Social Mobile Local Global and the Olympics

Team GB uniforms by Stella McCartney and adidas

At the time of writing this, The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, or Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or more recently 'Team GB' are doing rather well at London 2012 Summer Olympics. With a haul of 26 gold, 16 silver and 14 bronze medals - it’s our best showing for over a century. With 204 countries competing, this Olympic Games is truly a global event and shared throughout the world on social networks.

Social - Twitter
Before the games even started a Greek athlete was kicked off the team for tweeting with a racist overtone and it’s been a story of highs and lows for Twitter ever since. After posting some pretty malicious tweets about the diver Tom Daley, a teenager from Weymouth was arrested and given a dressing down by the police. For a fleeting moment this story was global headline news and seems to have re-ignited the debate as to how the authorities should deal with social network incidents of this nature.

Adam Naisbitt set up @2012TicketAlert after he tried to get hold of gymnastics tickets for his fiancée. This unofficial ticket alert helped thousands of people get tickets and filled the empty seats that were causing such a stir in the media. Of course the people at Ticketmaster and  LOCOG didn’t like his code crawling their site and they put a stop to it. But 30,000 angry Twitter users ensured that the service was re-instated. The Ticket Alert profile now has 54,466 followers.

Google
Each day Google has been running little games on their home page that typically take less than 30 seconds to play. They look nice, well illustrated as with all Google Doodles, are easy to play and are relevant to the day's sporting events.

Any search involving the keyword ‘medals’ results in an up to date medal table at the top of the SERPS. Yep, the UK does seem to be doing rather well!

Facebook
After winning gold in the Women's Heptathlon, Jessica Ennis had amassed over 600,000 followers and counting: today it is 726,516 with 957,976 talking about this page. Chances are that at least one of your Facebook ‘friends’ has liked her official page. But that is still a way off from the American basketball player, Kobe Bryant’s who has 13 million 'Likes'!  David Beckham, Britain's most decorated football player of all time, has 20 million. There’s even a trend in celebrity chart  if you prefer that to the actual medal count! Naturally, Usain Bolt is the most popular Olympian today.

There’s an app for that.
Shortly after the first athletes started arriving at the Olympic village, 'GPS, location-based Grindr', an app, or also known as a 'geosocial networking application', that hooks up gay men with others in the local vicinity, crashed due to the increase in traffic. Both the BBC Olympics and the official London 2012 apps have proved extremely popular. The free BBC Olympics app for iOS and Android devices gives headlines, video features, schedules and details about every sport, country and competitor.

The Join In app for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry phones connect viewers with local news updates and information about everything that is going on, in and around the Olympics, such as maps, guides, schedules, information on cash machine locations, ticketing issues and wheelchair access.

Rule 40
“Except as permitted by the IOC Executive Board, no competitor, coach, trainer or official who participates in the Olympic Games may allow his person, name, picture or sports performances to be used for advertising purposes during the Olympic Games.”  In the interests of protecting big global business sponsors, this effectively barred athletes from thanking any unofficial sponsors on social media platforms. The athletes are considered 'labelled marketing assets' and Twitter as a 'marketing tool'.

Media - BBC
The BBC, as usual, have done us proud. The 'Danny Boyle, Isle of Wonders' opening ceremony had 27M UK viewers and not surprisingly, generated more tweets than the entire Beijing Olympic Games four years ago and amassed a staggering 9.66 million worldwide tweets . Nice touch honouring Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Web, in the ceremony. You can watch any event live on the BBC website. You can get involved with live comments and nowadays the BBC even retweet comments.

All the major newspapers like @Telegraph2012  have set up dedicated Twitter streams of Olympic coverage. Many of the newspapers regularly make direct quotes from Twitter posts.

The Olympics inspired blogs from all over the world, from sport clothing designs, jokes, politics, women's rights, celebrity to youth engagement ideals.

Transport
In addition to Transport for London’s (TfL) permanent Twitter account (@TfLOfficial) a number of Transport for London Twitter accounts were set up to provide additional local advice on how services and roads are operating during the Games @TfLTrafficNews, @TfLTraveAlerts and @GAOTG.

The 'social media accounts' and 'travel mailing lists' introduced by TfL are supplemented by a number of other online travel platforms. Concentra launched an interactive graphic detailing which Tube stations were likely to face the most severe disruptions on any given day of the Olympics; Google maps offered cycling directions for Londoners planning on cycling to work during the Games.

Mashable Tech did their own article on The Olympics of tech which makes some entertaining reading about achievements in digital, mobile, social and programming.

Mobile
Half of all the searches and video streams in USA and UK are coming from mobiles and tablets during the Olympic games. Social Mobile Local Global; it’s all the same thing!

It is amazing to see all the technologies, social and search all coming together. Here at Rocktime we feel very proud of the Olympians and we are reminded yet again what a great industry of digital development we work in.

Which social or technical innovation inspired you the most at the Olympics?

Authors: Foz, Fiona Anderson

Well done Domino's, £130k mobile orders in 1 day

We love this case study which was mentioned over at Mobile Marketing News earlier in the week. It mentions that Domino's Pizza's had a record month of mobile orders with 13% of their total orders coming in via mobile device, bringing in a sum of £130,000 in one day alone! What a fantastic statistic!

Domino's chief executive, Chris Moore, puts the company's sales into perspective:

"When we launched online ordering just over a decade ago, it was a huge ivestment, but one that has continued to pay off, year on year. To put this achievement in context, 12 years ago we took £100,000 in online sales a year, by 2000 we were taking £1m in a year and now we are taking £1m in a day."

