Think e-mail is dead? Think again. Research released today finds that the rate at which online consumers are increasing email usage is more than double the rate for emerging media like social media and text messaging,

Featured in the ExactTarget 2009 Email Utilization Whitepaper, the research found a positive correlation among consumer usage of email, instant messaging, social networks and text messaging, dispelling myths that the explosion of social media and texting will overtake traditional email usage.

“The total number of social media users is rapidly increasing, but often these users jump in quickly, only to curtail their use of social media over time,” said Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget`s director of research and strategy. “Email on the other hand, is woven into all online interaction, making it an essential tool that consumers continue to use more and more.”

The increase in consumer email usage is not only tied to its close-knit
relationship with social media. Smartphones are driving increased usage of email as well, even among the elusive college demographic.

“Nearly 40 percent of students use smartphones and two-thirds of those use email,” said Mike Hanley, director of the Institute for Mobile Media Research in the study. “The increased use of mobile email is significant because it reverses the five-year trend of declining email use among college students.”

The complete 2009 Email Utilization Whitepaper is free and available for download online here.

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• Social Media Drives Increased Email Use (marketingvox.com)

The Wall Street Journal will begin charging consumers as much as $2 a week to access its news coverage via mobile device.

Rupert Murdoch, CEO of parent firm News Corp., said it will impose mobile fees within the next month or two. Murdoch did say that subscribers to the Journal’s print edition would only be charged $1 a week for mobile web access, with the $2 weekly fee applying to non-subscribers.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the few major U.S. newspapers requiring premium subscriptions for its online content – the publication currently boasts more than 1 million online subscribers. The Journal introduced a free mobile news application in February 2008, followed six months later by the WSJ.com Mobile Reader, a free app optimized for BlackBerry smartphones. The Journal’s free iPhone app debuted in April 2009.

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• Wall Street Journal to begin charging for on-the-go access (mobilecrunch.com)

The other month Sysomos identified that 5% of Twitter users account for the vast majority of activity, which would put Twitter’s active user base at around 2.5 million (60% in the US), as opposed to the 50 million odd registered accounts.

This chart that I picked up via Cheap Talk and Michael Nielsen confirms this – 75% of users have less than ten followers and I’d argue that Twitter first really becomes useful when you have 20-50 followers upwards.

Interestingly enough, the break through appears to happen in week two. If someone is still tweeting in their second week, it’s more likely than not that they will hang around.

That two week incubation period seems to be the thing for Twitter to zero in on if they want to bring down the high rate of churn – something that needs to happen before it really does meet its stated aim of becoming “the pulse of the planet.”

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• Interesting Twitter Usage Stats (myventurepad.com)
• Twitter’s power users. Who are they? (thisisherd.com)
• Twitter statistics that make you go “hmmmm” (downloadsquad.com)

Online banking is steadily growing in popularity among Canadians at these of other forms of banking, according to Synovate’s latest retail banking survey.

Only 17.6% of Canadian personal banking customers used automated telephone banking – which does not involve a live telephone banking representative – during the past six months ending in August 2009, compared with 19.5% during the same period in 2008. Similarly, only 16.2% of respondents used a live telephone banking rep this year, compared with 17.4% in 2008.

However, online banking was used by 61.9% of personal banking customers this year, up from 60% last year.

Image via Wikipedia

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• Global Broadband statistics – connections still increasing in all regions (nickburcher.com)
• Forrester: 2.2 billion people online globally by 2013 (news.cnet.com)

When you are in an agency pitch it’s almost impossible not to use the ‘f’ word – Facebook. It almost makes my heart sink as it can seem like ticking the ‘and then there’s Facebook’ box, when you know there are more creative routes of getting the message out online.

But this chart shows why it is unavoidable and it all comes down to the numbers.

Facebook is the only truly pan-European social network, with user numbers (according to Inside Facebook) having reached almost 100 million by the end of September.

Indeed, if you are planning an online marketing campaign that works across the continent it’s key, with separate Comscore stats (from April 09) showing that Facebook is the market leader in 11/17 European markets – notable exceptions being Germany, the Netherlands and Russia, with Facebook’s market share still being relatively low in the latter.

As before the top Facebook country remains the UK, though the network is becoming ever more popular in Turkey, with 1+ million users having been added in September alone.

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A few months ago, we discussed how mobile music is evolving from ring tones to new music services.   However, it’s not easy to find the right model to generate revenue in this market.

In September, the iPhone app Spotify was launched to the Apple app store, allowing users to access music playlists on their phone as part of the £9.99 ad-free monthly subscription.  However, the reactions were very mixed.  From the 1800 consumer reviews on the first day of the launch, there were 400 people giving the maximum of 5 stars, but no less than 1100 giving it only one star.
According to a survey among readers of the British website nma.co.uk, 2 out of 3 is not willing to pay for streaming music.

