Jon Byous Business Communications

One of my clients wants their salespeople to be able to walk around any city and use their iPhones to see which companies are nearby.

Hoover’s Near Here app for the iPhone is a mobile, location-aware database of companies and contacts, anywhere you go. Read the write-up by the developers who designed the app itself at Mutual Mobile.

This new iPhone app from Hoover’s is full of promise, even for a $20 app. I just downloaded it and within one minute found the name of my wife’s boss.

Gang,

I know, there’s a hotter market for day-old doughnuts than for day-old news. But just scan the headlines below: major mobile marketplace eruptions that have occurred this week. We are entering an astounding time of “mobile value growth” in all corners.

Foursquare Courts Business Users with Checkin Analysis Features

All local retailers, read this one: Up-to-the-second IDs & stats on your in-store visitors, coming from Foursquare.

Thanks to Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove:

At the end of the day, the business features further contribute to Foursquare changing the world as we know it.

iPad Pre-Orders Begin at 5:30 A.M. PT on March 12 (today)

Thanks to Mashable’s Samuel Axon

Google Mobile Product Search Now Does Local Inventory Check

Thanks to Mashable’s Christina Warren

Barnes & Noble to Launch E-Reader App for iPad

Thanks to Mashable’s Barb Dybwad

Twitter’s Website Now Attaches Location to Tweets [PICS]

Thanks to the reason I started reading Mashable The Social Media Guide in the first place, their Co-Editor Ben Parr

Google Apps Marketplace: 6 Great Apps to Try Now

Google launched the Google Apps Marketplace Wednesday night. This could become a significant enterprise app ecosystem connecting desktop and mobile. The evening of the launch, I counted just nine Financial apps. Hah. Just wait.

Thanks to Mashable’s Christina Warren

Google Fiber Sparks Online Competition Between Cities Nationwide

Thanks to Mashable’s Features Editor Josh Catone

YouTube Embracing Mobile Marketing

Thanks to Mobile Marketing Watch: Posted by michael on Mar 12, 2010 in In The News, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing,Mobile Websites

Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare Face Off in Location-based Services

Thanks to Mobile Marketing Watch osted by Adena on Mar 10, 2010 in Mobile Marketing

Digital Ad Spend to Surpass Print in 2010 for First Time

Thanks to Mobile Marketing Watch: Posted by Adena on Mar 8, 2010 in Announcements, Content Publishing, Featured, In The News, Mobile Marketing

Alabama Represents the “State” of Mobile

Thanks to the good gang at Mobile Marketing Watch: Posted by michael on Mar 10, 2010 in In The News, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Resources,apple app store, iPhone

Target Stores to Bring Mobile Coupons Mainstream

Thanks to the good gang at Mobile Marketing Watch: Posted by Adena on Mar 9, 2010 in Mobile Marketing

And take your pick of great mobile announcement headline news for the last week at FierceWireless.

But here’s my Favorite of the week’s announcements for mobile app developers: The relaunch of AppBoy – Dashboard, Apps, Ideas:

Appboy is a social outlet for mobile app lovers. Got a great app or a unique idea? Get feedback and use our community to get the word out.

Thanks to Mashable’s Christina Warren for her Appboy update coverage.

Thanks TechCrunch.com & Richard Wong:

In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It.

Yesterday’s post from SmashingMagazine.com was about marketing tactics for boosting mobile app sales. Today’s featured article from TechCrunch.com takes one big step back to consider your actual platform strategy.

• http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/04/mobile-fragmentation-forever/
• By guest author Richard Wong
• TechCrunch.com
• 3.5.2010

Android Developers

Too much data?

AppAware.org has some entertaining real-time specs on Android app installs and removals. They say:

“…become aware (App-Aware) of what other users are installing on their Android phones right now!”

You can see the recent number of user Installations, Removals, and Updates by application, and even though most users are “Anonymous,” you can see their handset type, as well as other apps they’ve installed or removed in the last few days. All free.

Look for things like this:

• Good: Air Control – 27 Removals/279 Installations
• Not so Good: Advanced Task Killer Free – 39 Removals/58 Installations
• What apps are users dumping quickly, or retaining, in your app category?
• Is there a common cluster of non-competitive apps that your users tend to prefer?

It looks like a good initial tool for uncovering some intelligence on the real-time success or failure of competitors. And it could be a good start on finding popular apps to ally with for co-marketing to similar audiences.

If you’d like me to do some digging for you, check into my Contact page. Thanks.

Here’s ten minutes of inspiration video for mobile app developers and marketers: Anonymized census-level user data reporting.

This light, upbeat video from comScore gives us a glimpse at the awesome customer data we’ll soon be able to access. It’s a big step in finding your most profitable customers.

