Speaking Sensis

You asked for it and now you’ve got it.

From today, you will be able to use White Pages® Online to send Business, Government and Residential listing information to friends on popular social networking sites, blogs and email as the directory expands on its highly successful send to mobile function.

This new functionality is a response to positive user feedback and it lets you tell friends where you saw those great bargains or had the best meal ever.

It also lets us promote our advertiser listings to an even wider audience through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Blogger, Linkedin, Google Bookmarks, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Ping.fm, Wordpress and Friendster as well as email. 

People who list their details with White Pages® Online are already aware that their contact details will be published in the public domain and this sharing of information is something that people can already do via email and SMS etc. However, we are conscious that further sharing of contact information may not always be desired so we have built in some measures to protect privacy, that include:

• phone numbers being shared only when it is sent to your mobile phone;

• only limited contact information being published on social networking sites for residential listings;

• identification of the “from” email address when you send to email and a limit to the number of listings that can be sent to one person each day. There is also a limit to the number of listings one person can send; and

• soon we will enable (next month) the ability to block your mobile number and email address from receiving these messages.

It’s easy to get carried away with the excitement surrounding “latest trends”, “new ideas” and “cutting edge” technology. We did it in the dot com boom when all we cared about was what the internet looked like and what it did. The thought of how the internet could make every day tasks easy caused our dial-up modems to run hot with excitement.

What we didn’t do was put a lot of thought into how to monetise it outside existing commercial models and we all know what happened after that.

But after attending the recent ad:tech 2010 conference at Sydney Convention Centre, I believe we are once again on the crest of an exciting new wave of technology and subsequently advertising opportunity.

At ad:tech 2010, it was discussed how connection speeds and mobility were bringing forward new ideas about how to reach and advertise online. And with Australian’s now spending up to one third of our leisure time online, consumers are waiting to be reached.

While online leisure time once meant time spent sitting in front of the computer, it now includes time spent sitting with your smartphone.

Collectively, Facebook users are spending seven hours a month on Facebook, 77 per cent of us read blogs and YouTube has more than 100 million unique visitors a month across the world and growing. In Australia in the past year we have seen Twitter account growth of 1050 per cent. The stats on Twitter usage are mind blowing with Twitter recently reporting that it was seeing 50 million tweets per day — that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.

Driving this growth in usage is mobile access. I know you’re all thinking “here’s another mobile blog post”. But with the launch rate and uptake of new mobile devices, the web is an anytime, anywhere proposition that’s no longer about sitting in the corner on your PC.

Did you know that 4.7 million mobile users around the world accessed Twitter from their mobile browser in January? This represents 347 per cent growth from the 1.05 million mobile users in January 2009. And in January 2010, 25.1 million mobile users accessed Facebook via their mobile browser worldwide, up 112 per cent from 11.8 million mobile users in January 2009. Incredible!

As consumers, if we are spending all this time online, then that’s where we are going to be when businesses want to talk to us. And that folks, was the underlying focus of ad:tech 2010.

The key themes of the two day conference were how business can tap into the explosion in activity that is social media and how mobile usage has contributed to us spending even more of our time online. I know that there are social media deniers out there and they must be in the minority because any stream focused on social media was packed to the rafters. The main areas of social media focus were how business was using aspects of social media usage to drive its advertising reach.

Here is a quick take-away for those of you who didn’t make it to the social media streams at ad:tech 2010:

• Do “listen in” and “contribute” to the conversations occurring on various platforms. The key message was that as a business, you should be monitoring, reacting and responding.

• Don’t see social media as a short term strategy or fad. The clear message at ad:tech was that it needs to become an ongoing form of engagement. Marketers have had mixed fortunes when it comes to tapping into social media, they frequently try to engage with brand ambassadors and embrace user generated content. There were numerous examples of businesses that were able to gather a following through clever campaigns and events, but only to let them go as soon as the campaign was over.

• Remind yourself that you don’t have complete control. You can guide the followers, but once you overstep the mark and try to take control, you risk damaging your brand.

Without doubt advertising ideas and thinking relating to social media are in their infancy.

There have been numerous social media campaigns from mainstream advertisers who measure this success through video views, followers and friends.

The challenge moving forward is to turn these friends and followers into hard currency.

It is a task not dissimilar to a retailer attracting people into their store and then getting them to make a purchase.

The anomaly of Sydney Convention Centre as the venue for ad:tech 2010 was not lost on me. It was here in the early days of online that I attended many exhibitions promoting the internet. I’m pretty sure one of Sensis’ (then Pacific Access) key messages at those early PC shows was that it’s not all about “hits”, it’s about buyers. From that perspective nothing has changed.

In his April speech “The Rise of Social Media“, Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst commented on the US mobile takeaway business – Kogi BBQ – and their success in using Twitter to keep customers in touch with where their vans would be.Bruce commented that Kogi BBQ had acquired 15,000 Twitter followers in its short life.

Well, I happened across Kogi BBQ’s Twitter page the other day. Turns out their band of followers has more than doubled – to over 36,600 – in just three months.

Ahhh… the tweet smell of success.