Big online retailers are still reaching far more users with their mobile websites than their mobile apps, Nielsen’s latest report shows.
The report was conducted on 5,000 U.S. smartphone users who participated in the research.
It shows that the combined reach for five big online retailers – Amazon, eBay, Target, Best Buy and Walmart – was around 50% of users for their mobile website, and around 25% of users for their mobile app in the period from October 2011 till January 2012. The combined reach averaged 52% to 59%.
Out of these five retailers, Amazon is by far the biggest, with its mobile website having a reach of over 15% in this period. It is followed by eBay with a 5% reach, and Walmart, Best Buy and Target, all of which have a reach lower than 5%. Interestingly enough, though, all of these retailers experienced a healthy reach “bump” on Black Friday, except eBay, whose bump was significantly less noticeable.
Finally, Nielsen’s report unveils a gender discrepancy between the mobile website visitors of these five retailers. Best Buy is predominantly visited by males (61%), while females (65% of them, to be exact) prefer Target. Walmart’s mobile website is also preferred by females, while eBay and Amazon are equally preferred by male and female visitors.
Image credit: Nielsen
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Whether they’re teaching classes about authentic Moroccan tagine cooking or how to live rent-free in New York City, peer-to-peer learning startupSkillshare lets its users market their classes online.
Now it also wants to be a place where brands, smallbusinesses, non-profits and other organizations can market classes taught by their employees.
The startup launched branded hubs for organizations called “schools” this week. Its first partner for the new feature is GE, which launched a traveling workshop for teaching people how to use power tools (and other classes) at South by Southwest.
Brands list the classes their employees are teaching on Schools pages. They can also choose to feature classes from other Skillshare users. GE didn’t pay for its branded hub, but eventuallySkillshare plans to turn the feature into a new revenue stream.
Small businesses have from the beginning used their Skillshare profile pages and classes to promote themselves. However, accounts designed for individuals don’t serve the needs of large organizations.
Establishing “schools” in addition to “classes” increases both Skillshare’s potential offerings and profits.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock, skillshare, sxsw
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Working from home is on the rise, and more companies are trusting their employees to be more productive in their own home offices than they might be at the workplace.
Digging deeper, Wrike, a company that makes collaboration software (so it has a stake in this game), conducted a survey with 1,074 rehttp://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331533190.jpgondents, asking them a variety of questions about working from home.
The results showed that telecommuting is far more prevalent than we thought. In fact, 83% of the rehttp://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331533190.jpgondents said they work remotely at least part of the day.
Some of us here at Mashable have considerable experience with working at home — many of us work at home at least 20% of the time, and some of our far-flung global staff telecommute 100% of the time. For instance, I’ve been working from my home office for various online sites for the past 12 years, with no ill effects thus far.
Working from home is not for everyone, but for many of us, it turns out to be more productive — ehttp://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331533190.jpgecially when doing highly concentrated activities such as writing, editing and researching — than it is in a room full of beloved colleagues. But it’s not all sweetness and light. See the infographic below for accurate examples of the drawbacks.
Beyond those details, find out even more fun facts about the telecommuting revolution in this cute chart, and then let us know in the comments what you think about working from home. Do you believe telecommuting will become more prevalent in the coming years?
Infographic courtesy Wrike.com/Tony Keller
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Virtual business card company CardFlick is giving its products a new look with the introduction of InstaCards, a web-based feature that now allows you to createvirtual business cards using your Facebook and Instagram photos.
Cards created using the service can be shared — or “flicked” — to others who are using the app, as well as emailed to new or existing contacts. CardFlick has been downloaded more than 80,000 times, and according to founder Ketan Anjaria, the average InstaCard user shares those cards eighttimes a week versus the roughly two shares a traditional card built on the app sees.
“Design separates the best,” Anjaria told Mashable, “When you meet people, your first impression is everything.”
