Most talk about mobile optimization tends to focus on responsive design and customized content (see Matt Dusig’s blog on Why User Experience is the Key to Quality). Consumers expect mobile sites to not only be catered to their eyes and thumbs, but also to their tablets and operating systems.

Scott Kevdon, the CEO of Urban Airship sums it up well: “Gone are the days when you could get away with just taking what works on the web and shoving it at mobile.”

Yet even though companies continue to invest more in mobile, there has been little discussion about one of the key issues of development that could make or break the experience as a whole, especially as it pertains to the Market Research industry: Battery drain.

A recent study by Stanford University on mobile-browser energy consumption highlights how even some of the most popular websites like the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) and Wikipedia fail to optimize for mobile. The study is a wake up call for the trigger-happy companies who go to market with their mobile offering without considering the consequences. The study warns that “sites who do not [consider this], end up draining the battery of visiting phones [which] can potentially reduce traffic to the site.”

No one is more aware of this than the mobile carriers themselves. Verizon just issued a warning to their customer base about “high risk” apps. We can only expect this type of communication to increase as more apps involve geolocation technology that drains the battery-life out of smartphones.

So how does this apply to the MR space? As more and more firms start turning out mobile research apps in response to client demand, it becomes even more critical that we, as an industry, develop apps that respect the integrity of our panel.

What do I mean by this? We’ve made the argument that without our panel’s health, the technology means nothing. This has never been truer in our rush to accommodate the latest and greatest mobile craze in the market. This mad dash has resulted in, as Kevdon observed, the “shoving” what we do on our online panel sites into mobile. So if our panel members are downloading apps that are depleting their mobile power supply, we are in turn, deterring them from participating in our surveys, and thereby compromising the quality of our research.

On the client side, I offer a key consideration before you decide to sign on with a mobile supplier: Make sure to download the mobile app, and test it out yourself for an extended period of time before passing it onto your panelists.

Here, at uSamp, we have made sure that the entire experience is user-friendly from the screen to the battery life. By leveraging responsive web design, our Instant.ly survey authoring tool detects the respondent’s screen size and automatically resizes and reformats each question type to fit accordingly. This ensures a positive experience for all respondents, agnostic of the device. Furthermore, though our mobile panel app iPoll does utilize geolocation services to conduct location-based research, we have invested significant time and resources in preserving battery life for our mobile panelists. It’s this dedication to the user experience that makes our panelists as happy as our clients.

Instead of waxing poetic on the future of big data, we decided to recruit our data experts-in-residence to weigh in on the discussion and provide a fresh take on this vast topic before it makes the Ridiculous Business Jargon dictionary. Here at uSamp, we’ve collected over one billion data points in the five-year lifetime of our company. In our big data blog series, we’ll look at the obvious and not so obvious truths from its predictive powers to its shortcomings. Is the revenue invested in mining big data a burstable bubble? What separates the men from the boys sitting on this wealth of info? Answers to these questions and more can be found in the following series of blogs.

by Siva Venkataraman, Director of Analytics, uSamp

Defining Big Data:

No other technology in the past few years has shown both the potential and hype in equal measures as “Big Data.” Yet the meaning of big data is ambiguous and not very well understood.

For some, big data means using new technologies such as map-reduce or Hadoop to crunch multiple petabytes of data; while for others – especially business folk – it has become more of a generic term for analytics, loosely used to describe any opportunities related to data.

Gartner provides a framework in defining big data as the “3Vs” – ‘Big data are high-volume, high-velocity, and/or high-variety information assets that require new forms of processing to enable enhanced decision making, insight discovery and process optimization.

However, none of these definitions offer a clear guideline to marketing executives on how much to invest in big data or to market researchers on how to use big data technologies to gain more insights about consumers and the market.  A more useful way of thinking about big data is as a set of technologies that enable collecting, storing, and processing large volumes of unstructured data in an efficient way.

