Digital Wallet uptake in Australia

The idea of having a wallet or purse that doesn't bulge with a multitude of plastic cards is quite attractive to many. I got to the stage where my wallet was so full of ID, membership and credit cards that I separated my cards into a pile of everyday cards and another of "some times" cards. That solution however proved to be problematic for me being spontaneous and likely to make a random decision to go to the zoo or movies and discovering my membership is in the sometimes wallet left back at home.

In Australia nearly 80% of us wont leave home without the smartphone, they have become as critical as your keys or up until recently your cash and credit cards. Enter the digital wallet, a one stop shop for all your credentials. Cash, ID and memberships all conveniently located in your smartphone.

Mobile payments use the same technology as contactless payments. Take a look at the supermarket or your petrol station, you can already simply tap your credit card on the merchant’s EFTPOS terminal and your payment is made. This merchant technology by MasterCard's PayPass and Visa's PayWave can also be used for mobile payments using wireless near field communication (NFC) to the EFTPOS device.

The large supermarkets such as Coles and Woolworths will adopt the use of digital wallet payments because of the convenience of the "tap and go" infrastructure already being part of the store payment systems. However a smartphone digital wallet goes beyond payments, it can also be used for travel and concert tickets, loyalty redemption and geo proximity special deals such as retailers enticing you into their store by offering instant freebies and time sensitive discounts.

Sometime ago I heard Google’s real business objective is to be a financial institution and it seems that ambition is coming into fruition with their latest banking product Google Wallet. This Android App allows you to store credit card and loyalty reward card details on your smartphone and make a payments to an NFC enabled EFTPOS device that accept MasterCard PayPass transactions as described previously. So it appears in Australia we are really well down the path of the technology for digital wallets in terms of both software & hardware, we just need the merchants to get behind it and make it available to customers.

Socio & Geo-demographic Segmentation

What we know today as a census began in Egypt over 5,300 years ago, where it was used for tax gathering and to determine a person's fitness for the military. In Australia, the national census started in 1911 some ten years after our country was united as a Commonwealth.

The orginal aim of the first Australian census was to provide a snapshot of Australia's people and their housing in the various states. Fast forward a century and now gathering information about the population extends signicantly past the government making decisions in relation to the determination of local services and facilities across the country. The power of computing combined with big data and GIS modelling software provides both the public and private sectors with vast amounts of information that is used to predict our behaviour.

Socio & Geo-demographic Segmentation - better targeted marketing, segmentation & ABS mesh block mapping

What gets interesting for marketers is when ABS census maps are linked to databases. Companies like Pitney Bowes Software have software called Map Info that is designed to visualise the relationships between data and geography, it facilitates customer data mining and modeling to enable customer insight, better targeting and prediction of future customer behaviour.

When a large supermarket chain such as Woolworths or Coles analyses their point-of-sale (POS) data with other geo demographic data they are able to determine a local area's sales trends, develop regional specific marketing campaigns and accurately predict customer loyalty within a determined socio economic segment. Everytime we use a supermarket rewards card or pay with our credit card the data collected provides a detailed profile about our purchasing behaviour.

In simple terms you can imagine locations are assigned a demographic segment using only their address and age are then mashed with a psychographic profile which differentiates a suburbs consumer types from each other by profiling their underlying psychological needs which is driven by their personal values, attitudes, interests and lifestyles.

Each suburban street in Australia is given a different classification depending on the consumer characteristics within that area. This data then gives marketers the business intelligence to develop peronalised customer acquistion and retention strategies, cross-selling opportunities and upsell campaigns by developing a deep insight into existing customers and identifying the location and target similar potential customers.

Visually Exploring Your Network

LinkedIn have a impressive feature that allows you to visualise your professional network to help you see the relationships between you and your connections. Check out LinkedIn Maps to create your own.

Here’s how it works: your map is color-coded to cluster groups from your professional career, such as your previous employer, school mates, or networking groups you’ve been part of. In my map, my Sputnik Agency collegues are blue, while my friends connected through the Social Melbourne network are orange and another employer Revium are green.

It's evident that people who work together are all inter-related and interesting to see how a few people I know also seem to know others in seperate network groups, this can be explained by the fact Ive worked in Melbourne most of my life within the technology industry.


What does your own map look like?

Foursquare helps you search for stuff your friends like

In January 2012, Foursquare announced the Explore feature, which leveraged its 1.5 billion checkins into personalised recommendations for users. By collating millions of tips,  Foursquare now allows you to search for places you’ve and for your friends have visited, but also placed you haven’t been or that have a foursquare special deal.

Here’s what Foursquare had to say about Explore:

"The vision for foursquare is much much bigger – it’s about adding an ‘interesting’ layer to the whole world, tailored just for you...Whether you’re planning a night out in your neighborhood or a vacation in Europe, what should you do? Which of your friends should you ask about things? How can you save money? Where can you easily find great places you’ve never been to? How do you search for personalized recommendations in the real world."