CardFlick is part of a growing number of virtual business cardapps. In November, LinkedIn announced CardMunch, an app that allows you to take a picture of a traditional paper business card you receive and then save the content of the card as a contact in your phone. The app also integrates information from a person’s LinkedIn profile into the experience, so you can instantly see education and work experiences you might have in common with the person.
SEE ALSO: Is It Time To Finally Ditch Your Paper BusinessCards?
If you’re excited about the prohttp://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419761.jpgect of putting your Facebook pictures on cards but aren’t ready to go virtual, the company Moo also started offering paper business cards this year designed to mimick your Facebook Timeline. There are also quite a few other unique traditional business card companies out there that can help you create memorable paper business cards.
Do you think virtual business cards on on their way to replacing their papercounterparts? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.
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The overflow of quick and witty reaction tweets to the new iPadname proves a name is never just a name. This applies for domain names, too. Here are tips to help you avoid these classic dot-com disasters — poolife.com, therapistsfinder.com or IPallover.com.
DomainNameSales.com, a name registration and web hosting company, created an infographic to teach brands domainname 101.
The first tip is to invest in your domainname as you would secure a primary location for a storefront.
“Don’t cut corners with your online identity,” says Frank Schilling, founder of DomainNameSales.com and an Internet entrepreneur. “A betterdomainname will lower your lifetime marketing costs.”
A great example of this is Diapers.com, which gets an average of 106 million unique visitors. More than half of these visitors found the site by using “diapers” as a search term. It’s the first thing that comes up on Google before a Wikipedia article about diapers, Walmart.com and Amazon.com.
Short, generic, descriptive and memorable adjectives make great website domains. Skip dashes, long names, broken language and made-up terms.
Many businesses make a mistake by quickly choosing to go with a name rather than weighing all the options, Schilling says.
SEE ALSO: Tea Party Domain Name Could Fetch $1 Million
Using a company name such as MagnoliasCupcake.com may be an obvious choice, but not the right one. Shorter, more memorable names like mycupcake.com and ilovecupcakes.com can make a difference.
Schilling said you should ask, “What message does your domain send?” when considering a branded domain or generic domain.
“Cupcakes.com may not be for everyone,” he said. “But owning the bold, generic single word or multi-word phrase that describes your services sends a powerful message to competitors and industry.”
Just as Facebook has secured numerous anti-Facebook or common Facebook.com typos, Schilling said you should do secure domain names for your brand — or someone you love. The domain guru registered a domainname 10 years ago for his 10-year-old nephew.
“The 7 billionth person has just been born on this planet and, in 10 years, he too will want an email address,” he says. “All these people will eventually ahttp://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419748.jpgire to own better names. The time to secure those better names is now.”
What crazy domain names have you seen on the Internet? Tell us in the comments.
Thumbnail courtesy of Flickr, liquene
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The Spark of GeniusSeries highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by MicrosoftBizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Quick Pitch: A one-stop, constantly updating database of social media’s most influential athletes in different http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419715.jpgorts and leagues.
Genius Idea: As social continues to permeate http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419715.jpgorts, brands, fans and players will want to quickly know who wields the most power online.
Sports and social media are becoming more and more intertwined. Twitter has become central for fan conversation. Brands routinely use Facebook for http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419715.jpgorts-themed promotions. Teams are even beginning to pick up on Pinterest. And players are all over social networks.
But there are few one-stop shops to quantify and analyze which athletes are working the social web best. TweetStarGame aims to fill that void.
The site ranks players in different http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419715.jpgorts, leagues and divisions according to Klout score, and creates “starting lineups” based on whose numbers are highest. The site’s 25-year-old founder Caleb Mezzy hopes it eventually becomes a go-to source for information on the intersection of http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419715.jpgorts and social.
“Ultimately, we want to become similar to what ESPN is for player stats,” he says.
For now, TweetStarGame is very much in startup mode. Mezzy runs it with the help of two friends on top of his day job in social media, but the site has gained some attention recently in the world of http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419715.jpgorts blogging since launching in earnest just before the new year. Before the Super Bowl, Klout itself actually sourced the TweetStarGame’s organized data for an infographic on which teams and players were best on Twitter.
