Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Facebook Is Finally Being Looked At For Real News

66% of Facebook users get news there, according to Pew. And, by news, Pew means something other than that the dog got a grooming and now looks like Dad. Or that Dad now looks like the dog.

Pokemon Go is the biggest U.S. mobile game ever. And, with that, it will soon get ads in the form of sponsored locations.

Smartphone use percentages by country: South Korea 88, Australia 77, Israel 74, U.S. 72, Spain 71, UK 68, Canada 67, Italy 60 and Turkey 59, and China 58 (Pew).

Turkey is second in Periscope usage behind the U.S. and led to real-time look-ins of the attempted coup.

The average mobile cost per click (CPC) for brand keywords rose 25-30% above where they were in early May, per Merkle.

A meteorologist won't fit in your pocket but the FEMA app will, according to a tweet from the National Weather Service. You don’t say.

Survey: One in four U.S. adults have refilled an prescription via smartphone, but 62% want to (Adobe Digital).

Smartphone video had a cumulative audience of 110.1 million adults in the U.S. in the first quarter, up from 85.4 million in the year-ago quarter, according to Nielsen. Those users consumed 5.69 billion gross minutes of video, a jump from 3.41 billion a year ago.

Video viewing on PCs declined. Cumulative audience was 77.7 million, down from 86.3 million.

60% of mobile users would have a more positive view of a retailer if they were provided with offers that could be saved to their smartphones: Vibes.

The television viewing numbers tell a convincing story that baseball is not a young-person’s must-see TV. The median age for the Major League Baseball All-Star Game was 54.6. There were 294,000 viewers aged 12-17, 1.2 million viewers 18-34, 1.5 million viewers 35-49, and 5.2 million viewers 50+.

We’ll get another high-profile viewership glimpse with the upcoming Rio Olympics. The amount of NBC Olympics broadcasting hours is equal to roughly 52 FIFA World Cups and nearly 1,700 Super Bowl telecasts.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - The Lowering Age of the Smartphone User

The average age for a child getting their first smartphone is now 10.3 years, according to Influence Central’s new report called Kids & Tech: The Evolution of Today’s Digital Natives.

As first reported by TechCrunch:

• Tablets have surged from 26% to 55% usage as kids’ device of choice during car rides. Smartphones trail at 45% (up from 39% in 2012).
• 64% of kids have access to the Internet via their own laptop or tablet, compared to just 42% in 2012
• 39% of kids get a social media account at 11.4 years. 11% got a social media account when they were younger than 10.

Uber shared the fact that riders will pay the most their phone battery is dying. But it says that it doesn’t take that information into account and gouge people. “We absolutely don’t use that to kind of like push you a higher surge price, but it’s an interesting kind of psychological fact of human behavior,” Uber’s head of economic research Keith Chen told NPR.

By 2018, the number of chat app users will reach 2 billion globally and represent 80% of global smartphone users: Forrester.

Google and Levi's have partnered on a smart jacket that can answer calls, play your music and go in the wash, recode reported.

An eMarketer study said that 35% of mobile app users want more personalized experiences. My question - 65% don't want more personalization or they don't understand the concept?

Another eMarketer report caught my eye: only 31% of marketers surveyed have a customer engagement process that they are consistently applying across business units.

#NationalSendANudeDay was trending on Twitter the other day. Questions from me - send ‘em where? College? Out of the country? To a "friend's" house?

Google says that 20 percent of mobile queries are voice searches. That is expected to pick up significantly in the next couple of years.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - When Smartphones Are Used By Dumb People

An Ohio fugitive who sent police a selfie because he didn't like his mugshot was tracked down and arrested. Note modern devices are called smartphones. No one says that they are used only by smart people.

56% of smartphone users purchased a product using an app in 2015: Verizon.

I’m getting more spam voice calls on mobile - way more than spam texts. WTF?

In the poorest countries, mobile phones cost 1/5 to 1/2 of monthly income. In U.S., it's under 1%, per The World Bank.

Google paid Apple $1 billion to be the search engine on your iPhone, according to court documents.

Uber usage by business travelers surpassed taxi and car rentals in 2015, VentureBeat reported.

20% of U.S. homes now have a smart TV, 56% have a tablet and 82% of people have a smartphone, Nielsen said.

Amazon now sells as much clothing as 250 Walmart stores sell altogether: Re/Code.

Uber is preparing to go live with full-scale food delivery service in 10 U.S. cities this quarter, according to The Wall Street Journal.

3.8 trillion photos were taken until mid-2011. 1 trillion photos were taken in 2015 alone, MIT SMR reported.

Headline: Less Than Half of Consumers Are OK With Swapping Data for Deals. Me: 47% who say good to go is huge.

Ken Chenault of American Express: mobile pay is not about the "tap", it's about what's the value? what's the service I get? Bingo.

