/2012/03/future-social-media-engagement.html

Human nature: our curiosity can often be provoked when a conference is prefaced by NDAs that prevent participants from sharing the discussion externally. Such was apparently the nature of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) Digital Marketing + Media Network Event in Palo Alto last week. An event which included senior leaders from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, among others. However, writer Todd Harrison was granted permission to share very particular elements of his journey. The net-net? That “next big thing” appears to be for brands to use ‘social’ more strategically, connecting with and engaging their customers more holistically to drive business growth.

Per usual, we culled some of the key points shared by Harrison:

• Social platforms & activities is where people are spending their time online: while people’s use of portals is down (-24%) and search is flat (+1%), social’s 52% growth belies a greater opportunity.
• Mobile devices may replace traditional PCs, as indicated by the children growing up with smartphones and iPads in their hands, but whom have yet to touch a PC.
• The battlecry in social – for brands – is to connect people to resources beyond purely the brand’s products. According to Harrison, “Strategies in Silicon Valley are shifting from ‘pages’ to ‘people and social patterns.’ Connecting communities who search for the same items or have similar interests is the next phase of social. It opens virtual doors to do the things you are already doing.”
• Companies’ advertising efforts should focus on reaching customers at the point of commercial intent, which is defined as the point where identity meets relationship. This concept in particular is one that we would love additional context around, as it is not entirely clear exactly how a company identifies that point of intent within social (and specifically Facebook), where a user’s decisions/behavior are oftentimes not public, nor transparent.
• Social can achieve more than just ‘engagement.’ Your social strategy should support a key strategic (business) goal — one that social can amplify and impact. Brands need to identify a metric to vet it against. Your business goal, however, is the place to start.
• Create a truly integrated culture that marries the power of your offline network to the connectivity of digital. Share between the two.
• While you’re driving scale and growing your business opportunity, maintaining focus on the objective or mission you started with will be your biggest challenge. Keep that single-minded focus.
• With social media spend surpassing email marketing spend in 2012, media spend has shifted from ‘what’ to ‘who.’ Your priorities, says Harrison, should be to “Connect, Engage, Influence and Integrate (in that order).”

resposted from: http://www.fastcompany.com/1818952/facebooks-new-ad-units-reveal-a-future-that-is-social-by-default

Facebook appears ready to launch a new set of premium ad units, and, based on a review of documents which purport to describe them, the social network would seem to be doubling down on two core principles that mark fundamental departures from traditional advertising.

First, Facebook is making the new ads social by default, meaning they will automatically show users when their friends have already Liked the advertiser. And the new formats will draw their content exclusively from posts to brands’ Facebook Pages, rather from advertising copy written independently.

Combined, these features make two statements about where Facebook believes the future of online advertising lies–at least in its particular universe. It is saying that ads based on content, rather than messaging, have a better chance of hitting home, and that ads involving tacit endorsements from the people you know have a better chance of capturing your attention.

“When people hear about you from friends, they listen,” the Facebook materials say. “We’ll expand your ad with stories from friends who have already connected.” (“Stories” is Facebook’s shorthand for a wide varitey of interactions on the site. In the case of ads, it seems to refer to the fact that the ads will display which of a viewer’s friends have Liked the brand.)

Facebook has not commented publicly on the new ads (presumably they will discuss them at a marketing launch event in New York next week). But the materials describing the new units were posted to Scribd earlier this week. The news was first reported on GigaOm. The documents are below.

Facebook Premium Ads Guide Facebook Premium Ads Overview

In the documents, Facebook says it is scrapping most of the display ad units it has offered until now, replacing them with the new formats. The previous ad units incorporated some of the social and interactive elements, but the new ones are implementing those features in a more comprehensive way.

Each of the new units will include Like buttons and places for viewers to comment on the ads. When viewers click the Like button or enter a comment, those activities will be posted to the user’s  friends’ News Feeds. They will also be posted to the brand’s Page.

Similarly, each ad will include pictures of friends who have already Liked the brand. The Facebook documents say this will happen automatically, instead of as an add-on.

While Facebook had already been moving in these directions with its previous ad units, the decision to draw ad content from Page posts is the most significant new feature–and a potentially radical departure from conventional notions of advertising.

