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Many people complain about Facebook’s mobile experience. For the longest time their app was just not very good. Even with the latest improvements the Facebook mobile experience still leaves a bit to be desired.

While it seemed that Facebook was simply focused on building their 900 million user powerhouse and mobile was backburnered as a result, that may not have been the case at all.

CNBC reports that as a result of early investor meetings there has been a change to the filings for Facebook’s IPO which indicates the trouble Facebook has with mobile.

Facebook said growth in the number of users using Facebook on mobile devices, which is hard to monetize, “may negatively affect our revenue and financial results.”

In an amended regulatory filing, the company said the number of people logging into Facebook is continuing to grow more quickly than the number of ads delivered.

Facebook said this is in part because more people are using the social network on mobile devices, where it shows a very small number of ads.

Could Facebook actually be the victim of the world’s move to mobile which is happening so rapidly right before our very eyes? Back in February when the first announcements for Facebook’s mobile ad plan were brought to light, this concern was there. At that time Facebook had admitted that it had failed to monetize the already 425 million mobile users it had and it did not go unoticed

The disclosure sent up red flags for analysts, because the company also said it does not “currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven.”

Facebook’s stating this initially was concerning but moving to the new wording that seems wary of rapidly growing numbers of mobile users and its potential to negatively affect revenue and financial results is a big jump. It should also be one that makes us all wonder just what can Facebook possibly do to monetize their mobile presence without frustrating users with too many ads in too small of a place. I’m not an analyst but this sounds pretty bad. Insurmountable? No. Pretty bad? Yes.

Maybe this is why Google has been content with letting Google+ slowly grind away in the background. Google already has the mobile ad thing working with search which is further bolstered by a 95% share in the mobile search game. It doesn’t need Google+ for monetization (although that doesn’t mean they won’t try). Imagine people en masse discovering that Google+ could be the place to connect with people in a mobile environment without being pitched every 2 seconds? Could Facebook’s absolute need to monetize the mobile experience be the reason for people to finally consider Google+ for real?

Far fetched? Maybe but I don’t see this development for Facebook as something that can be easily overcome. Could Facebook have missed this one so badly and painted itself into a corner that it may not be able to get out of?

What are your thoughts and impressions? As Internet marketers what does Facebook become if it cannot deliver in the mobile space?

Kit Kat is famous for their “give me a break” slogan and now they’re using it to give their fans in Singapore a much needed break from social media!

According to the Kit Kat Social Break website, 50% of 19-26 year olds in China, Singapore and US say keeping up social media is too time consuming and stressful. They say that they feel pressured to be in constant contact and guilty if they don’t respond right away to social media messages.

The solution? Kit Kat’s Social Break widget. The widget helps the user keep up on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The Facebook portion automatically “likes” any photos or updates that are tagged with your name. The Twitter helper automatically replies to Tweets with a relevant response randomly chosen from a list. The LinkedIn helper auto shares posts your contacts have shared. Says the copy: Now it is possible to seem intelligent without even lifting a finger.

The concept is all about marketing Kit Kat candy bars but it’s pretty brilliant. We’ve all become addicted to social media but China really takes the the prize for dedication. Nestle says that 91% of the respondents from China have visited a social media site in the past six months. This compares to 67% in the US and only 30% in Japan.

Social media usage even sneaks in at inappropriate times.

Looking at those numbers, I’d say the Kit Kat Social Break widget might save more than your sanity, it might save your relationship, too!

If the campaign is a success, the company plans to expand into China’s “homegrown” social networks and add artificial intelligence for more relevant auto responses. Right now, the creative team say most important thing is to “avoid causing offence or embarrassment with inappropriate responses, such as posting something flippant to news that a friend’s grandfather had died.”

Yeah. Good thinking, now break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar.

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Google does one thing better than anyone else (in my opinion, of course, so feel free to disagree in the comments) and that thing is maps. There are always improvements happening and it’s one of the few times that I don’t feel like a second class citizen in the smartphone era since they roll updates out to us Android folks first!