U.S. smartphone users spent 3 hours in mobile apps and another 50 minutes in mobile browsers daily in 2015: eMarketer

I have made a living NOT hyping mobile yet it fascinates me when brands and others operate in waiting, non-priority mode.

Per NBC's Alan Wurtzel, just 51% of TV viewing is live.

Twitter asked me to promote my app. I don't have one. 2016 personalization seems like 2015's – or 2008’s.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Gauging The Distance Marketers Still Need To Go

How far have we come – or not? Entering 2016, only four percent of marketers have a single view of their customers, says eMarketer.

Smartphone users will number seven billion in 2020, up from the nearly four billion today, Tune predicts.

On the new or renewed and repeated use of "App-ocalypse" - stop.

Purchasing happened more often from digital channels as U.S. retail sales grew 7.9% in 2015, per MasterCard. Furniture and women's apparel were the leading growth categories.

83% of consumers use 2.23 devices simultaneously with most of them 'feeling good' about it, reported Accenture Interactive. I, for one, always feel that something is lacking from that .23 of a device.

I am up to 26,000 tweets sent. .0000000000000000000000000000000000001% were about my meal choices.

With the mobile wallet, cash was supposed to be gone by Tuesday, no? Maybe some Tuesday in 2023.

My craziest tech moment of 2015 was when I got a “You Did It” Apple Watch message while at a urinal. Come to think of it, it was the best positive re-enforcement since I was 3.

Tabletop tablets enable Olive Garden to turn over tables six-seven minutes faster, the Washington Post reported.

I always gauge mobile adoption when the extended family visits over the holidays. This time around, they want from why to "oh, we'll just take Uber” and “Time to FaceTime with the grandkids cross-country”.

13% of Americans are “smartphone-only” as home broadband plateaus, via Pew. Meanwhile, 55% of U.S. adults have both a smartphone and home broadband subscription.

My best RTs this week – and every week, came from everyone who retweeted. Other yardsticks miss the point.

The equal to the StarWars fanatics are those who consented to push notifications for each score in 42 bowl games.

Google launched a 6-month accelerator to help startups build mobile products.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - It Isn't The Young That Value The Smartphone The Most

To those who still claim that there is still a technology divide among generations, I offer this: the older you are, the more that you value the smartphone, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

82% of the 65+ crowd say that their device gives them “freedom”.  The same percentage consider mobile a connector rather than a distraction. That's primarily because the devices are intuitive.

Conversely, 36% of 18-29 year olds say the smartphone is a leash and 37% call it a distraction.

Six ducklings that fell down a storm drain were lured out by a firefighter using the duck call ringtone on his iPhone.

Meerkat has introduced its app for Android, temporarily giving it a difference-maker over Twitter’s Periscope.

Meanwhile, the use of these apps is being limited by sports leagues and associations. The latest? The PGA Tour revoked a reporter’s credentials for using Periscope.

There are more mobile-only Internet users than desktop PC-only users in the U.S., per CTIA.

My new on-demand mobile foundations course is now available via Market Motive. There is actionable discussion to drive ROI.

20% more Americans use PINs/passwords to protect data on smartphones and tablets in 2015 vs. 2012, CTIA says. What stops the others?

Secret, a $100 million social app, closed but the co-founders made off with $6 million and a Ferrari. Evidently, they spent no money on a PR strategy.

Nearly half of Fortune 500 websites aren't mobile-friendly by Google's standards, according to Merkle.

Last quarter, Apple sold an average of 8 iPhones per second, 24 hours a day, for 90 straight days.

Starbucks says that its mobile transactions top 8 million weekly.

An Apple Watch fitness app from a deodorant company doesn't pass my sniff test.

39 of the top 50 news sites get most of their web traffic from mobile: Pew.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Is A Mobile Phone Just The Latest Thing To Distract Us?

A provocative question was posed on Twitter by @conradhacker, who is a Pew Research demographer: are smartphones really making us less social?

A quick, separate online search found several stories quoting psychiatrists, everyday folk, and others claiming that mobile devices are negatively impacting personal interactions. As an example, Dr. Gail Saltz, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, told NBC News: “Staring at your phone during a meal with your child is not a good thing.”

Maybe not, but is it a new thing? The embedded picture of heads buried in the newspaper brought me back decades and decades. That happened on more than one occasion at our kitchen table. We turned out OK. Actually, way better than OK.

Mitt Romney's tweets had to be approved by 22 people during the 2012 election, according to The Verge. In case you are wondering, my wife doesn’t approve Notes From A Mobilized Marketer.  I’m just happy when she reads it.

iPhone 6 made it into Yahoo’s top 10 searches of 2014 despite information being everywhere. Then again, the same can be said for the Kardashians.