The ads don’t simply repurpose content from brands’ Pages. By giving users the ability to respond to the content inside the ad, just as if they had seen the content on the brand Page itself, and then by posting those responses to the user’s friends’ News Feeds, as well as on the brand’s Page itself, the ads are acting less like traditional broadcast advertisements and more like viral mechanisms to expand and perpetuate the conversation off into the far corners of the social network, effectively giving the brand visibility in places it might not otherwise have reached and in a much more organic way than if it had simply plastered the site with a bunch of banner ads.

“Everything starts with great content from the Page,” says one of the Facebook documents. “Paid, owned, and earned work seamlessly together.”

Facebook believes that this ultimately will pay greater dividends for brands than conventional advertising. According to tests the company said it performed internally, the new ads produce 40 percent more engagement (usually meaning they get more Likes, comments, and clicks) and are 80 percent more likely to be remembered.

The company documents also claim the ads produce “signficant increases” in purchase intent, and it claims that viewers of an ad are four times more likely to purchase when they “see friends interact with a brand.”

If the ads truly do deliver the results Facebook claims, that could mean the social network is slowly but surely finding the marketing holy grail of “word of mouth”–at scale. And if that’s the case, it could have profound implications for the advertising industry as a whole.

The six new units are based on the type of content a brand would post to their Page. The Facebook documents label them as Status (a text comment), Photo, Video, Question (which replaces the old “Poll” ad format and which allows viewers to answer the question right in the ad), Event (ad viewers will similarly be able to sign up for the event right in the ad itself), and Link (which points viewers to content outside of Facebook).

The Facebook documents say that brands will continue to be able to target their ads as they do today, choosing to place their ads in front of any of Facebook’s 845 million users who fit demographic and interest criteria selected by the advertiser.

resposted from: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2162248/bia-kelsey-lowers-forecast-local-digital-revenue

reposted from: http://adage.com/article/news/big-books-blue-lights-great-moments-retail-creativity/233405/

As part of Advertising Age’s Retail Revolution Issue, Creativity looks back at some of the most iconic creative work in retail, including a catalog whose offerings put Amazon to shame, the store-aisle gimmick that landed Kmart in the pop-culture archives, Target’s design-driven ethos that led to a slew of innovative work and ideas, and daring social-media moves from Walmart and Kohl’s.

A 2004 MoMA exhibit featuring 150 everyday household products–80 of which were sold at Target stores, sowed the seeds of Peterson Mill Hooks’ “Design for All” campaign that turned everyday household products into gorgeous, graphic tableaux.

Overall, the marketer has distinguished itself by bringing great design to the everyman, via partnerships with some of the top names is fashion and industrial design. Its first collaboration, with Michael Graves, put sleek chess sets and tea kettles onto the store shelves. That tie-up ends this year, with Mr. Graves putting his final collection in Target stores this month, but the company has a host of other stars, including long-term partner Sonia Kashuk, and high-end names such as Liberty of London, Missoni and Jason Wu.

For her 2002 School of Visual Arts thesis project, Deborah Adler set out to improve the standard prescription-medicine bottle with packaging and labeling that was easier to read, and less likely to result in accidental overdoses or consumption by people living together. Ms. Adler was inspired by the experience of her grandmother, who had mistakenly taken her husband’s medication instead of her own. Ms. Adler blamed poor package and information design, and aimed to resolve it her Clear RX system, which incorporates color-coded labels that are easier to read. Target adopted Clear RX at its in-store pharmacies in 2005 — in line with the brand’s own commitment to good design.

Longtime agency Wieden + Kennedy Portland showed us Target’s funnier side on a slew of holiday ads, including a spot that showed where Santa goes when he runs out of toys, as well as several spots featuring marathon sale mistress Maria Bramford, who illustrated the real meaning of “extreme shopper.”

The agency was also behind the “Life’s a Moving Target” campaign, which included a slew of curious 15-second that depicted various quotidian disasters — like the one at left, which rolled out during a season finale of Lost — all easily avoided or resolved with a product available at Target.