Structured vs. Unstructured data:

Market researchers have always dealt with large volumes of structured data from a variety of sources to find useful correlations and market insights. Structured data can be defined as specific information stored in the form of columns and rows. Typical sources of structured data include transactional data from point of sales systems, customer interaction data from CRM and customer service systems, and survey response or attitudinal data from primary research, Technologies to analyze structured data, such as databases & statistical tools,have been around for decades.

With the advent and the increased use of social media and smart phones, however, people leave behind an unprecedented trail of information about their interests, likes, loyalties, and sentiments about the places they visit and the products and services they use – both online and in real world. Text, social graph, multi-media and the geo-spatial data do not have a consistent data structure, and tend to come in very large volumes, which makes this type of data harder to store and process in traditional databases.

With big data technologies such as map reduce and No SQL, it becomes much easier to handle this unstructured data. In fact, the most important objective would be to transform the unstructured to a more manageable structured data so it can be easily analyzed with other sources. Marrying the output of unstructured with the familiar structured data to gain unprecedented insights about the market is the best justification for investing in big data in the market research space.

Guidelines to a Successful Big Data Strategy:

Getting insights out of unstructured data should be no different than any other analytics initiative. The most important task before venturing into the big data minefield is to identify the key business objective:  - having a clear understanding of how this data will be used to gain actionable insights. If the objectives are vague and the full potential of the data sources are unclear at the beginning, it would be prudent to start with a smaller budget and employ a data scientist who can explore the data in the cloud (Elastic Map Reduce from Amazon or Big Query from Google), and use the exercise to articulate well defined requirements for the bigger initiative.

Another important exercise is to ensure that the analytics/insights team has enough human intelligence in-house to assimilate all the data and form insights and opinions about consumers and the market.

Big Data Opportunity for Panel Companies:

If there is one group of companies within the MR industry that can really exploit the full potential of big data, it would be the panel companies that provide market researchers on-demand access to consumers who are willing to opine about products and brands.

The panel companies, in general, progressively collect hundreds of data points related to panelists’ demographics, geography, and psychographics to form a user profile. These data points are usually collected based on self-stated information provided by the users through survey questions. The users can be specifically targeted by market researchers for surveys and focus groups based on their profiles.

In summary, big data presents big opportunities for market researchers if well understood. The best use of big data technologies is to efficiently process and gain insights from unstructured data. Big data provides exciting opportunities for panel companies. Panel companies can create a holistic profile of the panelists not just based on their demographic and attitudinal data but also based on the wealth of wealth of unstructured data from social media, online, and mobile sources that they leave behind in the digital universe.

Siva Venkataraman is part of uSamp’s data science team. He is tasked with integrating uSamp’s 12 Million+ panelists’ attitudinal data (surveys & profile questions responses) with their online & offline interactions to form a holistic psychographic profile. He oversees the business analytics, web analytics & optimization initiatives at uSamp.

The study conducted by uSamp using their B2B panel examined the office cultures and habits of 1,000 business professionals across the United States to find out how these workplaces compared. The research team at uSamp was able to analyze the data by company size, type of industry, type of organization, level in organization, education and age. The results may surprise you:

President Clinton is still learning how to tweet.

Market Research

Flex, future researcher
Jeremy Rix follows Jay Simpson, fictional future insight executive, during a typical working week to see how the job might change in the coming years.

UK MR budgets up in Q1, says IPA’s Bellwether
UK — Market research budgets in the UK were revised up on balance in the first quarter of 2013, according to the latest Bellwether Report from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

Is BrainJuicer ambitious enough?
Recent unflattering results from growth darling BrainJuicer surprised some observers, including Surinder Siama of innovation researchers mngful. So he asked BrainJuicer CEO John Kearon about what went wrong and what this means for BrainJuicer’s future.

ActiveGroup ‘to Close on Friday
US-based ActiveGroup, which provides video streaming to the market research industry, is reportedly to cease operations on April 5 after fourteen years in business. The firm is part of MVL Group, which also owns companies including PhoneBase and QuickTest/Heakin.

WorldOne Secures $35m for Physician Community
Healthcare research specialist WorldOne has secured $35m in funding, most of which it will use to expand its Sermo online physician community.

