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| What Americans Do Online: Social Media and Games Dominate Activity |
Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs, up from 15.8 percent just a year ago (43 percent increase) according to new research released from The Nielsen Company. The research revealed that Americans spend a third their online time (36 percent) communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging.
Additional findings include:
Online games overtook personal email to become the second most heavily used activity behind social networks -- accounting for 10 percent of all U.S. Internet time. Email dropped from 11.5 percent of time to 8.3 percent.
Of the most heavily-used sectors, videos/movies was the only other to experience a significant growth in share of U.S. activity online. Its share of activity grew relatively by 12 percent from 3.5 to 3.9 percent. June 2010 was a major milestone for U.S. online video as the number of videos streamed passed the 10 billion mark. The average American consumer streaming online video spent 3 hours 15 minutes doing so during the month.
Despite some predictions otherwise, the rise of social networking hasn't pushed email and instant messaging into obscurity just yet. Although both saw double-digit declines in share of time, email remains as the third heaviest activity online (8.3 percent share of time) while instant messaging is fifth, accounting for four percent of Americans online time.
Although the major portals also experienced a double digit decline in share, they remained as the fourth heaviest activity, accounting for 4.4 percent of U.S. time online.
The way U.S. consumers spend their Internet time on their mobile phones paints a slightly different picture to that of Internet use from computers. In a Nielsen survey of mobile web users, there is a double-digit (28 percent) rise in the prevalence of social networking behavior, but the dominance of email activity on mobile devices continue with an increase from 37.4 percent to 41.6 percent of U.S. mobile Internet time.
Portals remain as the second heaviest activity on mobile Internet (11.6 percent share of time), despite their double digit decline and social networking's rise to account for 10.5 percent share means the gap is much smaller than a year ago (14.3 percent vs. 8.3 percent).
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[Full Article]
Aug-14-2010 |
| Study Finds Twitter Users Three Times More Likely to Impact Brands Online |
A new study released by ExactTarget finds consumers active on Twitter are three times more likely to impact a brand's online reputation through syndicated Tweets, blog posts, articles and product reviews than the average consumer.
The survey of more than 1,500 consumers identifies top motivations for following brands on Twitter and provides new insight into consumers' expectations for interacting with brands online.
Key findings of the research include:
Twitter users are the most influential online consumers -- 72 percent publish blog posts at least monthly, 70 percent comment on blogs, 61 percent write at least one product review monthly and 61 percent comment on news sites.
Daily Twitter users are 6 times more likely to publish articles, five times more likely to post blogs, seven times more likely to post to Wikis and three times more likely to post product reviews at least monthly compared to non-Twitter users.
23 percent of online consumers read Twitter updates at least monthly.
11 percent of online consumers read Twitter updates, but do not have a Twitter account themselves.
20 percent of consumers indicate they have followed a brand in order to interact with the company – more than become email subscribers or Facebook fans for the sake of interaction.
Men are more than twice as likely as women to follow brands on Twitter to interact with the company (29 percent compared to 13 percent).
Nine out of the 10 most common motivations for consumers to follow a brand on Twitter involve consumers seeking information from a company.
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[Full Article]
Aug-14-2010 |
| New Research Shows Nearly Four out of Five Clients Have Had Internal Discussions about Cloud Computing |
TPI, a sourcing data and advisory firm, has released a new TPI Research report on corporate IT decision-makers' plans for Cloud Computing in the immediate future. Among the findings, 78 percent of clients indicated they have had internal discussions about Cloud Computing.
TPI recently surveyed more than 140 corporate IT decision-makers globally for their perspectives on Cloud Computing and where it fits into their service delivery strategies. The results indicate large corporations are interested in Cloud Computing because it offers a myriad of benefits without the exhaustive capital investments and resource-consuming projects characterizing the last four decades of corporate computing, not to mention the promise of cost reduction and nimbleness often discussed yet rarely achieved.
For small and mid-sized companies, Cloud Computing offers the promise of robust and highly scalable computing solutions nearly equal to those available to their much larger competitors, but without the same level of investment.
Yet Cloud Computing also poses risks. The TPI Research found that five concerns consistently arise in corporations' discussions about migrating business services to the Cloud:
79 percent of respondents say data security is inadequate or unclear
50 percent fear non-compliance with regulatory requirements
50 percent fear business continuity or disaster recovery issues
49 percent are concerned about integrating Cloud solutions with legacy systems
49 percent are concerned that others may gain access to company data
These risks have caused many companies to focus their initial embrace on more secure private Clouds, particularly since they do not know who can currently protect their data and consistently deliver service to meet the high expectations of their business customers.
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Aug-14-2010 |
| SaaS Revenue to Grow Five Times Faster than Traditional Packaged Software through 2014 |
A recent International Data Corporation (IDC) study shows that the Software as a Service (SaaS) market had worldwide revenues of $13.1 billion in 2009. IDC forecasts the market to reach $40.5 billion by 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 25.3%. By 2012, IDC expects that less than 15% of net-new software firms coming to market will ship a packaged product (on CD). By 2014, about 34% of all new business software purchases will be consumed via SaaS, and SaaS delivery will constitute about 14.5% of worldwide software spending across all primary markets.
Additional key findings from IDC's latest SaaS research include the following :
By 2012, nearly 85% of net-new software firms coming to market will be built around SaaS service composition and delivery; by 2014, about 65% of new products from established ISVs will be delivered as SaaS services.
SaaS-derived revenue will account for nearly 26% of net new growth in the software market in 2014.
Traditional packaged software and perpetual license revenue are in decline and IDC predicts that a software industry shift toward subscription models will result in a nearly $7 billion decline in worldwide license revenue in 2010. As a result, a permanent change in software licensing regime will occur.
SaaS segment mix will shift toward infrastructure and application development and deployment/PaaS, and away from U.S. dominance. IDC expects that by 2014, applications will account for just over half of market revenue. This shift will happen in part as a result of increasing IT cloud spending by enterprise IT groups and commercial cloud services providers (cloud SPs) relative to end-user spending.
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[Full Article]
Aug-02-2010 |
| Survey: Businesses Missing Out on Social Media Opportunities |
Companies failing to use social media to reach their customers and employees do so at their own peril, according to a new study on the importance of social media in business and customer communications.
The study, conducted by research firm Yankee Group and commissioned by Siemens Enterprise Communications, finds that the vast majority of employees and consumers would prefer to use social networking for business communications.
The study showed average customer satisfaction with current business interactions via social media is just 65 percent, and that one third of businesses have no formal social networking policies, do not allow the use of social media at work or aren't aware of their company's participation in social networking.
Survey highlights include:
Seventy percent of consumers want access to company experts and support via social media channels and trust company information provided to them via their social networks
Nearly 60 percent of customers feel company outreach via social media would improve their loyalty to that company
Most customers feel that companies should be monitoring social media for customer feedback
Fifty percent of respondents use social media daily or several times a day
Nearly 70 percent of employees feel they need better tools to track and manage social media for business, and would like the ability to initiate a Web conference automatically from a chat discussion at work, inviting people from within their social and work networks
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[Full Article]
Aug-02-2010 |
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