In addition to its traditional campaigns, Target has pulled off clever stunts that fit perfectly with its design aesthetic. For the first time in The New Yorker’s 80-year history, the magazine had a sole sponsor: Target, in the Aug. 22, 2005, issue. Under the guidance of agency Peterson Milla Hooks, the retailer approached the partnership with elegant and artful restraint. There were no ads, only a series of gorgeous red-and-white illustrations from some of the world’s finest illustrators and artists, including James Jean, Yuko Shimizu and Ruben Toledo.

In 2009, Mother New York created an eco-friendly campaign that turned Target billboards in Times Square into Anna Sui-designed tote bags, available for sale on the store’s website.

In 2010 the agency created the retailer’s Kaleidoscopic Fashion Spectacular, a dazzling nighttime show featuring a choreographed display of dancers and lights in the windows of New York’s Standard Hotel, to introduce the store’s fall fashion line.

Target’s bold bull’s eye has been around since the company was founded, but in 1999, Peterson Milla Hooks creative head Dave Peterson made it the heart of a playful, design-minded branding campaign. In the anthem spot, “Bull’s Eye World,” the logo is integrated into a series of fun, graphic red and white-filled interior shots of people and products (including the eye of Target’s mascot dog) backed by Petula Clark’s 1966 hit, “Sign of the Times.”

The idea was later incorporated in spots and print ads that take the theme outdoors and featured a more-diverse color palette.

What list of retail innovations would be complete without the Sears catalog? The tome of phone-book proportions started out in 1893 as a mail-order catalog where founders Richard Sears and Alvah C. Roebuck advertised lower-priced alternatives for farmers used to buying supplies at more expensive local general stores. By the following year, the catalog, with Richard Sears’ cover line “Book of Bargains: A Money Saver for Everyone” counted 322 pages. Over the years, the “Big Book,” as it came to be known, went on to offer a range of products to rival Amazon’s–from sporting goods, bikes, and appliances, to groceries, clothing, wallpaper and even kit houses. According to the Sears Archives, the catalog served as a “mirror of our times, recording for future historians today’s desires, habits, customs, and mode of living.” Along with its merchandise, its pages featured celebrities like Roy Rogers, Gloria Swanson, Lauren Bacall, Ted Williams and Gene Autry. Sears closed the Big Book in 1993, but continues to offer a surprisingly broad array of products through smaller print catalogs and online.

2000s, Saatchi & Saatchi led creative in the late 2000s, taking the brand’s advertising on a sophisticated, cinematic ride with a series of gorgeous spots shot by some of the industry’s top directors like Fredrik Bond (“Aviator”), Dante Ariola (“Life Imitates Art”) and Dougal Wilson (“Zombies”).

The highpoint of the relationship, however, was the wildly viral holiday film “Beware of the Doghouse.” Directed by Hungry Man’s Bryan Buckley, the short depicted the hilarious fate of hubbies and boyfriends who thought giving their lady loves a dual bag vacuum cleaner, extra RAM memory or mustache waxers as presents is a good thing.

In January, JCPenney announced a major brand overhaul with its new “Fair and Square” pricing strategy, designed to eliminate confusion from customers’ sales shopping experience and decrease the number of the retailer’s yearly promotions. Spots from Mother N.Y., Peterson Milla Hooks and Brand Advisors illustrate the scheme in a variety of ways and feature everything from crazy sales shoppers, to quirky, colorful vignettes and blow-out productions with Ellen Degeneres.

The new strategy is also reflected in Brand Advisors’ revamp of the retailer’s logo. Featuring the JCP initials embedded in a small blue square at the top left corner of a square red frame, the marque simultaneously evokes a sense of Americana and reflects the simplicity of “Fair and Square” mission. The logo’s square frame also figures into displays now being incorporated in the stores’ interiors.

In 1965, an assistant manager Earl Bartell introduced The Blue Light special, a Kmart original. The flashing blue sirens in the middle of store aisles became a classic symbol of great values and then later, an icon of discount-store kitsch. The retailer retired the idea in 1991, only to flicker it on and off periodicqally, in stores and on its website, the last time being 2009.

