- BLOG BEAG –

comScore in the US has just (22 March 10) released the results of a study on E-Reader and Apple iPad consumer attitudes, behaviours and purchase intent.

Over 2,000 internet users were surveyed regarding their awareness, attitudes and opinions of the Apple iPad and other e-readers/tablet devices. This Study and others to come are worth monitoring due to the potential such devices have to disrupt the way consumers currently access digital content.

Consumers were asked several questions regarding their awareness of various e-readers and tablet devices and their past purchase behaviour or intent to purchase these devices. The results showed very high awareness of the iPad, with an aided awareness of 65 percent, the same as that of the Amazon Kindle e-reader. Overall, consumers demonstrated a high level of interest in these types of devices with between 58 percent and 69 percent of consumers having conducted online research of the top five devices. Amazon Kindle rated highest in terms of current device ownership at 6 percent of all Internet users, followed by Sony Reader at 4 percent. The iPad rated highest in terms of consumers seriously considering purchase over the next three months at 15 percent of Internet users, with the Kindle at 14 percent.

While not many devices of the devices had been acquired yet, take a look at the figures in the “Seriously considering buying in the next 3 months” column.

It’s a long time coming and very much anticipated but the Internet Advertising Bureau of Ireland is working hard at finalising the inputs for their IAB/PwC Online Adspend Survey, according to the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland (IAPI). Survey participants include publishers/websites, sales houses and online advertising networks. As soon as there is something meaningful to share, we shall post.

While IAB Ireland is recently established, IAB Europe has been running since 1998. The IAB in the UK is streets ahead of Ireland and there is copious research available here. Hence the sense of expectancy for our market.

IAB Europe exists to support and promote the growth of the European digital and interactive marketing industry.

TV presenter Colette Fitzpatrick and author John Boyne today (14 March 2010) launched the Eason Book Club, an interactive online forum for book lovers and book clubs created by Eason, Ireland’s largest book retailer. The Eason Book Club will host discussions and reviews, top tips for setting up book clubs, recommended reads, regular competitions and interactive polls. John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas topped the first Eason Book Club poll of best book club reads of the noughties. The poll revealed the popularity of “cross-over” books – popular with both children and adults – for book clubs.

The Eason Book Club, which is powered by Facebook, has already almost 1,400 registered fans who are availing of book advice from Eason’s team of experts, including suggested reads, information on book events and group discussions on many bookish topics from favourite re-reads to judging books by their covers! There will be a monthly discussion on a selected title which has been kick-started with a lively debate on the poll winner The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The Eason Book Club will feature regular author participation and this month’s discussion includes an introductory synopsis of the book from the author, John Boyne.

Maria Dickenson, Head of Purchasing at Easons said “Book clubs have become a huge phenomenon in the last 10 years with thousands of book-clubs getting together on a monthly or weekly basis around the country. There is an incredible word of mouth network when it comes to book club books, and titles can have a long shelf life as they are passed from reader to reader over the years. Our online forum is designed to offer support to existing book-clubs and also to allow individuals who are perhaps not in a book-club to take part in discussions in their own time.

It was incredibly interesting to see in the results of our first book-club poll, that “cross-over” children-adult titles are making very popular book club reads with John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas topping the poll. Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Bind Up all also feature in the top twenty. Children’s literature has produced some real gems during the noughties and it is great to see that adults are happy to explore the genre.”

The first Eason Book Club poll registered 1700 votes and respondents were asked to choose their top reads of the noughties from a selection of 125 books. The books selected were drawn from national sales data over the last ten years. There was also a strong qualititative element with the Eason team selecting books that they have read and loved in their own book clubs, as well as books that customers have recommended or responded well to. (The full list of the top 50 selected titles can be found below).

The Eason Book Club is also providing a new way for Eason to interact with its customers.  “This online forum is facilitating direct dialogue with our customers which we greatly welcome.  The feedback we receive from our online members can have a direct influence on our in-store promotions, for example, following our first poll of top books of the noughties, we are now running a 3 for 2 offer on the book-club top 50 of the noughties. The Eason Book Club will allow us to actively listen to our customers views which is essentially changing the way we do business”, Maria Dickenson concluded.

