AT&T's exclusive deal for the iPhone has benefited the wireless operator enormously, pulling in new subscribers and boosting its bottom line. But the carrier's own application storefront -- the AT&T MEdia Mall -- has been unquestionably overshadowed by Apple's App Store, generating more than 1.5 billion downloads in the last year. AT&T has sparked some app buzz of its own, announcing a new mobile app via the MEdia Mall that offers simultaneous access to popular social networking services including Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Developed by iSkoot, the free AT&T Social Net app aggregates status updates, tweets, Wall posts and other information from social media properties as well as live news feeds from 35 news and entertainment sites. Because it works in the background, it can also notify users about updates to social networking accounts even when it is closed. "Five of the top 10 searches on our mobile Web portal are for social networking sites, a clear indication of the growing popularity of mobile social networking," said Mark Collins, vice president of voice and data products, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, in a statement. "With this app, we're satisfying the increasing demand for aggregation apps that make it easy for customers to be active in multiple communities simultaneously." AT&T says the Social Net app is compatible with 20 of its handsets including the Motorola V3 and Samsung Jack, but not the iPhone. While the app is free, the carrier strongly recommends that users upgrade to an unlimited data plan, since standard rates apply on data and messaging while using Social Net. Like its major carrier rivals, AT&T is looking to mobile data usage as a way to grow revenue with voice service becoming a commodity. Social Net was among the first apps to be featured in the Apps Beta program that AT&T launched in April, which lets developers test new mobile apps with its customers before releasing them widely. Apps that fare especially well in testing, like Social Net (previously called Notifier), gain the opportunity to be sold or distributed through the MEdia Mall. By identifying promising apps early on, AT&T hopes to build interest among customers, which in turn will encourage developers to work with the carrier to come up with hot apps. Some 100,000 developers already work with Apple to create iPhone apps -- the sales of which AT&T doesn't get a dime as service provider. As of Wednesday at least, it appeared the Social Net announcement had helped make AT&T a trending topic on Twitter.
Outdoor gear and apparel retailer L.L.Bean is inviting consumers to have some "moosey fun" via its first iPhone application. "Moosentration," created by Maine software company Blue Ox Technologies, is a twist on the classic Concentration memory card game. The retailer is offering free Moosentration downloads for six months to iPhone and iPod Touch devices through iTunes. The game can also be accessed on the company's Web site at llbean.com/moosentration. "The Moosentration app is a different, but fun way for L.L.Bean to interact with its customers through mobile technology," said Steve Fuller, L.L.Bean's chief marketing officer, in a statement. "We're looking forward to learning how our customers respond to this effort." The game features three skill levels, 24 game variations and eight picture sets to choose from. Gamers can test their memory skills by matching images that are hiding behind L.L.Bean-branded card tiles. Images include L.L.Bean and Maine iconic items such as Bean Boots, lighthouses and wildlife critters. The mobile app will be promoted on social network sites as well as in an email blast to customers, says L.L.Bean spokesperson Laurie Brooks. The company would not disclose how many times the application has been downloaded from iTunes or played on the company's Web site since launching earlier this week. There is no target audience for the app, Brooks says. "It's about sharing the brand with L.L.Bean customers in a new and fun way," she says. "We like that the game is ageless -- it appeals to a broad audience." No other mobile applications are currently in the works, she adds. The application is not the Freeport, Maine-based company's first venture into social media, Brooks says. "We have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FriendFeed and Delicious. We also have social media sharing Chiclets on the product pages at www.llbean.com." L.L.Bean customers might be slow to join social networks, however -- as the niche retailer's official Facebook page had only 5,345 fans as of the afternoon of July 29, compared to The North Face's 46,323 fans. Orvis, however, had only 1,821 fans. The L.L.Bean Facebook page launched in November 2008.
