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Social and mobile are two of the largest growth areas in the technology world. It is therefore inevitable that commentators are keen to identify (and understand how to monetise) convergence between the two. There is great synergy between the two areas. Both are focused on communication, both are undeniably personal and both are very immediate.

Whilst a computer is a window onto the web and into your social connections, a mobile, be it an iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone, is your personal window. And unlike a computer it brings extra data and functionality with it. With a mobile, you can share where you are and what you’re doing, generally in a much richer way than a simple status update. This is all becoming fairly commonplace and the level of use of this type of functionality is growing inexorably. The question is, once you’ve gained access to your social network of choice through your smartphone, what is there to tempt you to do more than what effectively amount to multimedia or spatial updates?

This is the question put to business and organisations who seek to engage with users in the social mobile world. Some businesses have an easier time answering this question than others. Foursquare, for example, is a great example of a social mobile offering. Find, visit, share, rate, all a great fit for social mobile and one of the key factors behind its success (as well as the gamification). But your business isn’t Foursquare, so how do you work out where you fit in this space?

Josh Clark, a well-respected voice in the field of iPhone app design, talks about three mindsets mobile users tend to have:

• Microtasking, when a user is engaged in short periods of intensive activity
• Local, when a user seeks information about or to support them in their current context
• Bored, when the user is looking for distraction, novelty or entertainment

As Josh himself has recently pointed out, these mindsets map nicely onto Google’s categorisation of mobile information usage; repetitive, urgent and bored.

Now, social mobile can fill one or all of these categories. So we need to delve a little deeper to understand what aspects of social interaction match these mindsets.

When thinking about the different types of interaction possible through social media, I found this model by Isra Garcia particularly useful.

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 From this model there are effectively four different types of interaction:

• Connecting to others
• Exposure, viewing information and activity within your network
• Sharing information with others
• Providing feedback on shared information or on a specific topic

There is also an associated interaction that can be facilitated or initiated through social media:

•  Communicating directly with others.

When combined with the mobile mindsets different types of social mobile interaction emerge. Using this, albeit simplistic abstraction, we can start to see how organisations can understand where their business and any potential mobile offering might fit.

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 If we return to Foursquare we can see that it covers the following areas:

• Researching – what’s good in my area?
• Situational support – is there anything good near me right now.
• Reporting – I’ve found something great, or I want to review this too.
• Matchmaking – are any of my network available to join me?
• Reaching out – well, what could I do today?

Which is quite a large portion of the spectrum, particularly the local part. Interestingly if we look at the social networks themselves, we can see that Facebook covers the entire spectrum (depending upon which of their suite of services you use), whereas the professional network Linkedin, is rooted firmly in the microtasking area, with some small forays in local.

So, how is this useful? There are two aspects, understanding what situation you find a user in will directly influence how you can engage with them and what the likelihood of them wanting to engage with you is. This I will cover in a future article. The other is determining which aspects of a product or service could benefit from a social aspect. A couple of examples might help to illustrate this.

iPad video app:

I have an app that lets people insert their face over the lead character in short clips of popular films. It’s a great timewasting app, but after the initial rush of downloads, sales have stagnated. There are several aspects of social interaction we can target. Broadcasting and the flipside, consumption, would allow people to share their videos with others. If we add in reviewing, via commenting, then we cover off a neat conversion of a bored user into a microtasking (and therefore more engaged) user.

Customer reviews app:

I have a service that helps people to view and share reviews of cars. I only focused on letting people easily view the reviews database (the researching goal). This is great, but I’m missing two other goals that would help to harness the community. If I were to provide an easy route to information about “that car there” (situational support) then I add to the utility of my app/mobile site. If I were to offer the ability to review a car (reviewing/reporting) or even ask a question (conversation) then I would increase both the utility of and engagement with my app.