Mezzy also says TweetStarGame can provide value for companies looking for potential endorsers because “a brand can go in and see which players are most influential in their territory — for example just the National League Central — instead of having to search through each individual Klout score.”
Building the site’s profile and influence are the main focus for now, Mezzy says, then revenue streams will become more of a priority. The site recently launched a store featuring t-shirts of players’ Twitter handles — a funny and appropriate take on the popular “shirsey” apparel genre that crosses t-shirts with jerseys.
While it still has a ways to go before becoming a viable business, TweetStarGame is an interesting idea extremely appropriate for the modern http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419715.jpgorts zeitgeist. If players themselves buy in to its rankings and actually compete for high rankings, however, the site could become huge.
Do you think TweetStarGame can become a success? Let us know in the comments.
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of GeniusSeries highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by MicrosoftBizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoftdevelopment tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
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Brent Daily is finally contributing to the GDP again as a founder of RoundPegg, a company culture intelligence platform that quantifies culture to helpcompanies hire for culture fit and engage employees.
You’re really good at what you do, but you were just passed over for a job that you would have killed. So what.
The typical hiring process is fantastically dysfunctional. There is little that’s right, so it feels quite random and unfair if you don’t land the gig. And that stings because we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking the job and the company were perfect (and we hate losing).
We never imagine what it would have been like to work there after the honeymoon period fizzled.
As the great philosopher George Costanza once said, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” But failing to do our own diligence has its costs.
I know because I’ve also been willing to overlook red flags in order to win a job. And after “winning” the job at a then-hot startup, I proceeded to be miserable and an awful contributor for the next 7 months and 17 days. The light bulb went off when driving to work a stoplight turned from green to yellow. My body physically went slack with relief as I realized this was 45-seconds less that I’d have to http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419671.jpgend in the office that day*. But those 227 days cost me:
Confidence, which http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419671.jpgilled over to our initial failed attempts to raise money (I wasn’t going to work for someone else again) and took almost two years to regain.
Motivation to engage in the other important areas of my life — family, exercise and hobbies.
Opportunity to positively advance my knowledge, rehttp://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419671.jpgonsibilities and personal brand.
Neither my knowledge nor my skill set had changed, and yet I was a brilliant failure.
There is more to our professional success than having the chops, and it comes back to how well we fit the company culture, the team’s work dynamics and our manager’s style. The best thing you can do when finding your next employer is to dig deep and conduct your own interview. Odds are the hiring manager isn’t going to be able to articulate the culture or how they operate so you have to get your hands dirty to get a better feel for whether it is the right place for you. Specifically:
Decision-Making. Who makes the decisions, how are they made, who gets credit?
Feedback and Rewards. How and when can you be expected to get feedback? What do the top performers do to be considered such?
Team Dynamics. What needs fixing? What are the expectations of new team members? What’s a meeting sound like (i.e. thoughtful, raised voices)? How does the team operate with other groups?
Management. Is your manager a top performer or is your star going to dim simply by being in his/her orbit? How does the manager resolve differences on the team? How does the manager divvy up assignments?
And then:
Drop Your Preconceived Notions. Every company operates differently, which is often at odds with the consumer-facing brand. Chances are, what you think you know is wrong.
Listen Critically. Everyone is trying to sell you on the job. Pretend like you’re buying a new car and read between the lines on everything.
Probe. Ask for http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419671.jpgecific examples and don’t settle for platitudes. You’re making a decision that will consume 70% of your waking hours.
Landing a job is less important than landing a job at the right company for you. Take back some control over the process, interview everyone on the team and don’t hesitate to be the first one to say, “It’s not you, it’s me.”
* Realizing how stupid this was; I quit before lunch.
Social Media Job Listings
Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!
Sr. MarketingManager, Audience Development- RealSimple.com at Time Inc. in New York City
Web Producer at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Washington, D.C.
