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by Josh Bernoff

We're arguably 10 years into the social network phenomenon (Friendster was founded in 2002). By now we should know the main business models. But popular sites like Tumblr (no visible means of support) raise the question, are there really any other good ways to make money other than advertising?

Here are the significant models:

1. Advertising. Facebook is already making multiple billions on ads on pages. Networks without ads on pages make money form ads on search (Twitter promoted tweets, for example).
2. Brand pages. Twitter has started to roll these out. As I understand it, you don't have to pay for the Facebook brand page, you just pay for ads to drive people to it.
3. Premium accounts. The freemium model is in place at sites like Flickr and DeviantArt. Charge members more for extra storage or to avoid ads.

There are others you hear about that haven't gotten big yet. Second Life created an economy around selling land. There are virtual goods. Merchandising the vast amounts of data that these networks collect is a possibility, although obviously it has privacy implications (Is there a market for behavioral data in the aggregate? Is it legal to sell targeting data at all?).

And I'm discounting the "get a lot of users and then sell to a bigger company" model. This just shifts the revenue question to the new owner. (YouTube's model is advertising now, even if that wasn't that big at the time it was sold.)

I'm interested in what you've seen -- what other models are out there, and how promising are they? When this finally matures, will it all be advertising based?

A major contributor to the fast-changing nature of smartphones in India is the explosion of Google’s Android onto the scene. The tremendous growth of Android since entering India last year has it taking the leadership position in terms of shipments last quarter. A Nielsen Informate panel found Android users in India spending more than 40 percent of total active time on their smartphones on data-centric activities. A full 25 percent of users’ time with apps is spent on those developed by Google, with the Android Market, YouTube and Gmail leading the way.

Google has the #1 app in terms of reach for 5 out of top 7 genres, while Facebook dominates social networking

Google properties occupy the top spot in five of the top seven genres, by reach. Facebook and Nimbuzz lead the social networking and chat genres respectively.

Google does well in time spent with the top app categories Google apps dominate in terms of time spent for streaming video, GPS, email, and search. 94% of time spent on streaming video goes to YouTube, while 86% of time spent on GPS is with Google. However, when it comes to social networking and chat applications, Google struggles to obtain more than a few percentage points of time spent.

Google apps dominate across age groups Google Apps have a fairly uniform usage across age groups indicating the success Google has had in establishing itself with all mobile users.

About Nielsen Informate Mobile Insights Nielsen Informate Mobile Insights leverages innovative smartphone metering technology to provide insights into evolving consumption patterns of mobile device users. Based on accurate, real-time usage data, we help clients understand consumer behavior and develop product and marketing strategies. Nielsen Informate Mobile Insights maintains opt-in smartphone panels to generate syndicated reports, in addition to building custom panels and conducting custom surveys for clients. Our insights aid decision makers across various segments like operators, OEMs, publishers, advertisers, content creators and aggregators and application developers.

For those of you who may not be aware, Saturday, January 28th is the fourth annual Data Privacy Day, a day devoted to promoting best practices to help equip business and consumers to protect their online data and privacy. comScore is delighted to be helping lead this effort as Data Privacy Day Champion.

I love video as a communication media. The combination of sound and moving pictures so much more engaging and more memorable than text.

We wrote in our research last year about how we're starting to see video being used more and more by eBusiness teams as an efficient and effective way to educate customers about products, encourage sales and deliver customer service.

With the Academy Awards coming up, we thought it would be both fun and helpful to highlight some of the best examples we've seen of online video in retail financial services in the past year. With the help of the rest of team, I've drawn up a list of our favourites in five categories:

Product marketing video DNB's S for Savings Plan video (Norway). PayPal's future of shopping video.

Service marketing video Commonwealth Bank of Australia's Welcome to NetBank video. E*Trade's Take Control In 3 Easy Steps video (US). Mint.com's 90-second overview (US). Lloyds TSB's money manager video (UK).

