Speaking Sensis

Sensis’ experience of its successful foray into the mobile space was presented at the recent Digitech conference in Sydney – and it proved to be a significant reality check for someone like me.

As a web analyst for Sensis’ mobile websites and Android/iPhone applications, I am a mobile fanatic, but even I was taken aback by the overwhelming interest in the medium, with a flurry of questions throughout my presentation and many fascinating follow-up conversations.

And if the number of Twitter followers and re-tweets of the event is any indication, mobile has become way more interesting to many more people in recent years. 

Why you ask?

Well, it’s no wonder. Reports from the recent Mobile Marketing Association Forum showed that there are six times more mobile devices in Asia compared to PC’s and by 2012, Disney projects that 50% of its engagement will be via mobile devices

Also:

• 40 million in China pay to get news alerts;

• 1 in 3 Google searches are mobile in nature; and

• The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has more than 200 per cent mobile phone penetration. That’s the world’s highest, which means that on average everyone in the UAE has at least two mobile devices. 

And the list goes on!

Mobile’s unique ability to connect businesses with consumers has been expounded upon frequently over the past few years, but it’s really in 2012 that we’re finally seeing the much heralded tipping point in terms of usage. Sensis’ mobile portfolio continues to see outstanding growth and in May it saw 3 million visits during the course of the month.

So what makes mobile so unique?

Firstly, mobile is one of the most personal devices we have. It reaches us in our sleep and wakes us up. It is permanently connected and if there is one thing that we carry with us at all times, it is more than likely to be our mobile phone.

In fact, did you know that half of all Finnair passengers check in via their mobile device? And that in Kenya, there are more mobile banking accounts in than other account type.

Available at the point of creative impulse, mobile measures its audience accurately (by some estimates ten times more accurately than other media). Sophisticated tools allow Sensis to measure all high value usage activities we are delivering to advertisers and functions such as seamless click-to-call provides directions, allows details to be saved to contacts, advertiser photo galleries views and listings sharing with friends to name a few.

Mobile use will continue to grow.  In fact, Mobile usage now makes up 12 per cent of all digital usage, which is double last year’s share.

Yellow Pages® Mobile continues to deliver an outstanding experience for users. For businesses that continue to invest in the mobile space, this is good news for them. And for those business who are sitting on the fence, perhaps it’s time you searched for this, or followed this list.

In his first blog for Speaking Sensis, Sensis Group Manager for Yellow Pages® Online & Mobile Product Simon Betschel announces that the latest release of Yellow Pages® Mobile has gone live.

I am excited to announce that the latest release of Yellow Pages® Mobile has gone live, featuring improvements for our advertisers and users.

The release is the culmination of many months work from the mobile development team and it delivers user and advertiser features.

Premium advertisers will be able to include a business logo, image gallery and a new text descriptor. 

Advertisers will also have access to new online and mobile combined summary reports that will demonstrate any improvements to return on investment resulting from extended customer reach.

For users, the new features are mainly targeted to high end devices and focus on improving search accuracy and aligning the online and mobile user experience.

The changes include:

Auto-suggest Type, Name and Location – reducing the number of keystrokes required to enter a search term on a mobile, and time to task for users.  To support this and the search changes, the team developed Hint Text which can also be reused across other mobile sites;

New Maps for iPhone, iPad and Android – now users can pinch to zoom and swipe to pan.  This now takes maps to a world benchmark position for mobile browser based maps;

Seamless Click to Call – enabling calls on high end devices to be actioned immediately and capturing these metrics to report back to our advertisers; and

We will also be releasing new versions of our iPhone and Android apps, and providing iPad support.

This has without a doubt been the largest release of Yellow Pages® Mobile since its inception three years ago and demonstrates just how far internet on the mobile has come in that time.

Sensis was the “book-ends” to the Australian newspaper’s Business section on Monday, with a feature interview with Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst (read it here) on the front page and a piece with Chief Operating Officer Gerry Sutton (read it here) in the Media section on the back page.

Both pieces touched on the opportunities digital media was providing Sensis and its Yellow Pages® business, with the focus squarely on the iPad as the latest digital device to take the media industry by storm. As discussed by Bruce and Gerry, the exciting prospect for the iPad is the value Sensis can help deliver to end users and ultimately our small and medium sized business customers.

Add to that the impressive strides Sensis has made with its presence in other digital channels such as online, the iPhone, Android devices and Telstra’s T-Hub, and you can see how technology is opening new worlds and chapters for Yellow Pages® and its users and advertisers.

