With the news last week that Facebook has more mobile users than PC, mobile has been thrust into the forefront of the social giants’ strategy.

That’s why Facebook is developing a new smartphone application that will track the location of users. In a bid to capitalise on their 680 million mobile active users a month, Facebook is set to help users find nearby friends.

Facebook’s new Graph Search feature, which the social network announced last month, is expected to place a lot more emphasis on location and the check-in, by allowing users to discover places to visit based on their friends recommendations. However, this new feature runs even when the app isn’t open meaning your friends can find out where you are, regardless of whether you want them to.

The app isn’t scheduled to be released until next month, but it is bound to reignite the whole privacy debate. Whilst some features of the new location-sharing app sound impressive, such as letting users know when they are close to people with whom they have mutual friends or similar interests, the fact that Facebook is effectively broadcasting your location, regardless of whether you want it to, isn’t going to sit well with some groups.

We will bring you more news of Facebook’s location-sharing app closer to the time, but what do you think of the idea?

Are you in favour of sharing your location with anyone or should Facebook start protecting your privacy?

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The recent demise of even more well known High Street retailers such as HMV, Jessops and Blockbuster should serve as a strong reminder that the world has changed!  80% of shoppers were reported to have researched online before making a purchase this past Christmas and the average shopper consumes an average of 10.4 sources of information as part of this research process.

The “consideration phase” of the purchase decision is bloated with resources, content and conversations to help (or confuse!) the process. Brands will need to achieve useful, relevant and concise content which cuts through the noise to get the voices of their products heard.  If you want any more reading, Google’s zero moment of truth research encapsulates the way consumers are behaving incredibly well: http://www.zeromomentoftruth.com/

There are plenty of stats out there to support this shift and the fact is inescapable - retailers large and small need to get on board the multichannel train!  Some do it well and some not so well. You may be interested in this report by one of our clients Tealeaf, an IBM company, in partnership with Econsultancy who delve into the “online customer struggle” from a brand’s perspective http://bit.ly/VTQxX5 . For example, this survey revealed that 70% of brands have limited or no understanding of why their customers abandon their shopping baskets! A sign that there is still a really long way to go yet…

As we watch the high street and its retailers strive for the ultimate multichannel experience here are 6 well-articulated predictions for 2013:

Infographic courtesy of Dan Mortimer, CEO of  www.redant.com

Picture courtesy of ZMOT tool box

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In 2012, social media became a major source for breaking news. Before newspapers and other traditional methods of reporting had even heard of a story, everyday citizens were updating their Twitter and Facebook accounts to spread the word. Social media’s immediacy meant that it could always be one step ahead of other sources and have a global reach.

This year saw social media become not just a source of fun to whittle away a few hours on but a space that blurred the lines of journalism. Some of the year’s biggest stories broke via Twitter and for the most up to date information you only needed to check what was trending to catch up on the biggest news stories. From the serious to the trivial, Twitter had it all. Whether it was news from Syrian fighting, Hurricane Sandy’s disruption or even Kate Middleton’s baby news, you heard it first on social media. Journalists are now being beaten to the punch by amateurs telling their own version of events.

resistance fighters blew up a military checkpoint (al-wahah, al-safirah) & killed +25 #assad troops #syria

— Rozalina Chomsky (@rozalinachomsky) December 14, 2012

People still without power b/c of Hurricane #Sandy: 3,258,741 according to latest @wnyc count compiled by @danielptucker

— TransportationNation (@TransportNation) November 1, 2012

Omg! Prince William and Kate Middleton are expecting a baby!! I’m way too excited about this. That child will be gorgeous!

— Sarah Kimball (@Sarah_Kimball) December 3, 2012

Mobile use has undoubtedly been a driving force for this shift. The ability to access social media anywhere, to film what you’re seeing, to take a photo and update your status means that news can spread quicker than ever before.

This may not spell the end for traditional journalism though. Robert Coxwell has argued that ‘News is more than just eyewitness and a mobile pic’ and there is still a place for well written news articles. The rise of news stories on social media highlights the speed at which we shared and consumed information in 2012 and if traditional journalism is to continue, it will have become more engaged in social media.

Take a look at this infographic to see some of the incredible stats surrounding social media and the news:

http://socialmediatoday.com/507284/social-media-new-news-source

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As the year draws to a close and we all reflect on the vast and rapid developments that have occurred in social media in 2012, it is clear that one of the most prominent progressions has been the growing importance of smartphones to access social networking sites.

40% of us use mobiles to access social platforms and the web, and this number is set to grow. Not only is mobile affecting how we connect with people, it is also affecting the way we shop. More and more consumers use their smartphones to connect with brands as well as finding new and more efficient ways to shop and enhance their shopping experience via mobile.

