We recently chatted with Pete Blackshaw, vice president of Digital Strategic Services at Nielsen, and his colleague, Maya Swedowsky, about how customers use social media sites to praise and complain about retailers and best practices retailers use to respond. Here’s a clip from the full interview available on eMarketer Total Access: (Read more…)

Are more Twitter users going mobile? A recent TechCrunch article revealed that US Web traffic to Twitter dropped for the first time in October 2009. This story, backed by data from comScore, set off a new wave of speculation about Twitter’s future, including an excellent blog post by my colleague Debbie Williamson which looked beyond the traffic figures.

It’s worth adding a few points to that discussion. For starters, comScore wasn’t the first measurement firm to report a month-to-month drop in Twitter site traffic. Compete noted a slight drop in US traffic in September 2009, and another slight drop in October. The percentage decreases were minuscule, but what’s more interesting was the flattening trend since June 2009, following a period of sharp growth in the first half of the year.

Here’s what the graph looks like:

Even though the Compete data confirmed the drop noted by comScore (leaving aside discrepancies in the actual numbers), I agree with Debbie Williamson that there’s more to Twitter’s health than site stats.

As we’ve said before — and research from Crowd Science has confirmed — many users access Twitter on platforms other than the Web.

We’ve also noted a steep increase in smartphone sales and activity, and this is likely impacting how Twitter users access the service. According to Nielsen, Q3 2008 was the first quarter in which the majority (52%) of US mobile Internet users used smartphones to access the Web. A year earlier, only 41% of mobile Web users used smartphones.

Until we see more data about how people are accessing Twitter, we can’t know for sure whether the comScore and Compete traffic data are early indicators of waning interest in the service, or a sign that a migration is taking place from the wired Web to mobile devices. What do you think?

We wrote a couple weeks ago about how web coupons are a hit, especially among affluent consumers. In the current recession, however, coupon usage is growing among all walks of consumers. According to new research from Inmar and The Nielsen Company, “year-to-date coupon redemption was up 26 percent to 2.4 billion redemptions, making it the fourth consecutive quarter of growth.”

CPG brands are aggressively deploying coupons to help allay the always-present threat posed by private-label goods, which are frequently less expensive than brand name items even when coupon savings are factored in. Paper and electronic coupons delivered via newspaper circulars, freestanding inserts (FSIs), direct mail, e-mail and Websites represent the vast majority of coupons used. However, coupons sent directly to mobile devices may be the next big opportunity for CPG brands seeking to drive incremental sales and ensure loyalty. Here’s one reason why, from my latest eMarketer report, CPG Mobile Couponing:

Delivering coupons via mobile or handheld device represents a time-saving convenience for consumers. The process eliminates the need for clipping and sorting, and ensures shoppers do not lose the pieces of paper. To redeem savings, consumers hold their devices up to a 2-D barcode reader or optical scanner at checkout … Consumers are sent targeted coupon offers based on their location, age and gender.

Some key questions discussed in the report:

• To what extent are CPG marketers conducting mobile couponing tests?
• What are the possible scenarios for coupon delivery via mobile phone or handheld device?
• What are the benefits of mobile couponing to CPG marketers?

What are your thoughts?

It’s no secret that smartphone users index higher for just about every key mobile activity than those with feature phones. But the growth in social networking usage among smartphone users has been truly eye-popping. According to a recent study from Nielsen, the number of smartphone users engaging in social networking activities shot up 187% from July 2008 to July 2009, nearly tripling from 6.4 to 18.3 million users in total.

What’s even more interesting is that mobile users have begun to display similar
frequency and time spent patterns as those accessing the leading social networks
from their PCs. As I discussed in my “Mobile Users and Usage: It’s Personal” report, marketers, publishers and advertisers alike can get a sense of what tomorrow’s mobile media consumption landscape will look like from today’s smartphone users, and mobile social networkers in particular are on the leading edge.