Social Mobile in Japan

Japan has always been a good indicator when it comes to looking for future trends in technology. Mobile interactivity is growing at a fast pace so here is a brief look at the world of Social Mobile in Japan.

Social Mobile In Japan

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I found carrying out this research fascinating. It's always fun to learn about other cultures. The differences in the ways (to the West) Japanese people interact and engage with one another online is very interesting to me. I hope you enjoyed it too!

The Future is Interactive, The Future is Mobile

Mobile and Interactive content to shape future marketing spend

Forrester, the respected forward-thinking business and technology research company has revealed in a recent survey that social and mobile will have the biggest compound annual growth rates (CAGR) - 34% and 27% repectively through 2014.

Social media has grown phenomenally over the past few years (as we all know). Social networking in particular has seen a massive growth in numbers of users in the past year. Brian Solis has estimated that for August 2009, Facebook recorded 370m unique visitors globally. Similarly, Twitter registered 66m unique visitors worldwide.

This has created the special opportunity to marketers for engaging customers through social media channels to build trust and brand loyalty. Activity otherwise known as 'Social CRM' (Customer Relationship Management).

Marketing is gaining more power in corporations because of its connection to consumers. Forrester says 40% of marketers said that marketing is the strategic leader of their organisation.
60% of respondents said they are boosting their interactive budget by shifting money from othe media - print will really suffer. Direct mail, newspaper media and magazines are expected to get the axe to feed interactive.

Mobile in particular is expected to really become massive in the not so distant future. New innovative technology is the reason for this. Last year we saw the rise of the iPhone app with great new devices bought out every second it seemed like! My favorite is the Barclaycard Waterslide app as shown below.


Augmented reality is really expected to take off hugely in 2010. Check out this video to see some of the latest augmented reality work!


Location sharing has also been highlighted as a future trend to rise in 2010. GPS-aware mobile devices became user friendly in 2009 and social networks Facebook and Twitter have taken interest (link).

Foursquare in particular has been highlighted as an exciting prospect for a location based social network. As a member of Foursquare you are encouraged to document places you visit in order to receive points. Also by documenting your location friends (who are also on Foursquare) can give you a 'shout out' to let you know they are nearby if you wanted to meet up. There are rumours that Facebook is looking to use Foursquare (or a similar location sharing tool) - see below - to encourage users to be more open.

(Image via Mashable)

Ultimately the rise of real-time communication seems to be the biggest thing to come out of social media from 2009. In any case, with more marketing budgets shifting towards digital and mobile the future looks very bright with much more exciting online and mobile content being created for us all to enjoy!

Lets hope we can all be as happy as this guy!

The 2009 Engagement Awards!

Starbucks social media team (of only 6) take the Gold.

Starbucks is the number 1 brand at engaging with consumers across social meda. This is according to research carried out by Wetpaint and The Altimeter Group who have gone beyond surface case studies to measure the true financial value of social media. The research was small scale - but was based on the world’s 100 most valuable brands – these are brands that are widely acknowledged for setting the standards in marketing as measured by BusinessWeek / Interbrand "Best Global Brands 2008" rankings.

The Wetpaint/Altimeter Group:

"evaluated how well they are engaging their consumers using social media and, even more importantly, how that engagement correlates with their most important financial metrics: revenue and profit".


The Top Ten

From the official report showcasing the full 100 brands - here - you can see a common trend showing how the top placed brands have much larger integrated campaigns across a number of social media channels with Starbucks, Dell and Google all having a presence on 11 different channels.

Personally I am a big fan of Nike and have been very impressed with their use of digital. They have a great Facebook fan page that is updated regularly to 438,285 fans. Their virals have been particularly impressive over the years - you may remember the Kobe Bryant jump over a speeding Aston Martin (3.3m YouTube views).

They also have Nike+, a genius idea where amateur runners can track how far they have run. They can then race against friends or just monitor progress by uploading their data collected through their Nike+ sensor and wrist band. However I still believe there is more to come from Nike, hopefully through competitions aswell as campaigns that encourage higher levels of consumer participation with the brand.

Most Contagious Report 2009

Here is a great round up to the most talked-about trends and technologies that influenced global marketing in 2009.

Most Contagious Report 2009

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The review by Contagious includes fantastic examples from successful campaigns from IKEA to Compare The Market to BestBuy and so on. A fascinating read!