Monthly Archives: October 2014

Could the Apple Watch change social media (and our lives)?

The Apple Watch was announced recently. This is no news to you. You’d have to completely shut yourself off from the outside world in order to have missed that announcement. What has resulted is a flurry of critiques of the product, as well as speculation on sales. On this, it seems people are pretty split: “among the finance set, estimates range from a few million to almost 40 million in the first year of sales.”

Interestingly enough, CNBC recently featured a number of business professionals, marketers, writers, bloggers, etc. to speculate on what the future of social media will look like. A number of these predictions focused on the integration of wearables into our daily lives and our social media.

Melody Kramer of NPR predicted the following: social media “will become part of the fabric of our clothes, part of the glasses we wear and the shoes we put on, and the gadgets we no longer see as gadgets but as part of our very selves. Social will measure, but sharing will become more passive in the process; it won’t require any effort on our part to share any part of our lives.”
Piera Gelardi, a creative director of Refinery 29 predicted: “I think that anything we talk about in 25 years is going to sound like science fiction. Mobile is the first step toward the portable future of social media and how we consume it, and I think wearables will be a big part of that. I can see it evolving into an implanted device in our bodies that will connect to everything around us.”

That might seem a little far-fetched right now, but the common trend is that wearables could be a large part of our daily lives within a short period of time. The information that we process and share could be shared even more instantaneously while we’re on the go. We could be constantly collecting data as we walk, talk, jog, or mountain climb. Our weekend getaway could be supplied by a virtual reality machine (see: Oculus).

The predictions are an interesting read and they do raise many important questions:

As social media becomes more and more engrained in our lives, will we even view social media as a separate entity or will it simply be commonplace in our share of ideas, commerce, etc.?
How quickly will the shift from online/mobile platforms change to wearable platforms? When will this be adopted by the majority of consumers? How will this impact our lives and the industry?
Is the Apple Watch the first step — or is it just a gimmick?

If you’ve got an opinion on this, sound off by commenting below or tweeting me @aclavers.

Mobile commerce rapidly growing

By Q2 2013, experts were estimating that 25% of online sales transactions would occur on a mobile device by 2017. Reports show that by Q2 2014, a full year following this estimate, mobile commerce traffic had already increased by 125%. Important to note is that this is the first time that mobile commerce has overtaken tablet commerce in the online sales transaction market. This is pretty big. Customers may very well be on the way to becoming more comfortable with making a quick purchase off of their iPhone or Android, rather than having the desire to fully browse on a more interactive and larger tablet or desktop platform or, of course, by actually touching an item in a traditional brick-and-mortar store.

Mobile commerce is on the rise. Image from fastcompany.net.

The rise in mobile commerce is not without some issues of course. As the Econsultancy article outlines, “a mobile customer’s visit to an ecommerce website has a 50% higher bounce rate, a 30% lower add-to-cart rate, and is 10% more likely to abandon cart.”

Mobile developers and advertisers are working to combat these rates, however. Just recently, AdWords announced an upgrade to their mobile ads. For example, as discussed on Marketing Pilgrim, AdWords’ new Mobile Lightbox Engagement Ads, generated ads will now dynamically resize to fit the screen. Mobile ads will start to do what we have seen on desktop platforms for a couple of years now: advertisements will start small before expanding into visually appealing, dynamic advertisements. Some consumers may be annoyed, of course, but these mobile advertisements will no longer go unnoticed nor will they no longer be improperly optimized for our mobile devices.

Combined with this and many retailers’ efforts to make sure their own online stores are mobile optimized, we can’t forget that social media giant Twitter is experimenting with their own “Buy Now” button. While no results are available yet, Burberry tested out the button on sponsored tweets that were available to select U.S. Twitter users during London Fashion Week. If this feature rolls out mainstream, the ability to buy things on your iPhone will become extraordinarily easy and potentially risky for impulse buyers — but this could be a huge aid to reaching that 25% by 2017 estimate that experts made last year.

E-commerce is growing at a quick rate. If retailers and developers can create e-commerce platforms for mobile devices that are attractive, optimized, easy-to-use, and secure for consumers, mobile commerce poses a huge opportunity for businesses and marketers to boost sales.

Sound Off: Are you comfortable online shopping off of your mobile phone? What sort of features/elements do you look for while mobile shopping?

Ello and (probably) goodbye.

If you follow the internet, which you probably do, you’ve now heard of Ello.

Ello is all the rage, especially amongst the defenders of the free, advertising-liberated internet. Even Tom from MySpace is kickin’ around, repeatedly poking fun at his former default popularity on MySpace. (And the fact that MySpace is now, essentially, irrelevant).

Even Tom from MySpace is on Ello.
Screenshot from https://ello.co/myspacetom.

So what’s the scoop with this bare-bones social media network? Deemed by some as the “hipster” social network, Ello has branded itself as the antithesis to Facebook. According to its manifesto, Ello will have be completely ad-free, will never charge a dime for access (but will be “freemium” by charging for additional services), and will never sell user information to third parties.

Recently, Ello has exploded. There have been reports that the site is getting between 4,000 and 30,000 account requests per day. A staggering number for a social media site essentially in Beta. If reviews are positive from initial users, Ello could be on the cusp of becoming the next big thing.

But will it be?

As Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols noted on ZDNet, there’s a lot of people who have been quite unhappy with Facebook. Some of it has to do with the mood-experimentation that it completed on users without permission. Some of it has to do with their “real name” rule that has affected numerous members of the LGBT community. But is this really enough to convince 1 billion users of Facebook (or even a sizeable fraction) to leave for something new?

Admittedly, I have not yet received my invitation to Ello, although I requested it multiple days ago. I was initially quite intrigued but have now lost a lot of my interest. The whole idea of a completely ad-free social media platform is definitely attractive. But Ello really offers nothing new. It’s been online since March and it still has a number of basic features which are listed only as “coming soon,” including: user blocking and a notification centre. These two features have become almost integral on social platforms. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see much of a point in developing or sharing any content if I’m not even going to be notified when someone interacts with it. What motivation do I have to actually make my profile interesting?

I feel like the strongest argument on generating content on Ello is to be individualistic. To have an online profile that defines “me.” A utopian profile free of advertising and without Big Brother tracking my keywords. But with such a minimalistic theme and a platform driven by, seemingly, visual content – what’s the difference between Ello and Tumblr besides a few visual tweaks? What feature would cause me to actually interrupt my natural time spent on Facebook (where thousands of people in my network are) for a brand new site. I don’t think Ello is there yet – but with the added attention it’s been getting, they better start figuring it out or people will say goodbye as quickly as they’ve said Ello.

Ello logo from ello.co

If you’ve got an opinion on this, sound off by commenting below or tweeting me @aclavers.

Sound Off: Are you comfortable online shopping off of your mobile phone? What sort of features/elements do you look for while mobile shopping?

Sound Off: What are your thoughts on Ello? Are you a fan? Do you think it will survive? Comment below, or tweet me @aclavers.