The latest update integrates Google Offers into the map experience for Android. From the Google Lat Long blog we get

Today, in the U.S. only, we’re launching a way to discover nearby Google Offers in Google Maps for Android. To see great deals near you, tap on “Maps” to open the dropdown menu and then tap on “Offers.” If you see something you like you can click on it to learn more. Some Google Offers can be purchased and saved for later while others are immediately available for free. With free Google Offers, press “Use now” to redeem instantly or “Save for later” for future use. You can also opt-in to receive notifications in the app when there are offers near you.

I honestly don’t get much of a chance to take advantage of this type of service since my suburban existence differs very much from the city dwellers who walk from neighborhood to neighborhood and can literally bump into new things to do and experience. Not to say it can’t be used at all but this type of offering certainly favors the urbanite, which is totally cool.

Here is the usual Google video treatment of this maps option

Does this kind of integration creep you out or is it exciting? If you are a business owner do you see this being a help to your business? Does your business fit the criteria for a walk or drive-by offer?

Making the top ten list is a good thing except when when it’s the top ten list of losers. The Washington Post and The Guardian social reader apps both took a big hit this week and many are wondering if it’s a sign of things to come.

The numbers come from AppData, a website that monitors the health of Facebook and iOS apps. They caused a stir this week when they reported a 46% drop in monthly usage for The Washington Post and a 43% drop for The Guardian. Immediately, tech outlets jumped in with explanations for this horrendous turn around.

 BuzzFeed suggested that the collapse was due to the haters finally getting their way.

“My brain already associates those little blocks of auto-fed stories with second-class content. I mean, I know my friends didn’t really mean to show to it to me. Why would I click? And god, why would I sign up for the thing that seems to have tricked its way into my timeline? It’s an app that broadcasts internet illiteracy for everyone to see.”

Points for style on that one.

The Atlantic Wire counters with a story titled: Facebook Social Reader Stinks Less Than Previously Thought.

Mashable counters with reader usage is down but engagement is up!

And Chicken Little chimed in to say, “the sky is falling.”

What is it about Facebook that inspires such passion in reporters? You know I’m not a huge fan but I’ll still give out FB credits where they’re due and in this, I think Facebook is getting the short shrift. When they added the social reader apps, it seemed like a great way to help failing newspapers get more exposure. And hey, adding world news to your Facebook page is a nice way to class up the joint, you know what I mean?

Unfortunately, as with all things Facebook, there were permission issues and space issues and who wants what on top issues and so they began to tweak. I swear that’s 90% of what they do over there is tweak things. It was on top, now it’s on the bottom. Left to right, most important before less important as decided by a complex algorithm based on the position of the stars and your blood type.

The hard truth is, no company can live by Facebook alone (unless you’re Zynga). Traffic from Facebook has to be a bonus on top of what you bring in on your own. Some days it will be great and other days it won’t be. Social Readers aren’t newspaper subscriptions, they’re advertisements. The hope is that a reader will like the content enough to become a regular reader of the publication. That’s where the money is, not in Facebook shares.

Here’s another truth. If you really want to know what’s going on in the world, shut Facebook down for an hour. You’ll be surprised by what else is out there.

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If you have ever dealt with Google Places in any way you know how it can a maddening experience. As soon as there seems to be a semblance of calm and normality there is a sudden suspension of a listing, or a merge of two listings happens or Google just decides to replace your data with “new” data it dredged up from a data warehouse. Many local marketers and SEO professionals are likely to be cringing right now as they recall a moment from the past of when that all to present. Sorry about that .

Well, Google is at least trying to help businesses with at least 10 locations (considered the low end limit) by introducing a new bulk upload tool. It’s best for you to watch the tutorials that Google has prepared and posted on their Small Business blog

First, this tutorial are for those who are new users:

Now, here is a tutorial for those who already have verified listings

If you didn’t watch those videos here is a list of what the tool can do:

-Edit one or more of your listings’ data at once
-Search through your listings, filtering by specific information or for listings with errors
-Upload new listings using a data file or by adding them individually within the interface
-Tell us how we can improve this new interface by clicking the “Give Feedback” link

Well, all we can say is good luck with managing your Google Places listings. It’s a game that has turned more than one SEO into a quivering mass of protoplasm. Good times. Good times.

