Posts tagged online
RESEARCH WATCH: 2m more Brits online
Jun 30th
There are 1.9 million more people using the internet than there were last year. But the real surprise is the demographics…
People over 50 years old are responsible for the majority of the increase in the numbers of Britons using the internet over the last year, says a new study from UKOM (The UK Online Measurement Company powered by Nielsen).
The size of the UK internet audience grew by 5% from 36.9 million people in May 2009 to 38.8 million people in May 2010. Of these 1.9 million new Britons using the Internet, 1.0 million (53%) were at least 50 years old.
Men over 50 were responsible for most of this growth, accounting for 722,000 (38%) new British internet users followed by women over 50 who accounted for 284,000 (15%) new users.
Following the 50+ age group, women aged 21-34 accounted for 272,000 (14%) new British internet users and ‘tweenage’ girls aged 12-20 who accounted for 231,000 (12%).
Alex Burmaster, from Nielsen, said, “The internet is getting older in more ways than one. Not only is the medium itself maturing but the audience is shifting towards older age groups. This growth is a reminder, if one was still needed, that it is very much a form of media utilised by all age groups.
“The fact that one in four Britons who use the Internet today are 50 to 64 years old proves it is no longer the sole preserve of the young and technical literati.”
The types of websites where people over 50 years old are most likely to be found are a varied mix of health, video, community, travel, fashion, genealogy, cooking and greeting cards.
People aged 50 or over account for 31% of people online (see Chart 1). Health website RealAge has the highest concentration of people this age amongst its visitors - 89 percent are aged 50 or over. RealAge is followed by video site Flixxy (80%) and community site Saga – of which 78% of the audience is at least 50 years old (see chart 2).
Burmaster added, “This age group have a wide appetite when it comes to the types of sites they are using to supplement the interests and needs they have in the daily lives. Consequently, a number of brands across a range of industries, particularly travel, are showing the rest what a valuable medium online is when it comes to reaching a desired audience who haven’t grown up with the Internet.”
Absolut caught out by ‘I’m Here’ online film fans
Apr 9th
Vodka company Absolut had an idea. That brainwave may have come in the sauna (with the company being Swedish). Or perhaps during a roll in the snow.
But it was a very good idea. The idea was to work with acclaimed film director, Spike Jonze, and the result was a 30-minute robot love story film entitled, ‘I’m Here’.
It was released in January 2010, at imheremovie.com but unfortunately – or perhaps more fortunately – has been an overwhelming success.
According to the vodka folks ‘I’m Here’ is screened every two hours on imheremovie.com, limited to just 5,000 viewers per day, the capacity of the site is now to be expanded to 12,000 a day.
In it’s first weekend of release the online movie theatre apparently clocked up 230,000 unique visitors alone.
“’I’m Here’ marks an evolution of our commitment to creativity, and I’m very happy about the great interest in this film. It is a beautiful story and a fantastic piece of art,” said Vice President Global Marketing at The Absolut Company, Anna Malmhake.
Seen in the worst light, it could be just a load of spin from Absolut. But there are widen implications.
It’s a reflection of just how viewing habits online are growing. In fact as we’ve already reported on UTalkMarketing, Online video is medium of choice for marketers in 2010
Why? Well it’s all down to the growth of broadband across the UK.
Absolut obviously knew the film was going to be popular. Otherwise they’d never have commissioned it in the first place.
They’ve also been driving traffic by integrating the project on Facebook, making it possible for social networkers to see the film together with friends.
But it looks like they underestimated just how popular it might be.
Lessons to be learnt?
Marketers should never underestimate the potential appeal of online video
Get it right and 230,000 unique visitors could be engaging with your brand over just one weekend too.
With the costs of video production falling too, there are no excuses for not making the leap into digital celluloid.
We’ve even got some top tips on How to produce video that delivers on a tight marketing budget here
Goodbye to the Facebook “fan.” Hello to the “like.”