This infographic by flowtown.com shows how the landscape of social media is being changed by mobile devices. As mobile usage is predicted to overtake desktop usage in terms of frequency by 2014, it is clear that 2013 is only going to see mobile affect the way we access social media even more. In light of these changes, companies who are running social media campaigns need to factor in mobile users in their campaigns.

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Earlier this year Econsultancy surveyed e-commerce and e-business professionals to understand if and how they were using mobile as part of their multichannel experience.

The survey revealed that 74% of companies had developed a mobile optimised website, 29% had developed a tablet-optimised website; and nearly half were seeing more than 10% of their website traffic coming through mobile channels.

In other words, companies that sell things online are starting to realise the value in giving consumers the best possible mobile experience, to help consumers during the product research phase and to be ready for when they want to make their purchase.

As of March this year there were 1.2 billion internet-ready smartphones in circulation – in other words 17% of the world’s population that could potentially be reached by brands with a savvy mobile offering.

So, what does this all mean for social? Is there any value in a multichannel social media strategy? Here are three reasons worth mulling over:

1)Better signposting. By next year more than 56 million people in the US alone are expected to access social media via their mobile. So there’s every reason to make your website’s social signposts as visible and clickable on mobile as possible.

2)Social app referrals. Facebook currently stands as the most downloaded mobile app ever – there’s no question whether people are using social media apps on their mobiles, so it pays to be optimised for any site referrals that come through.

3)Less is more. Clunky mobile sites take longer to load, so why not lighten that load by shifting content across to social platforms, which can be clearly signposted from your light and fast-loading mobile optimised site.

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It didn’t take long after the IPO for Facebook to make a fresh announcement about plans for developing revenue generation – and it is the move into mobile advertising.

Despite Mark Zuckerberg being described as having, “an evangelical approach to advertising,” and seeing the Facebook platform as, “a vehicle to open up communication, not to monetize”, there is no doubt that things have to change now the shareholders have more of a say. Let’s not forget, however, the billionaire does still own over 25% of the company and more than 50% of the voting power.

US based Nanigans, a firm that specialises in the Facebook Ads API and served over 175 billion ad impressions in 2011, released new data confirming a year-on-year jump in Ad spend over the Christmas period.

Nanigans also reported a 1,600% growth in Facebook Ad spend over the past year. Whilst this figure is not representative of Ad spend across the platform as a whole, there is still a compelling story to be told (feel free to Tweet these);

Facebook ad revenues grew from $738 million in 2009 to an estimated $3.8 billion in 2011

Tweet #FacebookAds

Facebook ad budgets grew 109% between the 3^rd and 4^th quarter of 2011. This is compared with just 27% growth in paid search spend in the same period

Tweet #FacebookAds

The number of view of Facebook Ads grew 47% in the last quarter of 2011

Tweet #FacebookAds

Click rates have risen 27% since the move to GraphEdge through more effective targeting

Tweet #FacebookAds

Come March, Facebook will introduce ‘featured stories’ into users’ mobile news feed as the first step on the mobile advertising ladder. With all of this in mind, and with Facebook’s growing number of mobile users, (currently at around 425 million), don’t be surprised if we are looking at some exponential growth over the next couple of years from the platform’s mobile Ad revenues.

Especially as there is no mobile advertising platform…yet…

Research from Kenshoo Social, eMarketer Inc and Nanigans

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You may have seen the other day that GPS navigation system Waze hit 10m users. It’s a social tool that aggregates user reports on traffic, accidents and the like. I’m a recent convert and signed up a few months ago, since then it’s become a part of my daily commute. If any of you have experienced the vagaries of rush hour traffic on the A3 you’ll understand that drivers need all the help they can get.

Waze: Useful and free, what's not to like?

As a consumer my prerequisites for downloading a geolocation app have to fulfil at least 3 of the following. Here’s how Waze hits those targets:

• Collaborative – Waze uses thousands of users’ traffic reports to create a map of road congestion and allows them to send messages in real time to update each other. Its success rests on the community spirit of its users
• Timely – this all happens in real time, a boon for an audience where seconds count
• Useful – I’ve avoided innumerable traffic jams with this tool and anything that can make the daily commute less painful and for free gets my thumbs up
• Fully integrates with my existing social profiles without superseding them – this is not a Foursquare, inundating friends with useless and annoying updates. It fulfils a purpose and doesn’t pretend to be a Facebook replacement. Should the jam be particularly bad you can send your update to Twitter or Facebook to alert your wider following, but that’s it. Waze knows its limits

Download it for your iPhone, Android or Blackberry here. My username is rupinjapan, so if you see a Transit wrapped round a traffic light on the Cobham bypass let me know ahead of time.