Do you remember when phones couldn’t do anything but make phone calls? With every passing month, we’re adding more and more functionality to our mobile phones and it’s good for everybody’s business. Games, shopping, directions, news — we can even have our phones nag us when we forget to do something. About the only thing our phones can’t do is transport us to another location. . . someday. .  . someday.

In the meantime, it’s apps that are occupying our mobile minutes. 82% of our media time is spent with these mini-programs and there’s no end in sight.

comScore put together a list of the top apps and I have to say, I was surprised by a few of them. Take a look.

First off, check out Android with the most unique visitors. You wouldn’t know it with the way Apple’s always shouting. After that, search is more important to Android users, but both have a stake in not getting lost. Percentage wise, more iPhone users are checking out Facebook and a lot more are using YouTube. What’s that all about?

Stocks and Music are hot with iPhone users while Android users go for Cooliris (an app that combines media with email and sharing) and they’re bigger fans of Angry Birds. Finally, it’s nice to see that a quarter of the users on both sides are enriching their vocabulary with Words.

Taken as a whole there’s an interesting trend — in that there is no trend. The apps on this list represent everything from practical tools to entertainment, video, photos, games and social media. The only thing missing is shopping. For that you need to look at the combined mobile app and mobile browsing numbers. Then Amazon comes in fourth with 44,028 unique visitors for March. They were beaten only by Google, Facebook and Yahoo. Ebay also made the combined list as did game company Zynga.

Apps are busting out all over. If you can create a tool that helps mobile phone users do anything faster, better or simply make it more fun, then you’ll be in the money, too.

Everyone knows you need analytics on your website and some people actually pay attention and act on the data they acquire. But digital design agency Extractable says you might be putting all your eggs in the wrong data basket.

Right now, off the top of your head, what would you say is the most common data point for measuring success?

If you said traffic, give yourself a gold star. 66% of the companies Extractable surveyed said they use use traffic numbers as a measure of success. 46% said they use time spent on site but neither one of these is a true indicator of customer satisfaction and neither speaks to conversions.

For example, back in the heyday of StumbleUpon, you could see your traffic triple overnight. Trouble is, most of it was junk traffic, people who hit the page because it was offered to them, without any real interest in the content. Two days later, it’s back to business as usual. Now, if you were paid based on traffic, then glory be, but otherwise, it’s not traffic worth counting.

As for time on site. . . oh, how I’ve battled folks on that one. Extractable points out that extended time on site doesn’t mean the customers are happily interacting. It could mean that they’re lost and aimlessly clicking around trying to complete a task such as buying what you’re selling.

Take a look at this chart from Extractable’s Data Driven Design report.

Shouldn’t customer satisfaction and conversions top traffic? At least Social Media likes isn’t at the top of the list but I suspect that it will show up higher in the years to come.

Look, I get it. We measure traffic because we can. It’s like counting heads as people walk into a store. Even if they don’t buy anything, it’s a first step and getting people to your site is indeed a first step. But pulling people in isn’t enough. You have to engage them and you have to get them to “buy.”

For you, “buy” might mean purchasing a physical product. For someone else, “buy” might mean downloading a free app or reading the content on a digital magazine.

Every website has an expected action. That’s what we need to be measuring. That’s how you define success.

What do you think? Is traffic measurement something we do just because we’ve always done it or is it a valid measure of success?

Chicagoans spend more than 200 hours a year commuting to and from work. Much of that time is spent mindlessly wandering the transit platforms of the city, waiting for their train to come in. Now, thanks to Peapod, commuters can use that time to grocery shop.

Peapod has turned the busy State and Lake Station Tunnel in Chicago into a virtual grocery store by lining the walls with larger-than-life photos of stocked grocery store shelves.

