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.

With what seems like more iPhone apps in the market than iPhones in Australia, Citysearch has done the sensible thing and launched a makeover of Citysearch Mobile for pre-app mobile users. Why is this sensible? Well, there’s only about 1 million iPhones in use in Australia (no one except for Steve Jobs really knows for sure) which is a fairly small share of the market compared to the many millions of  other smart phone users out there.

At Citysearch, we are always working on great new ways to provide on-the-go content to our users and we are working with our majority market first.

If you haven’t actually used Citysearch Mobile – then stop reading, start using, then come back to reading – but if you have already used Citysearch Mobile, I’m about to give you another reason to smile. I’m talking about a mobile site that includes a new look and feel (I know that’s very car salesmany – but it’s true) more on-the-go content and updated Whereis Maps thanks to the map people over at Whereis Mobile.

On-the-go content is the thing we say at Citysearch when we want to pile into a couple of words all the stuff you need at your finger tips when you’re out – preferably in the city of your choice! We’re talking info on movies, restaurants, music and TV – with new additional content in the movie and TV sections like star ratings, images and links to more articles from news and reviews pages, plus a whole new section devoted to bars so you can find the best watering hole in your city – whether it’s a friendly pub with an open fire or your uber-trendy joint frequented by super models reality TV stars.   

Oh yeah – and here’s the great thing about all of this – it’s FREE to browse for Telstra 3G and Next G™ mobile customers and is also available on other mobile carriers across Australia who have a compatible mobile – which means more people can use our Citysearch entertainment portal – which makes the Citysearch team pretty happy people knowing we’re helping make the important decisions like where to eat, what to drink, what movie to see and which TV show to watch. 

In my blogclusion, I agree, that’s a lot of excitement in a little package on your mobile, but you can’t underestimate the need for that kind of information at your finger tips – presented in that shiny new car kind of way – and how greatly appreciated you’ll be among your friends when you’re the one capable of making the entertainment decisions on-the-go. 

Type in m.citysearch.com.au to your mobile and have a great time in your nearest capital city without an app in sight!  Remember to watch this blog for upcoming great announcements about our constant work to improve on-the-go content.
Cheers

Cath

Before I kick off today I’d like to take this opportunity to mention an industry first advertising product for iPhones launched by MediaSmart. Simon Canning at The Australian wrote about it today. You can read his article by clicking here. Sensis’ new interactive mobile ads product was launched to the market this week with Open Universities taking out the first campaign.

Mobility – advertising’s first portable medium

With the buzz surrounding the launch of the iPad in the US - claiming to have sold 300,000 of them in the first day! – now is a good time to touch on an area I feel will provide unprecedented opportunities for advertising agencies, brands and digital publishers in the months and years to come. That area is mobility. And with the launch and uptake of new devices, mobility means the web has become an anytime, anywhere proposition with obvious and exciting opportunities for the ad industry.

To provide you with some background to my thinking, the mobile internet has exploded over the last two years. It is now so large, mobile internet is now considered by many in the industry as mainstream. In December last year, our mobile network hit 2.5m visits for the first time, growing  70% YoY. And by ‘our mobile network’ I am talking about the Yellow Pages, White Pages, Whereis, Citysearch and Sensis Search mobile sites.

And let’s not forget about the continued growth of the BigPond mobile portal – these guys now enjoy more than 2m unique visits each month and the numbers keep growing!

To put this into perspective, after Yellow Pages Online was launched in 1995, it took  five years to reach half a million unique visitors a month. In comparison it’s taken Yellow Pages Mobile only two years to reach that number and White Pages Mobile, which was launched mid last year, has almost achieved that number in only six months.

Now that’s impressive growth by anyone’s standards.

The future of mobility

After Kindle was launched last year, Amazon advised that, on Xmas Day, they sold more e-books than printed books for the first time.

We’re seeing a raft of new touch screens being released onto the market, with the big one – Apple’s iPad – due to hit Aussie stores in the coming weeks and the critics predicting it will revolutionise the way content is accessed.

So we now have devices for almost every occasion and they’re all internet-enabled. From large screen TVs to tiny mobile phones. So what’s next? Accessories!

Will one device eventually control everything? The phone making all other devices its slave? Will all devices operate separately, drawing from the cloud? Or will the future be a hybrid of the two?

That leads me to discuss applications.

The application environment for mobiles is far richer than online in its early years. There are already thousands of apps, books, games etc in Apple’s App Store, we now have Kindle looking for applications. More than half of the White Pages Mobile usage I mentioned above is coming from iPhones.

Precision targeting – it’s now becoming a reality

In 2008, we launched customer profile targeting in mobile which means more efficient advertising for companies and more relevant content for users. With geo-targeting growing rapidly, location services one of the most used mobile apps through both mobile phones and sat nav devices.

Whereis continues to be our most popular mobile application as well as being very popular on the web and sat nav. These sites enable the search for services based on location and the targeting of people based on their location.

So the future of mobility is exciting – and we’re only just warming up.

Mark Shaw

Sensis’ China team this week returned to work after the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) holiday and we discovered some amazing statistics about the sheer size of mobile use in what is the world’s most populous nation.

As it is China that we are talking about, with a population of more than 1.3 billion, the numbers are always big. And while I have become accustomed to all of the millions and billions, the mobile use statistics from the week long holiday this year (February 14 to February 28) were just astounding. And here they are:

• a total of 23 billion SMS messages were sent – an average of 30.8 wireless messages sent per person based on the 747 million mobile phone users in China and a 10 per cent increase on the same period last year;
• 13 billion SMS messages were sent on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day alone; and
• a total of 1.33 billion MMS were sent during the seven-day holiday, with a 40 per cent increase on the same period last year – wow!

For those of you who have never experienced it, Spring Festival in China is a bit like Christmas in Australia, but, of course, with a lot more people and instead of cricket we have fireworks – lots of fireworks! So much so that 7480 fires were said to be caused by fireworks during the festival.

Only a comparatively small number of people remain in Beijing during the festival as many of the capital’s residents travel to their home towns to spend time with family. As such Beijing seems to become empty with shops closed and streets free of traffic. While there is still activity, it was only the endless fireworks that reminded me that the city was still inhabited. It is an amazing transition to the typical hustle and bustle of this massive city.

Before I sign off, I have one more impressive statistic to help you put into perspective the sheer size of this country in terms of population and geography. The movement of people around China has been incredible with around 210 million passengers estimated to be travelling during a 40-day festival rush period that begins on January 30. This is said to be the largest migration of people in the world.

If you have any interesting digital China observations, feel free to add them here.