Black Friday About to Steal Cyber Monday’s Thunder Thanks to Mobile

By: Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer

I’m about to date myself, but remember the “Happy Days” theme song? You know, “Sunday, Monday, Happy Days. Tuesday, Wednesday, Happy Days. Thursday, Friday”… you get the point.

Aside from the jingle’s addictive tune, it also had a point: every day was a happy day. There were no distinctions.

And despite all the marketing, retailing and consumer hoopla over the recently passed Black Friday and Cyber Monday – once billed as distinctly different days, one largely an in-store affair and the other mobile – the truth is mobile commerce has become an essential component to all types of shopping on any day of the week.

Happy now?

A recent infographic posted by Mashable along with an article on the holiday weekend underscores that point. Over half of in-store Black Friday shoppers, 58%, used their mobile phones to augment their brick-and-mortar buying. In addition, tablets of all sizes were getting in on the buying act too with iPads being the distinct frontrunner. Fully 88% of traffic to the mobile web came through iPads, garnering 10% of total online shopping.

But wasn’t online buying supposed to be on Cyber Monday or Mobile Monday as some pundits began calling it not too long ago?

Yes. But from a PR perspective, it’s entirely possible the names we’ve ascribed to these retailer do-or-die days are failing to keep pace with technological reality. Think about it. Even the term “Cyber” sounds so nineties and may need upgrading. Cyber, it turns out, (thanks to cyberspace) comes from the word cybernetics, first coined in 1948 by author William Gibson and his novel, Neuromancer, and was a prefix common during the early Internet. Today we have words like: cyber security, cyberbullying, and yes, cybersex.

The same type of misnomer applies to Black Friday too, which has morphed into nearly a two-month-long holiday in and of itself. Which, of course, is augmented by mobile. So whether we call them Black Friday, Smartphone Saturday, Cell phone Sunday, Cyber Monday, Tablet Tuesday, Web Wednesday, or Tech Thursday, mobile shopping and mobile price comparisons have woven themselves through each and every day of the week.

In other words, “Goodbye gray sky, hello blue [mobile’s here and you know it’s true”]

Medical Records at the Tap of a Finger: Mobile is Transforming Patient Care

I recently went for an annual (medical) check-up and walked into the doctor’s office expecting a receptionist to hand me a form to complete. Instead, she handed me an iPad.

As I looked around the busy waiting room, I noticed other patients also clutching iPads. While the lengthy process of writing out one’s medical history is an exercise in tedium no matter what, that day, it was quite novel. Well, almost.

But this medical practice didn’t stop with its tech-savviness in the waiting room. The doctors also carried iPads to use during patient consultations. And in each consultation room, a large flat screen monitor hung on the wall displaying patient records, X-rays, MRI results and important medical data all beamed from the tablet to the screen via Bluetooth™.

It was certainly the most high-tech doctor’s office I’ve been in, a snapshot of what many medical practices will look like in the future and the first thing that came to mind when reading an article in TIME Magazine, Better Care Delivered by iPad, M.D. Part of TIME’s wireless issue, the story focused on the growing influence of mobile technology in the medical field and virtually every aspect of our lives. It’s not just doctors’ offices that are going mobile: hospital-based doctors are rapidly adopting iPads as a way to carry patient records with them and get back the bedside face time lost while looking up electronic records at desktop or remote stations.

So that’s the reason you get about 241,000 hits if you Google the words iPad Lab Coat. That’s right, medical clothing companies are now producing white lab coats with pockets big enough for tablets.

According to the article, every internal-medicine resident at the University of Chicago hospital and at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore is issued an iPad. At the former, patients of iPad doctors get tests and treatments faster and get a better understanding of their conditions.  

Even more impressively, the medical schools at Yale and Stanford have adopted fully paperless, iPad-based curriculums. Of course, these institutions are among the most prestigious hospitals and medical schools in the country, so it stands to reason they would be leading the way.

The influence of mobile on the medical profession is only going to grow: already 62% of physicians who own tablets and 85% of those who own smartphones use them for professional purposes, even if not linked to an electronic-records network.

Our overburdened and dysfunctional healthcare system desperately needs the streamlining mobile can give it. Let’s hope a leap into the future takes us back to a past where patients and doctors had the time to forge real relationships leading to better health outcomes.

How To Tackle Information Overload

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of ThinkInk, originally appeared on Marketing Daily.

"Distringit librorum multitudo."

To be clear, the above is not gibberish -- nor did I decide in a fit of rage to start banging my keyboard, bookending that in quotes. Although, on second thought, sometimes the idea does come up for a vote -- especially around 5:30 a.m. when before I turn to my hubby I turn on my iPad and BlackBerry to see what’s in the news, on the blogs and the dozens of emails that have come in overnight. That’s the typical start of another day in PR agencyland.

The opener is actually a Latin quote from the Ancient Roman philosopher Seneca, who in the first century AD lamented that “the abundance of books is a distraction.”

