During the past 12-18 months I've had more conversations with publishers about tablet and mobile than about any other topic. In fact, it's probably more than the next three topics combined.
The speed in which mobile and table computing are overtaking the desktop is unprecedented. According to Deloitte, more than one in five Americans own a tablet device. And every day, new vendors and agencies come along pitching products and solutions. The result for most publishers is confusion.
In speaking with colleagues at Newstex, I learned that they were seeing the same confusion among many of their customers.
The eBook starts with strategy, exploring 7 mobile content business models, noting that many publishers overlook new revenue opportunities on mobile. From there, it aims to demystify much of the mobile landscape, helping publishers understand the differences in platforms and providing tools to simplify issues like the app vs mobile web decision.
The last half of the book provides an action plan to help publishers implement their mobile strategy. Examples and case studies are provided throughout to help you understand the decisions made by other publishers - and their implications.
Whether you've already launched multiple iPhone, iPad and Android apps or are just trying to move past the hype and understand the mobile content space, this eBook provides quick and valuable insights. Download your free copy here.
A special thanks to Tom Shultz of Creative Attitude for his terrific design work.
The big thing that jumped out at me from today's Facebook Phone "Facebook Home on Android" event was the potential usage data trove that this could open up for Facebook.
This diagram tells the story:
Under this architecture, Facebook Home sits between the Android OS and your apps. In other words, Facebook potentially gains control of all of the usage data thrown off in "app exhaust". Of course, that's on top of controlling communications on the phone via Chat Heads and other features.
Of course, the underlying OS has always known about which apps you're using and with whom you're communicating, but this is different, in that Facebook is an ad platform. So, it will be interesting to read the T&Cs to see how Facebook may potentially use the user and usage data it captures.
Do you feel comfortable giving that much usage data to Facebook? Add your thoughts in the comments.
For several years we’ve been dismissive about the idea
of an inevitable “Facebook phone”. Apple and Android have won the mobile phone
wars and, as Microsoft, Blackberry and others have learned, there are few
crumbs remaining.
But if rumors are true, Facebook just may have come up with
a strategy for success.
The Facebook plan is not to build hardware, nor create its
own operating system. Instead, the strategy is for a “Facebook Home on
Android” app launcher, with hardware built by existing handset makers.
The idea of a customized version of Android is not new –
that’s the approach that Amazon has taken with the Kindle Fire. But the
potential impact for Facebook could be great.
Current rumors suggest that HTC is building the initial
handset for the Facebook phone. The modified version of Android would provide
the ability to launch any existing Android app, but the home screen would be
Facebook-centric.
That approach is compelling. If you look at mobile usage
statistics, users spend up to a quarter of their mobile use on social networks.
For many of those users, having Facebook as their home screen would make sense.
For Facebook, a “Home on Android” could act as a Trojan
horse that would allow them to shift increasing amounts of activity to their
own platform. At launch, the Facebook Home on Android might simply be your news
feed, Instagram feed, games and Facebook chat. Yet, over time, that could expand. Rumors
suggest the initial search partner will be Google, but that could easily
change. Facebook Maps, Facebook Music or Facebook TV could easily follow.
There are still many unknowns. Will the Facebook Home on
Android version be forked, requiring developers to build custom versions of
Android apps, or will all existing Android apps work on the phones? Will
payments be handled through Google Play or Facebook’s App Center? Will the
Facebook Home launcher be made available for any Android phone or will it only
run on customized handsets?
We’ll learn a lot more on Thursday, when Facebook makes
their introduction. But one thing seems clear - with the Facebook Home on Android strategy, the idea of
a Facebook phone no longer seems silly.
The new version includes a curation platform that allows anyone to create a Flipboard "magazine" by curating content and sharing it with others. Here's Tech Readings, a Flipboard magazine I've created this morning.
The user interface couldn't be easier. From any article, simply click the + icon and add it to your magazine.
For the avid RSS reader/curator, this is a great new tool. Against the backdrop of outrage at Google dropping Reader, I realized that between most of my content consumption comes via Twitter and Flipboard these days, with Reader a distant third. With this new curation tool, Flipboard should become an even more important tool for me.
Yet I think the real opportunity for Flipboard will come with brands. As brands move into the publishing space, there's tremendous opportunity for them to create custom magazines for niche communities, using proprietary content, curated external content, or, ideally, a blend of both.
