From Mashable: The Location Implications of Google Buzz

originally by Jennifer Van Grove | from Mashable

We learned earlier this morning that Google Buzz adds a shared social experience — very similar to FriendFeed and Facebook — to your Google contact circle via Gmail. Google also made it very clear that the mobile component, especially around location, is important to the product as a whole.

Location plays a big role in Buzz — we saw this with the introduction of the snap, Google’s answer to the check-in.

That one key feature demonstrates how right we were when we predicted late last year that “everything points towards Google taking big leaps on the location front in 2010,” and that “Google is interested in further assimilating the Latitude and Place Pages products into a more full-fledged location and recommendation service centered around places.”

The assimilation is Google Buzz for Mobile, and the ambitious endeavor is Google’s attempt to catch up to the likes of Foursquare, centralize the location-sharing experience around Place Pages and collect valuable place data. Here we’ll explore Google’s second attempt at getting the location-sharing formula right, and what it means in terms of the bigger picture.

Mobile Feature Run-Down

The mobile experience supports all the following features and functionalities:

Menu: From the Menu page you can search, select Following and Nearby stream options, navigate to My Posts, and view who you’re following as well as who is following you.

Snap to a location: Google Buzz’s version of the place check-in is a snap-to-location feature that lets you associate your physical location in place form with a buzz/status update.

Buzz: The “Share what you’re thinking” buzz box is located atop the My Posts, Following and Nearby tabs, and it’s the quickest possible route to snapping your location.

Once you start typing your buzz update, you’ll notice that a location is automatically associated with that post. If that location is inaccurate, you’ll want to click the light blue box and select the appropriate location from the list of nearby options. At the very bottom, you can also specify if the post is public or private. Once you select a post mode, your buzz is snapped to that location, and shared with Google Buzz users that are following you.

Replies: Right now the autocomplete reply feature supported in Google Buzz via Gmail doesn’t exactly carry over to the Google Buzz for Mobile experience, which means you won’t currently be able to type official replies from your mobile device just yet. You can, however, view replies as they were intended. Also, clicking on the associated user URL will direct you to the mobile version of the user’s Google Profile.

Streams: In the mobile application you have two stream types: Following and Nearby. Both are straightforward stream options.

Buzz Maps: In the Nearby stream, you can click “Buzz map” to view nearby buzz on a map.

Buzz Threads: Any item in your Following or Nearby streams has the potential to become a thread featuring comments and likes. You can moderate comments to your individual Buzz posts. What’s especially interesting about threads is that your check-ins, a.k.a. snaps, can become interactive conversations. That functionality doesn’t exist in location-sharing apps like Foursquare.

Buzz Permalinks: Each individual buzz and its associated conversation has a permalink, which means you can share individual items. If they’re public, anyone can comment on or like shared buzz items.

Place Pages: Every place in Buzz for Mobile is associated with a Google Place Page. Navigating to the Place Pages is a tad complicated at times, but there are a few ways to do it. If you’ve snapped to a location, you can select “Show map” from the specific buzz and click the link for the location. In the Nearby stream view, once you select a location, you can click “More info” to navigate to the Place Page.

Search: You can search all Buzz updates from the people you follow or just those nearby by selecting the search icon.

Is it Foursquare Re-imagined?

The answer to that question is not a simple yes or no, but Google was clearly inspired by the check-in model that Foursquare made popular. Here we will focus on the primary differences between the two approaches.

Snaps are conversations, check-ins are sport: Google’s approach is conversation-oriented. To snap to a location you need to post a buzz, and that buzz becomes the beginning of a potential conversation with friends. There are no points, no leaderboards, no mayorships and no rewards, but that doesn’t mean those elements won’t be added into the mix in the future. Buzz updates snapped to a location will also appear on Place Pages, which will expose them to a much wider audience.

Location-based deals are place-specific, but not tied to snaps: One of Foursquare’s finer features are the official location-based specials and mayor deals offered by businesses to Foursquare users that check in at their locale. While business owners have the ability to create mobile coupons for their Place Pages and promote them, the idea of snapping to a location and discovering nearby deals doesn’t seem to exist.