Many say that mobile has changed the purchasing funnel. McKinsey says the process is "circular”.

Wise words from @michaelwolf: “Until people drop their bundles, stop saying cable is dying.” I’m bundled. With Comcast, it feels more like a trap.

Steve Jobs famously dissed the phablet form factor. That was then. iPhone 6 Plus has grabbed 41% of the U.S. phablet market (Kantar).

No turkey - 70% of Walmart's Thanksgiving traffic was mobile.

Just one-third of publishers say their emails are fully optimized for mobile (eMarketer).

Finally an online ad that spoke to me - Provision a petabyte of data warehouse capacity in less than five minutes. I found my petabyte. WTF?

I wonder how many marketers pushed back on extending Black Friday for weeks, knowing dilution would come by making every day a “sale” day.

Sell a selfie stick in South Korea & you may get 3 years in jail. Here, you only get mocked for using one.

52% of Google health searches come via mobile.

70% of retailers surveyed by shop.org have invested in a mobile-optimized site.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Have the 2015 Black Friday Sales Started Yet?

Have 2015 Black Friday sales started yet? One day turned into one week in 2014. Why not one year?

Seriously, merchants can call them what they want and try to convince us that the deals are as good as those offered the day after Thanksgiving, but it’s going to take more than words to change behavior patterns. The stats show that we made record Black Friday purchases on, ummm, Black Friday.

Safari only holds a 5% share of the desktop browser market, but 45% share of the mobile browser market thanks to iPhone and iPad usage.

For the first time on Thanksgiving, mobile drove more than 1/2 of all online retail traffic, says IBM.

Several studies show that half of mobile users abandon a page if it doesn’t load in 10 seconds, and three out of five won’t return to the site.

People are now spending more time with mobile devices than with television.

80% of mobile retail research ends with a purchase, per Telmetrics.

41% of millennials will make mobile purchases while shopping in brick & mortar stores this holiday: Dynatrace.

Around the globe, the most popular tactic for the 40% of marketers using mobile this holiday season is SMS, according to Experian.

70% of retailers invested significantly in a mobile-optimized site in time for the holidays: shop.org.

By 2020, 90 percent of the world’s population aged 6 years and over will have mobile phones: Ericsson.

Stop the madness – I heard the term beacosystem for players in campaigns involving beacons.

Amazon was set to release new deals every 10 minutes on Cyber Monday with exclusive offers for mobile app shoppers.

Stupid tweet and headline on TheStreet.com – “Black Friday made it crystal clear -- mobile shopping has emptied our malls AND outlets.” Repeat after me – there are no absolutes in mobile or most anything else.

Twitter is reportedly experimenting with a mobile tool to help you determine the quality of your tweets. Isn’t that the job of your followers and others who look in?

Apps drive the vast majority of media consumption on mobile, accounting for approximately 7 out of every 8 minutes: comScore.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Will "Text Neck" Be As Common As A Selfie?

A text neck “epidemic" due to excessive lowering of the head to look at our mobile phones? A medical researcher told the Washington Post that “it is an epidemic or, at least, it’s very common.” The web and Twitter went wild with the hype. Most of us read it with our heads down.

22% of men made a purchase on their smartphones last year, compared to 18% of women, per SeeWhy. Will that change this holiday season?

Square says the company will begin accepting Apple Pay next year.

Stop the madness – I heard a new mobile term “beacosystem” for players in campaigns involving beacons.

Another “say it ain’t so” mobile finding– Motorola says that spice isn’t just for your pumpkin latte anymore. MotoX has spice colored backs.

1 in 10 mobile ad impressions in retail leads to a store visit: iAd.

People are now spending more time with mobile devices than with television, according to Flurry.

Not just for newbies: 76-year-old retailer Nebraska Furniture Mart has deployed beacons.

Holiday web spending will rise 16%, comScore projects, with mobile growing 25%.

100% adoption of mobile payments? Ha. The day that there are no bank tellers.

ESPN has 94 million unique users via mobile — 76% of its digital users come through phones, tablets; 40% through apps, and 17% through ESPN Fantasy Football.

19% of shoppers plan to increase Cyber Monday shopping despite shipping costs and online security concerns: Kelly Scott Madison Holiday Shopping Study.

Over 50% of YouTube viewing happens on mobile.

Google is now highlighting mobile friendly websites in search results.

90% of the global population will have a mobile phone by 2020, says Ericsson.

Target has included product inventory search functionality into its mobile app.

In 2015-2016, the percentage of digital travel researchers using mobile will rise from 54.6% to 62.2%: eMarketer.

97% of fantasy football players make weekly changes to their teams using a mobile phone or tablet, according to Thinknear.

53% of Thanksgiving Day online shopping will take place via mobile: IBM. Because we’ll be too bloated to move to our computers?

