The battle still rages on for the win in this seemingly endless competition between Apple and Google, AT&T and Verizon, and the iPhone and Android. Yet this is a great time for application developers and mobile advertisers to take advantage of the growing and dynamic mobile OS environments.

The debate over which major features are superior for each phone is a hot topic today.

PC World stated, “If you want a mobile device that takes full advantage of Web connectivity, applications, and personal media that you can also use for business connectivity such as e-mail and calendaring, get the iPhone, even with the inferiority of AT&T’s 3G network.”

However, many believe that the Droid Eris has a much better UI design, including a weather and time widget on the home screen, integrated platform to access messages, and a mail-preview widget. It also comes with high-quality programs that are becoming more and more superior to those of the iPhone. This smartphone also is much more communication-oriented by allowing users to manager their contacts across multiple communication channels, including messages and e-mails.

In terms of usability, the iPhone seems to be superior, with ease-of-use features including a quick-delete function, capabilities to add Web pages to the home screen, and a copy and cut feature. However, the iPhone falls short in terms of being able to run multiple apps at the same time, reducing its multi-tasking abilities that the Android has.

The application market for both of these phones is quite intense. Whereas Apple is more lenient with approving applications to go into the market, Google tends to be more reserved.

A report by Computer World stated, “Google seems to be more flexible with what kinds of applications they allow… Apple has too much stuff that shouldn’t be in the store and unevenness regarding what is allowed.”

There are about 185,000 iPhone applications currently, and more iPhone users are willing to buy these applications than Android consumers (50% and 21% respectively). A report by GigaOM stated that Apple’s iPhone has $200 million in revenue from applications every month, whereas the Android market has about $5 million per month. Top apps for the iPhone include Tweetie 2, Yelp, Slacker, Mint, and Sling Player Mobile, as reported by Time

“Two billion downloads and counting — that pretty much says it all about the wealth of available iPhone apps. No device comes anywhere close to the iPhone regarding the variety of third-party apps, and Apple keeps enhancing what apps can do…”, reported a Computer World article.

On the other hand, there are approximately 60,000 Android phones sold each day and the Android app market is growing extensively with 30,000 applications currently, 60% of them being free, reported Android Tapp . The top applications for the Android market since March 2010, as reported by Gizmodo are Touiteur, Opera Mini, TMZ, Google Earth, Google Gesture Search, Thick Buttons, Google Shopper, and AIM for Android.

When considering which smart phone market developers and advertisers want to enter, brand loyalty is a major player. Surprisingly, a Crowd Science study found that the brand loyalty between both platforms are about equal. 90% of users of both phones stated that they would be willing to buy from that same company for their next phone.

Another major consideration that comes into play is the advantages from a carrier’s perspective, Verizon and AT&T in this case.

A news story on att.com quoted the company’s President and CEO, “Combine our high-performance 3G broadband wireless network, the new iPhone’s business-class capabilities and a starting price of $199, and I expect that we will continue to increase revenue per user and attract customers who spend the most on wireless.” This new agreement and revenue-sharing model is very attractive for both parties, and the monthly revenues from the iPhone users will double their average revenue base from regular phones.

In terms of Verizon and Google, it seems like a perfect pair for the nation’s best wireless provider to partner with such a powerful company like Google.

Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google said, “The Android platform allows Verizon Wireless customers to experience faster and easier access to the web from any location. Through this partnership, we hope to deliver greater innovation in the mobile space to consumers across the U.S.” The two companies also agreed to devote a great amount of resources towards developing cutting-edge technologies to market and deliver innovative services to new and existing customers.

So who will win in the end? Seems like it is up to the users to decide where their loyalty lies depending on applications, costs, usability, and connectivity.

This is a guest post by Kristin Dziadul, Marketing Analyst for Backupify. She blogs on her own site as a new generation marketer, discussing new inbound marketing techniques and Generation Y studies and observations. She can be found on Twitter @KristinEDziadul.

The consumer/ordinary person in me always, or almost always, answers the questions raised by the marketer in me. One of these questions was why are there millions of posts written about community and brands in the past several months? Community has become the new buzzword: everyone talks about the power of the community and how every brand should build a community in order to be successful in its social media endeavors. Although some really smart people have explained what a community is and how it can impact a business, brands still don’t understand that it is more than just building a community, it is about building a strong community and nurturing that community.

