Placecast Teleconference, Mobile and Retailers
I listened in on the Placecast teleconference yesterday, talking about mobile technology driving retail foot traffic. There were some interesting points brought up during the discussion, a few of the most relevant:
- Consumer don’t mind giving away location as long as they get something valuable in return and they gave permission
- Texting is replacing emailing among the younger generation. Like receiving commercial email, receiving commercial texts is not seen as an intrusion as long as it was relevant and consumer gave permission
- In terms of ad delivery, location provides increased relevance… interestingly no one mentioned the consumer predisposition for acting on advertising when out and about… which I think is probably most important
- Going off and building an iPhone app is not for everyone. It’s expensive ($100k is not atypical) and overall smartphone penetration is not at scale. It makes sense for some demos more than others. Good old SMS is cheaper, easier and already at scale.
With respect to mobile meets retail specifically one of the panelists Kathryn Koegel from Primary Impact Research made mention of how consumers were often using mobile devices while IN STORE to get additional product information and reviews and to do price comparisons on the items they were shopping for. Read more
Retail-ization of Google Search Results
What’s the fuss about? Well before the recent change if you performed a Google search for a term like “dentist”, “florist” or “lawyer” you would normally get links to other WEBPAGES with content about “dentists”, “florists” and “lawyers’. So for example a search for the term lawyers would have links to the Wikipedia entry on lawyers and lawyers.com, and about 100 million other pages like it… in other words connecting the Google searcher to more and more INFORMATION about the subject of “lawyers”. But now with the change that seems to have been put in place, Google is trying to infer the intent of the searcher in some instance… assuming that maybe the user doesn’t want to find more INFORMATION about lawyers in the general sense, but instead wants to be able to locate a real nearby lawyer.
In case you’re wondering, Google evidently uses standard IP lookup to determine the location of the searchers computer in order to give the appropriate geographically relevant results… see above an example of the SERP from a search for the term ‘coffee’ from a PC in midtown Manhattan.
Enormous leap toward Google embracing location awareness as a core element of search? Or simply Google trying to further improve the search experience and giving people the results that they most often want?
