The End of Email?

Some fascinating data highlighted in this recent MediaPost article on the displacement of email by social media.

Apparently consumers are more attached to their social network pages, than to email -- especially teenagers, who visit Facebook several times a day, but their email address maybe once a week.

The study found 38% of those ages 18 to 34 log onto their social network as soon as they awake, but before checking email. Not only are consumers afraid they will miss a news event,  but the younger generation often checks in with their friends and followers online before they’ve even rubbed the sleep from their eyes. And 27% send more messages from within their social network than from their primary email account.

 

So true .... I recently spent a week trying to connect with a young cousin of mine in Ireland.  He sent me a message on Facebook and I sent him an email, both messages sitting unchecked for days in our respective secondary digital communication channels.

Our Facebook Mobile Ad Test

Nice plug for our company, Targeted Social, in this Forbes story.  The results from the first Facebook ad campaigns on mobile devices have been extremely encouraging.  Our first campaign featuring a Unilever promotion was no exception.  CTRs were almost 2%, a 2200% increase over the same campaign on desk top.

The Forbes reporter focused on another layer of data from our campaign and a few others - performance of ads on IOS versus Android devises.  And the results are compelling.  Android users clicked on ads 28%-109% more than IOS users.

Facebook: A New Creative Canvas

Highly recommend "Facebook: A New Creative Canvas", a 20 minute presentation by one of Facebook's senior brand and product execs.  Great, broad overview of how brands should be using Facebook as well as some obviously self-serving, but compelling visions of how a future social-media infused digital media landscape will look.

The main strategy outlined here coincides with our most successful Facebook campaigns at Targeted Social: Use many lightweight interactions over time to build relationships, and then throw the party.

Newsprint On My Fingers

Great article in GIGAOM titled "What Happens When A Newspaper Is Just Another Digital Voice".

Are the newspapers that have been able to hang in there, now cutting back on the number of days they print and rely more and more on digital distribution, losing their power as community watch-dogs and influence sources?

I certainly feel there is much more power in the print version of The New York Times that lands at my door every morning at 6 am, the authoritative first news of the day, then the version I read on my iPad or Google Reader, packed in with dozens of other news sources.

Certainly the advertising is more powerful.  Is there anything more impactful than a full page ad running the length of my arms to thighs while I sip my morning coffee?

But I will soon be moving out of the demo that advertisers covet most.

TV's Golden Age

TV is in the midst of a truly golden age, perhaps even  supplanting the movie industry as the showcase for our best and most innovative filmed entertainment.   There are literally dozen of shows now on the air that are not just buzz worthy, addictive entertainment, but truly artistic expressions of some of our country's most creative and innovative thinkers.  And while our technology innovation gets all the press, we sure know how to create great entertainment that is gobbled up around the world as voraciously as our iPhones and Facebook apps.

HBO built its reputation on introducing this stuff to TV audiences, but now there are dozen's of channels with a water cooler hit or two in their line up.  At a dinner party last month, just a few weeks before the Academy Awards, the conversation steered to TV shows.  Seemed everyone had a different show or two to rave about, and the list was broad and varied, as was the networks that carried them, from the major broadcasters, to large and niche cable networks.

The big question is how can all these networks sustain themselves on just one or two hits each, especially as more and more of the viewing occurs in DVR, online and tablet environments, where ad monetization models are still being established.

Get A Job In Mobile

As this year winds down it appears two of the media sectors I work in - digital video distribution and social - are poised for another year of enormous growth as they further define their business models and disrupt traditional media (television) and maturing digital media (search and display) more and more profoundly.

Watching our teen's media habits is illustrative of our near and long term media media future. Half or more of my 13-year-old's time online is spent on Facebook and other than live airings of Glee on the family television, all of her video consumption is online, split evenly between Netflix, Hulu and YouTube on the Family iMac or iPad.

But it's the smart phone (which of course is already a major hub of social media and fast becoming an important video distribution channel) that I think will be seen as the most disruptive force in another year of major media disruption.

Making grand predictions from small samples of personal experience is never a good thing, and a bad habit of mine, but a recent business trip to Washington DC showed me how the deep, omnipresent connection to and dependence on our smart phone is only getting more extreme.

For the first time I paid a taxi fare using Square, a mobile payment platform created by one of the founders of Twitter.  Here is my driver swiping my credit car through the small Square module plugged into the top of his iPhone.

After processing the payment through the Square app, a receipt was sent to my phone via a text message instantaneously streamlining a ridiculously clunky payment process, saving the driver and me valuable time, and allowing the driver to cut his credit card payments in half. (As he told me, the taxi company exercises a 4-5% fee for credit card transactions, while Square charges only 2 1/2%.

In between meetings, I stopped at Starbucks where 3 customers in front of me paid using the Starbucks mobile payment app - a process as simple as driving through a toll using Easy Pass.  Less than 6 months ago a friend seemed to be flexing his early adopter muscles when he paid for our Lattes using this app and now it has moved well into the next stage of consumer adoption.

In a recent column in the Times, Nick Bilton predicts that our Smart phones soon will be attached to our bodies in some form.

The smart phone is going to be the hub for our information sharing and gathering.  Think of it as a force field that will engulf us wherever we are, transmitting power and Internet access to sensors and screens that are tacked to our clothing.

It beckons a new field called "wearable computing" that execs at Google, Apple and perhaps the next great tech company are studying, ensuring that our current devices look as relevant as an 8-Track cassette player in a few years.