There’s many apps now available that let you scan product codes with your mobile and find online stores selling the product. It’s very easy and useful for the consumer – but possibly devastating for the retail stores. Traditionally, the downtown department stores, sporting goods stores, small electronics shops etc. have based their existence in the value chain on a central location and great service, but not on low prices.

Now, people can enjoy the great service and central location of a department store, and after making up their mind on what to purchase, thank the store by scanning the product code and ordering a cheaper alternative from the net. In the future, department stores are going to have hard time competing with the big-warehouse-in-woods ecommerce business model if people take advantage of their showrooms without buying.

Here’s an example of how easy it is. Of course you could use the app on anything; books, electronics, sporting goods, appliances – but what about soy sauce? I had Chinese for lunch today and tried RedLaser app (try also pic2shop) at the local restaurant.

“Hmmm.. delicious Kikkoman Soy Sauce – I wonder how much it’s online?”

Snap.

“Okey, the Germans sell it online for 2,79€”

Last April, just nine months after the opening of the App Store someone downloaded a billionth application, now nine months from that the staggering pace shows no signs of slowing down – in fact, its getting faster. Just a few days Apple announced that the three billionth iPhone App had been downloaded from the store.

*Wikipedia

Obviously the apps are getting better and the selection wider with the increased interest, more money pouring in, and by the time other smart phone manufacturers get their shit together. As of January 15, 2010, there were 133,979 third-party applications officially available on Apple’s App Store.

From a user’s perspective it’s all about finding the ones that are of value. Therefore, I thought about sharing applications some friends in the Finnish digital scene have found useful. I asked around and surprisingly few people wanted to share their apps – I got the feeling that the app selection is actually very personal. Luckily Ville, Jussi and Sami shared some from their selection.

Ville  Vesterinen, CEO, Co-founder at ArcticStartup:

Jussi Solja, ex-Nokia Global Marketing Manager, currently a freelancer:

Sami Viitamäki, Partner at TWBA Diego, and a crowdsourcing guru:

Faris Yakob, EVP Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson, Author at The Age of Conversation:

Sami Salmenkivi, Senior Strategic Planner at N2, and a marketing author:

More App Store stats, Top 10 app games of 2009, and 40 best free apps from PC Magazine.

What does facts about Facebook brand presence look like, really? With the relentless coverage in media, every man and his dog has an opinion about social media and Facebook. On the other hand, you have the social media gurus and true believers preaching about a revolution. On the other hand, you have the more traditional advertising pros who claim to understand the new more social approach to marketing, but continue doing things the old way.

Luckily there’s companies like Sysomos, who give us real facts. Sysomos analyzed 600000 Facebook pages and made the results public, nice, I’ll come back to those later. But first, here’s a look into how Finnish brands have found their way to Facebook. I compiled the brands from the most valued brands list, the largest companies list and added some popular culture names, as well as some traditional Finnish brands like Sauna and Kalevala.

TOP 100 Finnish Brands on Facebook	fans/group members
Nokia	712,368
Nightwish	305,165
Children of Bodom	204,912
HIM	185,000
Sauna	152,774
Apocalyptica	87,724
Madventures	80,787
Silja Line	48,402
Santa Claus	42,637
Salmiakki candy Suomen Poliisi	36,790 31,259
Big Brother Suomi 2009 Fazerin Sininen chocolate	30,466 26,068
Klamydia band	25,343
Oulun Kärpät hockey team	17,144
Saku Koivu	16,910
Apulanta band	15,377
Fazer	15,078
Reinot (a shoe) Petri Nygård Alko	14,729 13,800 12,618
Finnmatkat	12,426
Helsinki	11,854
Seppälä	11,795
Flamingo Jokerit hockey team	11,187 10,900
Karhu beer HIFK	10,500 10,371
Salomon (Amer Sports)	10,070
The Rasmus	9,930
Finlandia Vodka	8,915
Eppu Normaali	8,852
Sunrise avenue	8,773
Kimi Räikkönen	7,424
Malaco Truly karkki	7,268
Teemu Selänne	6,506
SubTV Hanoi Rocks	5,242 5,122
Le Corps Mince de Françoise	4,555
Sami Hyypiä	4,456
Pikku Kakkonen Lapin Kulta	4,401 4,164
Koskenkorva	4,127
Veikkaus Basso	4,114 3,780
YleX 69 Eyes	3,741 3,631
Darude	3,491
Jean Sibelius	3,490
HS.fi	3,438
Suunto	3,089
Suomalainen kirjakauppa	3,010
Genelec	2,600
Tjäreborg	2,491
Marimekko	2,170
Viking Line	2,164
Fiskars	2,120
Kiasma	1,905
Kalevala Koru	1,724
Atomic	1,626
Koff olut	1,500
Aura Juusto	1,400
The Dudesons	1,038
Aurinkomatkat	996
Wärtsilä	905
Kone	724
Iiittala	720
HK Sininen	700
Yle Puhe	602
Wilson (Amer Sports)	546
Outokumpu	505
Vierityspalkki.fi Itella	463 459
Jari Sillanpää	414
Finnair	411
Renny Harlin	400
Stora Enso	373
UPM-kymmene	277
SK-ravintolat	270
Kesko	247
Valio	242
Fortum	227
Atria	212
Lemminkäinen	136
Vaisala	134
Kalevala	127
Konecranes	127
Kansallisteatteri	119
Neste Oil	96
Tieto	93
Akateeminen Kirjakauppa	87
Arabia	70
MTV3	68
Hartwall Jaffa	54
Ateneum	43
Stockmann	39
Rapala	36
Juhla Mokka	29
Amer Sports	18
Elovena	18
Sanoma Magazines	18
TeliaSonera	13
Elisa	11
HK	4
Abloy	3
Sonera	1
Hackman	1
Tarja Halonen	0
Mikko Hirvonen	0
Metso	0
Ivana Helsinki	0
SOK	0
WSOY	0
Otava	0
HKL	0

