Google Wallet is officially live – for those of you who happen to have a Sprint Nexus S 4G phone and a Citi Mastercard at least.
But, the rest of us can be excited about the future. This Google Wallet app, accessible via PIN, making it safer than your physical wallet, uses near-field communication (like Speedpass at the gas station) to pay using your credit card.
Load your coupons and loyalty cards in your Google Wallet, and single tap your discounted payment.
Google isn’t the only one coming out with this type of application. But, as you well know, first to market is nearly everything. The sooner Google can roll out partnerships with the rest of the phone and credit card companies, the sooner Google Wallet will own this industry.
We at Windy City Strategies called for this a while back. After all, it was Twitter’s single greatest advantage. The fact that you could track celebrities and other thought leaders without being “friends” with them. In fact, we suggested that Facebook offer a “follow” feature.
But, the fact that it took Facebook this long to launch their Facebook Subscribe Button is really telling. It tells a story of arrogance as well as defeat. Worst of all, if they had copied Twitter a bit faster, it might have prevented their massive and ever-popular growth.
Here’s the big problem. Celebrities aren’t using Facebook to share publicly. After all, “that’s what Twitter is for.” And while I can now filter my friends list, and keep my church friends from seeing my questionable humor, it would take me going back and defining my 600+ Facebook relationships.
So, yes, you can follow celebrities and your industry thought leaders on Facebook now. The problem is, they’re not here.
We recently talked about why we prefer Living Social’s social incentives over Groupon’s, the slowly fading market leader. But is it even possible to predict what this daily deals market landscape will look like a year from now?
While Groupon was the real first-to-market leader, the truth is that Groupon’s retail partners aren’t thrilled with the results they’ve been getting. Not that they haven’t gotten foot traffic from their partnership with the daily deals leader. But, the fact that this traffic isn’t profitable. They usually take a hit on the deal itself, and aren’t retaining this swarm of new customers. Facebook is already discontinuing their deals offering, probably somewhat because their check-in service hasn’t truly taken off yet.
This isn’t to say that Daily Deals are dead in the water. But that they are likely to evolve into a better win-win situation over time. Google Instant‘s move to day-of deal delivery is probably closer to the winning strategy. Limited time offers to increase foot traffic immediately. The deals aren’t extravagant – which means they’re more profitable for the retailer. It’s just a nice little incentive to try a new local retail restaurant nearby, on a day when they’re looking to fill tables.
Groupon deserves credit for creating the formula, and for teaching their competitors some “what not to do” lessons. Unfortunately, they’re probably not going to be the company that reaps the rewards in the long run.
You walk in to your favorite restaurant in the city. You pull out your phone to brag to your friends, and possibly see that someone you know is there, too. So, what do you do? Check in to Foursquare, Google Places, Facebook Places, Yelp, or one of the many other check-in options?
Sonar, a new geo-location notification aggregate, can now do better – telling you which of your Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn friends are there – and tweet them directly to let them now you’ve arrived. This all-in-one functionality is terrific obviously, but relies on all of your contacts actually utilizing one of these services to check in themselves.
And how many people are going to check in via LinkedIn? Well, perhaps a business conference, I suppose?
It’s an example of an awesome possibility that will only become awesome once these services start auto-checking you into places – which admittedly, is uber-creepy.
Google has received some flack for their behind-the-scenes search personalization, utilizing predictive analysis to anticipate the results you’d be most interested in, before you see them.
But that hasn’t stopped Bing from launching Adaptive Search, Microsoft’s attempt at roughly the same thing. And their release of this new feature slightly downplays the release, viewing it “less as a ‘feature’ and more of what to expect from search”.
That’s how many people see it. An obvious step in the evolution of predictive search technology. Bing provides the example of an obvious film fanatic, based on prior searches, searching for ‘Australia’, you’re probably searching for the film, rather than the country. Now, these filters won’t trap users in a filter bubble, taking a huge assumption and radically altering your search results based on the prediction.
These are simple tweaks aimed at helping you find what you’re really looking for a little bit faster.
The Bing-Yahoo alliance continues to grow, with a 3% month-over-month increase. This while Google, the overwhelming search market leader, lost 1% month-over-month. These have really become the only 2 players (if we consider Bing and Yahoo to be a single player, which we should), with the next 64 search engines making up the remaining 6% of U.S. searches combined.
Secondly, it looks like longer search queries are becoming more and popular, with 5-8 word queries increasing by 3% month-over-month. In the past, users had to simplify their queries to find the information they need. As search engines become more and more sophisticated though, we can be as specific as we want and still find an answer.
WordPress administrators can now utilize Site Stats to see Web analytics regarding site commmentary, including who’s commenting the most and the posts they’re commenting on.
For blogs with less than 1,000 total comments, administrators will be able to access stats on everything. For blogs with more than 1,000 total comments, you will be able to see stats for the past three months.
With Google’s recent Blogger re-design possibly creating some interest in the Internet Marketing world, this is a way for WordPress to regain thought leadership in the blogging-as-a-business world. We’ll see if it’s enough to keep their huge market share going a little bit longer.
Twitter has renewed their search partnership with Bing, and sort of publicly teased Google about it via Twitter. In a tweet that referenced “Search w/o Twitter = old news”, Twitter makes fun of the fact that Google’s search engine no longer carries Twitter feeds, which are turning into the industry’s most real-time news outlet out there.
It’s a big differentiation for Microsoft, specifically in terms of news searches. And they seem quite happy to brag about it.
Of course, Twitter probably can’t be thrilled about Google’s new attempt at social with Google+ and probably had a little bit of fun with these Twitter teases.
Online privacy. It’s a growing concern. There’s a fear out there about who can access your online information. Well, now, at least you can be one of those people.
Google Takeout now allows you to export your data from a vast array of Google services. If you have a Google Voice account, your call history, voicemails and more can now be exported as mp3s, texts, HTML and more.
Other Google services available for data export include Google Buzz, +1s, your Google Profile and your Google Contacts and Circles.
This offering, which is a part of Google’s Data Liberation Front, is another great step forward in customer-centric business behavior.
Google has reached out to online retailers and helped provide a series of tips to improve their online success. And they need it. Today, online retail only accounts for 9% of all retail sales. As much as we think online has replaced traditional sales altogether, it really hasn’t.
Google recommends designing your Website for a browsing customer – aligning your business around a single customer experience, rather than organizing your channels within silos. Customers jump around. Make it easy for them to do. Make it incredibly easy for your customer to find what they’re looking for. Be device-agnostic. Make sure the user experience is delightful no matter what device they’re browsing on.
As online retail grows, Google knows that traditional brand value will mean less and less. And price leadership and web experience will mean more and more.