A new report makes the case for SMS text marketing on mobile phones: Texting has become pervasive, and generates response rates two to ten times higher than Internet display ads, it says. That's partly because messages are directed only at "hand-raisers," since SMS marketing requires consumer opt-in. The study from the Local Mobile Search unit of Opus Research portrays the mobile texting population as a vast, mostly untapped market. It estimates the number of people who use text messaging on a regular basis at 154 million, or 57% of U.S. cell phone subscribers. (A Pew Research Center study on wireless broadband released this month put the proportion of U.S. cell users who send or receive text messages on a typical day lower, at 43%. The Opus study also cites data showing that text-messaging volume has grown to 3.5 billion a day, with messages now outstripping calls in a given month among U.S. mobile users. The reach of text messaging is also twice that of the mobile Internet, estimated at roughly 70%. Although the mobile Web holds much promise for advertisers, the report casts SMS marketing as an established, ready-to-go option that also doesn't require a smartphone to work well. "While much of the ad industry is focused on the iPhone and other smartphones because of the buzz and excitement surrounding these devices, they currently represent only 15% or 16% of total handsets in the U.S.," states the report authored by Opus Senior Analyst Greg Sterling. The study also emphasizes that the opt-in process for SMS marketing offers translates into more targeted ads or promotions, and ultimately better results. It points to broader research from Insight Express and Dynamic Logic this year showing that mobile advertising performed better than traditional online advertising across brand metrics including unaided awareness, ad awareness, brand favorability and purchase intent. Still, neither marketers or mobile users seem to care for SMS marketing, despite reports of double-digit response rates. For marketers, the reluctance arises at least partly from the prospect of government regulation. This spring, U.S. Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Bill Nelson (D-FL) introduced legislation to curb unsolicited text messages by providing additional consumer protections via the m-SPAM Act of 2009. Marketers also don't want to risk alienating mobile users with unwanted messages. To avoid that problem, Forrester Research recently advised advertisers in a separate report not to send an SMS message if it can't be well-targeted. "After all, when your marketing is targeted well, users stop thinking of it as marketing and start thinking of it as content, or a service," wrote Forrester analyst Nate Elliott on the firm's interactive marketing blog. He recommends that companies build a list of qualified SMS leads through contests, Web site forms, or by using a short code in traditional marketing efforts.
Facebook has not shied away from expanding to mobile platforms, offering applications for smartphones such as the iPhone and BlackBerry and Windows Mobile and Palm devices. Phones running Google's Android mobile operating system have been a notable exception. But the social network is working with Google to launch a Facebook app for Android devices as soon as the end of this week, according to TechCrunch. The tech blog says the Facebook app will have a more limited range of features than its popular iPhone app -- omitting an inbox, for instance. But it will offer the full stream of information that users find on Facebook. Earlier this month, the Android and Me blog had hinted that a Facebook Android app was in the works based on online images of forthcoming Android phones from T-Mobile and Sony Ericsson showing a Facebook icon in their app catalogs. What took so long for Facebook to come out with an Android app? Relations between the two Internet powerhouses have not exactly been close, as they compete to shape the Web to their own ends. But with Android-powered phones proliferating and Google intent on challenging the iPhone, it appears that the two have found common ground to collaborate on an app. Google even loaned Facebook an Android engineer for the project, according to TechCrunch. Separately, the upgrade of Facebook's iPhone app will reportedly include new features such as the ability to RSVP to events, create new photo albums and a redesigned home screen. Facebook says it has more than 30 million active mobile users.
The Washington Post has rolled out a redesigned mobile site aimed at offering cell subscribers a more customized experience. The newspaper's new mobile presence features more intuitive navigation and a simplified structure focusing on five main sections: politics, business, metro, arts & living and sports. Underscoring the Post's increased focus on its mobile arm, the site will be managed by two dedicated mobile editors responsible for updating content and managing breaking news alerts. In the Washington, D.C. area, users will have access to customized weather, breaking sports scores and top regional news stories. Coming later in 2009 are e-commerce services that enable people to make restaurant reservations, buy movie tickets and other transactions as well as get real-time traffic information via Google maps and GPS technology. "The look and feel is completely revamped and is specific to a user's device," said Guy Vidra, head of business development and emerging media at Washington Post Digital. So, for instance, the iPhone version will be closer to the PC-based site while users on regular cell phones will see a more scaled-down version that is better suited to their devices. Vidra added that the Post's new mobile site was built completely in-house, "which lends a ton of flexibility on both the front end and back end for us." The newspaper's mobile site had 962,000 unique users in May, more than doubling its audience in the last year, according to Vidra. Goli Sheikholeslami, general manager of Washington Post Digital said in a statement that building out mobile services is a top priority for the company.On board as launch sponsor for the mobile site is Amtrak, running a campaign created by Mobext, the mobile marketing unit of Havas Digital.