In 2010, the company highlighted its Kohl’s Cares program on Facebook to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the company’s philanthropic program. Kohl’s pledged to donate $10 million to schools, wiht the winners decided by the company’s “fans.” The 20 schools with the most votes would each receive $500,000. Fans could vote as many as 20 times but no more than five times per school. More than 12 million votes came in from 2 million people, and Kohl’s scored 1.6 million new Facebook fans in six weeks.

Last holiday season the retail giant rolled out its Shopycat Facebook app to help shopers pick gifts for friends based on their interests and likes. Designed to attract users to shop at Walmart.com, the app was a pretty ballsy move, as the recommendations didn’t always direct shoppers to the retailer’s site, but also to others like Bed Bath & Beyond or Hot Topic, for items not carried at the store. It ultimately proved buggy, sometimes recommending the same items for different friends, or suggesting gifts they already had.

The Martin Agency lent Walmart a lighthearted slant with a series of spots that show what shopping lists really add up to. The clever ads reveal the story behind consumers’ seemingly unrelated lineup of purchases, and play out a a bit ilke longer, reversed versions of Wieden’s 15-second “Moving Target” ads for Target.

reposted from: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008930

Social media marketing spend predicted to nearly triple over five years

Marketers, it seems, are confident that a US economic recovery is under way. A February 2012 poll of CMOs conducted by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business found that respondents estimated their marketing budgets would grow 8.1% over the coming 12 months, a sign they were optimistic about the overall state of the US economy.

This was down slightly from August’s more bullish spending expectation, but part of a general upward trend since the end of the recession in 2009.

Much of the growth in marketing spending will be directed to online efforts, spending for which was expected to climb 12.8% over the next year. However, the outlook for ad spending in traditional media was considerably less rosy—the poll found that respondents predicted ad budgets for traditional channels would drop 0.8% during the period. Marketers will continue to flee some forms of old media in favor of digital, no doubt due to the latter’s ability to corner a mass audience while also providing targeting advertising and better analytics.

Social media campaigns, in particular, will see a significant influx of dollars. Marketers said that they planned to allocate 7.4% of their overall budgets to social media in the current year. Survey respondents said they expected that figure to almost triple by 2017 to 19.5%.

However, CMOs see social media as a category that currently exists largely outside of their companies’ overall marketing strategies. About 18% of those polled said social media had not yet been incorporated into broader marketing plans, while only 7% thought social media efforts had been well-integrated into their marketing strategy, with the balance falling somewhere between those two poles.

eMarketer estimates digital ad spending, including paid ads on the internet as well as mobile search and display advertising, will rise 23.3% this year, while traditional budgets other than TV will remain largely stagnant. Social network ad spending in the US is expected to grow 43% during the period.

reposted from: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/research/12432.html

Mobile search grew significantly in 2011, with Google’s share of clicks from mobile devices increasing by 132 percent between January and December of last year, according to a new report from Marin Software.

The State of Mobile Search Advertising in the US report found that ad budgets increased at an even faster rate, with advertisers increasing their share of search budget on mobile devices from 3.4 percent to 8.7 percent during the year, a jump of 156 percent. The driving factor behind the significant growth was the dramatic increase in smartphone and tablet penetration.

“The first big piece of news for marketers is the dramatic growth in mobile search clicks and the underlying trends behind that,” said Matt Lawson, vice president of marketing for Marin Software, San Francisco, CA.

“The predication that 25 percent of all paid search clicks will come from mobile — that is a staggering number,” he said. “If a quarter of all your paid search clicks are going to be coming from mobile, you really need to start thinking about search differently.

“The second big piece of news is that mobile offers a really attractive investment option for advertisers right now. It is a very favorable time for advertisers to invest and we think that they will invest more.”

Doubling search budgets
By the end of this year, Marin forecasts that mobile devices will account for 25 percent of all paid-search clicks on Google and that 23 percent of Google’s paid-search spend in the United States will come from mobile campaigns.

Despite the significant growth in mobile search ad budgets last year, ad budgets lagged behind the click volume arising from smart mobile devices, reflecting that there is room for more growth in mobile search.

“We think there is a lag between the adoption of mobile and the budgets that are chasing it,” Mr. Lawson said. “Advertisers are going to have to more than double their budgets to catch up to the level at which consumers are searching via mobile.”

