Weekend Reading – November 14
Cool mobile marketing campaign of the week. The Grid, a South African location-based network, is getting word out about their service via a documentary film, Mobikasi. Of course it’s a mobile documentary. But what gives it the extra coolness factor is that the 25-minute documentary is geo-tagged and split into 25 pieces that are one minute each making it a interactive tour guide focused on Soweto.
The ad agency says each one-minute clip covers a different topic that is relevant to the youth in Soweto and is geo-tagged to the location where it was shot. The location-based documentary looks at people, music, fashion, social issues and places of interest.
The Grid is a social network that enables users’ mobile phone to connect them with people, places and events. On their phones, users can see which friends are nearby, chat to people across South Africa and share photos and videos.
The video is a clever way to illustrate the power of The Grid and how users can use it. You can watch the video in its entirety here.
Spamming still apparently works. According to a new study, spammers still continue to spam [we know] because it seems to work, despite getting one response to every 12,500,000 spam emails sent out.
TechRadar reports that researchers managed to control 75,869 hijacked machines to conduct their own fake spam campaigns, offering a fake pharmacy site and, secondly, offering an herbal Viagra-style remedy to boost libido [we’ve seen those].
Says TechRadar, …”yet even with this apparently abysmal response rate of less than 0.00001 per cent, the researchers still estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 a day or $3.5m over a year.”
The web gets even more social. A new report by Razorfish offers some compelling facts about the web, how it’s turning into a more social playground and how quickly it’s evolving. Here are some compelling figures:
- 28 percent use Twitter, a relatively new communication tool, with some frequency
- 41 percent use tag clouds with some regularity
- 52 percent use RSS feeds with some regularity
- 52 percent have shared bookmarks with others through services like Delicious
- 55 percent use widgets on the computer desktop with some frequency
- 62 percent use widgets on Web sites such as Facebook or iGoogle
- 81 percent read “Most Popular” or “Most Emailed” links with some frequency (84% receive videos from their peers)
This can be taken two ways: more people are engaging the web and using it more than just for surfing and getting information. On the other hand, marketers have numerous newer ways to reach out to this audience.
TV and the web: All at once. If you were at our house election night, you would believe that many Americans surf the web and watch television simultaneously. According to the Nielsen Company, the heaviest users of the Internet are also among the heaviest viewers of television: the top fifth of Internet users spend more than 250 minutes per day watching television, compared to 220 minutes of television viewing by people who do not use the Internet at all. Nielsen found that the reverse is true as well – the lowest consumers of television have the lowest usage levels for the Internet.
Nielsen also found that nearly 31 percent of in-home Internet activity takes place while the user is watching television, demonstrating that there is a significant amount of simultaneous Internet and television usage. Conversely, about 4 percent of television viewing occurs when the consumer is also using the Internet.
We’re eagerly awaiting the day when we can both surf for stats and product information on the same device we are watching live TV on.
America Airlines introduces mobile boarding passes. American Airlines customers departing from select airports can now choose to receive their boarding passes electronically on their mobile phones or PDAs, saving the time it takes to print out and present a paper boarding pass at the airport.
Mobile boarding passes, which use a two-dimensional (2-D) barcode, are being introduced today for passengers departing on select domestic flights.
When customers check in for their flight using American’s Web site, AA.com – either the desktop or mobile versions – they have the option to receive their boarding passes on their cell phones or PDAs. If this option is selected, they will get an e-mail with an Internet link to their boarding pass. The mobile boarding pass contains a 2-D barcode that can be scanned at TSA security checkpoints and at American Airlines gates. At the airport, customers simply scan their cell phone or PDA screen when going through Security (proper identification must be presented) and when boarding, just as they would a traditional paper boarding pass.