Visit the Eason Book Club on http://www.facebook.com/EasonBookClub

EASON BOOK CLUB – Top 50 Books of the Noughties

We have to thank Gerard O’Neill, Chairman of the Amarach Group for pointing us to two items of particular interest. We’ll cover the first one here – the make up of the modern consumer and what are there demands. The second, the potential of the over 50s market, will be covered in a later post following the Turning Silver into Gold Conference tomorrow in Kilmainham.

IBM’s Institute for Business Value has produced a research  surveying more than 30,000 consumers in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Brazil, India and China to determine how they choose where to shop, what shopping methods they prefer and what they will demand from retailers in the future. While Ireland is not covered specifically it would be foolish to imagine we are so different.

Consumers are getting smarter as they incorporate new technologies into their daily lives and information becomes more readily available. In IBM language, consumers are becoming more “instrumented”, “interconnected” and “intelligent”.

Today’s consumer knows:

• which retailers have the best prices and products
• how they (the consumer) want to interact with both retailers and other consumers
• what matters most to them as they decide where to shop
• which retailers need to improve
• where they want to spend their money.

To the question, what’s most important to you when deciding where to shop and what areas do you feel retailers need to improve upon the most, the answers were, in this order:

The good news is that smarter consumers are not only more demanding, they are also more willing to collaborate. They are ready to contribute to the development of new products and services and will reward those retailers that listen by giving them more of their spend.

If you have the time, the IBM Executive Summary is available for download here and the full version here.

Unwieldy links spilling over lines, messing up pages, making a nonsense of your tweets? The following table of URL shortening software might help. It’s a summary of what we could find, what they work with and most importantly from our point of view, can you make a custom URL? It’s not definitive (what is these days?). So tell us if we’ve missed something or update us if you’ve found an even better option.

Our preference? BudURL. It was designed from the start to give small businesses and marketers insight into click traffic.

According to Interest over Time figures (below)  from Google covering the web search terms “george lee” cross referenced against “fine gael” for the last twelve months in Ireland, both terms reached highs together in May 2009. Fine Gael built on the interest and surged again in July 2009. Sadly neither capitalised on the other, with “George” flat-lining about a month after his election and “Fine Gael” unable to reach the levels of interest they had enjoyed up to George’s election in June 2009.

The numbers on the graph below reflect how many searches had been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100.

Run your cursor over the chart below to find the key dates. Significant news triggers for these high points to the search return figures were:

1. Search term “Fine Gael” [FG] – Feb 10, 2010 – George Lee resigns from Fine Gael
2. Search term “George Lee” [GL] – Feb 10, 2010 – George Lee resigns from Fine Gael
3. FG – Sep 27, 2009 – Fine Gael exit poll boost for Yes campaign
4. GL – Sep 20, 2009 – George Lee to speak on Lisbon
5. FG – June 7, 2009 – Fine Gael to heap pressure on Cowen with no-confidence vote
6. GL – May 31, 2009 – George Lee elected
7. FG – May 3rd, 2009 – George Lee may contest by-election for Fine Gael

Make up your own mind, but someone, by accident or design, missed an opportunity to explain their case or enhance their position.

There’s a very interesting piece on the Royal Pingdom (a website monitoring service) blog attempting to shed light on the relative popularities of social networking sites.

Simply put, Royal Pingdom ask, how do you put a number on how engaging a site is?

For the sake of argument, they have used the monthly visits per visitor X page views per visit  i.e.”visitor activity level”

Here’s their result. Stats from Google Adplanner, and the view is worldwide.

A clear leader: Facebook by quite a stretch.

A few observations:

• These numbers might appear a bit unfair to Twitter. Many of its users rely heavily on applications to access the site and don’t necessarily spend much time on the site itself.
• Facebook not only has a huge of users (350 million+) but the site manages to wring out so many page views from each one. This is bound to be extremely good news for Facebook’s income from advertising.

For more observations and a closer look at visitor behaviour on social networking site check out this excellent post here.

END

On Thursday 25 March 2010, people in hundreds of cities around the world, including Dublin will come together offline to rally around the important cause of Education by hosting local events to have fun and create awareness.  Twestival™ (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good.  All of the local events are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects.

The difference between the twestival and a usual “tweet-up” (meet-up) is that this will raise money for charity. The Twestival will provide a chance for “tweeple” to meet “twiends” in person. However “twebies” (twitter newcomers) in particular are advised to follow “twittiquette”.

Twestival was started in London last year by the local twitter community which decided to expand it into a global event for 2009.