Mobile search provides strong results for advertisers, another reason it is becoming an attractive option, per the report.

Smartphones and tablets tend to have higher click-through rates than desktop. In 2011, the average click-through rate for desktop was 2.39 percent, for smartphones it was 4.12 percent and for tablets 3.12 percent.

One reason for the higher click-through rates is that only two results typically appear on smartphone screens.

Additionally, the cost per click on smartphones and tablets is much lower than on desktop. The average cost per click by device in 2011 was $0.83 for desktop, $0.53 for smartphones and $0.63 for tablets.

However, when it comes to conversions, smartphones underperform compared with desktop and tablets. This may be because some of the conversions are taking place in a store or via an app, both of which are harder to track.

The average conversion rate in 2011 was 5.2 percent for desktop, 2 percent for smartphones and 4.9 percent for tablets.

Tablet search
The report also points to the significant opportunity for in tablets, where mobile clicks are growing. During July of last year, tablets accounted for 31.6 percent of all mobile clicks and, by December, that number had risen to 37.9 percent.

“There are actually more smartphones out there than tablets but it would appear that people are searching more from tablets than phones,” Mr. Lawson said. “We were surprised to find that the conversion rates for tablets was comparable to desktop and that the cost per conversion was lower than on desktop.”

Marin recommends that marketers separate out mobile search as a separate strategy so that they are bidding on mobile-appropriate words and leveraging relevant ad extensions such as click-to-call or location extensions.

Marin also recommends including device-specific ad copy in paid search ads so that consumers know a link will take them to a mobile-optimized experience.

Because smartphone browsers support fewer ad units, it is also important that marketers bid appropriately to insure that their ads are in position 1 or 2 in mobile.

“There needs to be a recognition by marketers of why mobile in general is huge and why tablets is a big category and that these might need to be treated separately, especially if you are doing commerce,” Mr. Lawson said.

“Tablets are going to play a big role in commerce this year and marketers need to think about how to optimize for their tablet device users,” he said.

reposted from: http://mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2012/03/22/m-commerce-and-s-commerce/

The Future Foundation’s Heather Corker reveals key insights about mobile and social shopping, which are both gaining momentum…

The potential of m-commerce means that mobile consumers will become ever-more shop savvy, with an increased ability to maximise outcomes in their favour and make more informed product decisions. Indeed, mobile access to the internet will lead to in-store price comparison and perhaps make the concept of price endlessly malleable – as the consumer has leverage to prove that a product is cheaper elsewhere.

Meanwhile, social shopping will gain in momentum as social networking sites, such as Facebook, allow users to shop directly from their site. More, the ability to post products and get instant feedback from friends will add a new element to the trend known as the Personalisation of Authority, the sense that the consumer has become the dominant figure in the processing of commercial claims and images.

The rise of m-commerce
The spread of the mobile internet, along with an increase in consumer ownership of smartphones and tablet devices, has enabled a new method with which consumers can engage the internet for shopping online.

Purchasing products or services via mobile phones virtually doubled between 2010 and 2011 with now one in five smartphone users doing so:

Unsurprisingly, interest in mobile purchasing is gaining most traction among younger consumers . They are the group most likely to carry out the weekly shop on-the-go, using their mobile phones or tablets; they also express the most interest in using mobile payment across a variety of sectors. However, it is this segment of consumers who are also most sensitive to privacy concerns in relation to shopping online, a feeling felt all the more intensely when shopping is moved to the mobile platform.

Product distribution : increasingly platform neutral
In November 2011, John Lewis and Waitrose trialled a virtual wall shopping concept, with customers able to purchase the “top 30 favourite things” sold by the brands by scanning associated QR codes with their mobile phones.

Once an item had been scanned, smartphone users were directed to the online shop at John Lewis where they could complete their transaction.

As the 10s progress, companies who offer their products across multiple platforms will merely be pursuing standard practice: consumers will expect such features from all the brands they favour. But security concerns hang in the air; consumers will want to know their data is protected, especially if they are ever victims of theft or hacking. Thus, perhaps even more than with e-commerce, m-commerce suppliers might well need to deliver advanced customer service via extra clarity and transparency.

