With more people using smartphones while shopping for homes, Trulia is launching a mobile ad platform to help real estate agents reach in-market home buyers on their devices. Trulia Mobile Ads will allow agents to buy display advertising within a particular Zip code -- even on an exclusive basis -- to generate leads through a click-to-call feature within ads. The ads will appear in Trulia’s iPhone and Android apps as well as its mobile site. The company says its mobile traffic has increased 250% in the last year, with about one-third of its overall online traffic coming from the mobile side. On weekends, when people are most likely to be out house-hunting, mobile traffic sometimes even surpasses desktop visits. In addition, Trulia has found that people using mobile phones to search for homes are 60% more likely to contact a real estate agent. Now the company is capitalizing on those trends with its new ad offering. “Because this consumer audience is at that stage where they’re out looking at homes, visiting listings, going to open houses, and driving through neighborhoods, it made sense to offer advertising to real estate agents who want to reach those consumers in the moment,” said Stephen Rossi, director of business services marketing at Trulia. The new mobile ad system essentially extends Trulia’s existing Local Ads product to phones. Agents are able to buy up to five blocks of impressions for a given ZIP code, with each block equal to 20% of the available impressions on map search results pages for that location. That would potentially allow an agent to buy up all the impressions for a ZIP code for up to a year. The ad units themselves take the form of drop-down banners that include an agent’s photo, name and number. Unless the agent had bought all the advertising for that ZIP code, the image and information for competing agents might also appear in that banner. The ads automatically minimize after five seconds. If someone clicks on the ad, however, it expands to full-screen, with the agent’s contact details and brokerage along with a “Call Now” button and lead form. Ads will appear after a certain number of touches on the map view, but are frequency-capped per each mobile session. Ad pricing will vary by location depending on factors such as demand for homes or property valuations in a given area. Rossi added that mobile ad slots are being offered on a first-come, first-serve basis, but that the platform would only be open to agents already advertising on Trulia for the first few weeks before being opened up more widely. He also noted that the mobile ad service doesn’t involve any bidding process. “We’ve thought about an auction process, but what we do as a service to our (real estate agent) customers is give them the opportunity to lock in rates for a certain period of time, and when we do adjust rates, we do it based on demand in the marketplace,” he said. Mobile ads will not initially be available for Trulia on tablets, but the company plans to add that capability. Trulia currently offers apps for the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
A federal judge has rejected a request by Google to delay a potential class-action lawsuit alleging that its social apps company Slide violated a consumer protection law by sending SMS messages without the recipients' consent. Google had asked U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, Calif. to stay the lawsuit pending a decision by the Federal Communications Commission about how to interpret the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Rogers said in a written opinion that delaying the lawsuit against Google was not appropriate. "The court is not convinced that the FCC has agreed to issue a ruling, let alone issue a ruling on an expedited basis." The lawsuit -- brought by Nicole Pimental and Jessica Franklin -- alleges that Disco (Slide's group messaging app) violates the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by using an automated dialing service to send SMS messages to people without first obtaining their consent. Disco allows individuals to send group texts to up to 99 people at one time. Recipients can opt out, but can't prevent the initial message from arriving. The service also allegedly sends recipients an introductory ad informing them that they can avoid text-message charges by downloading an app. Google earlier asked for the lawsuit to be dismissed because Slide's app was not covered by the statute on the grounds that the app doesn't fit within the definition of an "automated dialing service." Google also argued that the messages were protected free speech. Rogers rejected both of those arguments in March. Several weeks after that ruling, Google asked to delay the case pending an FCC review of how to apply the TCPA to text messaging. That review came about after Skype's GroupMe sought a ruling from regulators that its texting app shouldn't be considered an automated dialing service. GroupMe also argues that intermediaries such as itself should be able to rely on users' statements that the people they text have consented to receiving messages. But Pimental and Franklin successfully opposed that request, arguing that a delay would only provide Google with "a means of prolonging this litigation endlessly."