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We’ve reached the fourth and final post of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Marketing Job Seekers blog series, where we take Stephen Covey’s habits and help you practically apply them to your marketing job hunt. We cover “Synergize,” which is all about working together, and “Sharpen the Saw,” which emphasizes the need to continually improve yourself, your skills and your experience.

Researchers scanned every QR Code, Microsoft Tag, BEE Tag, JagTag, and the like in the top 100 magazines last year.

by Josh Bernoff

There's plenty of serious analysis going on about Google assembling all your data (and using it to improve your experience across devices). This is going to make Google stickier and harder to live without, ramp up the pressures on how they expose controls on data collection and use, and increase the seriousness of possible data breaches. 

But most of all, it's raised everyone's consciousness about just how much data Google collects, and made us wonder if we should be worried.

As we're all grieving the loss of our privacy, maybe Elisabeth Kübler-Ross can help us to get through the five stages of dealing with Google's knowing everything about you.

1. Denial. Wait a minute, Google. You're customizing search results based on my queries about erectile dysfunction? You read my gmails and are offering me vacations in Tijuana and criminal defense lawyers? My social security number is in some of those emails. You won't use that, will you?
2. Anger. How can I stop using these indispensable Google tools? Everybody already knows my gmail address, I'm lost without Google maps on my iPhone, and I gave up my newspaper subscription for Google News. Untangling this will destroy my productivity. I hate you but you're so useful I can't live without you. Dammit, Google, how could you do this to me?
3. Bargaining. Let me see your privacy controls. I guess I could turn personalization off on some of those searches I did for untraceable poisons. I'll tell you what, let's just hold onto the last three months data, then I'll feel better. And if you promise you won't boost your Google Plus search results over Twitter, we'll be fine. I guess. Let me try this for a while and see if it bothers me. Just promise me you'll let me opt out and delete everything later. And don't tell my wife. OK?
4. Depression. I guess I'm stuck. My choices are to give up Google, spend hours tweaking privacy settings, or just live with you knowing everything about me. I'm just going to curl up and stop clicking and tapping now. I have no friends in real life and my wife already left me since I spend all my time on the smartphone. This has gone far enough. Right this second, I'm googling how to give up your devices. Oops! Damn!
5. Acceptance. I admit it. I can't live without you. I love you more than anything else in my life. Just collect everything. I guess I trust you. I can live with this. You're a good friend and helper to me, and all you need is data I don't use much anyway. What the heck. Go with it. I feel so much better now.

Photo "Angel of Grief" by Konrad Summers via Flickr.

Back in 2010, we wrote a report that looked at how and where US online retailers were expanding internationally. Today we published a related report that focuses on brands that have extended their international offerings by launching transactional websites. Establishing A Global Direct Online Sales Footprint looks at the countries that brands are choosing to focus on with their eCommerce offerings, and some of the tactics they've used to keep costs in check.

A handful of findings from the report:

Brands rarely enter a market by selling direct on their websites. Most brands enabling eCommerce on their global websites today already sell in these markets through traditional retail channels - the online sales channel simply becomes a new way to reach consumers.

Country selection is not always dictated by market size. Brands expanding their online offerings in Europe, for example, often focus first on the UK, France and Germany. After the big three, however, the ease and convenience of serving other markets often trumps market size.

Online sales strategies differ by market. Rare is the brand that has an identical offering in every international market. Most brands that offer eCommerce-enabled sites also provide informational sites in other markets, with little consistency in how the informational sites direct online shoppers to the brands' retail partners.

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Back in 2010, we wrote a report that looked at how and where US online retailers were expanding internationally. Today we published a related report that focuses on brands that have extended their international offerings by launching transactional websites. Establishing A Global Direct Online Sales Footprint looks at the countries where brands are choosing to focus on with their eCommerce offerings, and some of the tactics they've used to keep costs in check.

