Marketers and advertisers agree, 2010 will be the year of the mobile web. In a few short months mobile will have more audience reach than television, radio, or the internet. Two thirds of the world’s population, roughly 4 billion people currently have a mobile device of which 20% are currently web enabled smart phones. In 2010, mobile advertising is forecast to grow 45 percent to $3.8 billion, which will be spent on SMS, mobile display, and mobile search.

Carriers opening up data plans to flat rates rather than per kb consumption (between December 2008 and December 2009, the percentage of US mobile phone subscribers with unlimited data plans increased from 16% to 21%), new more powerful devices, and a publisher surge in generating mobile wap and app content have created the perfect storm for marketers and consumers to meet on the mobile web. Consumer media consumption patterns are changing. There is a significant rise in both production and consumption of “snackable content” which is consumed during the commute, at a stoplight, or in the waiting room. This opens up the new mobile venue over which advertisers can broadcast and target. Facebook and Twitter for example saw a 112% and 347% uptick in users consuming and creating content via the mobile web from January 2009 to January 2010. Not only are there more users on the mobile web, they are more engaged. According to facebook, mobile users currently average two times the pageviews, production, interaction, and consumption events that they do on the traditional display web.

Mobile advertising added to your marketing mix will connect you to consumers who are closer to the point of purchase. Think targeting a consumer who is in the mall parking lot walking in to buy a pair of jeans rather than one on the traditional web browsing jeans styles on their couch. Mobile ad placements offer a commanding presence of the consumer experience, think one banner per page rather than the traditional 4 plus average that we are seeing today in traditional display. As an advertiser is makes sense to employ the tactics below to target your consumers via mobile:

• SMS / MMS – Communications protocol that allow exchange of short text messages between mobile devices. Reach over 2.4 billion active users, 74% of all global mobile phone subscribers.
• Mobile Display – Banner inventory within smartphone application and mobile Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) versions of html publisher pages. Reach over 405 million global users according to emarketer .
• Mobile Applications – Banner inventory on applications for specific mobile devices like iphone, blackberry, and android. According to GetJar mobile application inventory will jump from 7 billion apps downloaded in 2009 to almost 50 billion in 2012.
• Mobile Search – Search traffic through mobile search engines, directories, navigation, or discovery services., about 15% of the total mobile advertising market.

Mobile is a force multiplier to any of your current campaigns. Get on the small screen, take advantage of the big opportunity in 2010. Want to learn more? Contact Nalu Media to learn more about how to harness the power of the mobile web.

The Super Bowl is a yearly reminder of why it is good to be in the advertising industry. Pigskin brings together a massive union of audience and advertisers on television screens across the globe. Audience at scale engaged in the same content, at the same time makes for a prime target for Americas largest brands. This year television attendance was up with 106.5 million total viewers tuning in to the game. This is a 7.9 percent increase from last year which dethroned M*A*S*H’s final episode for the total viewers record set in 1983.

Eyeballs brought the ad dollars out in force for 2010. The going rate for a 30 second television spot was up to $3.01 million. This bodes well for network television revenue as this years Super Bowl boasted the most ad time in history at 47 minutes and 50 seconds meaning just short of $290 million in ad revenue.

Advertisers spend money for reach, conversions, and ROI. ROI is measured by purchases and brand awareness generated from their ad spend. As the line continues to blur between traditional and new media it is interesting to look at the ROI generated from web activity following the SuperBowl and additional value generated. Television advertisers spent $.03 for each unique viewer exposed to their advertising spot. A sampling of the Youtube Ad Blitz, a channel dedicated to hosting ads aired at the SuperBowl shows Godaddy, Denny’s, Doritos, and Alice in Wonderland garnered an additional 2.9 million unique views of their TV spot in the two weeks following the SuperBowl. That is a 3% value add, $8 million in total advertising spend from a medium which has only been in existence since 2005. Another success story is HomeAway.com whose reach according to Alexa jumped from .02 to .08 immediately following the SuperBowl. If the US internet population is indeed 227 million people, a .06% increase in reach means an additional 13.62 million uniques visited their site immediately following their Superbowl TV spot. Both perfect examples of how Television plus online was the play of the game in 2010.

Only 352 days for brands to refine their playbooks for BrandBowl 2011. My money is on the Chargers to win on the grid iron, and brands who continue to take advantage of the television plus web one two punch to go all the way.

The 140 character post has taken the world by storm. Twitter growth is currently trending at 965% year over year and predicted to be at 100 million users by end of 2009. This is a uniquely valuable channel to marketers, for both broadcasting your message and mining data to gauge your position in the market. It is more important than ever to understand the Twitter audience, both the Tweeters and the consumers of tweets.