Or how about a real world example, Groupon. Groupon is an offers site, with the key to their success being the sharing and viral spread of deals. Currently the Groupon mobile offering lets people find offers near them and share them with their network. This is simple, straightforward and it works. However, there are a number of ways that this could be enhanced. What if the service were to recommend deals that my friends have looked at or taken up (consumption)? What about reviewing or rating deals (reporting)? For dinner deals in particular, how about the facility to invite other people in your network to take advantage of a deal (matchmaking). All of these could enhance the Groupon service. As I was putting this article together, Groupon and Foursquare announced that Groupon daily deals would now be available through Foursquare. This looks to be very much a win-win situation for both of these companies.

It’s important to stress that I don’t intend to advocate simply bolting social elements onto a mobile offering. The appropriateness and likely appeal of the social aspect should be carefully considered. For example it might be good to use a service to find reviews of local doctors, but you probably don’t want to connect to your doctor or share with others that you’re visiting them.

The question then becomes, how do we gauge appropriateness and appeal? A great first step is to look at what similar services are doing and the level of engagement they attain. This will provide some indication of what social features might be useful and whether people will actually use them. If you have an existing product that you’re looking to socially augment, then depending upon your budget you then have a couple of options for determining which social features would be best for your product. Surveys provide a cost effective way of building a picture of the types of features people might use. Focus groups and one to one interviews can then build upon this insight.

If you don’t have a product yet, then your silver bullet is ethnography, whereby actual user needs are collected in context over an extended period of time. This is a very powerful method for understanding a person’s interaction, not only with technology, but also their environment and the people in their lives.

As part of this process you also need to consider how social features in your mobile offering link up to the rest of your communications channels and services. If the social experience is constrained just to the mobile platform, this represents a missed opportunity to widen the reach of your service. This opens up another set of questions around consistency of experience and handling of transitions between channels.

All of the above can be considered in an ad-hoc manner, but I would strongly recommend creating a mobile strategy to guide the development of any mobile offering. When coupled with a full user centred design approach, you can ensure that your mobile service or product meets the needs of your users, delivers on your commercial priorities and offers a great user experience.

This article was originally published on MyCustomer.com

Note: Google Analytics has informed us that this feature, Multi-Channel Funnels, is a limited pilot. They are testing the feature and its usefulness to a small group of trusted testers; they have not made any plans or a timeline for a full launch.

How does Twitter, Search, Direct Traffic or Social Media each impact on the sales journey?  Let’s find out! As a Google Analytics Partner, last week we were lucky enough to attend the launch of an exciting new feature in Google Analytics – ‘Multi-Channel Funnels’.  It follows shortly after the release of the Version 5, allowing users to analyse the performance of marketing channels and how customers interact with them in a much more detailed way.  This new feature, will help our clients understand the sales impact of different marketing channels, and answer the age old question, where should those marketing dollars be spent?

This video best describes the new functionality

Looking at a typical user journey there are often many interactions that lead to a conversion.

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Traditionally conversions are assigned to the last click. So what was the last campaign, referral or search term that was seen? But don’t you want to know how the prior role interacted in the conversion? How do marketing channels work together in order to create sales? How much time was there between the initial and final interaction? How much money should be invested in social media compared to online advertising?

Multi-Channel Funnels brings all this data together so you can understand the impact of each visit to the website.  So now you will know the impact of a visit, even if it didn’t lead to an immediate conversion.  If your customer visits your site a few times, just to browse products before returning later to purchase, you will now be able to understand this journey. 

The funnels will consist of five reports:

1. Assisted conversions
2. Assist interactions
3. Top paths
4. Time lag
5. Path length

Let’s take a quick look at some of the reports. As you know understanding customer purchasing behaviour is one of the most important insights you can have. Using the path length report you can analyse the interactions that lead to a conversion.

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This is essentially an extension of the ‘Visit to Transaction’ report but now includes the ability to segment using either goal conversions or ecommerce transactions.