The revolution mobile technology is bringing to the way people find, buy and sell reminds me of the proverb “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.

What brought this to mind was a recent survey that found that maps are one of the most popular applications on mobile devices today. The comScore MobiLens survey identified an almost 70 per cent jump in the use of mobile mapping and direction services last year. In February this year, it found that more than 21 million people in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy used their phones for navigation.

If maps are such a useful and in demand application, it’s easy to understand why they are now a key selling feature for someone upgrading their handset.

No wonder Nokia is advertising free navigation on all of its new smartphones as a way of winning back market share lost to iPhone, Blackberry and phones with Google’s Android system.

In 1997, Sensis (then Pacific Access) kicked off market research into the concept of enhanced map routing from the static maps found on the Online White Pages® and Yellow Pages® sites.

The objective of this research was to understand how people planned journeys, used maps and their features, and what information would be required to provide a great experience. At the time this new technology was seen as a great feature to encourage usage of our online directories and also allowed us new page impressions on which to sell banner advertising.

The basics back then are much the same as today. People told us they wanted information about the best route and one that incorporated local knowledge. They told us that they wanted location specific information and really only needed help for parts of the journey they were not so familiar with.

But, with all the features from mapping, directions and turn by turn voiced navigation being provided free of charge, the subscription and advertising models of today are under pressure.

New ways of monetising the features will need to be developed. So we need to look back to see the future. Clues to what might be new advertising models might just lie in that 1997 research report on my desk.

Journeys aren’t just about getting from A to B, people want to do it safely, avoid incidents and have a smooth journey.

Features like real-time traffic and alternate routes can be sponsored, much the same as traffic reports are on the radio.

Users want to know information of value on their journey, such as fuel prices, where to eat, where to pick up some flowers or where to find an all night chemist.

Again, these features can be monetised through different advertising models.

Advertisers might pay to become navigation points on a map, just as our survey found13 years ago.

Special offers might encourage purchase along the journey, who wouldn’t stop at the convenience store for a cheap burger! If your planned travel is for a few hours drive, it’s likely you are going to want to eat at some stage.

Constant in all this change are our basic needs to complete a journey without fuss and bother. The tools to help us do this are getting more sophisticated and as a marketer, I am excited about the highly targeted opportunities we are going to be able to provide by knowing where an individual is, and where they are going, even the time of day they are travelling.

The chance to reach someone on the move and near your business seems much more exciting than someone with their feet up on the couch for the night.

Recently, there’s been a lot of strong talk about the future opportunities created by mobile technology.

The highly respected Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley recently said: “We believe more users may connect via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.” Eric Schmidt of Google was prompted to say: “If you want to understand the future of the internet, don’t think of it as pipes and tubes. Think of it broader as a mobile device.”

And Google Europe’s boss John Herlihy went a step further by saying: “In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant … In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.” While not everyone ascribes to Herlihy’s point of view, it does really underline the ‘mobile mania’ running through the industry at the moment.

So is this excitement justified? Simple answer - you bet!

First up, mobile Internet uptake has been extraordinary. The Sensis® eBusiness Report last year found that finding local products and businesses was the most popular use for mobiles with 41% searching for information on products and services and 36% searching for information on suppliers of products and services. By contrast, use for social networking is 40%.

And numbers are tipped to continue to grow and this will be borne out in the next Sensis® eBusiness Report, which will be out later this year. Usage of our mobile sites is also growing at a cracking pace. In 2009, usage of our mobile sites grew by 70% YoY.

 Mobiles – everyone has got one

Secondly, the headroom for growth is huge.

Globally there are currently about 3.2 billion mobile subscribers in the world and that number is expected to grow by at least a billion in the next few years. Today, mobile phones are more prevalent than cars (there’s about 800 million registered vehicles in the world) and credit cards (there’s only 1.4 billion of those). So significant has been there take up that fewer teens are now wearing watches because they use their phones to tell time. It could be safe to say that the mobile phone may be the most prolific consumer product to be invented.

Even in Australia there are more mobile services in operation than there are people!

Mobiles are evolving – rapidly

And thirdly, the mobile phones we have today are incredibly powerful, and getting moreso every month.

The first mobile internet connected device was launched in 1997.  The Synergy, launched by Philips, was the first smart phone on the market and while sales were poor, it paved the way for the smart phones of today.