Place buzz and chatter: Lately we’ve seen Foursquare become a hub of curated content via its media partnerships, which bring in content from respected restaurant review sites (like Zagat), city tourism offices, reality stars, celebrities and fictional characters to serve as a dynamic and pocket-friendly city guide that travels with you. Right now, Google’s not attempting to separate the venue-related chatter from buzz updates that are meant to be recommendations or tips. Buzz for a particular place is mix of all location-shares and could be perceived as lacking the same value as Foursquare tips and to-dos. As a product that aims to reduce noise, this feature doesn’t deliver on that promise yet.

Place Page Significance

One way to look at the location features of Buzz for Mobile is to see as it another way to encourage business owners to claim their Place Pages. Google has been pushing Place Pages since their launch, and Buzz for Mobile extends the value of those pages. Now all Google Mobile and Gmail users are a few clicks away from Place Pages.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Google has finally found a way to support its own system for status updates and to tie those to physical locations in a potentially mainstream way. We’ve already seen that this data is incredibly valuable, especially to businesses and advertisers, and with every snap and its associated buzz, Google is learning more about what we’re doing and where we’re going.

Is Buzz for Mobile Too Ambitious?

While there are advantages to using the location-sharing functionality of Buzz, the mobile application is bloated with features and will be a challenge for the average mobile user to grasp.

The mobile application is certainly a nice complement to the Gmail experience, providing a convenient way to follow along and contribute to conversations. As a location service, however, Buzz for Mobile is overly complex. For those of you who have latched on to the location-sharing trend, the advantages to transitioning your check-ins from more niche apps with built-in rewards to Buzz are nonexistent at present.

From iMedia: Why top brands struggle with mobile

By Andy Bovingdon

January 28, 2010

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ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Even when a mobile page is available, the user is often presented with the traditional version
• Simplify mobile payment systems so they provide choice and consistency
• Established metrics systems typically use unreliable factors, such as JavaScript

With a rapidly increasing number of people accessing the internet from their mobile phones, the world's leading brands and developers are committing serious resources to engaging with their customers via the mobile channel.

However, even with considerable amounts of time, effort, and budget committed to building mobile solutions, many of these companies are still making simple mistakes that are preventing them from delivering a good mobile experience.

So, why are big industry players that are successful on the web still struggling to understand mobile? The answer is simple: Mobile is often assumed to be a smaller version of the desktop web. Companies fail to realize it is actually a much more complex platform where the usual online rules typically don't apply.

If you look at the mobile market as a whole, you can see that, with nearly 4 billion mobile phones, its size and reach are vastly bigger and more diverse than the desktop internet. New and more sophisticated handsets are launched into the market almost daily, each with very different capabilities, browsers, and settings. With such complexity, solutions that work on the desktop internet often do not translate easily onto the mobile internet.

Here are three key areas and typical scenarios where some of the big players are failing on mobile:

1. Mobile search
The division between desktop and mobile web pages often remains unclear, and leading search engines still regularly index and return desktop results on mobile. Even when a mobile page is available, the user is often presented with the traditional version, which doesn't render properly on the phone.

With companies like Google putting a lot of effort into building mobile applications, like Google Maps, it is not surprising to see core businesses like search fail to deliver acceptable results for mobile consumers. In contrast, Yahoo now focuses on a web strategy, and the quality of its search results has improved as a result.

As an example, I recently searched for British Airways using Google on a Nokia feature phone. But rather than being presented with the British Airways mobile site, which is a great and well-designed site, I was sent to the PC version instead. The page had a landscape layout, which did not render well on my phone, and it took a lot of scrolling to find what I was looking for.

But it is not just the search engines that are to blame. Many brands are still failing to offer a mobile optimized version of their sites. In fact, in a recent study by Bango that surveyed online brands, many admitted they do not even know how much mobile-originated traffic is hitting their desktop website.