Another question the marketer in me asked a while ago was how do you build a strong community?  What do you do to turn mere followers and fans into active participants in a community? The ordinary person in me (I don’t like to call myself a consumer) observed what some brands I was a fan/follower of have done to achieve that. The most successful brands do only a few things, but they do them really well.

1.    Engage: They respond to my wall posts and tweets. Even if it is just to say “Thank you”, they respond. There is nothing more annoying and disrespectful than a brand not responding to its followers! The brands that have managed to make me a part of their communities listen and respond when they have something relevant to say.  When I complain about being tired, they send a tweet that I need a break, even if it is just for 15 minutes. They show their human face and it makes me proud of being part of their communities. Sometimes they even take the conversation IRL. Although it might be hard to do with a big brand (depends on their strategy), an extended conversation IRL can be the most successful social media tactic for a small brand.

2.    Provide value: They provide value beyond informing me about their new product and showing me pictures of it. They share relevant information that appeals to my needs and wants. They inform me about things I need to know, or I think I need to know. They make me laugh. Chances are if you know your audience, you already know what they want and need to know; you know what will make them laugh; you know what they consider important.

3.    Provide experience: They provide experience that extends beyond a Facebook update and/or a tweet. They give me opportunities to have fun as a community. They give me opportunities to engage in activities or games as a community. They make me feel like a valuable part of the community.  The make me feel proud of being part of the community. They connect people who can help each other or have similar interests.  Again, they don’t act as a brand, but as a human, a human I would like to have as a friend.

All these activities show that a brand cares, which is exactly what I need from a brand and it is exactly what a brand, small or big, should be doing. If you want to build a strong community, and I guess you do want to, then start engaging with your fans/followers, provide them with value and a unique experience.

Final piece of advice: If you are a business owner, please don’t rely on the fact that because I loved your brand prior your Twitter/Facebook era, I will be a part of your community. You need to put some effort into achieving that and Facebook updates about your awesome product and pictures of it will not do the work. More likely I will just hide your updates. Please show your human face and care. Be a part of your own community!

About the Author: A true child of the Internet, Andreana “Addy” Drencheva spends too much time on social networks connecting with interesting people, observing what brands do and contemplating what they should do.  IRL Addy does a bunch of awesome things: from helping a peacemaking nonprofit organization to increase awareness, to planning carnivals and comedy shows, to writing for The Next Great Generation, to finishing her degree in Public Relations and Communication Studies. If you want to connect with her, try @addy_dren on Twitter.   She will love to chat.

Here’s another great guest post from our friend Mike Layton, Co-Founder of the hot social monitoring startup, Symscio, Inc.  It is important to remember that measurement programs will vary, but hopefully this post will assist you in asking the right questions towards setting up a meaningful measurement program. If you have any comments or questions, we’d love to hear from you. If you would like to learn more, Symscio can be found at symscio.com and on Twitter (@symscio).

One of the aspects of Twitter that I find most fascinating is the variety of approaches that companies take to advance their business objectives. Strategies range from branding and promotion to competitive intelligence and market research to customer service and recruitment. The possibilities are vast to say the least and many organizations employ multiple approaches.

As with any strategic initiative, measurement is vital for gaining intelligence and maximizing efforts. A few areas where we can lean on measurement include:

- Organizing data so that it is readily available to assist in decision making

- Evaluating the impact of efforts to assist in the development of future strategies

- Identifying potential threats that demand immediate attention

- And everybody’s favorite – demonstrating results to upper management

So how do you measure Twitter?
What do you measure? What metrics are right for your organization? Given the variety of uses for Twitter the short answer is – it depends. Measurement must align with your objectives, reflect the nuances of your industry and deliver actionable data. To make this happen, measurement must possess two primary characteristics to be meaningful: accuracy and relevance.

Accuracy matters. Can you trust the data?
Accuracy matters and, fortunately, is the easy part. Only trust human analysis for your metrics. Automation simply will not deliver meaning. It relies too heavily on the use of keywords, offers limited metrics and is wildly inaccurate. Automation reminds me of sweeping the dirt underneath the rug. It’s fast and looks nice at first glance, but it didn’t accomplish anything as your room is still dirty.

To be actionable, it must be meaningful.
Making measurement relevant requires a little more attention up front. The first step is to address the collection of tweets to be included in the analysis. The best advice I can give is to not be restrictive in the search criteria. You can always remove unqualified tweets but if your search failed to bring in the qualified ones (most likely due to the overuse of keywords) then you may never know what has been omitted from your research.