A few interesting facts about user behavior from a analysis done by Sysmos:
- 85% of Twitter users post less than one tweet per day
- 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people
- 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
- More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.

“Imagine if you will sitting down for your morning coffee and turning on your computer to read the local paper, well it is not as far fetched as it seems.” are the words from a report by Steve Newman in 1981 that marked the beginning of the end for the traditional newspaper industry. Audience moving online has been chewing away revenue from major newspapers around the country at an increasing rate. According to a New York Times article published in October 2008 weekday circulation for the largest metropolitan dailies like the Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution fell up to 15% over the previous six months. As traditional revenue dries up newspapers are forced to deal with finding new ways to monetize their content. Those slow to adapt to this shift have been forced to close their doors like the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Online audience forces newspapers to look at a different revenue strategy. Traditional subscription and ad sales models need to adapt and find new ways to drive profits. Classified ad sales which was once a large portion of revenue needs to compete with free sites like craigslist, which are seeing 47 million monthly uniques, one fifth of the US adult population. Established news sites like the Los Angeles Times (alexa rank 16) need to be nimble enough to compete with sites with a little over 4 years online who outrank them like the Huffintgton Post (alexa rank 13).

There are new strategies emerging daily. One of these, paid content, supported by king pins like Rupert Murdoch who feel “Quality journalish is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannabalizing its ability to produce good reporting“, pushes to charge users for the content they read online. Google has joined this fight with its submission of a proposal to the Newspaper Association of America detailing a micropayment system that would work more like itunes allowing papers to charge readers consuming their content online.

Another strategy is to bring more value to the massive amount of impressions the newspaper sites see everyday. With direct ad sales monetizing only a fraction of total impressions, newspapers sites are forced to look for ways to monetize their “unsold” or “secondary premium” impressions. Companies like the Rubicon Project are working to make this market more efficient, and layer data on those impressions making them more valuable. Yahoo’s newspaper consortium and APT platform allow a paper to sell the same users visiting high yield pages like the travel section to lower yielding sections of their sites driving more revenue.

Each day brings about more broadband conections, more iphones, more cancelled subscriptions, and less traditional revenue for our nations largest newspapers. In 1981 KRON reporters felt that ” the online edition wasn’t a threat to the $.20 street edition”. It is hard to deny that today the online edition, if not monetized properly, will be the death of the tradtitional newspaper. Good thing new media is here to save it.

Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life. It also helps the community coordinate a response to potential disasters like the recent Station Fire in Los Angeles. Over the past 72 hours the Station Fire Facebook Group has been helping the Angeles National Forest communicate evacuations, status of the fire, relief center locations, and points of contact for emergency information. The number of fans, links posted, and photos generated is a clear illustration that the community is looking beyond the airwaves and to the web for real time information and emergency response.

The Los Angeles wildfires have burned 105,000 acres with no end in site. Social Media is emerging as an incredible resource for aggregating and pushing information to the residents of Los Angeles affected by this tragedy. Updates from todays social web:

The #station #stationfire #lafire #socalfire tags continue to pop with observations on the ground. New users @latimescitydesk @passtarnews @angelesnf and @socalincidents are climbing the ranks and seeing much more activity. Quick analysis of one of the top users @latimesfires, currently has 2,900 followers, sending out about 2 tweets per hour which are being retweeted at 76%.  Looking at @latimesfires tweetstats gives a quick piucture of the influencers on twitter involved in the fires: @lanow, @socalincidents, @latimeslocal, @lafd, @ktla, @abc7 to name a few.

There is a Flick Stream of photos tagged with the Station Fire as well as youtube footage of Mt Wilson. The UCLA Mt Wilson webcam which updates every two minutes url has been picked up by major media outlets like the New York Times, the traffic spike is overloading their servers.

There is also a Facebook Group for the Station Fire. The group currently has 415 Fans, 2 Albums containing user submitted photos annd maps, 19 Links toVolunteer Opportunities, Photos, and Donations, along with 3 Notes Showing Evacuation updates, Angeles National Forest Evacuation Updates, Line of Duty Injuries.

The blogosphere is using the post format to ahre information and aggregate links. ThisisBrandX is following the fires from the blogosphere and compiled links to the top local sites. IndieSocal has a list of resources for the Station Fire.

Youtube is full of user generated footage, coverage replays, timelapse, and action videos. There are 267 new videos averaging about 200 views per video today.

