1. Gen Y women twice as likely as Gen X women to discover new brand or product when a friend mentioned it in an online status update.

2. Twitter, LinkedIn to partner, share status updates.

3. 607.5 million people worldwide will access social networks via mobile devices by 2013 and 150 million in US to use smart phones by mid-2011.

4. Google giving free wireless in 47 airports through January 15 (and indefinitely in Burbank, Seattle).

5. College students spend twice as much time on computers as compared to television.

1. $65 billion will be siphoned away from traditional advertising channels in 2009 and spent instead on companies’ own Web sites and Internet marketing. http://tinyurl.com/mwj2th

2. More people use Facebook to share links than any other service – including email. http://tinyurl.com/mjrkna

3. Twitter traffic doubles in three months, now 20 million

4. Financial performance of most highly engaged social media companies grew 3 times that of the least engaged companies. http://www.engagementdb.com/

5. 56 percent of adult Americans have accessed the internet by wireless means. http://tinyurl.com/lql939

It’s Monday, and that means it’s time for a direct marketing case study. This one comes to us jointly from Acxiom and Alltel Wireless. (Check out this link for a podcast on same topic, plus the opportunity to sign up for the full case study).

Customer Lifecycle Management

When Alltel Wireless engaged Acxiom to improve the precision, relevance and sophistication of its direct marketing communications, the company’s siloed sources of customer data and limited prospecting data were restricting their abilities to engage with customers and prospects. Acxiom worked closely with the Alltel Wireless team to deliver a set of solutions that anchored the entire campaign process. Acxiom combined its data products and customer intelligence with Alltel Wireless customer data and prospect list for targeted segmentation based on actual customer behavior and real household composites.

The Opportunity
Alltel Wireless wanted to increase customer acquisitions, improve retention and grow customer revenue with more targeted, relevant communications.

The Solution
Acxiom’s marketing database solution assisted in driving two top objectives:

• New customer growth
• Reduction in customer churn

The Results
265% increase in incremental customer postpaid additions tied to direct marketing efforts. “My Circle” campaign gross take rates exceeded 6% from existing customers. Direct customer communications have increased 285%.

Wow–pretty great results! Truly illustrates the power of a database.

Google has filed a patent for connecting phones to a multiplicity of providers (seen on Techcrunch) and letting those phones then negotiate automatically for the best rate in real time. Picture below:

Google’s Patent Diagram

Great idea as a business to execute, and Planet Mobile badly needs someone to play the “Microsoft” role to create a a unifying “mobile OS” and ecosystem, as none of the current incumbents have shown any will or leadership. For “Mobile Web 2.0″ or similar to break out, this is a pre-requisite.

But I’d be astounded if they actually get a patent – the amount of prior art in this space must be huge, I have seen these sorts of diagrams and ideas for price negotiation for going on 10 years – and a lot of it within those Telcos themselves. Google must know this, so either the US patenting process is near valueless, or they are making a point.

Still, this should really rattle the cage of the Planet Mobile oligopoly. I guess its sad that it will be replaced by a Google Monopoly, but it seems clear that no one else has the cojones – or cash? – to step up to the mark.

Except Microsoft – given their tenacious defence of their interests in so many other spheres, its interesting that their approach to mobile has been to play within the industry rather than impose a solution. After all, mobile is the next frontier for the OS as well as the browser.

Maybe this will set the Microhares running…..

Last Thursday we were travelling back from British Telecoms R&D labs, and the conversation turned naturally (as it does) to the rise of Machine to Machine (m2m) comms and its impact in the Digital Home – both subjects that we have done client work and given talks on in the past.

Anyway,we hypothesized about the rise of the Digital Butler and other functions in the Digital Home workflow including the Digital Housekeeper – computer based housekeeper that took over a lot of the admin tasks in running a busy home, those myriad of little details that slip between cracks, especially in busy houses infested with children, animals and other chaos inducing agents.

However, as we are shortly to do a presentation on these things, but to non techies, we were wondering how to make this more tangible – And so was born Mrs Fridge the housekeeper. They also say a picture tells a thousand words, and here it is:

Graphic: Mrs Fridge Avatar on Facebot and Critter <missing due to database crash, to be rebuilt tonight)

Mrs Fridge is an AI, but you can easily interact with her avatar on Facebot, the universal SocBotNet that makes it easy to set up, network and manage your bots. You can keep up to date and communicate with Mrs Fridge on your iPhone while travelling, and keep up with the rest of the household gossip (Mr Roomba is stuck under the hall umbrella stand again). But to communicate with each other however, a short form system that has proved more useful is Critter, a microbotblog service that allows unified comm ingress and egress (seen here as a feed on Facebot) which also allows you to see the ongoing conversations with Jeeves the e-Butler, the Ocado grocery delivery system and that persistent Mr ExpressBooker who keeps on trying to sell rail tickets because Mrs Fridge once did the family holiday booking when Jeeves came over poorly with a virus….

And just so you know this is coming – I noticed today that Cisco and Whirlpool are getting together to:

develop a complete line of networked home solutions stocked with Internet-ready products and services, which are now only prototypes. Cisco launched its Internet home platform at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week.

Mrs Fridge looks like she’s getting an upgrade…..

A wireless and removable Web tablet resides in the refrigerator door. You can use it as a calendar, or to check e-mail, order groceries, or leave notes for other household members. Kiss those magnets and cluttered sticky notes goodbye.

…..at the Consumer Electronics Show. We expect Mrs Fridge will be paying a virtual visit next year when they get the robofeeds sorted out. (We’ve looked at these tablet services, a fridge door is too small annd the i/o is lousy in our view – its more likely to be a small noteboard sized wall mounted device like todays photodisplays, or just displayed on the kitchen PC)

In all seriousness though, this whole area is non trivial – just working through the udse cases of Mrs Fridge shows the huge gaps in technology today, and what has to be solved to let a system like this work. Take the use case of knowing what food is in the house – the interplay between labelling, sensors, stock control, semantic systems, complex transactions etc is quite considerable. Its for this reason that home automation has tended to start in high value (entertainment) or high importance (health and security) systems.

I’d better go now and set Mr Roomba free……