Fast-forward 2,000 years -- and if Seneca were alive today, he’d likely dunk his head in the nearest aqueduct, overwhelmed by today’s digital information onslaught. Never mind the estimated 700,000 scrolls the Royal Library of Alexandria held -- the ancient world’s most important information repository. I can get three-quarters of a million hits on a single Google search on my BlackBerry while I’m reviewing and skimming texts on three other screens in my office, all at the same time.

But this isn’t a morning rant. Information overload -- and how it affects industries like PR -- is a very serious matter. It’s become so troublesome that tech industry writer Jonathan B. Spira, author of “Overload! How Too Much Information is Hazardous to your Organization,” estimates that info inundation and the productivity inefficiencies it generates cost the U.S. economy $1 trillion in 2010. $1 trillion. There is even an Information Overload Awareness Day to help us poor sufferers. Ironically, though, I didn’t get that email.

What spurred this article was a post I read on the Council of Public Relations Firms blog, which I had hoped would offer up some concrete advice. It wasn’t a bad post per se, nor was it poorly written. It’s just that the nine-paragraph “novella” was about five paragraphs too long.

The advice boiled down to: carving out time to have in-person meetings with colleagues rather than wasting digital ink over long emails and missed communications, setting aside “free thinking” time to allow yourself a chance to properly digest the words you’ve consumed, and skim and scan material rather than dig deep. You see? I summed up the entire article in 46 words. That’s a 96% reduction.

It may be hard for us in the PR industry to admit, and it’s probably just as much of a bitter pill for our clients, but so much of what we read (and write) can be said in far less space. And if it can be said in less physical or digital space, the information those words carry takes up less brain space too. That should leave all of us with more brain juice to do our jobs better and in less time.

Newspaper editors are fond of the expression “tight and bright” to describe copy. Barring The New York Times and few other heavy hitters, most news stories come in at 500-700 words. Still too long? No problem. The inverted pyramid style of writing that is popular in journalism front-loads the most important information, so that the five Ws are answered no later than the third or fourth paragraph. Usually.

Beyond more effective skimming and an industry commitment to churning out greater substance and less fluff, some measure of tuning out might be in order. Just because today’s technology allows endless publishing and limitless word counts doesn’t mean we must feel compelled to fill that virtual space every time.

Often I find myself giving the same advice to clients, especially ones where the glut of incoming data can sometimes dim the picture rather than brighten it.

A little more Googling revealed that the latest Information Overload event was held in February 2012. Considering the scope of information inundation and its predicted growth, it’s likely the event won’t be its last. And if I manage to get caught up and….and….and…. I’ll make a point of attending the next gathering.

Besides, more information can’t hurt.

Or can it?

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of ThinkInk, originally appeared on Marketing Daily.

Out From the Digital Stone Age: Tablet PCs Emerge Along with a Lesson

Perhaps one of the hardest tasks to man-up – or woman-up to in my case, whether in PR circles or just around the evening dinner table, is to admit when you’re wrong. Of course, this is mammoth amounts of scholarly work written on why that is the case, but I’ll spare you the details, provide the obligatory link to a book about “cognitive dissonance,” and get to the point of this blog post.

Recently I’ve blogged about two issues: the trouble with statistics, that approximately 47 percent of people like to make them up and the remaining 53 percent fail to interpret them correctly, (yes, that adds up to 100) and that tablet PCs and e-readers, while no doubt part of the mobile digital mix, are not likely to explode in popularity — at least until they are more completely untethered from Wifi-only Internet access.

Well, at least when it comes to the tablet computer portion of the above paragraph….(here goes) I may have been wrong. That wasn’t too hard.

An article in the technology section of CNN.com yesterday reported that adult tablet ownership roughly doubled during the holiday season jumping from 10 percent in mid December to 19 percent ownership in early January, only a few weeks later, and women were the biggest new converts. The Pew research behind the article attributed the surge to continuing price falls (some tablets are selling for as little as $99) and the aggressive marketing efforts of competitors like the Kindle Fire and Barns and Noble’s Nook as they continue nudging their way into what’s predominantly been an iPad 1 and iPad 2 domain.

What’s more, investment bank Morgan Keegan reduced its estimate of iPad shipments in December from 16 million to 13 million, a drop of 19 percent, while estimating that the Kindle Fire sold between 4 million and 5 million units, according to the article. An industry analyst cutting back on its predicted iPad sales is further evidence that the tablet market might be getting more complex –even if the Wifi umbilical cord hasn’t been fully cut.

While a doubling of anything is relatively easy when you start with low figures, (having $2 in your wallet when you started with $1 is a 100 percent increase) it’s quite possible this article and the Pew research are the first indications that tablet computers are finally coming into their own. Think about it, tablets were “born” right around and just after the momentary Netbook craze from roughly 2007, Kindle’s launch year, and 2010, the iPad 1 début. As “second borns” you’d think they’d be more refined products, flying off shelves. Well, it may have taken some warm up time, but apparently, they’re beginning to do just that.