A handful of findings from the report:

Brands rarely enter a market by selling direct on their websites. Most brands enabling eCommerce on their global websites today already sell in these markets through traditional retail channels -- the online sales channel simply becomes a new way to reach consumers.

Country selection is not always dictated by market size. Brands expanding their online offerings in Europe, for example, often focus first on the UK, France, and Germany. After the big three, however, the ease and convenience of serving other markets often trumps market size.

Online sales strategies differ by market. Rare is the brand that has an identical offering in every international market. Most brands that offer eCommerce-enabled sites also provide informational sites in other markets, with little consistency in how the informational sites direct online shoppers to the brands' retail partners.

Read more

As I mentioned in my blog on January 10, 2012, on "The Ten Potential Developments That Could Shape The Tech Market In 2012", I was watching closely last week and this week to see what the Q4 2011 financial results of IBM, Microsoft, EMC, SAP, and others were saying about the state of tech demand coming into 2012. Overall, they were about what I expected, which is to say, slower growth than in earlier quarters in 2011 but still positive growth. As such, they countered some though not all of the negative picture presented by Oracle's weak results in its quarter ending November 30, 2011 (see December 21, 2011, "Oracle Delivers A Lump Of Coal To The Tech Market, But It's Too Soon To Call It A Harbinger Of A Tech Downturn.")

Here are my key takeaways:

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Have you noticed an increased presence of Apple products in public spaces and workspaces in the last few years? Turns out that 21% of information workers are using one or more Apple products for work. Almost half of enterprises (1000 employees or more) are issuing Macs to at least some employees - and they plan a 52% increase in the number of Macs they issue in 2012.

Sure iPhones and iPods are ubiquitous in public spaces, but Macs weren't common, especially in the workplace. I started seeing lots of Macs in startups I visit such as Box and Evernote in Silicon Valley, and Backupify here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But it got really interesting when I started seeing a few employees at large established tech vendors using Macs, where corporate IT usually doesn't support them and seeing a disproportionate number of Macs among Starbucks loungers. The clincher was the behavior of CTOs at two large infrastructure software companies that have a group of CTOs that work across the company. In both cases, almost all of them were using Macs - and they were making fun of the remaining Windows holdout for using a "typewriter." Of course, the iPad added to this phenomena, which is visible when you walk down the aisle of long haul flights in the US - there are lots of iPads, especially in first class.

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I need to say something. I need to say something about ITIL in light of all the "poking" I have done via various mediums (such as the What Next For ITIL? and Giving Back To The IT Service Management Community blogs). The fact that ITIL is an easy target; and that breaking something is far, far easier than creating something. Hopefully we all appreciate that it isn't really that difficult to pick fault with just about anything, even if it is nigh on perfect (oh, and that is not intended to be read as "ITIL is perfect"). But as the oft-quoted senior manager quote says: "Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions."

I have great admiration for the creators of ITIL (or the IT Infrastructure Library as was) even though I do think that ITIL v3 became bloated, and potentially confusing, misdirecting, and demotivating. And, having only dipped in to my digital copy of ITIL 2011 I can't yet comment on the latest incarnation of the IT service management (ITSM) best practice framework.

So what do I really want to say? Or "for heaven's sake man, please cut to the chase."

ITIL-bashing doesn't work but we continue to do it

This might be an overly-dramatic statement but a lot of us do it.

I'd like to think that most, if not all, of us do it for the right reasons: we want organizations to be better at managing IT service delivery and at enabling their parent businesses via technology. However, I can't help think that WE need to change as much as ITIL needs to change.

Let's look at some "facts" (OK, "facts" might not be the right word):

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MarketingSherpa research, through a survey of 1,745 marketers, found that 79% of B2B marketers are not engaging in lead scoring. To help improve, or even set up a lead scoring program of your own, we have six lead scoring tips for you from Paula Reinman, Senior Vice President Marketing, Bersin.