GSMA Mobile Media Metrics (MMM): Next Generation Media Measurement for Mobile

Here are two good graphics showing the current desktop and mobile market size. Scroll down in each story to catch the graphic:

Mashable: The State of the Internet in One Giant Infographic

GIGAOM: Updated: The Apple App Store Economy

And for the analytically curious, here’s a sidenote: one of my first articles on analytics delivered through software.

It’s for the good folks at java.sun.com. (I wrote 114 articles for them.)

Play Ball! (Scroll down and click to enlarge the graphics for a glimpse inside baseball 2004.)

Much of my Java technology writing (1997-2005) is still available on java.sun.com, thanks to Oracle for preserving the site.

Vanno.com is back for big-company reputation updates, newly relaunched.

The quick glimpse is here: Hit the 1-2-3-4 vanno.com/tour/home.

The new Vanno is: “…a corporate reputation tracking service that follows the most talked about companies on the Web, and analyzes online stories and commentary to rank the top 250 companies based on how they treat their customers, employees, communities, the environment and society in general.” – Vanno Blog

I use Vanno to track my large-client competitive environment for sentiment and reputation, kind of a pulse beat: Cisco, Apple, Google, Oracle, IBM, HP, SalesForce. But note, Vanno tracks only the top 250 companies.

The service engine evaluates news stories and blog posts for each company I follow, and it shows me the day’s good, bad, and ugly with thumbs up/down icons. (Cisco, my largest client, consistently tracks near the top in reputation.)

It’s an easy way to see emerging reputation problems at the root – for $9.95/month.

These folks have a nice take on their past experiences realizing that “crowdsourcing” was often “mobsourcing.” They revised their data approach in a nice adaptation. All of my reading tells me that the “soft facts” of today’s analytics, such as sentiment and reputation analysis, are extremely difficult to nail, but it can be done. Vanno is on it.

More: The Vanno blog illustrates some thought-provoking uses of its data. More on Vanno as I give it time.

A related book for the analytically curious: How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business, by Douglas W. Hubbard. At Amazon

Now for SocialMention.com – another good service. You can go there and plug in a name or site for free, and you see a new level of information revealed – strength, sentiment, passion, reach, keywords, and sources.

LauraRoeder.com provides a good two-minute video describing the use and value of SocialMention. It’s called How To Track Your Online Reputation with SocialMention.com.

Take a shortcut and go to this video. Meanwhile, here is her Microblogs Mentions page on SocialMention for reference in the video. (This is just the microblog mentions.)

Also, watch her similar short video about backtweets.com called Find Links to Your Website on Twitter with BackTweets.com.

But really, take a look around Laura Roeder’s site. And visit her on Twitter.

She could be a valuable consultant to consider for social media strategy. She speaks like someone who has passionate direct experience with everything she’s talking about and was born with it. She’s at a high level of insight. I explore maybe 20 resources like this a day, and this one stands out: LauraRoeder.com.

Next stop: Vanno.com

Here’s a light-weight two-step process for taking a dip in Twitter data.

I’ll start with the second step first (visualization), then describe one approach for finding who to visualize (metrics).

Visualize the Relationships Between Tweeters of Interest: Mentionmap

Click to open the Mentionmap web app, give it a moment to load, type in your favorite Twitter username and hit Start. They offer some examples. Robert Scoble or Padmasree (Cisco’s CTO) are good.

After it loads and adjusts, you’ll see a constellation map of connected Tweeters in realtime – tribes, influence groups, connections between groups. These folks pay attention to each other. As the instructions say, “Click on a node to explore its neighborhood,” and watch the constellation move around to reveal new connections. You can see the Tweeter’s id, name, location, and bio in the box at the left.

Find your fans and their friends, or your competitors and their customers, or just chase down the most active people connected to your interest topics. (The “#” in front of some names is called a “hashtag,” and it represents a group. Click on one of these and you’ll usually see a lot of connected and active people.)

Where Do I Find My Fans, Competitors, and Groups?

Among the many options, I like the analytics approach of ViralHeat.com. I’ll review others later. For now, hit the ViralHeat.com site, take a glance at their overall theme, and then go to the Social Trends tab at the top.

The Social Trends page offers 35 of the top user names across seven categories – glam stuff, not really biz. Better yet, write in the name of your company or a popular competitor. They don’t really show you much of the subscription capabilities here, but you’ll learn who the most active Tweeter in your category is, on this page. Then, take that username, plug it into Mentionmap above, and start clicking around. There’s lots to learn.

Now, for a specific dive on your tribe or company or competitors, the ViralHeat site doesn’t do itself justice. I subscribe to the $9.99 /month service to get email delivery updates on the day’s Tweet metrics and specifics every morning. It’s worth it to me to see these two page formats whenever I want to go hunting:

Viralheat | Profile dashboard for #Oraclesun_1265166953372

Viralheat | Twitter dashboard for #Oraclesun_1265167020194

Look at all the info here, especially on the second page.

That’s a good start, with lots of paths to explore.

More later. SocialMention.com comin’ up.