Marketers must start thinking about apps

The mobile phone apps market is booming and is expected to go into overdrive when Apple’s new iPad device launches next month. For most corporate marketers apps are probably nothing more than a curiosity or a convenience if they have app-friendly devices.

But maybe businesses should start thinking about apps a little more strategically as part of their internet marketing strategy.

Research firm Gartner expects that cellphones will be the most common device used for browsing the web by 2013. They predict the number of browser-equipped phones to exceed 1.83 billion, compared to 1.78 billion old fashioned computers in use within 3 years.

Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t help but wonder if News Limited totally miss the point regarding the new digital world or are just spectacularly successful trolls.

Rupert Murdoch, who spent a fortune investing in the like of MySpace only to see it drop away, continually threatens to remove his news content from search engine indexing and seems set on constructing paywalls to access his content.

In Australia, the News Limited marketing boss Joe Talcott toes the company line by unleashing regular diatribes about online measurement. His latest came last week when he attacked research showing that time spent online has outstripped that spent consuming traditional media.

The internet is not a medium, it’s a place where people do stuff. There’s media on the internet, no question. No one sits down to `watch the internet’.

Read the rest of this entry »

Media Hunter is now an iPhone app

We’ve been experimenting with iPhone apps a bit lately here at Sticky. Last week we launched GetSticky as an iPhone app and now the Media Hunter version is live too. Its all thanks to the guys at MotherApp.

Once again, its not earth-shatteringly amazing, its just another way to follow this blog and a fun experiment for us in the emerging world of apps. We do this so we can explore how they might be able to work for our clients in the future. And with the imminent release of the iSlate / iTablet we think the apps market is going to explode.

If you’d like to you can download the app here: http://itunes.apple.com/hk/app/media-hunter/id351983688?mt=8

All reviews and downloads will be greatly appreciated.

Enjoy.

Over at Marketing Magazine they’ve just published my post Marketers need to turn to ‘inbound’. Its about making sure your marketing is keeping up with today’s media consumption and marketing trends. Let me know what you think.

from IT News

Senator Stephen Conroy is fast becoming an international name – with the world’s technology and political community astounded as much by his plans for an internet filter as the build of the $43 billion national broadband network.

London’s Telegraph led with the headline “Australia plans Chinese-style internet filtering“, reminding its UK readers that the leaked ACMA blacklist had included the “innocent websites of a dentist’s practice in Queensland, a tuck-shop consultant and a kennel operator.”

In the United States, Fox News ran with the headline: “Joining China and Iran, Australia to filter internet.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The Internet, Twitter especially, exploded with indignation today when the Australian government announced it will proceed with controversial plans to censor the Internet.

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, said today he would introduce legislation just before next year’s elections to force ISPs to block a blacklist of “refused classification” (RC) websites for all Australian internet users.

While the Australian government may be proposing an Internet filter with the best intentions of protecting the youth of our nation against “immoral content”, most experts agree that this is easier said than done and could do more harm than good.

Read the rest of this entry »

The evolutionary nature of the internet means that its increasingly important for organisations to have a website that is keeping pace with change. A neglected website is one that will be left behind by the most powerful marketing force in the world. Amazingly, only a small percentage of organisations are really taking advantage of their web presence.

Web NLYZR, a free website rating service owned by my company, has been appraising the marketing effectiveness of websites for most of 2009. In this time we have ranked thousands of Australian websites, looking at their Search Engine Optimisation, Keyword Search Results, Competitors, Social Media integration and Traffic Conversion strategies.

Web NLYZR provides us with a fascinating insight into the state of Australian web design industry and the sites being produced for Australian organisations.

Here are the latest statistics that have emerged from websites tested over the last 6 months:

Read the rest of this entry »

Over at GetSticky I have posted 8 reasons to turn your marketing inbound in 2010.

Considering that Australian’s spend more time online than with any other media, should your organisation be marketing like its 1999 or should it be ensuring that inbound marketing is in the mix?

Tell me what you think??

Source: Adnews 16 October 2009

There is a lack of loyalty to online news providers among Australian consumers, according to Nielsen data.

Nearly three-quarters (71%) of visitors to Fairfax Digital Media’s news sites in September 2009 also visited News Digital Media, and 69% of visitors to Ninemsn’s National Nine News website visited the news sites of Fairfax Digital Media.

More than four in five internet users (86%) consume user-generated content and of those people, 60% read blogs, up from just 48% in the previous 12 months.

The future of successful marketing is relevance.

We now live in an age where consumers have developed selective hearing as a defense mechanism against being inundated by thousands of marketing messages every day. Your potential customers are time-shifting, downloading and channel surfing. Most of them research purchases online and many of them rely on the recommendations of those they respect in their social networks.

Interruption marketing is under threat. Customers are in control. You best give them what they’re looking for.

This warning extends to online marketers too.

Ranking highly in search (either organic or paid) isn’t good enough if you had to “game” the system to get there. Link-baiting and link farming often results in disappointment for the consumer who has wasted time visiting a site that doesn’t really address their needs, or lured them there under false pretenses.

Read the rest of this entry »