GroupM Consolidates Multicultural Insight Services
WPP’s media investment management group GroupM has expanded its line-up of multicultural insights services and brought them together in one until called GroupM Multicultural, led by Hispanic media specialist Gonzalo Del Fa.

Social Media

Social media drives increase in TV programme engagement says study
AUSTRALIA — Interaction with social media while watching TV drives a 9% increase in programme engagement according to research released today.

Stephen Colbert Helps Bill Clinton Send First Tweet
In a recent interview with Bill Clinton, Stephen Colbert tweets from @PrezBillyJeff on behalf of the former President.

Justin Bieber Twitter followers ’50% fake’ says report
Around 50% of Justin Bieber’s followers on Twitter are fake, suggests a report which looked into social media profiles on the microblogging site.

Five Social Media Lessons From the US Ambassador to South Korea
As the Korean peninsula teeters on the brink of war, US ambassador to South Korea, Sung Kim, has a bit of a social media mess on his hands.

Facebook Home Puts Facebook First and Everyone Else Second
“We’re not building a phone and we’re not building an operating system.” That’s what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday as his company launched Facebook Home, something that essentially turns an Android phone into a Facebook phone, and keeps you inside the social network in such a way that it might feel a little bit like an OS.

Facebook Expands Ad Targeting Based on Purchases
Do you buy a lot of children’s breakfast cereal? Then you might see some new Facebook ads for those products cropping up on Facebook thanks to a new program from the company called Partner Categories.

Twitter Shuts Down Ribbon’s In-Stream Payment Option Hours After Launch
Ribbon, a San Francisco payments company, made headlines early Wednesday with the launch of anew in-stream payment option for Twitter that lets users buy and sell items directly through the news feed on the social network. Now, just a couple hours later, Twitter has killed off the feature.

‘Facebook Home could change our brains’
Leading neuroscientist Susan Greenfield says Facebook’s new phone and app encourage us to live in the moment. That could change our brains, she claims.

Technology

Amscreen to use Quividi’s face recognition across network
UK — European outdoor digital media network Amscreen is to roll out audience measurement company Quividi’s face recognition technology across its networks.

Worldwide PC sales tumble 14 per cent
Global PC sales fell 14 per cent in the first three months of the year, the worst decline since 1994, as the growing market for tablets and smartphones siphoned away shoppers’ cash and Windows 8 failed to excite.

Waterstones founder to launch Spotify for books
It may seem an unlikely match, but the founder of Waterstones is turning to technology to revive the lost art of the Charles Dickens-style serialised novel.

Slow iPhone and iPad sales blamed for slump at Chinese manufacturer
Hon Hai Precision Industry, the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics, posted its biggest revenue decline in at least 13 years, pointing to slower sales of iPhones, iPads and computers.

Next two iPhones ‘designed under Steve Jobs’
The next two iPhones were designed under Steve Jobs, according to comments attributed to Apple’s head of government liaison.

Japanese Students Invent ‘Girlfriend Coat’ to Hug Lonely People
Forever alone? Fear not — Japanese students from the University of Tsukuba have developed a “girlfriend coat” to keep you company.

Mobile

Foursquare 6.0 Lands in the App Store
Foursquare has launched a major update to its iOS app, rethinking the location-based service as a discovery tool instead of primarily a way to see what your friends are doing. Search is much more prominent in the app, and it suggests nearby attractions as soon as you open it.

On the geofence
Allen Vartazarian, uSamp’s resident ‘mobile guru’, explores the research potential of throwing virtual fences around real-world locations.

Google ‘to buy WhatsApp for $1bn’
Search giant Google is reportedly in negotations to buy popular messaging service WhatsApp for $1bn.

Facebook: ‘Our Home is on mobiles’
The future of Facebook lies on the mobile phone and the tablet rather than the desktop PC, the social network has claimed.

Apple censors Tibet book app in latest concession to Chinese government
Apple has ejected an app that offered access to banned books from its App Store in China, in the latest sign of the technology giant’s willingness to appease the Chinese government.