As concerns about security recede and the features and functionality of the mobile option take centre stage, many more m-commerce sites will emerge and mobile shopping will become a progressively more mainstream practice – further enabling the consumer to live more of their life on-the-go.

The Social Shopper and Seller
E-commerce has already entered the world of social networks, allowing shoppers to connect with their friends, family, acquaintances while perusing and purchasing online. In the coming years, we can expect sites such as Facebook to play an ever more important role in the way we select – and review – the products we buy online.

Not only does Facebook allow its users to connect with others on the site to buy and sell personal items, a number of retailers now sell their goods directly through the social networking site. This adds a new element to the trend personalisation of authority as it allows consumers to get instant feedback from friends on their purchases, as well as share and post their purchases to the site. The consumer is very much in control.

Online retail moves into the social space
In autumn 2011, e-commerce site Etsy launched its Gift Ideas for Facebook Friends service. With access to the user’s Facebook profile, the site proposes a number of gift suggestions for a chosen friend, based on content shared by that individual.

In 2011, clothing retailer Asos launched a fully functional shop inside Facebook, allowing its customers to browse its entire range, ‘like’ or ’share’ garments and complete transactions without leaving the social networking site. And, if in search of clothing advice, users can share ‘look books’ with their friends.

The combination of e-commerce and social networking facilitates greater interaction between brands and consumers, allowing retailers a potentially explosive degree of contact and dialogue with their customers and the opportunity to receive personal information from them – and their networks – in exchange for a valued service. With this, the concept of the 21st century social influencer, an individual with perceived authority over their networks, could become ever-more prominent and important for marketing and communications.

reposted from: http://www.amazon.com/Grouped-groups-friends-influence-social/dp/0321804112#reader_0321804112

The web is undergoing a fundamental change. It is moving away from its current structure of documents and pages linked together, and towards a new structure that is built around people. This is a profound change that will affect how we create business strategy, design, marketing, and advertising. The reason for this shift is simple. For tens of thousands of years we’ve been social animals. The web, which is only 20 years old, is simply catching up with offline life.

From travel to news to commerce, smart businesses are reorienting their efforts around people–around the social behavior of their customers and potential customers. In order to be successful, businesses will need to understand how people are connected, how their social network influences them, how the people closest to them influence them the most, and how it’s more important for marketers to focus on small, connected groups of friends rather than looking for overly influential individuals.

This book pulls together the latest research from leading universities and technology companies to describe how people are connected, and how ideas and brand messages spread through social networks. It shows readers how to rebuild their business around social behavior, and create products that people tell their friends about.

reposted from: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/03/the-ipad-3-and-the-future-of-the-web/

Apple is expected to announce the 3rd version of the iPad tomorrow. It’s easy to mock the excess enthusiasm the tech community has for new Apple gadgets — Wow! Look, It’s a new computer!

At the same time it’s just as easy to see why that enthusiasm exists — Apple can be counted on to push the boundaries of how we use computers and how we use the web.

As developers, pushing the boundaries makes for exciting times. Difficult times too. Times that challenge our current models of what the web is and what the web might become.

Apple has already pushed the web in several new directions by popularizing touch-based devices and in the process redefining our behaviors, habits and expectations.

Taking away the mouse forced developers to rethink many things we previously took for granted — of course I can use a drop down menu that activates when a mouse rolls over it, how could that possibly not work? Well, now you know. That was only one small change and suddenly web developers had to pivot, best practices had to change.

What will all the new changes coming this year mean for the web? No one knows yet, but the web today is feeling less like a thing that lives in your browser and more like something that exists in the space between things. The web of tomorrow will be less visible and more powerful — the thing that pulls everything together and makes it work even when the web isn’t something you access directly on every device.

A while back Brad Frost told developers to “get your content ready to go anywhere because it’s going to go everywhere.” This has been happening for a while now with RSS and APIs that push and pull content to places often far removed from the “webpage” where it was originally published. Expect this to continue and to become even more common as we navigate between different devices, platforms and technologies. Android apps can’t run on iOS. Windows Metro won’t integrate with a Spark tablet. Something has to link the device silos together.

