Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Average Net User Now Online 13 Hours Per Week

December 23, 2009: summarized from cnet news -- How much time do you spend online each week? If you're an average Net user, a new poll shows, it's around 13 hours--excluding e-mail.

The Harris Interactive poll, released Wednesday, found that 80 percent of U.S. adults go online, whether at home, work, or elsewhere. Those who surf the Net spend an average of 13 hours per week online, but that figure varies widely. Twenty percent are online for two hours or less a week, while 14 percent are there for 24 hours or more.

The average number of hours that people spend online each week has grown over the years, hovering at 7 hours from 1999 through 2002, 8 or 9 hours from 2003 through 2006, and 11 hours in 2007. The level hit its peak at 14 hours in October 2008--after the global recession had set in and just before the U.S. presidential election.

The jump in time spent in cyberspace likely stems from a few factors, according to Harris. More people are comfortable using the Internet. More of them are shopping and watching TV online. In addition, the number of Web sites and online applications has increased. Harris adds that the recession may also play a role since surfing the Net at home is free (after paying monthly access fees), while going out means spending money.

The age group that spent the most time online per week: 30- to 39-year-olds, at 18 hours. The total number of U.S. adults on the Internet is 184 million, around 80 percent of the total population, according to the poll. That figure is virtually the same as in 2008 but is a big jump from 1999, when it reached at 56 percent, and from 1995, when the figure was a mere 9 percent.

Read more at: http://bit.ly/789Zmh

Mobile Marketing Association’s Forecast For 2010 In North America

LM Comment: Which of these will you try out in 2010?

December 30, 2009: summarized from Mobile Marketing Watch -- It’s the time of the year when every research company and industry organization puts out a prediction for what’s to come in 2010. The Mobile Marketing Association this month put out a list of 10 industry predictions for mobile marketing in North America for the coming year.

What do you think about these predictions from MMA for 2010?

10. Mobile Healthcare
9. Real Time Mobile Coupons
8. Mobile TV
7. Texting Limitations
6. Mobile Barcodes
5. Aggregators Will Be Key
4. Free GPS
3. Mobile Skype
2. New Ways to Measure Mobile Marketing Success
1. Mobile’s Eyes and Ears

Read more at: http://bit.ly/5vi11h

Why Twitter Will Endure

LM Comment: A worthwhile read. Great insights into the twitter revolution … that many of us are trying to understand.

January 1, 2010: summarized from NY Times -- Nearly a year in, I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice. Not that long ago, I was at a conference at Yale and looked at the sea of open laptops in the seats in front of me. So why wasn’t my laptop open? Because I follow people on Twitter who serve as my Web-crawling proxies, each of them tweeting links that I could examine and read on a Blackberry. Regardless of where I am, I surf far less than I used to.

At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup: if it looks like Apple is going to demo its new tablet, or Amazon sold more Kindles than actual books at Christmas, or the final vote in the Senate gets locked in on health care, I almost always learn about it first on Twitter.

The expressive limits of a kind of narrative developed from text messages, with less space to digress or explain than this sentence, has significant upsides. The best people on Twitter communicate with economy and precision, with each element — links, hash tags and comments — freighted with meaning. Professional acquaintances whom I find insufferable on every other platform suddenly become interesting within the confines of Twitter.

All those riches do not come at zero cost: If you think e-mail and surfing can make time disappear, wait until you get ahold of Twitter, or more likely, it gets ahold of you. There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.

But in the right circumstance, Twitter can flex some big muscles. Think of last weekend, a heavy travel period marked by a terrorist incident on Friday. As news outlets were scrambling to understand the implications for travelers on Saturday morning, Twitter began lighting up with reports of new security initiatives, including one from @CharleneLi, a consultant who tweeted from the Montreal airport at about 7:30 a.m.: “New security rules for int’l flights into US. 1 bag, no electronics the ENTIRE flight, no getting up last hour of flight.”

It was far from the whole story and getting ahead of the news by some hours would seem like no big deal, but imagine you or someone you loved was flying later that same day: Twitter might seem very useful.

Read more at: http://bit.ly/8bncJZ

Six Million More Seniors Online

December 22, 2009: summarized from Promo Magazine -- The number of surfing seniors is growing. While people 65 and older still make up less than 10% of the active Internet universe, their numbers are on the rise, according to Nielsen.

In the last five years, the number of seniors actively using the Internet has increased by more than 55%, from 11.3 million in November 2004 to 17.5 million in November 2009. Even so, people 65 and older still make up less than 10% of people who use the Internet.

When broken down by gender, the growth of women in the last five years has outpaced the growth of men by 6%, Nielsen found.

These older people are also staying on for longer. Time spent on the Internet by seniors increased 11% in the last five years, from approximately 52 hours per month in November 2004 to just over 58 hours in 2009.

"The over 65 crowd represents about 13% of the total population and with this increase in online usage, they are beginning to catch up with their offline numbers," Chuck Schilling, research director, agency and media, Nielsen's online Division, said in a release. "Looking at what they're doing online, it makes sense they're engaged in many of the same activities that dominate other age segments - e-mail, sharing photos, social networking, checking out the latest news and weather—and it's worth noting that a good percentage of them are spending time with age-appropriate pursuits such as leisure travel, personal health care and financial concerns."

Read more at: http://bit.ly/5296eS