For the benefit of those consumer brands that weren't listening the first few hundred times this has been said, consumers do not wake up in the morning thanking the lord they live in a country where they get to worship your brand and see life through its narrow self-serving lens. That only happens in the retro-fantasies of Don Draper and the households of top executives at many of these major brands. The only people who really should or would "love" a brand the way many brand managers think we do (or could) are the vested upper-level managers whose stock in a shoe, beverage or apparel company paid for the summer house and the McMansion. For the rest of us, you know what? We really don't spend a lot of our time wishing we were Nike/Victoria's Secret/Coke/CBS/Bud/Ford or even (no, really) Apple kinds of people. We are a year into the mobile application cycle now, and scores of branded apps have cluttered the App Store. The first wave of apps, mainly the gift giver guides from last Christmas and the this-and-that finder apps, made stupid freshman mistakes. Most of them had such a narrow utility to them that was so bolted to their own product that only slobbering brand name acolytes could be enthusiastic about using them. And as we covered in the graph above, there really aren't as many of those Tide detergent sycophants around as you may think. Earlier this year we really did start seeing laudable efforts like the Kraft iFood Assistant and a couple of helpful bathroom locators. I already sang the praises of the Absolut app that appeared last month, because unlike the overwhelming majority of branded apps I have seen, it is both useful and entertaining. The brand app du jour now is MasterCard's "Priceless Picks," which aspires to crowdsource the "priceless" stores, deals and eateries in your immediate vicinity. The app uses an entertaining 3D isomorphic view of your surroundings (GPS located) and pop-up bubbles highlight vendors, sales, and notes about locations that users submitted. MasterCard did some things right here. First, unlike a lot of social apps, they pre-populated the database with local listings from third-party partners, so in relatively populous areas, you will get something to peruse. Most of these listings from merchant partners and from the Not for Tourists directory are innocuous and unhelpful, however. Walking around downtown San Francisco this week, I found the listings sporadic and random, but there were some delis and offbeat bars listed that I might have missed. I am not sure that a $19.99 offer for Minoxidil at the Union Square Walgreens constitutes a call to action, however. Other entries, much rarer, come from the Amazon Mechanical Turk and its pool of humans who get paid (sort of) to make entries for MasterCard. I have only come across a handful of actual users posting items. There are some nice filters on the 2D and 3D map views, where you can hide or show the Entertainment, Dining, Shopping, Other and "Priceless" categories. I can't say exactly what "priceless" signifies in this pocket universe of MasterCard's, although I guess we users are supposed to attach it to the products and places we feel passionately about. The connection between the familiar branding campaign and this app is tenuous although not completely detached. In most of the ads, "priceless" suggests moments or sentiments that transcend the material. The campaign has this knowing wink-and-a-nod charm, especially since it comes from a credit card company we know at heart doesn't believe a word of its own drivel. And here is an app that uses the same terminology but really is looking for us to find "picks," things, deals. One can imagine a real missed opportunity here, where an app actually did try to crowdsource "priceless" moments, memories, thoughts, but, ya know, that ain't gonna push up those debt loads, will it? Neither will this app push your credit card bills higher, however. It fails to close the loop in so many ways. I will be interested to follow it over time, but I have a hard time believing many people want to contribute the content that is necessary to make it valuable. While superficially clever and well made, the Priceless Picks app demonstrates where branded apps really are in a tough position. MasterCard's app just doesn't give us enough in the way of information, listings or features to be of real use. The listings don't have precise addresses. They don't tie to directions, and there isn't even a click-to-call link. Users can input places, but there is so little room for text that other readers can get no detail. They don't even allow a rating system. I imagine that some of these restrictions are imposed by the brand to avoid any damage user-gen content might do to partners. After all, MasterCard doesn't want to open up a graffiti wall of user-generated sniping in an app that is supposed to serve the merchants. But it is precisely this kind of necessary coyness and restrictiveness on the part of most brands that put natural limits on what they can do with an app. They simply don't have the freedom to be publishers. Unless they can put the user's needs above brand management, then there always will be someone else who will offer the same functionality in a better, deeper way. I called up the social app Yelp! for the same downtown area of San Francisco and was overwhelmed with listings that had scores of user reviews, addresses, call links, even photos. Other than cute pop-up bubbles, what did MasterCard just give me that Yelp! and others don't offer already and in a more complete way? Are these brands looking at the competitive set for these apps, or are they just presuming that their brand will float them to the top and leapfrog superior products? Does it all come down to a silly fantasy that despite all of its myopia, limited utility, and restrictive interactivity, a user would prefer to use a "trusted brand's" app? Well, Yelp! doesn't give me the opportunity to exercise a bit of empty subversion in quite the way the Mastercard app does. Users of Priceless Picks can go to the downtown San Francisco map at Columbia and Broadway to see my puckish addition of City Lights Books. Standing in the upstairs Beat Poetry Room, a shrine to Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, and their countercultural vibe, I couldn't resist adding the listing to a directory provided by the very symbol of modern consumer excess. The joke was on me, of course. As I checked out, and got ready to pay for my oh-so-outre underground comix graphic novel, you can already guess how I paid for it. City Lights takes Visa/Mastercard. Priceless.