When you visit Explore and login to your account, you see a Google map and various search options.

The results then display all of the data you and your friends have given over the years you have been checking-in to locations. If you’re looking for a beer in your area, you’ll be shown a map of all of the local bars and pubs, along with user generated content about them including tips, photos and visitor comments.

It looks like Foursquare has finally worked out a highly valuable way of using all the data it has been collecting from us for years. It’s also in a great position to monetise the killer app by replicating Google’s search and selling busineses a pay-per-click paid listing that would show at the top of the search results.

Evolving into Immersive Consumerism

People are facinated about knowing what the future holds. This infographic video, “Digital Life: Today and Tomorrow" projects what life will be like in 4 years from now in 2015. It makes some interesting points about our daily lives being immersed with technology such as social media and mobile computing.


Digital Life: Today & Tomorrow from Neo Labels on Vimeo.
This made me think of how marketing will evolve in its application of geo-targeting of the publically available information we post up about ourselves on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. How will this effect the everyday lives of people when exposed to omnipresent branding? The video below explores coruption of the technology like we have already seen with Spam email and viruses.


Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Then there's the scientific side of enabling technology and how we would go about if we could evolve to develop a Sixth Sense to access the meta data without using a smart phone. The next video is of Pattie Maes talking at Ted about SixthSense. Is this part of Homo Evolutis? as Juan Enriquez puts it that humanity is on the verge of becoming a new and utterly unique species.

Using LinkedIn to promote your personal brand

With the number of Australians now using LinkedIn surpassing 2 million this year, the social platform LinkedIn has become more than just networking for professionals, it’s become the business to business (b2b) marketplace for many Australian companies and the recruitment ground for both HR agencies and companies head hunting talent.

Last week at the Social Media Club Melbourne, Cliff Rosenberg the Managing Director of LinkedIn Australia & New Zealand gave a presentation to a very packed room on the new LinkedIn Signal tool which works a little like twitter in the sense of being your very own personalised news service. Signal aggregates comments from everyone on LinkedIn who's in your professional network, the companies you follow and industry groups you have joined.



Described as your personal business intelligence dashboard, Signal allows you to access the most relevant insights from the constant stream of status updates and news from your connections. Conversely, it can also be used to put your business at the centre of conversation with your customer and promote your products and services informally using a viral word of mouth approach.

LinkedIn Signal offers 8 filters to modify your stream. To see what people are tweeting or sharing on a particular topic you can narrow or expand your view of the stream based on the following filters: Network, Industry, Company, Time published, Geo / Region, School or keywords and hash tags such as #SMCMelb.

As a way to get your business into your customer’s Signal stream you should actively participate in LinkedIn groups and respond to relevant requests for LinkedIn Answers. Additionally you should also regularly update your LinkedIn status. This activity will also increase your visibility on LinkedIn by ensuring you appear more often on your connections’ home page feeds and Linkedin Signal.

Like any social network, you need to be proactive and consistent in your efforts to make LinkedIn work for your business and personal brand. Some tips to help nurture your business relationships include: sharing relevant content via status updates and sending contacts individual messages when appropriate. Note: By integrating your Twitter account with LinkedIn, Tweets that contain #in will automatically be posted to your LinkedIn account.

This blog orginally appeared on Revium's blog

Facebook Datamines Real-Time Conversations for Ad Targeting

Last month Facebook started to profile real-time conversations to target ads using a worldwide test sample of 1%, which gives them a sample size of over 6 million people.

While advertisers can already use Facebook to reach users based on profile data such as age, gender, location, keywords, interests and preferences through "likes", this recent addition provides real-time processing of data from status updates and new wall posts so that users are served with corresponding advertising messages that are relevant their current conversations.

For example: Users who update their status with "Hey mate, let’s go out for a beer tonight” could get an ad from the local Irish pub, a new boutique beer or the latest drink alcohol responsibly message by the South Australian government (see video below).



While Facebook is not the first website to serve targeted ads (Google started back in 2009 with behavioural advertising program called Adsense) this latest immediate attempt to reach the consumer with a marketing message during a conversation is a major breakthrough.

With real-time delivery of advertisements, any online discussion taking place in our lives such as getting engaged, planning a holiday, organising a dinner with friends turns has become a new marketplace for brands to raise awareness or gain top of mind at the time when people are ready to purchase their product.

This immediacy is even further enhanced if combined with GeoTargeting technology which would put brands directly in front of a potential buyer when they are activily out shopping.

If 57% of people talk more online than they do in real life as the following video suggest, then digital marketers have a great opportunity of tapping into the online conversation.

The World Is Obsessed With Facebook from Alex Trimpe on Vimeo.