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The much rumoured “BlackPad” has been revealed. Last night at the company’s developer conference CEO Mike Lazarides introduced its Apple iPad rival.

We know little more than the tech specs right now but the preview video looks pretty cool. Price? Well that is mooted by the guys at PR News to be double an iPad, estimated to be between $1,000 and $1,300. That is a lot! When can we get our sticky fingers on it? According to an interview with BlackBerry’s Dan Dodge, it will be early 2011 in North America and next summer in the UK. That is a long time!

BlackBerry is keeping its focus on their enterprise market and the video above specifically calls the device “enterprise ready” and a “professional tablet”. They are clearly positioning the device in a different place to Apple’s iPad. But then why call it a PlayBook? Not sure an enterprise IT director would countenance deploying 1,000 PlayBooks across his organisation?

As with the iPhone and iPad before it, key to the BlackBerry PlayBook’s success will be the range of apps available and the speed with which they become available. Apple has a huge head start and my feeling is that this will simply be another device wealthy BlackBerry fanatics will buy to “play” with in airport lounges.

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So Facebook Places finally comes out of the closet. At first read it looks pretty good, and when you go to the iPhone app it stands proud in the middle of your phone screen. What it has over other location services such as Foursquare and Gowalla is an existing network of friends who are more than likely to be the ones you would actually want to bump in to “by accident” in the pub.

For a more detailed look, have a read of Walt Mosberg’s column on the WSJ the video is worth a watch to.

Those other two location games have gained some traction and a lot of headlines, but the established nature of our personal Facebook communities combined with the weight of half a billion users worldwide, will guarantee use of Facebook’s service by a much larger volume of people. That means businesses will flock to it and now be trying to get their first Places campaigns running as soon as possible.

Facebook does appear to be being very embracing and actively encouraging Foursquare and others to access Places through its API. Facebook has also not gone down the game route, no mayorships or awards, allowing the more niche services to keep their focus unchallenged.

Right, so what can we do right now, if we live or visit the US? Here are a stream of tweets this morning from @sophysilver from the Facebook UK PR team, thank you!:

• If you don’t trust your friends it is simple to turn off. For most there is a lot of value in being able to share an experience with friends
• Places never automatically shares information on the location
• You must take an action to associate yourself with a place by either checking in yourself or by allowing friends to check you into a place
• It is not true that the primary location setting is switched on by default. “Places” tags will not automatically be shared with friends
• Where you have not allowed check-ins you are simply tagged in your friends status updates, just like status tagging works on the site today.
• Additional protection of being able to turn tagging off for Places, and to sett your own check-ins to any group you want including ‘only me’
• You also have the option of never checking in with the product in which case you will never be associated with a place
• Default setting for all is Friends Only. Minors can only share their location with Friends even if they try to widen it

Do follow Sophie on Twitter and for further news about the arrival of Places in the UK.

We will be keeping a close eye on this, especially should we be lucky enough to go on any trips to the US and when it finally arrives on this side of the Atlantic. Let us know what you think of the announcement, are Foursquare and Gowalla doomed?

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Having declared last week that it was not illegal to jailbreak iPhones the U.S. government effectively gave consumers the right to fiddle with their proprietary software, allowing them access to other providers or to use apps and music from sources other than Apple’s own iTunes Store. This all became possible thanks to the exemptions made to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA.)

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF,) a selfstyled civil liberties group defending consumers’ digital rights, more than a million iPhone owners are said to have jailbroken their handsets in the past few months. The EFF hails the DMCA exemptions as a landmark victory and a good percentage of iPhone users might agree with them.

Apple on the other hand has warned that although jailbreaking may not be frowned upon by the law of the land, it won’t take the matter so lightly. Not only will jailbreaking void the warranty, but there is a risk of bricking the handset, effectively turning it into an expensive door stop. However, according to a journalist friend of mine it can be easily restored to a non jailbroken state.

If you’re after my personal opinion,  I’m torn. On the one hand, I agree that Apple should be able to protect their IP with some legal recourse, however, emotionally I’m with the EFF (who remind me a bit of the Wolverines from mediocre 80s action flick Red Dawn) who believe a handset shouldn’t be locked down once you’ve purchased it. This battle will continue to rage. Choose your side carefully, maybe grow a mullet, wear khaki, buy an AK.

Let me know what you think about jailbreaking; a digital taboo, or your revolutionary right?

mmmmm the 80s

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