Ask.com has launched a branding campaign -- You Asked, We Answered -- polling residents in and around Seattle. It gives them an opportunity to voice complaints, such as lousy morning commutes, loss of recreation activities due to budget cuts and gloomy weather. Ask will "answer back" -- in an effort to ease one of the city's biggest annoyances. The Q&A site ditched the concept of mass marketing in favor of a targeted, local strategy that speaks to audiences on key issues. The campaign, almost reminiscent of something Google might do, could trend through the end of the year as Ask makes its way from city to city, depending on the Seattle success. "We wanted to piggyback on some paid media efforts, such as television campaigns and other local ads," said Valerie Combs, Ask's vice president of communications, who is driving the project. "We wanted to give back to the community, while reminding people of the brand, rather than the campaign being 100% stunt-driven." Combs said Ask began running local television ads in a couple of strategic markets, such as Seattle, back in September 2011, to test the waters of integrating traditional media with online and mobile. As part of the project, the Q&A site worked to understand the needs of the community and support local efforts. The campaign took on three projects -- Ease My Morning Commute, Spare Me From Stadium Traffic and Save The Wading Pools -- and asked locals to vote on one through May 15 on either the dedicated Web site or the "man on the street," known as Answer Man and Question Mark Boy, two superheroes making their way through the city. Those who want to vote also can download Ask's PollRoll mobile app launched during South by Southwest. Geographic targeting features identify the location of the mobile device downloading and launching the app. The survey pops up as the first poll for area residents. The percentage of mobile traffic continues to grow on the site. Today, traffic runs at about 12% on Ask.com coming from the mobile Web and dedicated app. California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois have the highest percentage of traffic on mobile on the Q&A engine. Aside from the online and mobile branding campaign, Ask had banners hung on freeway overpasses that read "Morning Commutes Suck" to attract commuters to vote. The company also recently began using a social experiment to foster innovation, giving employees time to work on pet projects, before exploring the possibility of turning them into services. Google began supporting that strategy years ago with its 80/20 project. IAC/InterActiveCorp on Wednesday reported that Q1 2012 search revenue rose 47% to $343.2 million. The search engine business includes Ask.com, Mindspark, and Dictionary.com.
Some 19 million males with a household income of more than $100,000 spend twice as much when shopping online compared with their female counterparts, according to a report released this week. It turns out that men outpace spending for luxury items online compared with women, according to the iProspect study "The Affluent Male: What His Online Behavior Can Teach Luxury Brand Marketers." The survey included 26 questions. Some 40% of respondents shop online at least twice weekly, and those who shop multiple times spend in excess of $30,000 annually. The findings identify behavior and trends related to online research and shopping habits of affluent males with salaries of more than $100,000 annually. "About half spend $4,000 per year -- but they buy monthly -- about 13% of respondents," said Andrea Wilson, luxury practice lead at iProspect. "The next-biggest group spends more than $30,000 online annually. Four out of 10 who shop online do so more than twice weekly." Top sites visited frequently include Amazon, Yahoo, Google, eBay, MSN, Bing and AOL. But most affluent males want detailed product information and simpler, yet more focused messages, according to the study. While the majority of purchases are made on PCs, affluent males do more than research products on mobile devices. Findings from the study reveal a multichannel approach to buying. More engaged with search than the general public, 96% use search to learn more about products. Search ads -- especially those on mobile devices -- appear to be effective. About 71% report clicking on sponsored search links either sometimes, usually or always. Some 91% access a PC at least once daily, while 77% have a mobile smartphone and 50% have a tablet. Affluent males with daily access to tablets are 32% more likely to make a purchase on the device. About 71% have seen ads on a PC, while one in three have seen ads on a mobile phone or tablet. The study also provides tips on setting expectations and questions to consider before designing strategies and building apps, such as what content and features the brand can include to encourage consistent use, what the goals of the app are, what platforms the brand will support, and the best ways to collect and process feedback from customer satisfaction from the apps.
More than three quarters (79%) of U.S. smartphone and tablet owners have used their devices for shopping-related activities, according to a first-quarter survey by Nielsen. The study showed smartphones are used more often than tablets for “on-the-go” activities. The difference was most pronounced when it came to locating a store, with 73% using phones compared to 42% on tablets. Handsets were also preferred for using a shopping list, while shopping, (42% versus 16%) and redeeming a mobile coupon (36% to 11%). However, tablet owners are more likely to use their devices for making purchases, at 42% versus 29% of smartphone users. The findings suggest the smartphone is the go-to research tool while out shopping, but the tablet is where the deal gets closed. If that’s the case, it likely has to do with the tablet lending itself more to making online purchases while relaxing at home and on a larger screen. And as tablets increasingly eat into time spent on desktop PCs and laptops, it makes sense that at least some e-commerce activity would shift to tablets as well. While smartphones may be more popular when people are out and about, a majority of both phone (57%) and tablet users (66%) use their devices to research items before purchase. Mobile payments, however, haven’t really caught on with either group yet, with less than 30% of smartphone and tablet owners using their devices to pay for things at checkout. A separate survey released Thursday by location-based marketing firm Placecast focused on comparing smatphones and feature phones in relation to m-commerce. It found that about 20% of all adult mobile phone users, equal to about 39 million Americans -- had used their handset to make an online purchase in the past year. That proportion rose to 34% among smartphone owners, somewhat higher than the 29% cited in the Nielsen research. Placecast said overall interest in using phones for purchases has grown by eight percentage points in the past two years, with 38% of all mobile phone owners saying it’s at least somewhat important to be able to do so. That rate was again higher for smartphone users, at 59%. The study also offered other stats on smartphone-wielding shoppers: 50% use a GPS/mapping app to find a retail location; 44% accessed the site of a retailer where they typically shop; 34% had downloaded a retailer’s app; and an equal number (24%) had either searched for a coupon to use at checkout or used a barcode-scanning app to comparison shop. The Placecast research also indicated that people have become a bit more receptive to text-message marketing. About a third of mobile users (31%) who don’t already receive text ads said they are at least somewhat interested in such messages, provided they gave permission. That figure, equating to about 64 million consumers, is up from 28% in 2010. Currently, only 4% of mobile users get text promotions. Within that group, however, nearly one in three said they are more likely to visit the store as a result, while a quarter are more likely to buy the product advertised. Smartphone users said texting generally is very important to them, compared to 35% of regular phone users. The Placecast study results were based on a survey conducted by Harris Interactive in February among 2,262 adults from a nationally representative survey. It is the third in a series of studies called “The Alert Shopper,” conducted previously in the summer of 2009 and 2010.