Apr 1st
Facebook is replacing its “fan” buttons with “like” buttons on ads that direct users to big brands’ “fan pages” in a bid to further monetise the social networking site.
That’s according to new internal information acquired by All Things Digital.
Brand ‘fan pages’ are nothing new, of course but the problem for Facebook is they can be set up and operated for free.
All that free exposure to 400 million users via what is in effect a microsite for nada? Naturally Facebook is not happy so is now encouraging brands to buy ads on the site promoting the pages.
The move from ‘Fan’ to ‘Like’ has been prompted by a couple of developments.
First up is the fact that users have demonstrated the success of the ‘like’ button in other contexts – such as status up dates and photos. Facebook claims this is used twice as frequently as the ‘become a fan of’ button.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is the bigger picture. Facebook, according to All Things Digital, will be driving to add the ‘like’ button throughout the Web as a way of funneling more and more interaction onto its platform.
“‘Like’ offers a simple, consistent way for people to connect with the things they are interested in. These lighter-weight actions mean people will make more connections across the site, including with your branded Facebook Pages,” Facebook said a FAQ Sheet, All Things Digital claims to have get its hands on.
“I believe this will result in gaining more connections to pages since our research has shown that some users would be more comfortable with the term “Like”. The goal is to get the most user connections so that you can have ongoing conversations in the news feeds of as many users as possible.”
It adds, “The core functionality of Pages will not change. For instance, your Pages will still have distribution into your fans’ News Feed and you can still call the people who “Like” your Page, “Fans”-your Fans are still your Fans.”
Will users notice the difference in the change of buttons? Possibly. Will they care about the name change? Probably not.
Will the name change increase user engagement with brands? Facebook seems to think so. I’m not so sure.
After all, at the end of the day, it’s about whether you like a brand or not; not really about the difference between ‘like’ or being a ‘fan’.
Race is on for publishers large and small to get mobile
Mar 23rd
Think publishing. Think revenue generation. Think multi-platform. Or your future might look pretty bleak.
Going mobile is nothing new to publishers. After all, how many years has WAP been around, never mind the smart phone.
But the planned launch of the iPad and it’s potential to revolutionise media and publishing is encouraging on those publishers to take action.
The reasons are simple. Going digital – and mobile - opens up the door on alternative revenue steams.
It’s something we’ve touched on a few times, most recently with the launch of Skimkits, but as tech advances, so do the opportunties.
However while major publishers may have had the budget and resources to make the digital leap, it’s not been so easy for smaller players such as bloggers.
A new development may be set to change all that. A new tool has been released that allows publishers to create and monetise a mobile version of their website, turning RSS feeds and web pages into mobile pages.
The best news is that Mobilizer, as developed by BuzzCity, is a free service, with no hosting fees, and free publisher support.
It allows publishers to start earning mobile display advertising revenue with a payout of up to 65 per cent of total ad revenues. Publishers are able to choose the type of adverts that will appear on their mobile website as well as the number of ads and their position.
“It is common knowledge that consumer behaviour is shifting. Reading habits evolved from print-based media to web-based media and now mobile media is really coming in to play,” explains KF Lai, CEO of BuzzCity.
“It is vital that publishers are making their content readily available on the mobile. Many have invested in apps for the iPhone but this will only serve a small section of the market.”
In addition, publishers receive a unique QR code to display on their website, newspaper or magazine.
Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL.
The simple act of reading may never be the same again…
Can’t afford a TAG Heuer watch? Try it on online in real time.
Mar 17th
Got a spare grand in the bank? Thought not. But you still fancy some stylish wrist action? TAG Heuer is providing the answer by jumping on the augmented reality bandwagon.
A new pioneering app on its website, live “from the end of the month” will allow poverty-stricken consumers to try on a selection of virtual watches in full 3D in real-time.
Consumers will be able to access the tool from their own computers or laptops but a number of store consoles are also being rolled out to enhance the in-store virtual experience.
Consumers visiting the TAG Heuer website will be able to download software, print out a Tag Heuer wrist-band and experience, through a web-cam, a selection of this seasons watches in full 3D as if they were actually wearing them in front of their computer.