Social Media Manager at Buildon in San Francisco
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Looking for happiness? Now there’s a map for that.
Mobile web app Happstr lets users mark the locations at which they’re happy on a map and browse for happy http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419651.jpgots left by others nearby.
It was built last week during a mobile hackathon called The Startup Bus. The team of six entrepreneurscompleted the project en route to South by Southwest.
Here’s how it works: When users are feeling happy, they navigate to the Happstr mobile site, where they find a huge pink button labeled “feeling happy?” Since they are feeling happy, they push the button.
The app asks for explanation for the happiness, but those reasons stay private for now. Other users, which thanks to Twitter already include people from all over the world, just see a happy balloon at that http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419651.jpgot on the map.
Why build a happiness map? The Startup Bus answer, co-creator Ricky Robinett says, is that people might one day pay to track their happiness like they do their fitness. There’s also an opportunity for brands to http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331419651.jpgonsor some happiness.
But, at least when he’s not competing in a contest for which business model is a criteria, Robinett says Happstr is really just a sincere effort at making the world a better place. He’s worked on similarly amusing (and profitless) hacks before, creating, for instance, a game that pits the five boroughs of New York City against each other in a Foursquare-enabled game of Risk.
Other entrepreneurs on the bus suggested adding other emotions — like anger — to Happstr, but the team refused.
“The real idea is helping people be happier, and that would not help them do that,” Robinett says.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, skynesher
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Online marketers might think they have mastered the art and science of reaching out to their home audience, but many still struggle with connecting to those on an international level. Complications with search engine marketing on this scale can hinder companies from reaching their maximum brand and revenue potential due to language barriers and simply not giving global search marketing the care it needs.
“Search marketing is a zero-sum game — we are all competing for visibility in the same limited amount of http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331341528.jpgace on the results pages,” search expert Anne F. Kennedy told Mashable. “If a company can provide clear signals to search engines, they will rise above the confusion, and it will open up more opportunities for savvy search marketers.”
Mashable http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331341528.jpgoke with Kennedy and Kristjan Mar Hauksson — co-authors of the upcoming book “Global Search Engine Marketing: Fine-Tuning Your International Search Engine Results” — during the 2012 Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference in Iceland about how businesses should approach online marketing to customers in different countries and in differentlanguages.
SEE ALSO: 6 Best Practices for Modern SEO | 20+ EssentialResources for Improving Your SEO Skills
Many international businesses don’t show up on U.S.-based search engines. Why?
Kennedy: In order to show up on Google, a business has to make it clear which country the content is intended for. Google has a pretty clear set of procedures for this, which — in our experience — many internationalcompanies ignore because they don’t know better or set sites up based on what they think is easiest.
Hauksson: In many ways, it’s like any SEO model when sites are built without taking the limitations of search engines into account. The bottom line is to make a clear path for search engines to follow.
What are some of the major challenges for international companies to successfully show up in search results?
Kennedy: We see a lot of confusion in the search engines results in differentlanguages. For example, a search may dihttp://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331341528.jpglay a site in Spain for a search in Mexico. Words can vary greatly in meaning from country to country, particularly in Latin America. That is why using a country coded top-level domain — also known as “ccTLD” — is important for companies. This is a unique two-letter sequence of characters assigned to a country or geographical area to identify it in a domain name, such as “.com,” “.uk,” “.de” and so on.
It is very helpful to geo-target websites for http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331341528.jpgecific countries with Google Webmaster Tools and Google AdWords. That is essential for sites with international domains, but you cannot geo-target a region in Webmaster Tools, such as the European Union or Asia. Google recognizes the domains “.eu” and “.asia” as regional — not country- or language-http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331341528.jpgecific.
How should companies approach international search marketing?
Kennedy: International search marketing should incorporate basic marketing principles. Start by understanding the target market, http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331341528.jpgeak your customers’ language and become familiar with the media there. Google and Facebook are dominant in the majority of countries worldwide, but in some big markets such as China, South Korea, Japan and Russia, other media platforms might be a better fit.