To order groceries, customers simply use their smartphone to scan the bar codes printed along the wall. 2 boxes of Barilla pasta, 10 Chobani yogurts, a six-pack of Powerade. Then they schedule delivery for the next day or the next week. Groceries can be delivered to their home or to the office. Perfect for the office manager who needs to keep the company break room stocked.

Once they’ve connected with the Peapod app, they’ll have access to over 12,000 items including fresh meats, specialty foods and pet supplies so they can complete their list.

Peapod ran a smaller version of the campaign in Philadelphia earlier this year but the tunnel takeover in Chicago is the first of its kind. It’s a large scale example of what mobile can really do for us. People don’t have to shop from giant, virtual aisles, all they need is their phone, but creating an interactive wall draws folks in and sharpens the idea. There’s something cool about scanning groceries then having them show up at your house the next day. And since the process starts on the platform, they’ve got plenty of train time to work out the details on their phone.

Have you seen an innovating campaign using mobile? We’d like to hear about it.

A recent study by Viacom states that tablet users are most comfortable using their tablets in their homes. In fact, the number is 74% of the time. Why do you suppose that is?

Well, most tablets are Wifi only devices so it’s portability is somewhat limited. Of course, if you want to go to any room in a home with a Wifi connection that’s no problem. Of the most common rooms the study showed we see from eMarketer

Notice how the use goes down as you reach rooms where it is less likely to have a TV. No science there just an observation.

Now, what about the 25% of the time that the tablet leaves the property? Well, no real surprises here.

I want to meet those who bring it to a sporting event. Have you done that? If so let us know why.

Tablets are becoming more and more ubiquitous for sure. As a result, marketers have to give serious consideration as to how their online efforts render on a tablet. Right now (and, let’s just say it, for the foreseeable future) the iPad is going to be the tablet of choice. Android tablets have had a very hard time getting traction. The roughly 50 / 50 split that occurs in the smartphone market does not occur in the tablet market at all. Remember how hot the Kindle Fire was when it rolled out? The numbers for it have cooled off considerably while iPad sales continue to soar.

Have you fine tuned your marketing to meet the needs of this growing market segment? Are you making any specific tweaks to your offerings that are aimed specifically at the tablet crowd? If so tell us in the comments.

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If you are the person who has the responsibility of monitoring your brand’s reputation one of your greatest fears is that your CEO will be “found out”. Ask the folks at Yahoo today how it feels to put out the reputation firestorm that has been ignited by Scott Thompson’s “little white lie”.

Now the folks at AT&T look like they may have a cringe-worthy moment as their CEO, Randall Stephenson, is telling folks that when their Android device doesn’t update it’s not AT&T’s fault, it’s Google’s. The following comes from 9 to 5 Google reporting on Stephenson talking at a wireless conference

Stephenson blamed Google, claiming, “Google determines what platform gets the newest releases and when. A lot of times, that’s a negotiated arrangement and that’s something we work at hard. We know that’s important to our customers. That’s kind of an ambiguous answer because I can’t give you a direct answer in this setting.”

It may have been ambiguous because he really didn’t know what he was saying. Google responded as follows

“Mr. Stephenson’s carefully worded quote caught our attention and frankly we don’t understand what he is referring to. Google does not have any agreements in place that require a negotiation before a handset launches. Google has always made the latest release of Android available as open source at source.android.com as soon as the first device based on it has launched. This way, we know the software runs error-free on hardware that has been accepted and approved by manufacturers, operators and regulatory agencies such as the FCC. We then release it to the world.”

I am not an expert on this by any means but it seems as if AT&T’s head honcho is not quite up on his P’s and Q’s. How does this make AT&T look to you? We live in a world where placing blame on others for failures is like a full time job for many people.

Should CEO’s be out in the wild if they are not completely aware of how their business operates? Going around and throwing out misinformed jabs at major partners is probably not the way it’s taught in business school these days. Or is it?

How do you feel about the reputation of a company when their leader does something like this or pulls a Scott Thompson?