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  • myYearbook/MeetMe Leverage Mobile Virtual Currency As ‘Payment Platform In Your Pocket’

    A year after cutting a deal to acquire the meetup network myYearbook, Quepasa will roll out a rebranding of the merged companies as MeetMe. The project will start in July at myYearbook.com. Citing comScore metrics, the combined companies say they are among the 40 most-trafficked sites online. myYearbook in particular saw a 40% rise in active users and a doubling of registrations. Visits are up 75% and page views up 100% in the fourth quarter compared to the same period in 2010. In very short order, myYearbook became a mobile-driven company. Within just the last year or so, audiences have migrated quickly to smartphone access to the site. “Fifty-eight percent of users log in on mobile,” says COO, Quepasa, Geoff Cook, who is part of the Cook family team that has nurtured this alternative social network into prominence since the mid-2000s. “We are seeing astonishing growth on mobile year-over-year,” he tells me. Registration for the site via mobile is up 371% in Q4 2011, and now is responsible for 26% of all new registrations. In 2010, myYearbooks was only seeing 2% of traffic coming from devices. It hit 50% at the turn of 2012, and in just the last few months escalated even further to 58%. myYearbook/MeetMe has moved to a genuine “mobile first” publishing paradigm, where features and ideas are being born on the device that may never migrate back to the Web experience at all. A “Locals” appeared first on the Android app and more recently on iOS. Cook says that a survey of users showed that 54% had met someone face to face via myYearbook. Many were using a location-based feed of user postings based on recent activity, but there were also many who were just browsing profiles on the Web. They flipped this activity into a GPS-fueled proximity filter that helped locate myYearbook members in the area. The new feature increased profile browsing on Android apps by 30%, he says. myYearbook has had the same challenge as any mobile social network in taking staggering amounts of traffic and resulting inventory and making something from it for marketers. The company told All Things D recently that it was making only about 1% of its revenue from mobile. Cook says the site is approaching 2 billion mobile page views a month, and they have mixed up a number of different ad units and interstitials to monetize all of this. But as has been the case all along with the myYearbook project, the real money appears to be virtual -– as in virtual currency that allows users to gift things to one another and buy more prominent places for themselves in the user search engines. Yes, at myYearbook — as in high school — popularity is king and everyone is a brand unto himself or herself. You can buy credits that can be applied to spotlighting yourself. Cook says that they recently injected virtual currency buying into the Android app in Feb. and the iOS app in March. “We had low expectations going into Android and all that was written about how it under-monetizes,” he says. “But we found it was blowing away the Web on a daily active user basis.” Rather than a friction-filled revenue laggard, Cook sees Android really kicking in. “I think Google is just getting better about frictionless payments that it implemented in its most recent billing solution,” he says. The iOS version of the virtual currency model is just kicking in, but about on par with the Android version, he adds. But for all sorts of publishers who are trying to leverage incremental payment solutions or in-app upselling, Cook’s early experiences with m-commerce are encouraging. With integrated payment systems, mobile devices become payment devices that are used more effortlessly than their counterparts on the Web, which usually require either credit card entry or at the very least some involved kick-over and sign-in to a PayPal. “It is like a four to five times difference in terms of DAU value of a mobile user when it comes to buying currency,” he says.   I have to wonder what the possibilities might be for a range of cross-platform content providers once they realize that their users could pay them for just about anything more easily and quickly from their phone than from the Web. With user session frequency levels so much higher on mobile than on the Web for most publishers, these media brands now have so many more opportunities to put offers and incremental paid content in front of users. I can’t count the number of strange “micro-payment” schemes aimed at publishers I covered back in the late 90s and early 2000s. People didn’t much like buying many digital subscriptions, so publishers dreamed of selling content by the piece online with a simple click. Now, as media themselves are migrating across screens, mobile presents a golden opportunity to plug a cash register into the content distribution system. That movie review, buyer’s guide, nutrition advice or some other combination of content or service that no one dreamed of paying for at their desktop may suddenly become worth a buck if it becomes available at the right place, time and circumstance. And that pay-walled archived article or one-day pass to a database on the Web might be that much more tempting to access if a tap on the site’s corresponding smartphone app will get me in effortlessly. M-Payments could help all media re-imagine what content and business models become possible in a new surround-screen environment.       