Next, you will want to identify the qualitative metrics that tie back to your initial objective(s). Here are a few metrics that offer value to a variety to different measurement programs:

Audience: The beauty of Twitter is that we have access to profile information and past tweets to help us better understand “who” is tweeting (analysts, competitors, customers, etc.).

Subject: Categorize tweets into different “buckets”, such as market segment or purpose (i.e. product feedback), to help recognize “what” is driving discussion and segment reporting for internal audiences.

Sentiment (tone): Alone sentiment is meaningless, but when combined with metrics, such as audience or subject, it points us in the right direction towards pulling insight from the analysis.

Sometimes in life you look at the flaws or how things could have been to understand what may be next. With the all the speculation on the iPad release, its easy to focus on the downside.  By now we’ve all heard of the imperfections: lack of flash support, no camera, no voice support (SMS and calling not supported) and no USB or microSD support.  Sure, from the surface level, those are all potential red flags which could hold up purchasing decisions.  However, if we rewind back a few years it seems eerily similar to the disadvantages of the iPhone: no multi-tasking, one carrier network, issues with 3G data connectivity, dropping calls etc.  As a society we are so quick to tear down new products and services, we miss the quintessential meaning of how they will transcend our daily lives.

Even when you consider the inefficiencies of the iPad (pre release!), it’s important to remember our past and not just what this device means to us on a personal level.  More importantly, consider how this could impact the technology landscape as a whole.  I’ve been excited about the iPad for sometime, however, it has been difficult to understand the all encompassing impact this product will have on the industry.  But, as fate would have it, Marc Benioff chimed in on Tech Crunch in a guest blog post and enlightened me:

The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it’s called the iPad. It’s not about typing or clicking; it’s about touching. It’s not about text, or even animation, it’s about video. It’s not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it’s about the cloud. It’s not about pulling information; it’s about push. It’s not about re purposing old software, it’s about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle). Finally, the industry is fun again.

What’s most exciting is that this fundamental transformation—cloud + social + iPad—will inspire a new generation of wildly innovative new apps that will change entire industries.

Our industry has gone through many shifts, but ultimately, the big ones have always been about software, not hardware. Now, we are seeing a simultaneous software and hardware revolution. The key apps we use in productivity, collaboration, communication, entertainment, education, and even health, will all be rewritten to take advantage of the new capabilities. This will result in a new generation that looks more like Facebook on the iPad than Yahoo on the PC. Our industry is changing. We all need to step up to meet this change head-on or we will leave an incredible opportunity behind.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff gets it.  Its not about the hardware or software, its about the profound impact a device like the iPad can have by being the missing link to ignite the next revolution.

There has been much debate recently about the level of exposure a brand should have on various social networks.  Since we’re at the early stages of measuring the effectiveness of these environments, most organizations who are skeptical have used one of two approaches:

a.) “Whack a mole” approach of spreading their company’s name all across the social web.

b.) Refusing to participate in the conversation.

Both usually end up in the same place…. an assertion social networking was not built for their particular niche.

We try and take a simple, grassroots approach to determining a course of action for when/how/if a brand should be developing a community.  We have boiled it down to one question – “Are you in business to make money?”  My reasoning? All of your customers are already living in these various social communities, sharing sentiment about issues, products, brands.  How long can you pretend otherwise?

We will concede, social media optimization is a complicated endeavor for any brand, and opening yourself up to potential critics can give any exec a sour taste.  However, the conversation is happening, so the question remains; Is it better to engage, make mistakes, admit those mistakes, and move on, or to ignore the conversation entirely?  The answer is definitely not as simple as you are hoping for and will continue to be unique depending on the goals of your organization.

While the horror stories of failed attempts are starting to gain exposure, even this week Nestle’s Facebook Fan page was overrun by critics around deforestation. These are isolated cases, and should not be the case study for why a brand should resist social media because it exposes issues that already exist. Its simply the digital form of real-world protest. Over time, the power/beauty of social media will be its ability to quickly expose.   The important thing to remember is these social feeds are a direct extension of your brand’s image.  The same way it takes time to forge “real life” relationships, its takes equally as long to harvest “virtual” ones.

Most industries are continually impacted  by the emerging trends in digital and mobile media.  The industry everyone continues to point towards is the publishing industry – questions are abound regarding just how long they can sustain their current business model.  The million dollar question is, “What will publishing companies look like in the future?”  People I know working in the print world took solace after watching this holistic video of how teenagers engage with traditional media.