Los Angeles is on fire. Currently there are over 35,000 acres burning and minimal containment. Mike Dietrich the on scene commander said last night in a press conference that the people of LA are just as important to putting out these fires and defending the city as the 2,200 fire fighters from around the state who are coming to the rescue. Enter the 140 character superhero, Twitter, who is empowering observers on the gound to pass information in real time to decision makers and people looking for help.

In the last 48 hours the tags  #lafire #calfire #stationfire @latimes @lanow and @latimesfires have been popping with tweets which paint a picture of the situation at hand. Doing a quick search of twitter you can see the current state of the fire, and gain situational awareness that is helping emergency personell and citizens make the right decisions.

Some highlights from the last 24 hours on Twitter:

- AM 640 is using twitter to get updates from citizen journalists and recruit listeners to come on the air and give updates.

- LA Times created the username @latimesfires to consilidate user generated news content. They are aggregating some of this content on LA Time Your Scene hosted on thier site.

-@lanow has layered goverment and user generated observations over google maps showing affected areas and evacuation centers.

Tweets From the Field:

- birdiebreeze damn the winds are picking up !! best to everyone in Glendale, AltaDena, La Canada Flintridge, et al Evacuations have been ordered

- douglaswelch RT @anodyne2art: To see motion of fire: http://www.geomac.gov/viewer/viewer.htm Select Modis & HMS Ther Sat #calfire #lafire #Cottonwfire

- AlBoeBNO RT @latimesnystrom: @latimesfire Map of Rancho Palos Verdes area http://bit.ly/LZaAH | #lafire http://bit.ly/tz2qL

Twitter, facebook, and the hundreds of other social media platforms offer an open portal for you to broadcast your message to millions. The point to many communication architecture takes away the need to “look” at who you are speaking to. With this comes an alarming lack of security for your personal information.

Case and point. An insurance company in Sydney recently sent out a warning to their clients of the potential risk of broadcasting your vacation plans, recent high value purchases, and daily schedules. In a survey of 2,000 plus social media users conducted by British company Legal & General 38% of users posted details of their holiday plans through their profiles. 33% of users broadcast schedules, and information about their weekend away. Combine those numbers with their findings that out of 100 blind friend / follow requests 13% were accepted on facebook and 92% on twitter. That makes for some easy targets and readily available data for people with bad intentions.

Case and point. Ran a quick search on twitter for a keyword telling me someone would be away from home. Found their name off their Twitter profile. Googled them. Went to their myspace profile and saw their address and pictures of their house.

Bottom line, social media is a powerful tool. Information discipline must be top of mind when broadcasting any information about both your brand and more importantly your personal life. Remember that your digital exhaust leaves a trail for all to see.

The goal of any advertising campaign is to target specific users with the right message, in the right place, at the right time to alter their behavior and convince them to act in accordance with your campaign goals. Millions of dollars have been invested in finding the right secret sauce to correlate the content of a page to a particular user. Contextual targeting has spawned the largest ad networks in the business. Google Adwords, Yahoo!, Microsoft adCenter, and Lucid Media to name a few.

Using content as a proxy to define audience makes the assumption that the content a user is reading on a page directly correlates to their interests, and that by targeting off of this content advertisers will see better performance for their campaigns. Contextual networks classify and categorize pages into buckets based on the mix of keywords they are seeing on a referring url. They see this url through the ad call and scan the page in real time or match it to their database and previous scan of the page by a bot. They match the referring url to one of their content catagories and use thayt catagory to determine the right advertising campaign to serve.

When the decisioning made by the contextual network is right things are great. Advertisers have the ability to target specific keyworks and appear on placements across a content network. Measuring ROI on ad buys across multiple keywords is simple and scalable. Contextual works. On the other hand when the decisioning does not take into account content being mentioned in a negative light and your brand ends up running alongside bad press like the example to the left. Contextaul fails.

Bottom line, there are many choices in how you want to reach your target audience on the web. Contextual neworks offer precise keywork targeting and analytics to measure what works. Contextaul is a smart choice to add to the mix for your next advertising camapign.

According to numbers just released by eMarketer  the percentage of worldwide internet users who have created a profile on a social network is up to 62.5%. That means that there are currently just under 1 billion profiles living on facebook, myspace, hi5, friendster, orkut, etc…  There are still  5,778,439,159 billion people on the globe who are not part of the global internet population. If the billion who are already here aren’t reason enough to be on board, the potential should be.

So what are people doing with these profiles on the social web?  Top activities include, messaging friends, uploading photos, connecting with old and new friends, joining groups, and finding music. That’s billions of opportunities a day where people are creating valuable data for marketers, and potentially building a relationship with your brand. Now more than ever it is time to define, implement, and measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing strategy.