And this potentially creates new revenue opportunities for Flipboard. A professional version of the curation platform might allow brands to have some control over layout, to include their own branding and to package it up as their own branded app.
Those capabilities could also be of interest to publishers and informal curators within the enterprise.
Flipboard has delivered a great reading experience since its launch. There's an opportunity for them to create a similarly great experience for curation and publishing. I'm excited to see how brands and publishers begin to experiment with these new tools.
Best Buy (BBY) announced this week its intention to begin
price-matching prices from key competitor websites, such as Amazon (AMZN), Buy.com,
Target.com (TGT), B&H, Walmart.com (WMT) and others, for purchases made in its stores.
On its surface, it seems like a smart and aggressive
strategy for Best Buy to remain relevant and to discourage its customers from
showrooming, using Best Buy to view items, then buying them cheaper online.
Yet in practice, I don’t know how the numbers could work.
There’s no way to profitably run a brick and mortar big box retail business that matches the
best of online pricing.
For comparison, I just spot-checked a few of Best Buy’s prices.
And those three items are hardly unique. On almost every item
I checked, the Best Buy price was 20-40% higher than prices at Amazon and other
sites. The exceptions tend to be large screen TVs, where Best Buy is competitive
to the best online prices, and certain brands which are rarely discounted, like
Dr. Dre Beat headphones or an Apple iPad.
And that experience is consistent with what I’ve seen in the
real world. There was a Best Buy across the street from my old office. Any time
I tried to buy anything there, I found their prices to be 25-50% higher than
the online price. I might pay that premium for an emergency pair of earbuds, but for
anything over $25, I found myself ordering via the Amazon app instead, often
before leaving the store.
So, how might Best Buy adapt to a world of price-matching? I
see three possibilities:
First, Best Buy can hope that while price-matching becomes a
useful marketing campaign, customers don’t bother to actually do it in
practice. This seems unlikely to me, unless they either make the process too
difficult to perform (“let me find the manager for you” or “you just need to
fill out this 12-page form and we’ll match the price”) or perhaps deploy cellular
signal jammers in all their stores.
The second option is
for Best Buy to work with manufacturers to create custom versions of its
products for their stores. This is the trick that the mattress industry has
used for decades, to make price comparisons difficult. When mattress
discounters like 800-Mattress sprang up, department stores scrambled for ways
to keep their artificially high prices up. The solution was for mattress
manufacturers to create “exclusive” models available to each department store
or retailer. So, you can’t compare the price of the Stearns & Foster Delana
mattress from Macy’s, as that model is not available at Sleepys or elsewhere.
Might Best Buy try something similar? Could they ask Canon
to make a Vixia HF M50BB (or similar) which is only available at Best Buy? That
might be a bit more difficult to do across some product categories (I can’t
imagine Apple participating) but for some products I could see it. Truly unique offerings would be most compelling, but that's really hard to do with electronics. Home retailers like Target (TGT) can get designers to create custom collections; FAO Schwartz has unique toys that Toys R Us can't offer. But there's not as much flexibility with electronics. Maybe a custom color for a phone or camera, but that's about it. Another
option might be to create custom bundles. Perhaps a flat screen TV, a wall
mount and HDMI cable could be bundled together into a package that is exclusive
to Best Buy. Smart consumers might compare the bundle to the price of the unbundled components, but you won’t have a one-click price check from a barcode.
A third option might be for Best Buy to treat big ticket
items as loss leaders then offer private labeled accessories, unique to Best
Buy. This is not far off from their current process for large screen TVs. Their
prices on these tend to be fairly competitive, as they know people price
compare before dropping a thousand bucks on a flat screen. But they hit you up
for a $59.99
HDMI cable and a $119.99
wall mount, items that can be purchased for a third that price at Amazon.
If they truly wanted to be price-competitive, Best Buy would
make it easy to check competitive prices in their stores. But they’ve actively
avoided this to-date. Best Buy actually incubated a startup, Tecca, which offered
mobile apps providing detailed information and comparisons on electronic
products. The apps included barcode scanners which returned pricing from
Bestbuy.com, Amazon.com and Google Products. Yet although they funded it, Best
Buy was never comfortable enough with Tecca to encourage its use in their
stores. Tecca was shuttered late last year, but could have been the centerpiece
of this new “price matching” strategy.