The benefits to retailers? Well, the technology platform offers significant additional business benefits by enabling brands to support test marketing, just-in-time capacity, present extended ranges and build a virtual sales assistant to expand staff availability, in addition to supporting displays at exhibitions and in store.
Developed by Holition, the programme allows users to change products, colours and styles at the touch of a button. Augmented Reality 3D viewing is possible when the user wears a symbol and stands in front of a web cam.
On screen the technology merges the 3D object into real-time video of the person so that the product can be viewed from all angles as the user moves their body.
Intrigued? Well we have a sneak preview video showing the tool in action.
“As part of TAG Heuer’s avant-garde heritage, we always strive to be the brand leader in design, precision and cutting edge technology,” said Antoine Pin, CEO LVMH Watch & Jewellery UK. “We are very proud to be pioneers in this new field.”
With luxury brands becoming more savvy as they attempt to claw their way out of the recession it’s an innovative step forward.
It’s one very assured step on from those luxury retailers such as Prada and Louis Vuitton who have just realised that you can actually sell goods online rather than people having to stumble into your Bond Street or Sloane Street stores. Amazing.
But with luxury brands having the financial clout to embrace AG, its perhaps interesting to see them following rather than leading in some ways.
So, for example, on UTalkMarketing recently we talked about an independent clothing company for children championing the tech, on the back of a collaboration with ad agency Brothers and Sisters.
But without question the tech is there for all to harness. All that’s required now is a little imagination.
Head of digital strategy at marketing communications agency, KLP, Stephen Beasley, provides some inspiration on how brands can move beyond the Augmented Reality hype and turn it into practice.
The alternative to charging for content – and still make money
Mar 10th
Publishers are faced with an ever growing challenge as print sales slip and readers largely reluctant to pay for content online.
Sure they could start simply churning out advertorial. That would surely keep the advertisers happy, but where’s the editorial credibility or ethics?
A new tool could well be the much sought after holy grail offering to monetise content both ‘seamlessly’ and ‘ethically’.
It comes from Skimlinks, a content monetisation service that we picked up on UTalkMarketing some time ago, and now operating on more than a half million sites - blogs, newspapers, content networks and forums - worldwide.
Fans include the Mirror.co.uk, whose Head of Digital, “SkimKit places the content and the commercial opportunity together,” said Paul Hood, has praised the content and the commercial mash-up.
“The editors have complete control over the content that they’re selecting and the commercial happens automatically. We’re not missing any opportunities,” he adds cheerfully.
Skimlinks helps website publishers by automatically turning normal retailer links in their editorial content into affiliate links. Each time a user clicks through and makes a purchase, the website earns a commission from the retailer. Simples, eh?
So why is it important? Well, the service is ideal for publishers lacking the resources or capacity to harness affiliate marketing as a revenue source, in a market that industry analysts predict will grow to $4 billion in the U.S. by 2014.
Now a new desktop tool – SkimKit – aims to empower editors and bloggers to easily produce revenue-generating content in a way that critically distances them from the commercial side of the process.
The tool offers a live, searchable database of millions of products from Skimlinks’ merchants. The tool lets publishers research, find and link to products they are writing about, with immediate access to deeplinks and image URLs.
It also features a service that creates shortened, monetised links for use in Twitter and email newsletters, turning a means of communication into a potential revenue source.
While SkimKit makes the creation of content more efficient for publishers, it is also more lucrative. So, if a publisher chooses to feature a product found in the tool, they earn a commission on the sale.
“Skimlinks gives publishers a way to generate revenue streams beyond banner ads and text ad units by making the most of the commercial value of the content they are already writing,” says Alicia Navarro, CEO and co-founder of Skimlinks.
“SkimKit makes it even easier by allowing editors and bloggers to actively play a role in the monetisation process without feeling any impact on their integrity or impartiality, as they are still writing about the kinds of products and retailers they normally write about.”