Mark Mulligan, VP and research director at Forrester Research, said the mobile music market is a tough challenge and no one has yet cracked it. “Consumers have generally said they have no appetite for paying for streaming music and there’s endless evidence that they won’t buy music they don’t own. So realistically, for Spotify, the aspiration should be to convert a small number of people to premium via the mobile app,” he said.

But a Spotify spokesman told NewMediaAge the company wasn’t surprised by consumers’ responses to the app. “We always knew the majority of users would stay on the free service,” he said. “We’re getting a lot of traffic from people used to free illegal downloads, so they expect us to be free. We’ve only launched on the iPhone and Android for now, so that’s just a small percentage of the market, although we’re confident a fair number will upgrade.”

Meanwhile, Napster, the illegal-gone-legal music service has reacted to the Spotify launch by halving the price of its streaming service to £5 a month.

Who will win this competition?  Or will consumers stick to their illegal downloads, still found everywhere online…?

More than half of the country’s collective workforce (51%) is mobile on any given day but most companies have no idea how much it costs them.  Those are among the findings of the 2009 Total Employee Mobility Benchmarking Report, released today by Runzheimer International.  The annual report was developed through interviews with executives from 90 small, mid-sized and large organizations across the U.S.

Here are the key findings:

• Fifty-one percent (51%) of the workforce is mobile on any given day, whether traveling, working from a virtual office or driving for business. This number has increased by 31 percent since 2006.
• Total investment in workforce mobility per-employee, per-year has increased significantly in the last four years, and currently stands at $7,426. This number increased by three percent year-over-year and is significant when compared to budget cuts companies have enforced in areas like IT Security, HR Training, Marketing and Legal Counsel this year.
• Businesses lack insight into management of employee mobility programs. In the case of virtual office programs, 73 percent of respondents have no policies in place and 57 percent were unable to provide support cost information. Sixty-four percent (64%) of organizations reported that corporate travel costs were loosely managed.
• Mobile workforce program ownership often involves multiple departments. More than 80 percent of employees fall into multiple categories of drivers, travelers and virtual office and often need to interact with three-to-four different departments regarding policy and systems.
• In many cases, companies are not aware if the money they are spending on employee mobility is benefitting the organization. In the case of virtual office programs, 56 percent are unaware if the programs they have instituted are productive.

Much has been written on how innovative ideas are born, evolved and tested first on consumers before they make their way into the enterprise. We have seen it with Web 2.0 and social media and social networking.  This is absolutely true and the consumer market proves to be a wonderful and invaluable living lab for the enterprise.  In most cases the enterprise doesn’t have a choice since after the consumer market tests and likes something they take it to work!

Becoming A Better Mobile Application Developer for Consumers

Today I am going to propose something that will go the other way instead. It goes backwards (so to speak) from the enterprise to the common folk out there. If you learn this small and valuable lesson you will become a better developer of mobile consumer applications. You may not become a rock star in the App Store overnight but your hard work will pay off in the end way after the rock star’s have faded. Your applications will be more relevant, meaningful and useful to the end user.

I made the following point a few days ago:

…if we want to talk specifically about mobile workers the conversation cannot revolve around any one of the above points. Instead it needs to focus on one thing:

the mobile worker as part of a process that adds value to your organization

I was trying to drive the point that you you need to focus on the user and their process if you are going to build a mobile application that will add value to an organization.  Don’t mobilize for the sake of mobilizing!  Do so because it adds value.

From Workflow to Lifeflow

If you are developing in the enterprise you do (or you should) a careful process analysis of those roles you are going to mobilize.  You study the workflow – the steps involved to produce that product or deliver that service…

Crude and Simple Workflow

I have seen a lack of rigour and structure among far too many mobile application developers. The App Store has not helped matters since now everyone wants to develop for that shiny object in the room.  A shiny, distracting object!

If we look at the consumer the same way we look at a field worker, a sales person or any other type of mobile worker I believe we would have better, more user-friendly and truly relevant mobile consumer applications.  You can’t really study someone’s life to the extent that you study a process … but you can certainly take the context and given situations, study and analyze those.  I could almost bet that the best consumer applications out there were either done by studying lifeflows or by folks with a deep understanding and first hand experience of how those flows go (because they lived them).

Crude … but definitely not simple Lifeflow!

Even though I can write for hours about this subject I am not going to… Today I will drop this on you and if there is some interest out there in helping me explore some use cases then maybe we will continue this topic.   If not I will just take my little flow and go home.

(What I would really like to do is start a repository of Lifeflows so others can use these for development purposes… I know it is a stretch… anyone?)

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