The most  interesting find based on this list is that content is king (all creative people say yeah!) and that brand comes second. Let me explain. Look at which corporate brand has the second most fans after Nokia and the entertainment brands – yes, Silja Line the cruise line brand – which actually has many times the fans of the beer brands, athletes, largest companies, and our most prominent import brands like Marimekko and Iittala. Silja Line has about 20 times more fans than the other popular cruise line, Viking Line. They must be doing something right. True, they are constantly posting good content – mainly quality offers, competitions and discounts. Good valuable content can give you a free direct connection to one percent of the whole population.

Quality of execution must be crucial, since there are such huge differences in the amount of fans on a seemingly similar brands. Look at the two largest book store chains Suomalainen 3,010 fans vs. Akateeminen 87 fans, two largest travel agencies Finnmatkat 12,426 fans vs. the market leader Aurinkomatkat 996 fans.

Sysomos studied a whopping 600,000 pages and blogged the results. Interestingly, only a tiny fraction of all pages have more than 10,000 fans (who mentioned a long tail?).

Sysomos report conclusions:

• On average, a Facebook Page has 4,596 fans.
• Four percent of pages have more than 10,000 fans, 0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans, and 0.05% of pages (or 297 in total) have more than a million fans.
• Pages with more than one million fans have nearly three times as much owner-generated content as the average Facebook page. (Where “owner-generated content” means things like photos, videos, and links posted by the page’s administrators.)
• Pages with more than one million fans have nearly 60 times as much fan-generated content (photos, videos) as the average Facebook page.
• On an average Facebook Page, the administrators create one wall post every 15.7 days. Among pages with more than one million fans, one wall post is created for every 16.1 days. This suggests that wall post frequency does not correlate with a page’s popularity.

It’s live with a few second delay. I posted this on my Twitter account: “Try Google “Tiger Woods” – Google has added a live Twitter feed in the results, meaning that Twitter is now a SEO tool.” And, then went back to the search results and there it was, see the picture above. Very nice. In addition to making your stories and brand messages spread, Twitter is now officially a tool for making them findable – in a major way  - since Google direct massive traffic to anything coming up on the first page.

If all the Apple rumors were true, Apple would be making TV’s, cars, wending machines, you name it. The most persistent of the recent rumors is of course the Apple Tablet – and in the light of the recent developments it starts to feel more probable than not.  Here’s my five cents on the matter.

Regardless, if Apple is in the game or not, media is for sure getting ready for tablets. The recent update of the Times Skimmer is a perfect example of an interface tailored to big touch screens. Try using it with arrow keys – down key changes sections, right key delivers more headings on the topic – can you say intuitive for touch screen browsing? Ronnestam was first to write about it.

NYTimes is not alone. Two weeks ago Conde Nast said they’re “working on a digital version of Wired magazine for the secret device as well as most of its other titles.” Hmm.

Then yesterday Sports Illustrated uploaded this video to YouTube:

For two good reasons, Apple is likely to be producing a tablet: Media is now ready for them, and Apple has a niche between $250 iPod Touch and $850 MacBook. IDC predicts that Apple will indeed roll-out the tablet in 2010, they also guess its going to more of an oversized iPod Touch than a downsized MacBook.

I would buy one, would you?

Google Autocomplete helmiä löytyy myös Suomeksi:

The small labels are not happy with Spotify’s payment. Spotify pays 3 euros for 1000 album listenings. This according to Sakara Records is not nearly enough to support the bands. The representative of Sakara Records Label, which produces Finnish metal music, such as Mokoma and Stam1na, said that if people stop buying their records they’re going to have to stop making music regardless of the Spotify income, for which he used the word sad. He added on the Mokoma Facebook page comments that they can think of cheaper hobbies.

Would be interesting to know if all labels have similar payout schemes.

via Arctic Startup

Cost (Facebook 1 – Twitter 0)

Twitter and Facebook are the two most talked about marketing channels for brands in social media, but which one is better? Before I go to the quick & dirty analysis I did, I thought I’d give you the result: Facebook Page is about hundred times better marketing channel than Twitter channel (86 times to be more unscientifically exact). So there, the people who are too busy to read more than 140 characters can go back to Twitter.