Read more about the mobile application over at the Mobile Marketing website, which shares news, views and analysis of all things mobile.

This is a great testament to the value of mobile commerce and E-commerce, and shows the important of enabling customers to order and pay for their food no matter where the are.

Rocktime believes that companies who invested in mobile early will reap the rewards, but appreciate that tapping in to an unknown market has its risks. However the mobile market is growing at such a pace that today's business really needs to embrace the mobile culture or be swept aside by their competitoes, so developing a clear strategy is essesntial when considering mobile investment.

Dominos are a great example of a company who saw the market when it was in its infancy and decided to invest for the future.

If you want to discuss how mobile websites and/or mobile applications can integrate with your business, please contact the Rocktime Sales team.


Author: Martin Bradbury

Why you should mobilise your website?

Studies are indicating that people are increasingly likely to leave their laptops at the office and use their mobiles for web browsing on the move. We are advising our clients to mobilise their websites, so that their customers can find them from mobile search and most importantly be able to access and navigate their sites with ease from a mobile.

In creating a mobile site the Flashlight Search Marketing team are also encouraging social share of news, offers, and deals via the mobile site owners established social networks.

Along with talking to our current clients, the Sales Team are making new contacts with companies (local and national) that have websites, to gently encourage them to make the small step to consider creating a mobile site.

We have a blog coming soon from Fiona and the Technical Team on "How easy it is to create a mobile website" - watch out for it.

Talking to the Sales Team today, they let me know that when talking to mobile website prospects, they have found that people are generally surprised at the low cost of mobile website development and once the UK mobile statistics are laid out with the price of development, then they are then keen to begin scoping out the mobile website development further.

We would like to share with you a selection of the UK mobile statistics which the Sales Team use when a client, or prospect asks whether they should mobilise their website.

We have invited Sales to add further links to the latest UK mobile statistics on this blog (comments section).

If you would like any further details on why your business should create a mobile website, or alternatively, or additionally create a mobile application, then please contact the Rocktime Sales team to discuss:

Sharing a selection of UK Mobile Website Statistics

It was reported this morning on BBC Breakfast News that Ofcom is auctioning off parts of the air space to enable the adoption of fourth generation technology (4G) which will make mobile phones more internet ready than they are. They also reported that Smart phone ownership grew in the UK by 58% 2010.

Interestingly, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has decided to include smartphones and their applications (think "Angry Birds") within the UK inflation basket / consumer price index but has taken out mobile phone downloads. (Techradar.com, March 2011)

Over the past 12 months the number of handsets that have the (mobile augmented reality) enabling technologies has risen from about 8 million to just over 100 million,” (Windsor Holden, principal analyst at Juniper Research UK, 2011).

Note that Alice (at Rocktime) regularly talks about Augmented Reality Applications on our blog, do watch out for her posts.

In November 2010 the UK was reported as being the 5th biggest mobile internet market globally (Silicon Alley Insider, Nov 2010)

There are 15,375,945 mobile media users in the UK (3 month average to January 2009). (Source: M Metrics via Orange survey, March 2009]

7.1 million Brits now access the internet through their mobile phones (Internet Monitor Survey, 2010)

60% of UK online shoppers would be more likely to shop at a site that rewarded them for reviews or recommendations (Immediate Future, 2010)

14% of UK mobile user watch more TV because of mobile video access. (Orange, via The Guardian, October 2010)

15% of UK adults have mobile broadband (Ofcom, October 2010)

Take-up of mobile broadband increased by 8% among 15 to 24s and by 3% among 35-54s in the UK (Ofcom, October 2010)

Smartphone usage is up 70% and growing faster in the UK than Europe.
(comScore/GSMA MMM, via AOP Digital Landscape Report, June 2010)

AdMob reported 253,737,396 mobile advertisement impressions in the UK during January 2009. (AdMob, January 2009)

Around 70% of mobile internet users use a traditional browser, 55% use an app. (Orange, via The Guardian, October 2010)

47% of daily mobile internet users live in urban areas. (“Brandheld” study, Essential Research, December 2009)

11.5% of all UK shoppers use their mobiles to research before they shop (ITPro.co.uk)

Mobile advertising is expected to grow to £355m in Britain by 2014 (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2010)

In the UK, 81% of mobile media users access mobile media more than once a week with 46% using it daily (MobiAd News, 2010)

27% of children (aged between 5 and 15) owned a mobile phone in 2009. (Source: Office for National Statistics, November 2010)

89% of the UK population have (or use) a mobile phone.(Ofcom, October 2010)
– 14% live in a mobile-only household.

People that use Facebook on their mobile device are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users (Facebook, 2010)

In May 2010 90.4% of British mobile subscribers used their phones to send a text message. The second most used activity in the UK is accessing news (35.5%), followed by using a browser (35.2%). Social networking is used by 22.6% of mobile subscribers in the UK in May 2010.

According to an Orange study, when clicking on adverts on the mobile internet, the next stages which are most popular are: going straight through to the brand‟s website (47%); receiving voucher codes or coupons (43%); clicking through to another area of the site (36%); being entered in a competition (34%). (Source: Orange via Econsultancy Blog, March 2009)

If you would like to talk to us further about creating a mobile website for your business, or would like to discuss marketing your mobile website or application then please give the Rocktime Sales team a call.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

The above image is from the Rocktime New story: FJB Hotels lead the way in Mobile Marketing. If you are local to Rocktime, you may have noticed that we ran a short ad and article on Mobile Websites in the March edition of the Business Magazine (Dorset, West Hant, Salisbury), with an advert on page 5 and article on page 16.