Why marketers need to target women online
Mar 8th
It is international Women’s Day and what better day to talk about how to target this avid consumer online.
According to a Publicis Groupe survey, 88 per cent of the household disposable income is controlled by the lady of the house and advertisers are beginning to notice that the internet is becoming another place where they can reach women.
According to web measurement firm Media Metrix, women represent 48% of all internet users, with studies by Jupiter Communications, NFO Interactive, and NetSmart America all predicting the number of women will soon surpass the number of men online.
The November statistics from Media Metrix found the types of web sites with the highest composition of women included toy retailers, women’s portals (such as iVillage), greeting card sites, retail savings sites, and health sites.
The online world is beginning to mirror its brick-and-mortar counterpart in appealing to consumers who have both the greatest spending power and the most enthusiasm for the shopping experience.
There are now 86% of women using social networks, a 48% increase over 2008, according to a new study from SheSpeaks.
Social networks including Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, have become drivers of purchase intent among women, with 50% of social media users reporting they have purchased products because of information on social networking sites. Furthermore, 40% have used coupon codes found on social networks.
Women have become more comfortable using social media, and for marketers, the overall growth and habitual use of social media represents opportunities to reach and engage women of all ages, and influence their purchase decisions.
Collette Dunkley, CEO of XandY Communications, told UTalkMarketing that the importance of presenting products and services that meet women’s needs is vital, together with brand communication which fully understands the way women think and interact with communication.
Ads during Oprah and The View just aren’t cutting through anymore. Online is where is at for women.
Dunkley says that women are influenced by different types of marketing and communications and there needs to be a long-term commitment to communicate better with them.
Taking advantage of digital. Murdoch might be on to something…
Feb 12th
Given the disastrous circulation figures in the magazine industry, it’s no wonder the newspaper industry is looking to protect itself. Pay walls might actually be the way to go – just as long as they can get advertisers on board.
The debate about pay walls rages on in the media industry. Rupert Murdoch sure is determined to protect his vast empire, despite that fact his company, New Corp, continues to do well. But if the magazine ABCs are anything to go by, ‘ol Rupert might actually be on to something.
Yesterday’s ABC figures for consumer magazine sales for July to December show serious decline across the industry.
The PPA sold it like this: “In a world of ever more free content on the TV, radio and the internet, the UK public bought well over 1 billion magazines in 2009 and more than 85 per cent of UK adults continue to buy magazines.”
But figures reveal that the sector is continuing into decline consumer magazines falling by 1.3 per cent in the second half of 2009.
Yes we can attribute that to tough trading conditions, but it’s not like the economy is showing any signs of a full recovery anytime soon.
In the past couple of years, as advertisers have fallen away from magazines and favored other avenues such as sponsorship, magazine titles have looked to ramp up their digital activities.
However, magazine websites often only provide the reader with bitesize information and teasers, requiring the reader to then go buy the magazine that has ‘just hit newsstands’.
With the take-up of Kindle’s and the iPhone, consumers no longer need the physical magazine in their hands and are lacking in the time to actually sit and read them cover to cover.
But people do still read online. That we know. So perhaps if magazines offered online subscriptions they would increase their lunch-time reading audiences and advertisers would likely follow.
The advantage of the pay wall, as Murdoch sees it, is that readers can read both the online and printed version for one price. So if you have a subscription to, say the New York Times, and never read it in the printed version, the revenues from the pay model online will still trickle down keeping both versions alive.
It’s the best of both worlds. Or is it? What do you think?
The magazine industry has to do something now if it wants to protect its future. But first and foremost, it has to reassure its advertisers that it at least has a plan.
Reputation, reputation, reputation is key to online success
Dec 1st
When it comes to doing business online, you can mess with your location as much as you like – but don’t risk your reputation.
If you build a good reputation on the web, people will link to you. If people link to you, other people will follow those links, and you will build up your traffic and your business. And the more good quality and relevant links you have, the higher you will rise up the search engine listings. More and better links means better rankings on Google, too.