On Tuesday, January 24, 2012 President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address.  The address was carried live from 9:00PM to approximately 10:15 PM on 14 networks.  The sum of average audience for those networks was 37,752,613 viewers, with a combined household rating of 24.0.  The networks carrying the address were ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, CNBC, CNN, FBN, FOXNC, GALA, MSNBC, MUN2 and on tape delay on TEL, TF and UNI.

State of the Union, January 24, 2012

Networks	Combined Household Rating	Combined Household Share	Number of Households	Number of Persons 2+
ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, TEL, TF, UNI, CNBC, CNN, FBN, FOXNC, GALA, MSNBC and MUN2	24.0	38	27,569,423	37,752,613
Source: Nielsen

Major Addresses to Congress, 2009-2011

Subject	Date	# of Networks	Combined Household Rating	Combined Household Share	Number of Households	Number of Persons
Obama – State of the Union	1/25/11	11	26.6	41	30,871,688	42,789,947
Obama – State of the Union	1/27/10	11	29.8	45	34,182,725	48,009,595
Obama – “Address to the Joint Sessions of Congress”	2/24/09	10	32.5	49	37,185,000	52,373,000
Source: Nielsen

Download a historic look at State of the Union ratings and viewership.

During December 2011, there were 164.3 million unique U.S. video viewers who streamed over 22 billion videos and spent more than 5 hours on average watching online video.

Overall Online Video Usage (U.S.)

	Dec-11
Unique Viewers	164,298,000
Total Streams	22,617,316,000
Streams per Viewer	137.7
Time per Viewer (hh:mm)	5:04
Source: Nielsen

Top Online Video Destinations by Unique Viewers (December 2011, U.S.)

Video Brand	Unique Viewers (000)
YouTube	131,382
VEVO	39,701
Yahoo!	36,681
Facebook	23,523
MSN/WindowsLive/Bing	22,986
AOL Media Network	20,637
The CollegeHumor Network	19,261
Hulu	19,261
ESPN Digital Network	16,684
Perform Group	10,893
Source: Nielsen Read as: During December 2011, 131 million unique U.S. viewers watched YouTube video content

Top Online Video Destinations by Total Streams (000) (December 2011, U.S.)

Video Brand	Total Streams (000)
YouTube	13,782,781
Hulu	756,921
VEVO	435,411
AOL Media Network	358,784
Yahoo!	338,700
Netflix	251,792
ESPN Digital Network	233,104
Comcast Digital Entertainment Websites	216,502
MSN/WindowsLive/Bing	205,260
Disney Online	167,892
Source: Nielsen Read as: During December 2011, over 13 billion videos were streamed on YouTube

Top Online Video Destinations by Time per Viewer (Decemeber 2011, U.S.) / 500K Unique Viewer Minimum

Video Brand	Time per Viewer (hh:mm)
Netflix	10:07
Hulu	3:08
Youtube	3:02
Justin.TV	2:28
Megavideo	2:10
Youku	1:42
CWTV.com	1:32
CBS Entertainment Websites	1:05
Nickelodeon Family & Parents	1:04
ABC Television	1:03
Source: Nielsen Read as: During December 2011, Netflix video viewers in the U.S. spent an average of 10 hours, 7 minutes watching video content on Netflix

Overall, 211 million Americans were active online in December 2011 and Nielsen estimated that over 273 million Americans had access to the Internet.