HTC ‘Facebook phone’ picture appears ahead of launch
A picture supposedly showing the “Facebook phone” by HTC has emerged on Twitter ahead of its expected launch tomorrow.

Amazon hires former Windows Phone boss Charlie Kindel for ‘undisclosed project’
Amazon has hired former Windows Phone boss Charlie Kindel for an undisclosed project, prompting speculation that it may enter the smartphone market.

Apple designs iPhone with wraparound 3D display
Apple has patented a new iPhone design featuring a wraparound display and no buttons.

Samsung announces Galaxy Mega 5.8 and 6.3, coming to Europe in May
After months of speculation, Samsung has finally revealed its latest oversized smartphones, the Galaxy Mega 5.8 and 6.3. Larger than even Samsung’s enormous 5.5-inch Galaxy Note 2, both phones are low- to mid-range in terms of specifications.

Gamification

Community PlanIt Makes a Game out of Fixing Community Issues
Now, what if there was a way to make civic planning not only simpler to participate but engaging as well? Designed by the Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College (one of many labs across the US), Community PlanIt is a game that aims to get local citizens more involved with community planning.

GCo’s Picks: Games for Training Skills at GSummit 2013
Adobe and Delta Air Lines both use gamification to drive engagement with their products, which in turn produces a kind of learning and subsequent new behavior for the engaged users. Learning is taking place in this regard but Adobe and Delta have managed to use gamification for an even higher level of learning

University Game Labs Emerging to Enhance Community Learning
To think, there are still people who say gaming isn’t good for education; try saying that to universities with game labs.

Minor League Team Debuts Urinal Games at Coca-Cola Park
If you’re into minor league baseball and in the quaint area of Lehigh Valley between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, you’ll have a golden opportunity to play some games in the men’s bathroom of the IronPigs’ Coca-Cola Park.

Bitcoin: The First Universal Loyalty Program Currency
Bitcoin — the buzzy virtual currency that’s focused on privacy — continues to gain major traction. For some time you’ve been able to pay for games (or a hitman), invest your earnings and speculate on Bitcoins. In recent days, it’s become possible to use the world’s first Bitcoin ATM and pay your employees in Bitcoins. In short, Bitcoin is angling to be the first broadly accepted virtual currency not issued by a nation-state.

Bitcoin Was the ‘Victim of Its Own Success,’ Not DDOS Attack
Bitcoin, the world’s most popular virtual currency, yesterday took a huge nosedive — from its all-time-high of $265 to as low as $105 — but the reason is not a DDOS as some have speculated.

Market Ripe for Health and Wellness Gamification Startups
A new study shows that employers are increasingly relying on gamification to increase employee health engagement. According to Buck Consultants, 62% of employers consider gamification the most effective strategy in encouraging employees to improve their health and at least 31% will adopt at least one new health-related gamification strategy in the coming year.

Moving Beyond Points and Badges: Gamification 2.0
The technology and business world has been abuzz with a new term– gamification, defined as the use of game elements in everyday scenarios in order to drive engagement and make work more interesting.

Miscellaneous

Dubai’s new police car: a £360,000 Lamborghini Aventador
In a city of boundless bling, police have to be able to keep up with the bad guys – and when it comes to chasing supercars, your average squad car just might not be up to scratch.

Iranian scientist claims to have invented ‘time machine’
An Iranian businessman claims to have mastered time with a machine that allows users to fast forward up to eight years into the future.

Snake finally beaten
What happens at the end of the classic game Snake, popularised by Nokia?

Margaret Thatcher’s Most Famous Quotes
As Great Britain’s first – and as yet only – female Prime Minister, Baroness Margaret Thatcher’s life was not short of famous sound bites.

Self-Healing Hydrogen Leaf Could Power the World
There are plenty of scientists out there trying to solve our impending energy crisis. Many of their creations never leave the lab. Here’s one that is on its way to commercialization — and just fixed one of its biggest problems.