    April 30, 2012
  • A Digital Experience Platform – Beyond just a WCM

    Today’s digital marketing landscape is a complex ecosystem created by emerging touch points and new inter-dependent media channels. Consumers now have direct access to information and a higher expectation for relevant and personalized content at their finger tips anytime & anywhere. Conventional approach by marketers to this complexity has been rather ad-hoc and disparate in […]

    April 29, 2012
  • SCRAM! -Harnessing Social Customer Relationship Application Management

    If you’ve been following the trends recently in Social Media you are no doubt watching a new revolution taking hold; brands and retailers creating customer tools using SCRAM and reaping the benefits of the data it provides. What is SCRAM? Social Customer Relationship Application Management; the SocMe version of a web form where users “connect” with your app on Facebook, mobile phone or other platform, transition data and other preferences and then use the application your company has created. The applications range from games to collection of points, POS commerce and even coupons. These applications contain a wealth of information on your customers and give a whole new light to the more traditional means of managing and data mining your audience. In the old days, users had to fill out a web form, give up a lot of personal info and then watch it get sent to a black hole in the online space where it was up to you to decipher and filter what data went where. With SocMe applications, users simply click “I Accept” on the permissions applet and they have agreed to let you access their profile (certain conditions always apply, naturally) and they are off and running. With these applications you have users in active participation of your brand. Victoria’s Secret has a great application for brand VSX where Facebook users use the app to upload photos, motivational statements and share with other users their fitness journey while wearing VSX work-out clothing. The brand, in turn uses those stories and posts as part of their marketing efforts. Likewise, Victoria’s Secret can glean a great deal of information about their users based upon their participation in the app such as age, location, fitness level and even “devotion” of their fandom based upon their active participation. Likewise for WalMart and American Express, users can hook in via permissions and use cool tools and applications in how they interact with you and receive all that you have to offer. Instead of waiting for users to visit your site, pick up the phone or walk into a store, the “idle scroller” who is on mobile and killing time between meetings or the school carpool line can interact, comment, purchase and be “present” for your brand and your message. Not convinced? Considering that Facebook allows you to self-select OGV (open graph verbs) to track unique behavior and “actions” using certain adjectives and action verbs (think: Orville Redenbacher fans can be “popping” each time they used the app and that’s what shows up to as activity in the right hand scroll to other users) you have multiple ways to see what fans are doing. You will know in real-time what is going on, no data-base firing needed. In addition, the viral quality of Facebook and Twitter itself (not to mention Pinterest) means your application and subsequent reaction by others could possibly create an even more broad reach than any web form acquisition strategy could do. And…you still get email. Part of the permissions for Facebook could involve acceptance to obtain the user’s email address. (You can also add in an opt-in box in the application as well) And that satisfies more than a few checkboxes of good CRM best practice not to mention a nifty way to create acquisition, retention and data mining with one click of “I Accept.” You want in on the next big CRM wave in the industry? Are you ready to have your customers SCRAM into your database and marketing efforts this year? There’s an app for that.