It is more likely that you know what car your neighbor drives, or even what they call their pet, than it is for you to know the name of that person who lives down the street. According to a Harris survey done last year for WhitePages.com, our degree of obliviousness to our own neighborhood is astonishing. While the personal and business listings company has been allowing you to search your neighborhood from WhitePages.com for the past year, the tool comes to mobile in a refresh of the company’s very popular iOS app. “It is a people discovery experience,” says Bret Moore, general manager mobile, WhitePages.com. While many startups in the social media space struggle to get scale through user check-ins and the like, WhitePages already knows who lives where. “We have 200 million people already listed," Moore boasts. The secret sauce is what you do with that kind of built-in scale. The new app allows the user to combine new and old contacts in interesting ways. When you find people in a given area, they can be saved to your address book. Listings can be shared via a unique Facebook and Twitter integration that allows you to choose specific people from your networks with whom to share and perhaps arrange meetings at a given spot. The app has comprehensive local business and service listings as well. With the radically revised listings app, WhitePages.com is trying to build on considerable success in the mobile space. According to Moore, the iOS app alone has been downloaded 17 million times, and the brand is present across all of the major mobile platforms, including an active mobile Web site. Of the 30 million total unique visitors WhitePages.com sees from all sources each month, 7 million are from mobile devices. WhitePages.com is already the top-grossing app in the iTunes App Store and enjoys a remarkably strong 4.5-star rating after thousands of user votes. While the download and basic service is free, the app makes most of its revenue from upselling specific services like reverse lookups of cell phone numbers. In fact, user revenue has been the only monetization for the past year, since WhitePages turned off the ad spigot and began working on a new suite of ad products with ad server AdMarvel. Moore says that big brand advertisers are getting in line, as the app offers both scale and highly targeted opportunities. In the year or so since the neighborhood personal search, users have not raised any privacy concerns, Moore says. The site allows anyone to modify or hide their listing to thwart snoops, or perhaps traveling salesmen. Moore says that in most cases people come into the system not to unlist themselves, but to add to their profile and make it more accurate and up to date.
