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The five most interesting mobile loyalty apps

When a good idea comes along in retail and digital there are soon many, many start-ups getting in on the action.

Take loyalty apps for example. Loyalty is a big beast. Many types of company may consider it part of their remit, from digital payment solutions, to social-style check-ins, to group buying sites, or indeed a retailer’s own app.

I’ve previously looked at the state of apps in retail and found that using loyalty schemes is pretty much the major rationale for customers using a retail app.

Whether customers will settle on retailers’ own apps or on a generic loyalty scheme provider (perhaps lumped with payment) remains to be seen.

But of those tens of consolidated loyalty apps, which are the best? Here’s the list of five I think are most interesting. Whether mobile wallets such as PayPal and Google Wallet will buy them up remains to be seen but the space seems set to get richer before it gets poorer.

YouTube reveals sneak previews of the 2014 Super Bowl ads

Its pre-game teaser time, with the YouTube channel Ad Blitz currently showcasing excerpts from some of the major brands’ 2014 Super Bowl adverts.

The Super Bowl itself (number XLVII for anyone counting or able to understand Roman numerals) doesn’t happen till 2 February, but that hasn’t stopped the hype machine from kicking into gear.

Last week I revealed the top 20 Super Bowl ads of all time according to Unruly and discovered that 60% of the most shared ads of all time were launched before Super Bowl Sunday, thereby using word-of-mouth and early publicity to generate extra shares. In fact seven of the top 20 ads used teasers to build hype.

Marketers are clearly learning tactics from major film studios, where big event films can be teased a year or more before their release, even before a single piece of footage has been shot.

How the top 100 brands use Twitter

Audiences for brands grew by 20% in Q4 2013 and brand tweets that included pictures and content links generated the most engagement. 

During Q4 2013, the top 100 brands according to Interbrand averaged 210 engagements per tweet when they added a picture link. 

This comes from the latest research by Simply Measured, analysing the Twitter activity of brands listed in the Interbrand 100, compared with the Forbes 100 Best Small Companies in America.

Here’s a look at the research along with some recommendations for brands on how to increase their engagement.

Do big retailers need to create social value to succeed?

The high street debate is one that attracts much comment on the Econsultancy blog.

Feelings run high when it comes to ensuring the survival of stores in our towns. The situation has yet to crystallise, though it’s clear there are business models that aren’t best suited to bricks and mortar any more. 

Alongside the trend towards experiential retail (shops doing more than simply selling stuff that consumers can buy cheaper online), a trend towards creating social value in the community may be emerging. 

High street vacancy rates are steady in the UK at 14% in 2013 and independent stores such as cafes are on the increase. Part of the reason for this is social and local. 

Most of us still value our retail centres as places to take a ‘humanity bath’, meeting people outside of the office, the church/mosque/synagogue and your neighbourhood. 

But what else can big retailers do to engender a closer community? Does every store have to get involved? What about digital technology, can it play a part at a community level?

The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has released a report detailing the business case for socially aware retail. The report includes the results of six months of research with three ASDA stores. 

Whilst most of the findings are relevant mainly for larger focal points, chiefly supermarkets, here’s what I gleaned…

PPC-illustration

PPC agency payment models: fixed fee

Towards the end of last year, I started a series of posts digging into the mechanics of PPC agency pricing models.

The aim? To help buyers make more informed decisions when it comes to choosing a model that’s right for their business, whilst hopefully leading to some healthy debate amongst buyers and sellers alike.

If you haven’t already, check out the overview of percentage of spend and pay on performance models. And if you have, thank you for sticking with me. Here we go with the final post in the series, a look at fixed fee models.

Matt Cutts declares the death of guest blogging for SEO

Matt Cutts made his strongest statement yet on guest blogging, declaring it dead as a linkbuilding tactic.

This does seem to be a broad statement and, as Editor of a blog which accepts (and values) guest posts, Google’s policing of the internet can be irritating. 

Still, there’s no doubt that guest blogging has been hammered as a link building tactic, to the extent that we’ve become tired of guest blogging approaches. 

So how will this affect sites looking to accept guest posts?

Stop focusing on edge cases

If you have a reasonably big website there could be literally hundreds of tasks a user might be trying to complete. In such scenarios it is unwise to try and accommodate them all.

Microsoft had a problem. To be more specific the support team for Microsoft Office had a problem. The team had built one of the most comprehensive Knowledge Bases available online, answering every possible question you might ever have with a Microsoft Office product, and consistently received low scores in customer satisfaction.

This just didn’t make sense. The team had been thorough. You couldn’t think of a question about Microsoft Office that the Knowledge Base didn’t answer. Why then did people rate them so low?

Reports of Facebook’s death have been greatly exaggerated

Despite reports suggesting that teens have been deserting Facebook in their thousands, a new study into global social media usage shows that the network is still in good health.

While the level of active usage fell by 3% in the second half of 2013, Facebook is still hugely popular among all demographics and has actually increased the audience size for its apps.

The GWI Social report shows that Facebook remains the most popular social network in terms of global account ownership (83%), active usage (49%) and visit frequency (56% of users log in more than once a day).

In terms of account numbers Facebook is followed by YouTube (59%), Google+ (58%) and Twitter (51%), all three of which saw increasing membership during 2013. Facebook still remains someway ahead of this pack, but the gap has been narrowing.

Will Google have to start a marketplace?

With searchers choosing Amazon over Google for product searches and eBay resurgent, will Google have to launch its own marketplace to keep up?

Online retailers are a major source of advertising revenue for Google but shoppers are increasingly turning to Amazon as their shopping first port of call.  

In 2010 24% of shoppers began researching on Google verses 18% on Amazon, however in 2012 this had almost completely reversed with 30% on Amazon and only 13% on Google.

Google is clearly aiming to be the destination for product searches with the launch of Product Listing Ads (PLA). However, some industry experts are wondering whether to win in this space Google will need to go beyond simply advertising products and launch a fully-fledged marketplace.  

Here’s why…

50+ fascinating stats about mobile commerce in the US

Mobile commerce is no longer the newcomer to the digital scene, but it is likely to remain one of the main challenges for businesses for the foreseeable future.

Ever-increasing levels of smartphone and tablet ownership in the US means that businesses have no choice but to adapt to accommodate the ensuing rise in mobile web traffic, however some sites (including our own) are still lagging behind.

So just to reiterate the importance of mobile commerce I’ve rounded up more than 50 of the best stats from surveys and reports that we’ve seen in the past 12 months.

And for more data on m-commerce download out Internet Statistics Compendium…

BBC trials bitesize news reports on Instagram video

The BBC has begun experimenting with using Instagram video as a way of distributing bitesize news reports.

Though the Beeb has been using Instagram video for some time, up to now the clips were just repurposed TV news footage. 

The new ‘#Instafax’ short form news service uses content specifically created for Instagram, with each video including a selection of images and facts that give a very brief outline of the story. 

It’s described as being “very experimental” at this stage and it’s great to see the BBC trialling innovative methods of sharing news and connecting with a younger audience.

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