We hope you enjoy it (and make sure you watch it up to at least the halfway point, there’s a surprise!).

As our online lives continue to be viewed through the browser and saved in the cloud, I thought it would be interesting to outline our favorite plugins. Similar to social widgets, users can add tons of functionality and customization through browser add-ons or plugins, which can make your surfing life a lot easier.

Below are some of our favorite browser plugins.  We would love to hear what everyone else depends on.

Multifunctional:

• Instapaper – Like a blank sheet of paper, just save as you please in one click.
• Glims – Glims adds a cocktail of features to Safari (Tabs, Thumbnails, Full Screen, Search Engines, Search Suggestions, Forms autocomplete on, Dated download folders, Type Ahead …)  Its the Swiss Army Knife of browser plugins

Multimedia:

• Cooliris – This takes browsing multimedia on the web or desktop to an infinite “3D wall,”  allowing you to view the content without clicking page-to-page.
• Boxee – This is a home run for saving videos you find online with one simple click of the Boxee button in your browser.  You can also watch them from the Boxee portal on your TV.

Music:

• Extension FM – Create a music library in your browser and autofill it with the songs you come across on the web.  If you have a passion for music take a couple minutes and watch this overview
• Last.fm – The world’s largest online music catalog with free music streaming, videos, pictures, charts, artist biographies, concerts and internet radio. This has an amazing integration with Cooliris, mentioned above.

Sharing Content:

• Stumble Upon – One of the most popular social bookmarking sites makes it super simple to share web content over Twitter, Facebook, and save to StumbleUpon.
• Shareaholic - Available across all major browsers, the Shareaholic plugins allows for quick and dirty sharing across popular social nets, email, IM, and blogging platforms.

Exciting news  coming out of SXSW from Philadelphia based startup Nearverse.  The company’s “Lokast” iPhone app went live over the weekend in the Itunes Store and has already been generating some serious buzz.  The app uses proximity awareness to find other “Lokast” app users within a 300 ft radius and allows those users to connect for mobile file sharing of music, videos, pictures, contacts and even share browsing like a mobile Webex.

The possibilities are endless for sharing mobile content during conferences, meeting, concerts, sports games.  Sure, real time “casting” of thoughts through “# tags” or location through “check-ins” has changed the way we interact, but opening your mobile content and “Lokasting” is certainly taking proximity based mobile social apps to the next level.  This morning, we had the chance to chat with Nearverse’ CEO, Boris Bogatin, on where he thinks “Lokast” will fit in the scheme of things:

LoKast is making the iPhone a local social music hub, a social boombox. Everyone has an iPhone or iPod. What are you spinning today? And of course #byebyedemocd

Foursquare and Gowalla have exploded through an ego feeding game concept, encouraging users to “check-in” for social captial and badges.  Nearverse’ secret sauce is rewarding their users with real value, social rich media; the more “Lokast” users within proximity, the richer the experience becomes.  Viral in the truest sense…

Check out the sneak peak demo below:

While the Google Content Network can certainly provide an advertiser with huge click volume, if not managed correctly, content ads can quickly drain your budget with minimal results.  Below are a few best practices for managing Adwords campaigns within the Google Content Network:

Replicate Campaigns for Content Only:

From a campaign hierarchy perspective, I would recommend replicating your Search Network campaigns to Content Only campaigns and labeling them accordingly.  For example,  if you have a search campaign called “Golf Putters,” call the replicated Content Only campaign “Golf Putters: CONTENT.”

Use Data from Google Search Network:

Because the Google Content Network only gives you visibility down to the Adgroup level, its best to initially launch a Content Campaign with only your best performing Adgroups from the Search Network.  Next, I would pause all under performing keywords and ads from the Search Network Adgroups to ensure you’re transfering only the best performers to the Content Network. Finally, I would start by setting your bids at 50% lower than your Search Network campaigns, as conversion rates within the Content Network are typically much lower.

Negative Match Ad Placements:

At one point or another, we’ve all landed on a web page full of Adsense ads with little or no relative content.  Obviously, the likelihood of generating quality conversions from a domain park is low, so refining your ad placements is a key driver to Content Network success.  Similar to finding Negative Keywords, by running an Adwords Placement Report, you can start to negative match any non-converting content websites.