To begin, how would you go about estimating the effectiveness of a marketing channel? Cost, reach, and effectiveness came to my mind first, so I used those. To make things simple, lets look at Facebook page and Twitter channel only, and forget the advertising formats Facebook has and Twitter hasn’t.

Both channels, the Facebook page and the Twitter channel, are often considered to be free; anyone can set up one without paying an other. However, someone has to update them, and therefore the real cost comes from the time spent by an employee or a designated agency working on the content. According to the social media gurus and their mantras Twitter account has to be updated very frequently in order to be considered good, Facebook page on the other hand needs to be updated more seldomly e.g. weekly. Thus, Facebook page must be cheaper to manage.

Reach (Facebook 86 – Twitter 0)

This is where things get interesting. Twitter has been the favorite topic of the who’s-whos of the social media marketing for a good two years, and it seems that Facebook hasn’t been at all as trendy. But, not surprisingly, when you look at the popularity of the brand channels the numbers are rude: Facebook stomps Twitter when it comes to branded channels follower amounts. Interestingly, however, profiles of (famous) people more popular on Twitter than Facebook.

Examples of fan vs. follower amounts:

Red Bull        1,562,380 vs. 21,210
Nokia              699,890 vs. 10,610
Nike             1,654,092 vs. 26,890
Apple            1,400,187 vs. couldn’t find an official Twitter channel (?)

Someone might whine about the niche nature of Twitter and how brands like Nike have more channels on Twitter than on Facebook, but this is wrong, there are many channels on Facebook as well. Furthermore, most of these niche Twitter channels lose numbers – as an example Nike Football on Twitter has 1954 followers, which can’t even be compared to Nike Football Türkiye which has 134,780 fans, let alone Nike Football global.

Best brand-channels on Twitter (non-media channels)

NBA                   1.5 million  (45th out of all twitter accounts)
Woot.com          1.4 million  (55th)
JetBlue              1.3 million  (71th)
Dell Outlet          1.3 million  (80th)
Threadless         1.3 million  (89th)
NFL                   1.2 million  (104th)

Best brand-channels on Facebook (non-pizza channels)

Starbucks             4.5 million (9th out of all Facebook pages)
Coca-Cola             3.7 million (13th)
Nutella                  3.3 million (16th)
Pringles                 2.7 million (20th)
Kinder                   2.6 million (25th)
Ferrero Rocher      2.4 million

Brand channels on Twitter have, very unscientifically questimated, 0.0148 times the followers of similar Facebook channels. Only the geekiest of brands such as Mashable and Techcrunch have found considerably more audience from Twitter.

Effectiveness (tie)

Estimating effectiveness of the marketing channels is tricky, since we don’t know for what reason the channels have been created, but in all simplicity if used in marketing the purpose can’t be very far from acquiring traffic or selling products. In acquiring upstream traffic, Twitter users seem to be in a browsing mode and are more likely to click links, but the sheer amount of Facebook fans might at the end drive more traffic. When selling products, Twitter has proven, at least in two cases (Twoot.com and Dell) to a concrete source for sales, and due to the lack of further statistics I’d say effectiveness is a tie.

All-in-all, it seems that Twitter works for people – the Ashtons of the world – better and Facebook for brands.

The guys at W.Steinmann challenged some small/medium sized Finnish ad agencies with blogs to reveal their statistics, and to our delight most agencies did. Here’s a compilation of the stats as well as my blog’s traffic details. There’s a striking similarity to the graphs, the similar “growth” can be explained by the temporary slump professional blogs have in readership over the summer and the volume of traffic may be indicative of the size of the pond in Finland. The bigger traffic volume on my blog must be direct result of the language difference and the resulting Google traffic, since it can’t be content related – I’ve been lazy lately and used Twitter instead of writing as good blog posts as, for example, Panu at maailmamuuttuu.fi.

I’d be happy to see more agencies sharing stats, media agencies welcome as well – Dagmar?

W.Steinmann:

Barabra:

Työmaa:

Avalon:

This Blog:

Couldn’t get the same view from WordPress.com, but here’s a weekly view. In the last quarter I had 13769 visits.

EDIT 24.11.2009: 16:26 Tässä oli Anna Moilasen kirjoittama hieno kolumni mainosalasta – mutta nyt se on poistettu Markkinointi&Mainonta lehden toiveesta. Kannattaa siis tilata kyseistä lehteä, sillä siellä näitä hienoja artikkeleita on.

EDIT 24.11.2009 11:14 Kuva on siis Markkinointi&Mainonta lehdessä olleesta artikkelista. Sain kyseiseltä lehdeltä juuri postia koska olin unohtanut mainita lähteen. Lisäksi he kehottivat poistamaan kyseisen valokuvan, koska minulla ei ole siihen oikeuksia. Onkohan minulla oikeutta ottaa kuvaa lehdestä ja laittaa blogiin, vai pitäisikö poistaa?

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