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - A Smartphone and a Flying Machine?

Since some supposedly have the iPhone 6 nailed, iPhone 7 rumors anyone? I heard that the phone will enable us to fly without planes.

Orbitz lets users resume searches across devices. That is so 2014.

The majority of Americans download zero smartphone apps every month, comScore says. This report is everywhere on the Internet.

Digital time spent on mobile is all additive, not substitutional to desktop, according to eMarketer.

I had no issues with mine (before it was recalled) - 10-20% of people are allergic to nickel, a material unregulated in the U.S. that's found in devices like Fitbits .

1.6% of app developers make more than the other 98.4% combined, a review by Vision Mobile shows.

Google’s 2013 mobile search revenues were approximately $8 billion.

The value I put on Twitter is high, but it doesn't get me to believe 79% of marketers used Promoted Tweets this year.

Half of American adults now own either a tablet or an e-reader, Pew tells us.

Younger millennials spend a majority of their "TV" time watching TV on another device, according to eMarketer.

The mobile spend by marketers is slowing , the CMO Council tells us.  It’s maddening but points to need to work harder and smarter to show ROI.

I've been doing this all wrong. I see an "offer" to get me 100-200 retweets per tweet for 30 days. You know that my stuff is not that compelling (but you did read to the end, so thanks).

The most secure version of BBM is coming to iOS and Android this year. That’s at least 4 years too late.

173 million people in the U.S. now own a smartphone per comScore.

50% of Walmart web traffic comes from mobile.

75% of HR managers say mobile HR improves worker satisfaction, ADP reports. More education needs to be done there since it isn’t a no-brainer apparently.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - The Smartphone Turns 20 And No Longer Connects To Fax Machines

The world’s first smartphone just turned 20. Yes, there was a smartphone before the iPhone.

The IBM Simon wasn’t called a smartphone, but it did feature software apps. It could also be linked to a fax machine. Young ‘uns, consult Wikipedia or a history book if you have never heard of a fax machine.

It was amusing to see some tech sites diss TMZ for showing and hyping supposed bogus iPhone 6 photos. Of course, hunting for clicks, the same sites went that route themselves.

Headline: Researchers Say They Can Charge a Phone With Ambient Sound. Me: consumers need a compelling reason to upgrade. A device that constantly has power is meaningful to many.

Half of Facebook and Twitter users get news on those sites, Pew reports. It was on Twitter that I learned about the deaths of Robin Williams and Michael Jackson, not to mention the ultimate fate of Osama bin Laden.

More than one in three seniors in the U.S. will make a digital purchase this year, eMarketer tells us.

Travel "deals" on Twitter remain a head-scratch - who do you know who will head to Ho Chi Minh on Friday as result of Wednesday night "offer"?

How many times are Promoted Tweets repeated? I wasn't interested the first, fifth or 20th time.

Real value - Google Now for Android shows alternate flights when yours gets delayed.

Lookout Mobile Security nabbed $150 million in funding. As was the case with PCs, consumers will be slow to protect their devices. This is an Enterprise play for now.

Apple supposedly wants to be a “hub” of health data and is in talks with top hospitals. Tracking will soon be more robust than calorie counts and steps taken.

More than half of 18- to 24-year-olds say they "never" unplug from technology, according to eMarketer. We at least have that in common.

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - The "Fat Chance" Edition

Headline – “Using smartphones too much may make you anxious, fat and a poor student.” So may Twinkies.

The text message turned 21 this week. With 160 characters, there is nothing sexy about text message marketing. Except that it works. In that regard, it likely leads in sex appeal.

Approximately, 100 million U.S. Internet users will log on to social networks via smartphones this year, according to eMarketer. Almost 80 million will use tablets to do the same, up 52 percent from 2012.

In five days, the video of the final play of the Iron Bowl was watched 2,245,386 times on Auburn's YouTube page.

Amazon, the king of personalization, delivered to me an offer for laser toenail fungus removal treatment. Flying trapeze lessons weren't available?

The tweets off of last week’s Amazon "news" drone on. Five years of this?

Text, coupons have replaced flash deals as a mobile holiday focus with just 5 percent of retailers using daily deals, eMarketer says.

Gogo tops my list of technology that needed major improvement in 2013 but failed miserably. Meanwhile, the company’s Twitter description says it’s “everyone’s favorite part of flying”. Someone has lost his or her mind.

Quote I read – “"Shopping is in the process of being forever changed by mobile." You think?

Smartphone sales have surged 61 percent in Southeast Asia. Android dominates with a 72 percent share, but that will change with Apple’s deal with China Mobile.

There are an estimated six billion mobile telephone devices used in the world today, and, for the first time, a small majority are smartphones.

In Japan, you can buy underwear for your smartphone. Some things should never come to America. This is surely one of them.