I think Best Buy will likely employ the use of bundles and
white-labeled accessories to improve margins, while using price-matching on
major items as loss leaders. That approach may slow the showrooming somewhat,
but it doesn’t seem like an effective long-term strategy for a profitable
business. They can’t possibly sell enough overpriced accessories to support
1,000 big box stores across the U.S.
How do you think Best Buy will handle price matching? Add your thoughts in the comments.
If you're like me, your twitter stream this week was filled with two oft-repeated messages:
Hurray! I have one of the top 5% most viewed @LinkedIn profiles for 2012; and
#BuyAmexGiftCard25
The first message was driven by a LinkedIn (LNKD) campaign to notify owners of the 20 million most active profiles that theirs was among the "top 5%" or "top 10%" most-viewed profiles. Clicking the link brought you to a page which encouraged you to share this message over Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn:
Hurray! I have one of the top 5% most viewed @LinkedIn profiles for 2012. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/profile/0/066/72a
It's not the first time LinkedIn has taken this approach. In March of 2011, LinkedIn sent an email blast to many of its early adopters showing them that they had been among the first million users to sign up for the platform. For a week or so, we all saw many tweets boasting of users' early adopter status (for the record, I was user number 135,826).
There's nothing wrong with what LinkedIn is doing, but it does feel a little forced. And by the 4th or 5th time you see that message in your stream, it begins to feel a little spammy. And, of course, for those who bothered to do the math, being among the top 10% of LinkedIn's 200 million users doesn't really feel that special. But LinkedIn knows that rankings and gamification works, and they have been clever in getting users to promote their message.
This week also brought a marketing partnership between Twitter and American Express (AXP) aimed at testing out Twitter-based social commerce (TCommerce?). As you've no doubt seen and heard by now, users could link their Twitter account to their American Express account, then make purchases by tweet. To encourage users to try it, American Express offered a $25 gift card for $15 for those using the process.
Unlike the LinkedIn approach, where sharing the message was optional, users were required to tweet a message using a specific hashtag #BuyAmexGiftCard25 to start the transaction. This was the way that American Express could identify buyers, but it also clearly was used to promote the message to that users' social network. In order to complete the transaction, users needed to then link their card to their account, then tweet a final confirmation message including the hashtag #ConfirmAmexGiftCard25.
Using Twitter for commerce, and particularly mobile commerce, is interesting. You can tell that American Express was trying to emulate the simple approaches used for fundraising via text message. But the multi-step process felt a bit clunky. Part of that was due to the need to link a card with a Twitter account. I have to assume that the conversion rate, from those who tweeted the initial #BuyAmexGiftCard25 to actually completing the process was probably less than 50%. But apparently the offer is now sold out, so American Express must have achieved their targets.
Twitter and other social media platforms are clearly becoming more commercial. Innovative companies like LinkedIn and American Express will experiment - and that's all good. At the same time, companies will need to be careful not to appear too spammy, as a backlash can come quickly and is likely to spread more virally than the original message.
If the holiday season is any measure, the Microsoft (MSFT) Surface
and Windows 8 have been a complete dud. In fact, I saw this headline come
across my stream this morning: Sell
Microsoft NOW! Game Over - Ballmer Loses.
The article, by Adam
Hartung, notes that for the Christmas period, Microsoft sold only 5% as
many Surface tablets as Apple did iPads.
To be frank, I’m surprised they sold that many.
This first version of the Surface was aimed at consumers.
And why would a consumer buy a Surface rather than an iPad, an iPad Mini or a
Nexus 7?
The Surface runs on
Windows RT. It doesn’t run Windows software. Instead, it runs special Surface
apps that you can download from the Microsoft Store. And how many apps are in
the Microsoft Store? Around 20,000 at last count. Compare that to the one
million apps in the Apple App Store.
Add the fact that the
Microsoft Surface does not yet support cellular (3G/4G/LTE) access – it’s a
WiFi-only product today. And most of the initial reviews of the Surface were
lukewarm at best.
Even those users who
don’t like Apple, or feel Apple is becoming too powerful, have options like the
Google Nexus 7.
For Microsoft, the goal is not to have the best consumer
tablet product. That game is over and Apple (AAPL) has clearly won. Microsoft is
focused on the enterprise and I believe that they still have a realistic shot
at gaining strong market share there.