I’m hoping that even all of the techno-forward people who read this column still experience occasional moments of wonder at what all of these gadgets we own can do. I had two such moments this week: 1. The moment in which I discovered that the touch screen on my aging Droid still works, even though there are dozens of cracks on it after its fateful encounter with a local sidewalk Sunday afternoon. 2. The moment I logged on to Cablevision’s Optimum TV app for the first time on Thursday night. Though there was no real reason, at that moment, that my son and I needed to watch the Red Sox game on an iPad, we did -- just because it was possible. This column is about the second moment of wonder. (However, if anyone wants to weigh in on whether I should buy the Droid Bionic or the Droid RAZR, please get in touch.) What amazed me about moment number two is how, overnight, your idea of what devices you need, and how devices should work, can change. The truth is I’d downloaded the free Optimum app some time ago, but because I’ve been so busy lazy, I’d never gotten around to looking up my password. But then, a media consumption crisis happened. After nearly eight months of feints, Cablevision finally made good on its threat that the old, boxy kitchen TV that came with our house would be rendered obsolete without a digital cable box. Until the moment that I turned it on last Wednesday, it had received cable using only a relatively slim, white, bit of coaxial cable. Suddenly, I was facing kitchen cablemageddon; there’s really no room in my kitchen for a cable box -- and, seemingly, no solution that the TV and cable companies have fully supported that will obviate the need for a big box. Though there is something called CableCARD technology, which replaces the box with a credit-card sized slot on the back of the TV, it’s very hard to find, and virtually impossible to find in small TVs, even though a consumer’s need for a small TV implies that he or she is dealing with a space that might not be hospitable to a big box. Confronted with this problem, I did the obvious: I asked my Facebook friends how to solve it. (One can only put up with the gnashing and wailing of an eight-year-old, who likes to watch TV in the kitchen while Mom cooks, for so long.) Talk of antennas and converters ensued. Commenter no. 16 simply said the entire thread was giving her a headache. But one friend reminded me of the Optimum app. And the rest is Social Media Insider history. Beyond the gee-whiz of discovering yet another trick that our pet iPad can perform, the app’s interface is so much cleaner and easier to use than its TV counterpart that I’m almost embarrassed for Cablevision now when I find myself clicking around on its button-crammed TV remote, scrolling endlessly through its circa-1993 interface in search of the right channel. How do they let that thing out in public? But, as a student of social media, the interface got me thinking about how quickly convergence is happening, and therefore how easy it is to integrate social features into TV when it’s watched on a device. Cable isn’t transformed as much by the digital cable box my old TV would now require as it is by the medium’s integration into our devices: a place where things like social sharing and search can, almost effortlessly, be incorporated into the experience. TV networks are jumping all over social TV, as studies show the connection between social media and TV ratings. But a lot of the clunky attempts to integrate social onto a TV simply aren’t necessary when TV is streamed over a laptop, or a tablet. I’ve cancelled any plans I had to buy a new TV for the kitchen. It’s not just about the iPad. As if to prove my point, Cablevision just last week launched a laptop version of its app, which I downloaded to my MacBook this morning. Neither app has a Facebook or Twitter tab yet, but I’m sure it’s coming soon, to a touchscreen near you.
Some 3 billion hours of video monthly are watched on YouTube by more than 800 million viewers worldwide, according to Google. YouTube sees 600 million mobile views daily -- roughly 10% of total video views. On Wednesday, the Mountain View company released information on new original channels and content aimed at brands that want to reach a diverse audience. By July 31, viewers can expect 25 hours of new original content on YouTube daily. Some of that is seen via a mobile device with help from partners and filmmakers Jon Avnet and Rodrigo Garcia, the U.S. Olympic Committee, collaborations between Tribeca Enterprises and Maker Studios, and a new show from Machinima and Halo Waypoint. The YouTube study "Generation V," released Wednesday, will point to consumer video trends, revealing that men 18-34 now spend more time streaming video than watching live TV, one-third visit YouTube multiple times a day, half subscribe to a YouTube channel, and two-thirds shared YouTube videos in the past week. It also finds that 40% of women 25-49 have subscribed to a YouTube channel, half shared a video in the past week, and one-third regularly share online video with their kids or parents. The millions of mobile YouTube views daily will lead consumers to spend more time on mobile devices. Of course, that's merely an assumption on my part, but facts pointing to time spent on mobile from brands such as Starwood Hotels and Resorts, and 1-800Flowers suggest a match between original content and brand and search marketing. And don't forget mobile's tie with local. This strategy should not be viewed only as growing business for large companies. Small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) will have the options. Online video puts smaller companies on the same playing field when it comes to marketing and advertising -- especially with help from new SMB services from Microsoft and Yahoo. Tie together media. Don't keep them in silos. Hypothetically, a click-through from sponsored content on YouTube's original programming could become lucrative for brands. Consider this. Nearly 75% of business travelers use mobile search and apps compared with more than 50% for leisure travelers, according to Michelle Ogle, digital marketing and affiliate strategy manager at Starwood Hotels and Resorts. Last week, during a Google+ hangout to unveil best practice guidelines, Mobile Playbook, Ogle shared trends, along with marketing folks from Comcast and 1-800Flowers. The hangout introduced more than a guide. Examples demonstrated and explored how mobile influences and supports new and existing customers. Some of the fundamentals the group talked about during the hangout included how mobile changes the relationship between brands and customers. Companies must consider organizational structures within their company to accommodate mobile. At Comcast, a lot of people were coming to the site on a mobile device trying to purchase services, for example, which forced the company to think differently about a mobile platform. Amit Shah, director of online mobile and social media at 1-800Flowers.com, said the company began using mobile about six years ago. He said it is important to study the data to determine what to bring from the desktop to the mobile strategy. Don't bring everything -- but consider all.