Here’s a stat to get you thinking:
Only 21% of marketers actively use mobile, but 81% of mobile leaders say that mobile fundamentally changed their businesses
Bottom line: If your business touches the public, and you’re not using mobile, then your business is immobile.
The world of mobile-data analytics and marketing is undergoing a revolution. It’s driving new revenue and forging new connections to the public. And it allows businesses to engage customers in context.
What does it mean to engage customers in context? In the simplest terms, it means the ability to serve customers content and experiences that they want within certain surroundings or as events or experiences unfold.
Wimbledon’s a great example. Only a few hundred thousand people can attend the event. And television coverage is often limited to choice matches at inconvenient viewing times. IBM developed the Wimbledon app and crunched streaming analytics and big data to deliver real-time info on every point in every match on every one of Wimbledon’s 19 courts.
The data involved 101,778 tennis points across 660 matches, corresponding to 852,752 data points. A team of 48 statisticians – all of them high-quality tennis players – provided contextual data (like speed of the serve) to enrich the machine-collected data. All data was combined with historical performance data and live data from the web and social networks, then fed into an advanced set of analytical tools to provide real-time insight to sports analysts, TV presenters and the global audience.
Impressive? Absolutely. But the same tools can be employed within any business that engages customers. Instead of data about serves and historical matches and points totals, businesses can directly engage customers in the act of shopping, or searching, or traveling, or vacationing with information that incorporates social-media activity, preferred brands, coupons, recent purchases, weather forecasts and so on. Businesses that provide value, or important information, or community – in other words, businesses that engage their customers in context – realize a much greater ROI on their marketing spends.
That’s what is means to engage customers in context, and that’s why it’s so important.
It’s not automatic though. Efforts to engage in context take foresight, solid application integration and a business climate ready to embrace change within the new mobile landscape.
Interested in mobile development, deployment or integration? TxMQ can help. Initial consultations are free and communications are always confidential. Contact vice president Miles Roty for more information: (716) 636-0070 x228, miles@txmq.com.
Tag: streaming analytics
IBM Leverages SoftLayer To Offer API Management Service
A new cloud-based API-management tool from IBM offers businesses and developers an easy, secure and flexible service for the exposure, monitoring and management of APIs. IBM plans to release an evaluation version of its new API Management Service on Sept. 26, 2014, and the initial specs show a lot of promise – especially for SMBs that want to quickly and effectively participate in the mobile and API economy, or for Fortune 500s and 1000s that want to more efficiently manage their sprawling API exposure and footprint.
The cloud-based service allows developers to easily manage SOAP and REST APIs through a single console. At the same time, it provides a simple and scalable method for businesses to advertise, market and sell their APIs worldwide across public, private and semi-gated developer communities. Just as important, it provides businesses with the tools to track and monitor API usage to measure market penetration and streamline developer billing and use-charges.
There’s no coding involved, according to IBM, and the attractive developer portal will help entice partners within the already ultra-competitive and time-strapped API economy.
The latest IT buzzword isn’t cost-control, it’s cost-optimization – in other words, how to use existing IT investment to its full potential. For many companies, the most effective path toward cost-optimization is to expose key business services to drive new collaboration and revenue. It can be done through APIs, and now it can be done entirely in the cloud through IBM’s API Management Service.
TxMQ is an IBM Premier Business Partner and can help your company with all its cloud-based computing and API needs. For a free and confidential consultation, contact vice president Miles Roty: (716) 636-0070 x228, Miles@TxMQ.com.