Although most phones have very capable web browsers and can display full websites, companies should not rely on this. There is still no substitute for a properly designed mobile site. Today's made-for-mobile websites present relevant content in a way that is easy for a mobile user to read and navigate. Sites can even be made to look like applications.

2. Mobile payment
Mobile comes with a powerful operator billing solution built in. Consumers can pay their phone bill with a single click, so it is a real surprise that so many brands are still unable to give their customers a good payment experience. Often, customers are forced to enter detailed registration information, an operator network, and phone number, or send complex text messages before a payment can be made. And if the consumer connects via Wi-Fi, they often cannot pay at all.

One example of this is the Nokia's Ovi store. Nokia, like many others, has followed the app store trend, but despite its many attempts to develop a successful app store, the journey to achieve this has been more than testing. As with many other app stores, the Ovi checkout process can be a frustrating experience. In order to purchase content, you must pre-register details on multiple pages; to complete the task and make the payment, the consumer needs to have a considerable desire to get the application.

Nokia needs to realize that supporting multiple stores across multiple devices and operating systems is not the way forward. The complexity, differences, and restrictions it imposes inevitably impacts the consumer payment experience, increases customer care costs, and reduces sales for the application developers. A web-browser-based distribution model is much more scalable and delivers far wider benefits to the handset. It also delivers the same slick one-click payment experience that many other content providers offer on the mobile web. In short, it provides choice and consistency.

3. Analytics and CRM
Many web analytics tools have failed to replicate their success on mobile, including the world's most popular web analytics tool, Google Analytics. But why is this? Google Analytics, like many popular web analytics tools, relies on JavaScript to collect data and cookies to identify unique visitors -- methods that are simply not reliable on mobile, even on the latest smartphones.

Perhaps with its current focus on the Android app store and tracking application usage, Google has forgotten that the vast majority of campaigns are delivered through the mobile web. The company has acknowledged these issues in some of its recent release notes, so only time will tell if it will refocus its mobile efforts and replicate its online success on the mobile channel.

The factors and solutions

Understanding and overcoming the challenges of mobile and taking advantage of the massive benefits it brings is essential for brands to succeed. Here are a couple of the top factors that must be considered:

Visitor identification
Unlike the PC, mobile phones have unique identities -- from built-in serial codes to the unique mobile phone numbers we all use. These identities are the key to delivering services that elevate mobile above the desktop web we are familiar with.

Mobile identification facilitates secure, single-click mobile payments and is crucial to analyzing the usage of websites, campaigns, and applications with any degree of accuracy.

Mobile phones and internet connections
Most phones connect to the internet via a gateway, a mobile web connection provided by the operator or handset manufacturer. Many phones today also come with Wi-Fi, especially the latest smartphones. These phones can switch connections, and consumers are becoming savvier when browsing, choosing between their operator and a local Wi-Fi connection to get the best performance.

This habit poses identification issues and a whole range of usability problems, especially when paying for a download. Brands need to use a reliable mobile payment solution that is able to identify every user, including those connected via Wi-Fi. This way, they will be able to provide a consistent experience across all connections.

These factors, among others, pose challenges for brands delivering services on mobile. Companies need to understand them in order to get the fundamentals of mobile right. When developing a mobile solution, it is important to realize that mobile is different; there is more to consider, but the results can be far better than typical digital campaigns. Don't just use the same tools and techniques from the internet and expect them to work.

Andy Bovingdon is VP of product marketing at Bango.

From iMedia: Mobile predictions for 2010

Mobile predictions for 2010

By Noah Elkin

November 30, 2009

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ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• The mobile divide among consumers is closing rapidly as more adopt smartphones
• The more relevant gap that persists is the one between marketers and consumers
• To succeed in mobile, marketers will need to provide utility, relevance, and entertainment

Next in Wireless

It's amazing how quickly we return to the hyperbole (emphasis here on the "hype") of yore. Google announces it plans to buy AdMob for $750 million, and the next thing you know, we start hearing that next year is the year of mobile. This is hardly anything new: Industry boosters have perennially declared the year of mobile every year for the past decade, and somehow it never quite works out to be the year of mobile. Next year promises to be no exception. In fact, we'd all be better off reinstituting the moratorium on declarations of the year of mobile in favor of focusing on the serious work marketers need to do to bridge the gap with mobile consumers.