After gaining insight into the typical time between the first and last interaction, you may ask what the path actually looks like. Accessing the ‘Top Paths’ report, Google has grouped traffic into the following types:

1. Organic
2. Referral
3. Direct
4. Paid Advertising
5. Social Network
6. Email

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This video gives a detailed walkthrough of the Multi-Channel Funnel report.

Having had a play, the first iteration of Multi-Channel Funnels is very impressive and sets itself apart from many other analytics solutions currently on the market. Even a lot of the paid-for web analytics solutions cannot compete with this and I am pretty excited about implementing this and helping clients solve a problem they have debated for a long time.
Multi-Channel Funnels currently is only available to a limited number of users but expect a wider roll out to follow shortly.  Foviance is working with some our clients already to get them involved in the trial, so look out for more news from us when we get more results and feedback.

Foviance is delighted to have been recognised as a Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP), achieving company level accreditation to package, sell and deliver analytics with Google’s trusted badge of certification.

Google Analytics is the leading free-to-use enterprise-class web analytics solution. In the right hands it will provide insights into website traffic and marketing effectiveness. It’s powerful, flexible and simple to understand, ensuring businesses are in a better position to target advertising, strengthen marketing campaigns and improve those all important conversion rates.

Of course Google Analytics can be implemented out-of-the-box, but that level of solution would not leverage the power of the data that our customers require. Over the last few years our consultants have demonstrated an advanced ability to use Google Analytics to help improve our clients’ website conversion rates and ultimately their profitability. Our detailed knowledge of implementing and using Google’s tools frequently help us to optimise the ROI of those customer brands.
Read more…

The mobile advertising market is growing rapidly, presenting fresh challenges for any brands wishing to get their messages in front of this important new target audience.

According to recent figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the trade body for digital marketing, the total spend on mobile phone advertising in 2009 rocketed by 32 percent year-on-year to a new high of £37.6 million – and all that despite an overall contraction in the advertising sector in 2009. Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 23/04/10 and is republished here with permission.

When the graphs are going up and to the right, people are generally happy. Life feels fine when there’s good growth in the right kind of metrics and despite the tough economic trading conditions over the past 18 months, the digital economy has generally been doing OK. Here in the UK spending on online advertising grew by just under 5% in 2009 compared to 2008 with spend on Search up by just under 10%. Whilst that isn’t the kind of stellar growth seen in previous years, the indicators are positive. Business confidence amongst advertisers is higher than it’s been previously and we’re continuing to see growth in the active online audience (up 10% vs. a year ago), some of that being driven by the growth in population of social networking sites such as Facebook. Read more…

By Chris Holmes

Anyone else miss this? In January this year Google announced that hackers had managed to steal information from their computers, but they were pretty vague on the details of what was actually stolen. It has recently been revealed that the hackers managed to get their hands on something pretty significant: Google’s password system, called Gaia, which controls access by millions of users worldwide to all of Google’s web services, including email. Read more…

By Chris Holmes

We’ve previously mentioned the browser wars and the Microsoft anti-trust browser case, and this week sees the initial limited roll-out of Microsoft’s “web browser choice screen” for European users. In a nutshell, the European Commission ruled that bundling Internet Explorer (IE) with the Windows operating system was a big no-no and forced Microsoft to give users the choice of which browser they wanted to use. Read more…

By Chris Holmes

The big news this week, is the event at Google headquarters to demonstrate their much hyped operating system on Thursday, which promises to be the first major confrontation in the new browser war which was triggered by the release of Google Chrome earlier this year.

The relationship between the major players in the online world has always been described in overtly bellicose terms, but in the continuing fight for online supremacy, the battle ground has shifted from the traditional Battle of the Browser, to a fully-fledged global World Wide Web War. Google is making a bold move in challenging Microsoft’s OS dominance, but the old war horse still has some fight left, as evidenced by Microsoft moving in on Google’s search dominance with Bing and their deal with Yahoo. Read more…