Top 10 Web Brands for December 2011 (U.S., Total)

Rank	Brand	Total Internet Audience (000)	Time per Person (hh:mm:ss)
1	Google	173,325	1:36:42
2	Facebook	153,385	6:51:09
3	Yahoo!	144,227	2:17:14
4	MSN/WindowsLive/Bing	128,755	1:28:20
5	YouTube	128,061	1:37:51
6	Microsoft	99,717	0:44:43
7	Amazon	87,920	0:42:10
8	AOL Media Network	84,026	2:51:19
9	Apple	79,118	1:08:28
10	Wikipedia	74,368	0:17:36
Read as: During December 2011, 173.3 million unique U.S. people visited Google’s websites. Source: Nielsen

Average U.S. Internet Usage for December 2011

Metrics	Total
Sessions/Visits per Person	62
Domains Visited per Person	94
Web Page Views per Person	2803
Duration of a Web Page viewed	00:01:00
Online Time per Person	28:06:22
# of People Who Went Online	211,932,000
# of People who had Internet access	273,286,092
Read as: 211 million Americans were active online during December 2011. Source: Nielsen

Yesterday, Google announced that, effective March 1^st, it would be creating a single view of users across the majority of its products and services, and creating a single, simplified, global privacy policy to cover the new approach.

Now, as a customer intelligence analyst, I preach a "consolidated view of the customer" to clients nearly every day. I advise retailers, CPGs, and others that creating an optimal experience for customers is nearly impossible without having a clear understanding of their needs and preferences, across all channels and lines of business. But what Google's doing extends well past traditional "single view" and into "personal data locker" territory.

On the face of it, Google claims that it's making these changes for the same reason: to improve the user experience. But to remain profitable and keep providing free services to several hundred millions users, Google will also use its vastly increased insight about users to sell better targeted (read: more expensive) ads to advertisers.

Is Google's new policy PIDM-friendly?

I wanted to look at how these changes map to the principles that companies must follow to be successful as personal identity management emerges. Here's my take:

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Amazon, Federated Media also see big gains in audience by year's end, comScore Media Metrix reports.

Ron Johnson, the new CEO of JCPenney, had a dog-and-pony show in New York this morning to discuss the company's go-forward strategy. The major change: fewer sales and a move toward an everyday low price (EDLP) program. He also mentioned some store redesigns that would create boutiques to make JCPenney more akin to European department stores. There was also an allusion to services (similar to Genius Bar). While that should help to weed out cherry-picking shoppers and improve JCP's assortment and experience (which already has significantly improved before Mr. Johnson thanks to partnerships with Mango and Sephora), it is unlikely to reverse JCPenney's downward revenue slide or to grow the challenged mid-tier department store sector. This is because the biggest problem with JCP is something that is very difficult to fix (the same challenge that Sears has, by the way) which is that it has over 1,000 stores mostly located in bad malls with declining foot traffic. The question I have isn't so much, can JCP reinvent its stores or the store experience, but how will it drive traffic back to those stores? Only the small fraction of its stores located in prime locations will even have the opportunity to re-engage shoppers; in fact, by our count, only 84 of JCPenney's 1,100 stores are co-tenants of Ron Johnson's old employer and the premier retailer today, the Apple Stores.

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Ron Johnson, the new CEO of JCPenney, had a dog and pony show in New York this morning to discuss the company's go-forward strategy. The major change: fewer sales and a move toward an everyday low price (EDLP) program. He also mentioned some store redesigns that would create boutiques to make JCPenney more akin to European department store. There was also an allusion to services (similar to Genius Bar). While that should help to weed out cherry-picking shoppers and improve JCP's assortment and experience (which already has significantly improved before Mr. Ron thanks to partnerships with Mango and Sephora), it is unlikely to reverse JCPenney's downward revenue slide or to grow the challenged mid-tier department store sector. This is because the biggest problem with JCP is something that is very difficult to fix (the same challenge that Sears has by the way) which is that it has over 1,000 stores mostly located in bad malls with declining foot traffic. The question I have isn't so much, can JCP reinvent its stores or the store experience, but how will it drive traffic back to those stores? Only the small fraction of its stores located in prime locations will even have the opportunity to reengage shoppers; in fact, by our count, only 84 of JCPenney's 1,100 stores are co-tennants of Ron Johnson's old employer and the premier retailer today, the Apple Stores.

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