The Surface Pro, previewed to journalists at CES, is due for
release the end of January. And while it shares a name with its consumer-focused sibling, it’s a completely different product. The Surface Pro has an Intel I7 processor
and runs the full Windows 8, just like any laptop or desktop PC. It won’t be
quite as portable as an iPad – more like a MacBook Air in size and weight – but
it will be the first touch-screen tablet computer to run a full computer
operating system.
The Surface Pro will be a compelling solution for many
enterprise IT departments. While the BYOD trend has taken hold at many
organizations, most large enterprise companies still have limited or no support
for user-owned devices on their networks. That’s why you still see so many
people carrying both an iPhone (for personal use) and a Blackberry (for
corporate email). At many large companies, users have both a desktop PC and a
laptop, with the latter used largely for travel purposes. As it comes time to upgrade those
laptops, it would make sense to swap them out for Surface Pros. While the
Surface Pro costs as much as a laptop ($899), it would probably make users happier and
reduce pressure on corporate IT to fully support employee-owned iPads.
The good news for Microsoft is that these organizations tend to buy devices in large quantities. A hospital looking to provide its nurses and doctors with tablets could buy several thousand. Large corporations could buy even more. And government agencies? The US Department of Defense just inked a $600 million contract for the Windows 8 operating system. Just think how many Surface Pros they could buy if they decide it's the right mobile device for them.
Personally, I don’t see myself switching. I’m happy with my
MacBook Air and my iPad and I've never been much of a supporter (or defender) of Microsoft. But for large companies locked into the Windows
platform, the Surface Pro has the potential to be the device of choice for
mobile computing.
Image courtesy Paulo Ordoveza Flickr.com/8211313831
I'm writing an ebook aimed at helping publishers develop and implement their mobile strategy.
One section of that book will spotlight apps from publishers that get it right. I've got a bunch in mind, but would love to get your suggestions on content apps that are deserving of recognition.
First, to define what I'm looking for, I'm focused on apps from publishers, not on generic readers. So, the NY Times app would be a fit, but Flipboard or Pulse would not.
The focus can be b2b or b2c; I'll include native apps, mobile web apps and hybrid apps in the discussion. Content can be text, images or video. And I'm looking across a wide range of business models - free apps for brand awareness, paid subscriptions, content-enabled mobile commerce, digital-print bundles, sponsored apps and more.
During the past week, my Twitter stream has been filled with
various thoughts on the demise of News Corp’s (NWS) tablet-centric news app, The
Daily (including my own). Some, perhaps in an effort to be provocative, have
suggested that the end of The Daily signals the idea that tablet-based
publishing itself has proven a failed model. Here are a few of those stories:
The failure of The Daily says little about the future of
tablet publishing, and mostly tells the tale of a failed publishing initiative.
Let’s take a look at what The Daily was:
A tablet-only (to start), paid
subscription, consumer app, providing general news content, with a very high
budget.
Now, let's break that down into its parts:
Tablet-only: By the end, The Daily had moved beyond tablets
to include smartphone, and also had integrated the ability to share content via
the web. But to start, it was a single-platform (iPad) product. And the fact
that it was optimized for the iPad was both a strength and a weakness.
Paid subscription consumer news app: the good news is that
we are seeing paid content take hold in various markets. But consumers are only
willing to pay for content not perceived to be readily available for free elsewhere.
High budget: one of the challenges large companies have when
trying to launch something new is that they bring with them high cost
structures. Startups don’t dangle 7-figure salaries to attract talent, but
large companies fall into an expense base that’s not sustainable. Oh, and The
Daily was the only app to run a Super Bowl commercial.
Yet, despite that high cost structure, The Daily really only
faced a challenge once News Corp split into two companies. As part of a single,
diversified entertainment business, a $30m annual budget for the Daily was
almost a rounding error, easily covered by box office proceeds for the movie Avatar in Poland.
Not much to pay for a real-time R&D lab, whose learnings can be applied throughout the
multi-billion dollar company. Yet, split off into a business already wracked by
difficulties, it became an expensive luxury.
So, what lessons can we learn from The Dailly
Mobile First vs Tablet-Only: There’s a real difference between being Mobile First and
being Tablet Only. The Daily became a walled garden, making it difficult to
share content or to shift your reading from one platform to another.
In building digital products, it’s critical to understand
user behavior. Will users skim your content on their mobile device during the
morning commute, marking content to read on the desktop when they get to the
office? Or, are they marking content during the day to read later on their
tablet on the ride home? Do users need to share your content with peers?
Particularly for b2b content, the need to shift from one platform to another is
critical.