    April 29, 2012
  • Facebook Is Your New CRM

    Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, punish me with telemarketer calls! Forget everything you have read about CRM needing to be a tool you install, a program that you launch, or a team of “experts” you need to hire. After watching the Facebook “fMC” webcast and the new FB tools launching, Facebook is likely your best investment for CRM. Before the guys in white coats haul me away, hear me out! Your customers are on Facebook telling you so much about what they think, what they like, love, hate, what they listen to and even what they want to share. Managing that customer has actually never been easier. Most Facebook users edit and prune their own data such as location, life milestones, changes and even Pinterest favorites. Your Customer Relationship Management DNA is gift-wrapped for you and ready for use. Are you un-wrapping that gift? Getting customers to just “Like” you or your brand is easy; those are the “admire from afar” customers who like you, sort of care about you and say “let’s keep in touch” in some sort of a distant-uncle kind of way. But there are those customers who not only like you, but comment on stories you post, like the comments by others and even occasionally will share out what you post in case someone else might want to know. These are your “Friend” customers who are along for the ride and will likely hang around. Then there are the “Fanatics.” These customers post every day, will ask questions, make their status about you, share, comment, like, disagree and even debate with other customers. No matter what you post, they will “Love it” and will shower you with so much attention it gets frightening in sort of an Amy Fisher-stalker kind of way. Now, thanks to the new timeline and OGV (open graph verbs) and new “stories” integration into FB, your “Distant Uncles,” “Friends” and “Fanatics” can now co-exist on your brand without you having to do much except keep it fresh and interesting. Here is an example; if a customer likes your brand and then writes something about your brand in their status, their friends and friends of those friends will see it as advertising, as a “story” on your brand page and will even have it incorporated into other areas of FB. Unlike the old days of figuring out how to pace your contact to your customers and the “how” and the “why” – now all you need to do is spend time on Facebook and let the perpetuity of Facebook “virility” spread far and wide. Chances are if you “feed” your fanatics a little harder with compelling content, offers, and info, like pollinating bees that virility will boomerang around the social media sphere like screaming preteens near Taylor Swift. Investing a little extra time to study up on your fans can also shed some light, too, such as gender, median age, location, likes, interests, education, networks and other handy info. No magic wand, needed just a little time and elbow grease. True, some users keep a lot of that info tightly locked away from non-friends; however, the new timeline function out now actually reveals a little more than previous “locked” walls that were more like Fort Knox. Again, a treasure trove of CRM DNA awaits you behind every fan and fanatic alike. Matching that DNA back to your database patterns and personas could be some of the most significant yet “free” investment to date! Will you give it the thumbs up?

    April 29, 2012
  • The Perfect Storm for Cloud Computing

    Cloud computing is without a doubt is one of the biggest innovations to ever hit the technology industry. While the basis of what is “cloud” has been around for years, the term and its effect are gaining significant traction.

    March 12, 2012
  • Performance Testing & Tuning | Solving The Mystery

    Performance testing & tuning for any application is critical for a successful delivery but a lot of times it is either ignored in the estimates/plans and picked up when it’s already too late or in some cases simply ignored due to a lack of an existing performance testing & tuning approach. While there is no […]

    March 7, 2012
  • Mobile Development Strategies – What is Right For Me? Native vs HTML5 vs Hybrid?

    It’s interesting and appalling at times to see how this debate continues with strong opinions that simply add a silver line to a single development methodology in the mobile app space, some would pick native, some mobile web or some would now say hybrid is the “be all” for mobile development. The truth however has […]

    March 6, 2012
  • Google+ Beyond D’Eye

    A lot has been said and written about Google+’s future, possibilities and roadmap. Is it a social networking site like Facebook, or maybe it’s like Twitter and so on. Comparing Google+ with any of the existing social platforms will be immensely undermining the potential of what Google can do with its social arm. The impact […]

    March 3, 2012
  • Future of Cloud Computing – Overcoming IT Cost Barriers

    Cloud computing breaks down barriers to computing power that was once only available to a select few. As more and more businesses explore the benefits of cloud computing, revolutionary innovations are happening across a wide range of industries. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit www.ibm.com Follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com and on our blog at www.thoughtsoncloud.com

    February 29, 2012
  • Apple: Just Halfway There

    Apple ( Nasdaq: AAPL     ) shares have been on a monster rally so far this year.

    February 29, 2012
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