The outlook for mobile is still positive, mind you, but it's possible to have steady, even solid growth without the need for any "year of" declarations. After a decade or more of unfulfilled expectations, we can say with near-certainty that, Google or no Google, mobile advertising and marketing are not going to "explode" next year or even the year after. Instead, mobile will continue to grow incrementally as more brands and agencies fold it into their marketing mix, a trend I pointed to in my recent outlook for mobile advertising.

At the same time, it's also worth remembering that there are two sides to any marketing equation: the marketer and the consumer. On the marketer side, the AdMob acquisition comes at a time of renewed enthusiasm for mobile. A case in point is Millennial Media's recent "state of the industry" study, conducted in conjunction with online knowledge base DM2PRO. The study highlighted two key trends for 2010: more marketers planning on employing mobile advertising in the year ahead, and bigger budgets, especially among the brand marketers surveyed.

The vast majority of respondents to the Millennial/DM2PRO survey also indicated that the mobile campaigns they've run performed at least satisfactorily against campaign goals, although brands and direct marketers were more apt to say their campaigns exceeded expectations and publishers were most likely to say they underperformed. Overall, though, this is a positive finding -- it shows that mobile is working for brands, agencies, PR firms, and publishers alike.

Yet, many respondents, including both marketers and publishers, classified themselves as "non-mobile." Most cited a lack of resources and a lack of knowledge as their primary barriers to entry. Nearly half of the publishers and a little more than one-quarter of the marketers who declared themselves to be non-mobile said the availability of reputable data demonstrating positive ROI would encourage them to adopt mobile advertising. These results suggest that even with all of the positive momentum in the mobile space, gaps still exist on the marketer side.

A mobile divide persists among consumers as well, although it is closing rapidly as mobile users voraciously upgrade to ever more capable smartphones. The NPD Group noted recently that more U.S. consumers have mobile data subscriptions than last year, and the Yankee Group's November 2009 "Mobile Commerce for the Holidays" webinar likewise indicated strong consumer demand for multimedia smartphones with data plans. Similarly, the third wave of BIA/Kelsey Group's "Mobile Market View," an annual mobile consumer study, found significant growth in both mobile internet usage and more "advanced" behaviors such as video viewing, purchasing, and sending.

The more relevant gap that persists is the one between marketers and consumers. As consumers' usage of mobile devices has grown more sophisticated, their attitudes toward mobile marketing have become more negative. BIGresearch's "Simultaneous Media Usage" study indicates that relative to last year, more consumers now dislike receiving text ads, video ads, and text voicemail ads, and more feel that mobile ads constitute an invasion of privacy.

These are not positive findings for marketers, but they beg the question of cause. It's tempting to chalk it up to familiarity breeding contempt, but that seems too simplistic an explanation. When asked directly about their attitude toward advertising in any channel, consumers routinely respond negatively, so more likely, it is a function of the ongoing disconnect between consumers and the marketers trying to reach them.

Marketers can take heart from some of BIGresearch's findings, namely that the percentage of adult consumers who feel mobile ads can be helpful in making a purchase and are acceptable as long as they get content in return both remained stable, dropping by an insignificant 0.3 percent year-over-year. Within this sliver of hope lie the keys for marketers. To succeed in mobile, they will need to provide consumers with a measure (and measurable degree) of utility, relevance, and entertainment.

So let's pause to celebrate the strides mobile has made, but let's also build on the momentum. There's still plenty of work to be done, gaps to be bridged, and problems to be solved before we truly reach that oft-promised year of mobile. With much on the agenda, it's safe to say that 2010 promises to be an exciting year for mobile.

Noah Elkin is a senior analyst at eMarketer, where he covers trends in mobile marketing, content, and commerce.