With that coveted laptop-sized screen, who knows, 2012 could really be the “year of the tablet” never mind the smartphone. As communication professionals, it might be time to start thinking and re-thinking both for ourselves and for our clients ways in which tablet PCs can better disseminate a marketing message or push a product.

We already know they’re great for downloading books, have a knack for beating the statistical odds, and have proven this PR professional mistaken. (At least for the moment)

Now let’s see what else they can do.

Stop The Presses!

Yes, there are still presses!

And, no, we’re not talking about cookie presses, juice presses or drill presses, but rather that staple of mechanical print writing that for oh, about the last five and ¾ centuries –iPads and other iOS devices aside— dominated the newspaper and communications industries and marked the dawn of our information age, version 1.0.

That was the heartening, (and perhaps stunning) conclusion in a recent article on The Daily, which profiled a Brooklyn “pressman” Dan Morris and his efforts through his business, The Arm letterpress, to help a now-niche industry prosper in decidedly digital times.

Considering that I recently wrote about the power of old school print and supported our cheers with data that suggests print media – in all formats – may have endured the worst of its circulation declines, I wanted to throw my support (and ThinkInk’s), albeit digital, to Mr. Morris’s work. His business, launched in 2005, offers Sunday DIY classes on the mechanical printing art while his own 1950s-era Vandercook presses, according to The Daily, pump out wedding invitations among other individualized requests.

Morris’s passion for print preserves our written heritage. From Gutenberg to Jobs, we all should offer a simple thank you.

Now start those presses!

Tablets: The New Mobile Device

My post today comes to you courtesy of the Heartland Mobile Council’s blog, where I penned a short article yesterday about tablets. Are they mobile?

Tablets have been touted as hybrid devices, filling the niche that existed between the laptop PC and the smartphone. While this may be true (just don’t tell that to anyone that was on the netbook wagon a short while ago), for marketers, the tablet is essentially a mobile device and should be treated as such – in my opinion.

With some tablets, this is a natural association to make; many look and function like souped-up versions of their manufacturers’ top-tier smartphone. But the most popular tablet, the iPad, has been positioned as unique from any existing mobile device, and so marketers have approached this platform with strategies that differ from those utilized with the mobile channel.

This, however, is changing, and as tablets become more popular will continue to change.

Part of the reason for this evolution is a gradual refinement in marketers’ approach to mobile marketing. Just a few years ago, bilateral communication, through voice or SMS (text messaging), was the pinnacle of mobile marketing. Now it is a truly rich environment, hinging as much on native apps as on the burgeoning mobile web.

While direct marketing continues to be effective, it’s no longer the only tool in any company’s marketing kit. Tablets, without the universal capability for voice and SMS communication, are the beneficiaries of this fleshed-out mobile marketing ecosystem. Many of the strategies aimed at the smartphone-owning market also translate to the tablet-owning market; rich native apps, access to the mobile web, and the combined capacity of a device that can both be taken on the go and features the computing power comparable to a laptop are all extensions of a robust mobile marketing strategy aimed at tablets.

Which, of course, leads to the other part of the reason that the tablet market will (and should be) considered a mobile market: the tablets themselves.

Since the iPad was introduced last year, the trend has been toward more, not less, direct connectivity. Apps have been developed to augment and improve the ability of most tablets to function as one-to-one communication devices, and every tablet features the critical portability aspect. The prevailing impression of tablet computers may be as couch-bound entertainment devices, but in reality, they’re built for the proverbial road.

Marketers ought to be capitalizing on these two aspects of the tablet trend. Location awareness should figure in heavily in tablet marketing strategies, just as it represents a fast-growing tactic in most mobile strategies. Apps that access the mobile web will eventually take precedence over native apps, just as that evolution is underway in the mobile sphere. Payment via tablet should become as prevalent as payment via smartphone, and tablet apps should become as monetized through placement and advertisement as mobile apps are.

By accepting that the tablet is the latest mobile technology to engage consumers – and not a ‘third-way’ niche product that necessitates a reinvention of the marketing wheel – marketers can begin to leverage this category to its fullest.

Of course, not everyone will agree with my view that the tablet is indeed a mobile device. What’s your take?

You can read the post on the HMC post here and click here for details of the HMC’s Tablet Seminar on April 13th to learn more and continue the discussion!

iPad iPad in my hand, who is the fairest tablet in the land?

“Mirror mirror on the wall” now reads “iPad iPad in my hand"... First day pre-orders rounded up to 120,000 for the iPad. Nice... Make that 120,001 with my order.

If the iPhone moved the needle on the smartphone market and mobile advertising, publishers and content pushers will be rubbing their hands with absolute glee. My take is that the iPad will spur the pay-for-content movement –- finally –- and help re-write the playbook on why quality content should not be free.