And in 2000 Panasonic took things a step further with a converged gaming device and phone – a forerunner to the iPhone.  Again sales were poor and the phone was impossible to fit in your pocket, let alone the gaming console!  But these innovations helped shape where we are today.

The phones we use today are a totally different beast. In fact, behind all the cool applications is an engine that is probably ten times more powerful than the PC you had on your desk only 5 to 10 years ago.

And the whole mobile experience is just going to get better and better with new devices, new operating systems, like the Android and Apple’s OS4, and a never-ending stream of mobile apps.

The future …

But this is just the start. In fact, when you start to think about what’s coming in the coming five to ten years, the whole conversation starts to take on a distinctly Star Wars tone.

• Mobile internet will extend to new devices. Already we have seen the launch of iPad, NetBook, and Kindle – the next round of mobile connected devices will include in car Navigation systems;

• Solar powered phones – While there are already a few solar powered phones available today, we should expect to see them evolve quickly over the next 2 years with their primary goal to service third world countries and people who do not have access to electricity;

• Sixth Sense Technology – For me this is the most exciting mobile opportunity.  Imagine being able to project the content on your mobile phone onto a wall (or any surface for that matter) and use your hands to type emails, sort and share photos, read the newspaper and get shown the latest video content displayed onto the actual newspaper (yes the paper version)?  Oh and don’t forget that you’ll also be able to make phone calls, but they may change a little as well. Click here to look Sixth Sense Technology in action;

• Holographic screens – Do you remember in Star Wars when R2D2 mistakenly plays a holographic of Princess Leia saying: “Help me, Obi Wan. You’re my only hope”? Well we could expect that on our mobile devices in the next five to 10 years;

• Augmented reality – AR is live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment where elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery;

• Near Field Communications – the ability to scan your mobile at the point of sale to pay for goods; and

• Wearable technologies – like a mobile phone in your glasses. In fact, Apple just hired wearable technology expert, Richard DeVaul, as “Senior Prototype Engineer”.

So there’s definitely a lot of reason for the excitement about mobiles and its being driven by usage that’s now mainstream and technology that’s advancing at a rate of knots.

At the end of the day, the mobile phone will prove itself to be more than just another channel. It will be a game-change for the way businesses and consumers all over the world communicate.

Mobile phone apps – everyone is talking about them and everyone wants them.  Whether it be for playing games or finding a business, service or friend close by, people are jumping on the app band wagon and for good reason.

Apps, short for application software, add an increasing array of functions to mobile phones. At Sensis, our Yellow Pages® and White Pages® iPhone apps were some of the first on the Australian market, with the Yellow Pages® iPhone app being downloaded more than 300,000 times since its launch in August last year. The iPhone app has so far connected more than a quarter of a million people with businesses, and boosted Yellow Pages® Mobile usage by more than 50%.

And on the back of that success we have launched the Yellow Pages® Android app, which is now ready to be downloaded.   

To get the app on your Android phone, simply visit the Android Market and search for ‘Yellow Pages® Australia’ or ‘White Pages® Australia’ or follow these links from your Android phone:

• Yellow Pages® – market://details?id=au.com.sensis.mobile.android.yellow

• White Pages® – market://details?id=au.com.sensis.mobile.android.white

The free apps connect Android-enabled mobile phone users to all the helpful information that can be found at Yellow Pages® Mobile and White Pages® Mobile but enhanced with some features that leverage the enhanced capabilities of the Android platform like:

• Auto-location
  The GPS capability of Android devices allows you to search for businesses close to you. This means you don’t have to type in the location when you do a business search.

• Save to favourites and recent searches
  Create a list of favourite businesses within the app and include notes against listings i.e. “Café Grotto – great coffee, friendly service”. There’s also a list of your most recent searches.

• Auto-suggest categories
  When you start keying text for a business type search, suggestions are presented, meaning you don’t have to type the whole word if there is a match.

While the first Android devices were launched in Australia in early 2009, it will be another 12 months before they really take off.  At the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Richard Fink, Director Device Management & Operations at Telstra, announced  that the first Android handset, the HTC Desire, will be due in next month. 

“We have decided to include Android smartphones on our device roadmap now because there is real momentum building behind the platform. There is a growing range of excellent handsets to choose from, real maturity in the operating system and an ecosystem of around 20,000 apps (growing rapidly) — which gives customers unprecedented freedom to decide how their mobiles look and what they do.”