User Experience Matters: While The Daily ultimately failed in reaching their goal of
a half-million paying subscribers to a consumer news product, they did exceed
100,000 paid subs. That’s pretty impressive considering the ubiquity of free
news sources on tablets and the web. User engagement was high and they created
many real fans. Rather than a boring “replica” app, the Daily created a
compelling user experience, leveraging the iPad in ways few others have done.
Specialized, hard-to-find information beats generic news: This one almost goes unsaid, but while many companies are
finding that users will continue to pay for information they can’t find
elsewhere (particularly in b2b),there’s no appetite to pay for content where
there is a viable free substitute. Editorial quality and a big marketing budget
can’t overcome “good enough” free alternatives.
SIPA members, by definition, should not face the problem of
selling generic information to consumers. These companies offer niche products
aimed at b2b markets. During this session, we’ll be exploring trends in mobile
and tablet use, particularly among business users and explore how to develop an
appropriate mobile and tablet strategy. We'll take a hands-on look at publishers who are doing it right (and a few who appear to be on a misguided path). I hope to see you there.
There's an interesting discussion going on this morning on Fred Wilson's A VC blog in a post called Rethinking Mobile First. I'd encourage you to read the entire post AND the comments, but here's a short recap, along with my thoughts.
Fred's post is in response to a post by Origami Labs and Everyme co-founder Vibhu Norby questioning whether mobile is the right platform for many new app developers to focus on and why Origami is pivoting from mobile first to web first.
The Norby post highlights the fact that mobile-centric startup success has been limited to a handful of apps:
Only a handful of apps have succeeded mobile-first: Instagram, Tango, Shazam, maybe 2 or 3 others
The challenge, as he notes, is that the conversion process from download through true engagement eliminates most users. In the case of Everyme:
At best, we retain 5% of users through the entire onboarding process. Attempts to fix it have raised it only nominally. We are not alone on that count even amongst apps with much better onboarding and many more app versions than our own.
In his response, Fred notes that despite the fact that it's hard, it's necessary:
But just because something is hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do it. I am convinced the next set of large and valuable consumer facing services will be built with mobile as the primary user interface. You can see it in the success of Uber and Etsy this holiday season. That's where your users are most of the time. And if you don't design your products and services for what is rapidly becoming the dominant UI, you will not maximize the success of your business in the long run.
I tend to agree with Fred on this one. Mobile IS difficult. It's hard to get your app noticed in the first place, hard to get users to download it and even harder to get them to return to it a second, third and fourth time. But that's not altogether different than the web experience. In the early days of the web, people bookmarked sites all the time. I had hundreds of bookmarks in my Netscape bookmark manager. Of those hundreds of bookmarks there were even a dozen or more than I returned to frequently, but most just sat in the list, never to be clicked again.
Your platform is not the biggest factor in user engagement. Your application is. Are you providing a compelling experience that users rely upon in their daily life? If so, I'm convinced you can deliver that experience on any platform. That's not to say that the experience won't differ on the mobile platform than on the desktop, but if you deliver value, users will return.
That said, the platform is key in how users interact with your app. Does your onboarding process require users to type a lot? That's fine on the web, less so on tablets and a real challenge on smartphones. Does your business model depend on running tons of ads on every page? Again, that may be fine on the desktop (though I could argue otherwise), less so on mobile devices.
The key, of course, is understanding what you are enabling users to do, then optimizing your offering (whether a native app, a mobile web app or a web page) to deliver that capability as simply as possible. Understanding your audience is critical. Are you aiming for smartphones or tablets? Do you expect a lean forward or a lean back experience?
And mobile first doesn't have to mean app-first. For publishers, mobile first can simply be rethinking your content so that it thrives in a mobile and/or tablet experience. That may mean creating shorter articles with more images and video content. If you build web pages that look great on tablets, they'll probably serve you well on the desktop. The reverse is rarely the case.
So, is mobile development easy? Not at all. Is there a simple path to success? No. But does that suggest that mobile-first is not the right strategy? No. Your customers are shifting more of their time to tablets and mobile devices. Mary Meeker's latest study shows that 29% of American adults currently own a tablet or eReader. And it's safe to say that after this holiday season, that number will probably be more like 33%. Is that a trend that you're willing to bet against?
Success will come to those publishers and developers who understand their audience and delight them with engaging products on the platforms where they are increasingly spending their time.
