Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

While at Google’s offices recently, I had the pleasure to hear a Google Product Manager present the company’s view of how information retrieval has changed with the rise of mobile and smartphone adoption.

They are calling it “micro-moments,” the premise being that as smartphone adoption and use continues to skyrocket, consumers increasingly have small bursts of interaction with their phones across search, social, video and email, as opposed to prolonged periods in front of a desktop.

This viewpoint represents a shift from the linear “sit, search and act” desktop mentality that characterized the early days of the internet, in which research and action were typically performed in one sitting while in front of a connected internet device.

These days, according to Google, more searches are done on mobile than on desktop in many countries, including the United States, Japan and United Kingdom.

Google’s micro-moment perspective posits that discovery and action are decoupled as discovery comes in multi-session bursts, across channels, on a mobile device, while action (conversion/purchase) often takes place later on a larger screen, a laptop or tablet device....

In May, a significant threshold was crossed: In the U.S., 60 percent of global online activity now happens via mobile devices – up 10 percent from the previous year. Perhaps even more significantly, “mobile apps accounted for more than half of all digital media time spent in May,” according to commercial analytics specialist Comscore.

The most mobile-driven platforms are digital radio, image-based sites like Instagram and Flickr, maps and instant messaging services. However social media overall is rated by Comscore as the number one category in terms of “overall digital engagement” with 70 percent of content now generated via mobile....

The 2015 holiday shopping season already is shaping up to be a gift for U.S. online retailers, based on IBM’s eighth annual Online Retail Readiness Report just out.

As the final tally of 2014 holiday shopping, online retail sales increased 13% from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday with the average order value reaching $125.

Mobile accounted for 21% of sales during last year’s holiday shopping season and IBM projects it will account for 26% this year.

Mobile traffic to U.S. retail websites reached 47% in March of this year, a rather huge increase from the 29% just two years ago.

Mobile traffic is projected to top 55% of all traffic to retail websites by the end of this year, according to IBM.

And along with traffic, mobile sales are up.

Mobile sales accounted for 24% of all online retail sales in March of this year, nearly double the 13% from two years ago....