Whether buying a house or opening a shop, there’s an old saying that the most important factors are location, location and location. But how does this work out on the internet?
Your web server can be physically located in a data centre almost anywhere in the world. Potentially, you can run an online business as effectively from a beach in Majorca as you could on Oxford Street.
One of our customers a few years ago even succeeded in managing his store while halfway up Mount Everest!
So when it comes to doing business online, you can mess with the location as much as you like. But the one thing you don’t want to mess with is your reputation.
If by action or inaction you manage to damage your reputation, the world can hear about it very quickly; via Facebook, MySpace, Digg, del.icio.us, Twitter. There is an endless list of media by which disgruntled customers can spread their complaints about your business. Do you monitor them? Would you know?
On the internet it’s not location, location, location; it’s reputation, reputation, reputation that counts.
That means selling a quality product at a fair price, and looking after your customers. It also means watching what’s being said about you in social and interactive media, and taking every opportunity to intervene positively and turn disappointed customers around.
Before you pay to use Twitter, ask yourself if it’s worth it
Nov 27th
A new report say that the majority of companies are planning to increase their spend on social media activities next year, but will it be worth it?
The Social Media and Online PR Report from Consultancy reveals that fewer than a quarter of companies are able to see a ‘tangible’ return on their investments, while just under two thirds had gained ‘more benefit’ from their spend ‘but nothing concrete’.
However, companies that have concentrated spend on social media have seen a return on investment with more than half of all firms that had made a significant effort saying that they had seen return.
Some 90 per cent of respondents said that social media is taking up more time than it did a year ago, while 86 per cent are planning to increase their budgets next year.
But you can’t ignore the recent comScore figures about users declining. Recent figures have shown that the number of users on Twitter has actually declined in the past three months, with growth down by 8.1 per cent.
Are users simply over the hype of Twitter?
Twitter launched in March 2006, two years after the social network that started them all, Facebook, which launched in March 2004. It’s taken almost three years, but the site now has more than 92 million users worldwide.
To put that in perspective, radio took 38 years to reach just half the amount of current Twitter users – 50 million. TV took 13 years and the internet, four.
Social networking isn’t just a fad, it is fundamentally changing the way we communicate, as we discovered at our Social Media roundtable earlier this year.
A number of major advertisers and brands have used Twitter as a way of communicating directly with their customers, but not only are new users down, Nielsen data reveals that traffic to Twitter was down 27 per cent during September and October. That means less eyeballs seeing your tweets! And yet, co-founder Biz Stone announced this week that the site will be launching paid accounts next year.
The site is also considering signing further deals with companies to licence its content and live streams, just as it did recently with Yahoo, Google and Microsoft’s Bing, that will see your tweets in search results. But it also means that your tweets will have to spot on, full of key words and be engaging. Is this too hard to achieve for brands in just 140 characters?
As it is, only 10 per cent of Twitter users accounted for 90 per cent of all tweets as of May 2009. A study from Harvard Business School confirms that the typical Twitter user tweets “very rarely”, while the average number of tweets per user over a lifetime is just one. People are losing interest and brands and advertisers are failing to ‘tweet’ about anything compelling.
A report last week said that users on were tech-savvy and usually work in the media and marketing industry.
And surprise surprise, the brands they are talking about the most include Google, Apple and Amazon followed by a mix of tech companies and other strong global brands like Starbucks, Disney and HP.
But one of the biggest complaints made by Twitter users about brands on the site was that tweets need to be “more human”.
Using Twitter to promote brands just got harder. And while tweet may direct users to your website or attract them to deals or even just engage with your consumer, one must wonder if there is any real future in this micro-blogging site. Has the hype ended? Or has it just begun?
Twitter seems hell-bent on making next year it’s revenue year. But despite all the media attention, many are wondering what the future holds for Twitter and marketers will soon wonder if Twitter is worth the investment, especially when it competes alongside so many other social media sites that are yet to lose users or suffer declines.
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