The web has already become a way to link information across otherwise disconnected apps. Take Marco Arment’s Instapaper, for example. Instapaper saves webpages for offline reading and syncs them between iOS devices and Kindles. Is Instapaper a web app? Is it an iOS app? Is it a Kindle service? It’s all of these things.

Even when platform-native apps are the access point, the web remains the key element in the equation. This will likely be the future of the web — less visible, less obvious, less about the browser, but essential for connecting everything together.

That doesn’t mean that the browser will go away. The browser will likely continue to exist for some time as a fallback. We will still need a device and platform agnostic way to access the web as long as devices remain silos. If iOS went away and Amazon stopped making Kindles, you could still read your Instapaper articles on any device with a browser. The opposite isn’t true — take away the web and the Instapaper apps would be isolated, with no way to connect them.

The web is bigger than the browser already and it will continue to expand into new areas. What’s going to happen when the web is on your television? How will the web need to change when the screen is much larger and further away? How will the web need to change if we want to interact with it by voice commands? Very soon Android devices are going to be in your car dashboard. Eventually your car itself will have an API. Your car could talk to, for example, your car dealer, logging in, making an appointment for a repair it’s just become aware of. It might then use another API to push the appointment on to your calendar app, which then might use the Siri voice API to ask what time works best for you, scanning your other appointments and offering suggestions.

Where in that scenario is the web as we think of it today? It’s just a series of APIs talking to each other. There is no web as we know it. And yet the web is still there, invisibly making it all possible. There’s a reason, after all, that we call it a web — it’s what binds everything else together. It no longer matters if what you’re after ends up displayed on a feature phone via Opera Mobile or inside the Instapaper app running on the latest and greatest iPad. The web is already everywhere.

reposted from: http://news.investors.com/article/600351/201202071711/social-media-disappoints-as-ecommerce-driver.htm?src=HPLNews

Facebook, Twitter and other social media will be an unstoppable force in e-commerce, prodding millions of people to buy goods — and get friends and family to follow suit. At least, that’s a common contention.

Yet many observers say that despite the buzz, social media is still far from sparking any e-tail buying stampede. And some early data on the subject show critics have a point.

“Social media commerce hasn’t popped yet,” said Brian Walker, an analyst with Forrester Research. “It is a customer-acquisition tool, but it’s not as effective as search and email marketing.”

A shopper uses the Facebook Deals service on an iPhone, but how much do social sites boost e-commerce? View Enlarged Image

Walker prefers to view social media as a further adaptation of other direct marketing tactics already used online, rather than as a separate sales driver. He says mobile devices will be a much bigger factor in e-tail than social media.

Forrester clients that sell through Facebook stores or other social media have enjoyed only modest results so far, he says.

“Customers are saying ‘I’m not on Facebook to shop,’” Walker said.

A 2011 report by Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru for trade group Shop.org found that 68% of U.S. retailers say that if Facebook went away, it wouldn’t hurt their Web sales. And 77% said the top benefits of Facebook are brand building and as a way to listen to customers. Only 1% said it helped them get new customers.

“In the history of retail, there has probably been nothing that has been so widely anticipated yet underwhelming as the ‘era of social commerce,’” Mulpuru wrote in the report.

The report, though, found retailers are continuing to boost social network spending, as 72% said they were spending more on marketing on social networks in 2011 than they did in 2010.

But retailers aren’t getting much bang for their social media bucks, some data show.

The percentage of total online sales generated by social media this past Black Friday actually fell to 0.53% from 0.55% the year prior, says an IBM Coremetrics study. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. That figure rose on Cyber Monday (three days after Black Friday) to 0.56% from 0.41%, but still remains negligible.

Sales referral traffic via Facebook rose just modestly on Cyber Monday, to 0.80% from 0.73%. Referrals from Twitter specifically fell, to 0.02% from 0.07%.

Young Adults Stop At ‘Like’

A poll of shopping trends by 18-to-25-year-olds issued in January by the LIM College National Retail Federation Student Association found shoppers in this age group will “like” a brand on Facebook but won’t go further. Nearly 90% said they don’t want to shop through Facebook or Twitter.