Hauksson: The wrong approach is to simply translate U.S.-based content without incorporating cultural and language nuances of the target market. Approach each country as a unique entity with culture-http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331341528.jpgecific strategies and key performance indicators for each. One-size-fits-all won’t work and could even damage your brand overseas.
How can companies better target local audiences?
Hauksson: Turn to local experts. Find a native http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331341528.jpgeaker of the target country and “localize” the strategy and content. Consider revising your design and graphics for individual markets and even the color scheme. A local can help you discover which design features might work best.
How can companies use web analytics to track performance of marketing campaigns in different languages?
Hauksson: Approach it as you would with any language. The main problem is that you might not understand the keywords around referring traffic and the context of it in relation to the landing pages.
Kennedy: Having a team member that understands the language is always best, but you can also use Google Translate to get a general overview of what is being said and then take action based on that.
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This post is brought to you by HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company based in Cambridge, MA, that makes a full platform of marketing software, including marketing automation tools. For more information on http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331341513.jpgonsored posts, read here.
If social media is where it’s at (and it is) and mobile is where things are headed (and they are), then it’s the intersection of social and mobile where you — and your marketing — want to be. That’s the sweet http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331341513.jpgot. A study from Juniper Research shows the number of socially active users on mobile devices will rise from 650 million in 2011 to 1.3 billion in 2016.
Make the most of your inbound marketing by learning where the social-mobile sweet http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331341513.jpgot is and using it to your advantage. Here’s how:
1. Be socially correct. Align your mobile initiatives with social media best practices. Remember, social media is best when it creates a dialogue between your brand and the consumer and a discussion among your customers about your brand. Content for the social-mobile http://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331341513.jpgace should drive conversations. Keep it short and sweet on Twitter, fill it out a bit on Facebook and use low-res photos or short videos when engaging on social media platforms on mobile devices.
2. Maximize mobility capabilities.Social mobile initiatives should be mindful of how mobile devices are used. Incorporate voice, SMS, cameras and location-based features whenever it makes sense to do so.
3. Be content-lite. Engage with content maximized for people on the go. People use their mobile devices to search for immediate needs — pizza now, latte later — and for snack-sized snippets of information that help them make decisions, often in-store with cash or credit card in hand. Your social media content should address those needs in encapsulated form.
4. Point the way. Make the connections to your social media presence obvious in your mobile tactics. Be sure the ability to tweet, follow, “like” or connect is not only prominent, but encouraged.
5. Think in layers.Social networking is about the engagement between consumers and your brand. Mobile is about the device itself, timeliness and location. Layer mobile device functionality and purpose over social media’s strong suit of building long-term relationships. Create campaigns that include geography and immediacy and foster conversations about your brand, products and services.
6. Reward winners. Use your inbound marketing platform to find your best social sharing customers — the influencers who give your content and your brand the most bang for your buck. Then, give them incentives to share even more about your brand with their network, optimized for mobile.
7. A holistic approach. Being social and mobile doesn’t mean abandoning everything else you know about inbound marketing; in fact, just the opposite. It’s more critical in social-mobile marketing than perhaps anywhere else. First, understand what your customers prefer in social media and on mobile devices. Then, define your social-mobile goals. Make sure your social-mobile tactics fall in line with those goals. Provide value and relevance, and content that is interesting, engaging and timely.
The connection between social media and mobile grows stronger every day. Your job is to leverage that connection by engaging your customers and prohttp://www.thesociety.org.au/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1331341513.jpgects using the best practices these two have to offer.
(This post is brought to you by HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company based in Cambridge, MA, that makes a full platform of marketing software, including marketing automation tools. The content was written by Jeanne Hopkins, VP of Marketing at HubSpot, who co-authored Go Mobile with Jamie Turner, founder of 60 Second Marketer. Go Mobile012/03/1331341513.jpgonsored posts, read here.)
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