BII MOBILE INSIGHTS: News Consumption Is All About Mobile Now

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News Consumption Is All About Mobile And Social (Pew Research Center via GigaOM)
A new study from the Pew Research Center into news consumption habits shows that the impact of mobile and social continues to grow. Almost twice as many users got news from a mobile device compared with 2010, and almost three times as many got news from a social network.

where users get their news

Newspaper readership continues its long, slow decline and radio has also been following the same general pattern. The study says that the number of Americans who read a newspaper the day before the survey was taken fell to 23%, down only a few percentage points from 2010′s survey, but down by more than half from the number who said the same a decade earlier.

newspaper consumption

And while TV news consumption has held up much better, it has been in decline over the past few years as well.

The Pricing Of Mobile Products (Simon-Kucher & Partners via Pinterest)
Here is an excellent presentation on mobile media strategy from strategy and marketing consultants Simon-Kucher & Partners. It's a 31 page slide show that walks through pricing power and how the media thinks about it and should think about it. Bottom line: Costs are a matter of fact, price is a matter of guts! - Jack Welch

Mobile’s Hidden Opportunity: Marketplaces (TechCrunch)
Building and controlling a marketplace is hard. Fortunately, mobile makes it much, much easier. The near-ubiquity of mobile devices today makes it vastly quicker and cheaper than ever before to “wire up” both sides of a market and then to have real-time visibility into that market’s supply and demand dynamics. The best opportunities for creating new marketplaces (or reshaping old ones) via mobile will be in markets where supply is inherently constrained and there are no viable (similarly priced) substitutes for that supply. Aggregate that scarce supply and the demand will follow. This playbook isn’t new to mobile. Mobile just makes it a whole lot easier.

Airbnb Sees More Than A Quarter Of Its Traffic From Mobile (The Next Web)
Proving the point above, travel booking site Airbnb says mobile adoption of its service is “exploding”, and it’s marking a new milestone today to prove its point; over a quarter of its traffic now comes from mobile devices. Half of those visits come from Apple’s iPhone and iPad and the iPhone app alone has been downloaded more than a million times. A sizable portion of those users still seem to be active on the app, as 500,000 of them upgraded to Airbnb’s latest version when it went live earlier this month. Though room bookings and mobile might not always seem to go together, Airbnb believes it’s an improved experience.

Mobile App Vs. Mobile Web (Zabisco via Mobile Winery Websites)
Here's a good infographic of a side by side comparison of mobile application vs. mobile website:

mobile app vs mobile web

How The Smartphone Revolutionized Internet Marketing (name.com)
With the proliferation of smartphones, businesses with locally optimized websites have the opportunity to take advantage of one of the most influential platforms for free advertising ever invented. We've all seen the commercials where someone asks Siri for the nearest bank or a Smartphone is used to locate restaurants within a 5-mile radius. If your business has not optimized its website for mobile devices and is not using strong locally targeted keywords, this marketing opportunity is passing you by. What do you have to do?

Build your website on HTML5
Understand that social media is like the ultimate word-of-mouth advertising platform ever built
Incorporate local keywords into every single page of your website
Invest in a customer engagement application

While the actual building of the site will be an investment cost, after that the advertising is free.

Small Business Mobile Usage On The Rise (Trendslide)
Small businesses are increasingly using mobile smartphones and tablets. In turning to mobile, SMB’s are opening up opportunities for efficiency gains and general productivity improvement.

Small business owners are using mobile technology an average of 21x per day to run their business
37% of small business have smartphones
34% of small business have iPads, which is quadruple that of last year

Check out the infographic on Small Business Mobile:

small business mobile usage