-as compiled by Philippa Craig-Humphreys, Panel Development Manager

Traditionally, the research industry has moved cautiously when it comes to embracing new technology. For example, it has taken a number of years for the industry to embrace the transition from paper to telephone to online. There are perfectly good reasons for this, which have to do with concerns about data integrity, validity, security, representativeness and the need to minimize disruption in trend measurement for our longitudinal studies, which were (and will always be) important measures for our businesses.

Now, with the huge growth in consumer smartphone usage and the variety of functions that the latest technology has to offer for collecting consumer and shopper feedback, we find ourselves at the beginning of another major shift in data collection mode. We have become an app culture. The growth in smartphone usage is even more intense than the growth of the internet in the late nineties – and  that was considered an unprecedented phenomenon at that time. This begs the question:

Will it take the research industry years to embrace this latest mode or will the use of smartphone technology be incorporated into our research plans at a faster pace than online?

I think most of us who have been involved in the move to mobile realize that this mode is different. Not only is the consumer’s technology adoption rate faster than online, but it is also a behavior that has become ‘second nature’ to consumers, with the smartphone being a device which is by their side – all the time, everywhere. This fact alone gives us the power to conduct studies that we have only dreamed about in the past. The research industry has never had the ability to reach out to shoppers along the entire path to purchase and to consumers during the point of consumption in such a fluid manner. The power of this, along with the pure technology capabilities (rich media, GPS, instant data uploads, etc.) will result in our becoming ‘immediate adopters’ of mobile-based research, without question.

What about the concerns of data integrity, validity and the like? When I think about these things, there are two main reasons why we can be sure that these concerns will not slow down our path to mobile adoption like they have in the past with online.

For one, we already know how to use technology to maintain panel quality and validity. At uSamp, we use many of the same quality processes and procedures for our mobile panel as we do for our online panels. These are processes that have been refined and honed over the last several years and that leverage the very best technology has to offer.

The second is that rather than focus on the overall panel balance and representativeness, most of our studies consist of targeted audiences who, by definition, represent the people we want to hear from and listen to. In fact, there are many targets we can reach now that we couldn’t reach before – both demographically (i.e. Millennials, Hispanics, etc.) and especially behaviorally (i.e. location-based, activity-based, etc.).

So it’s with confidence that I say we are about to witness a major shift in research mode, the likes of which we’ve not seen before. The shift to mobile-based research may very well be the most significant change at an unprecedented rate of speed.

Because of this, it is absolutely critical for research organizations of all kinds to be actively engaged in learning, evaluating, testing and executing a wide variety of research based on mobile technology.

The customer intelligence derived from actionable data helps identify markets and customers, measure brand loyalty and pinpoint new trends; ultimately, helping companies understand what people think. Big data doesn’t come from one source, but from a multitude of sources – surveys, focus groups, mobile feedback, purchase history and customer service to name a few.

Even The Pope Tweets! Image courtesy of USA TODAY

Welcome to uSamp’s bi-weekly link dump: A compilation of all things trending in Market Research, Mobile, Social Media, Gamification and more. We hope you’ll find this aggregation as informative and entertaining as we do. Let us know if there are items that you’d like to see included in the next link dump!

Market Research

Adapt to survive, warns latest Grit survey
US — Traditional researchers will have to move away from data collection if they are to survive in a world of social media monitoring, according to the latest survey on market research trends.

Shock of the New – an interview with Jane Frost
The MRS Annual Conference kicks off next week with sportsmen, artists, broadcasters and scientists on the agenda. But what does it all mean for research? Avery Dennison’s Edward Appleton asked MRS chief executive Jane Frost to explain all.

Social Media

The top 10 most irritating social media updates
A new survey has revealed the 10 most annoying types of social media update. How many are you guilty of?

A ‘like’ on Facebook tells the world all it needs to know about you
Welcome to the world of psychological profiling based on your likes and dislikes on Facebook, the social networking site. Cambridge University scientists have declared that they can determine your personality with greater accuracy “than your own mother”, from the information that you leave every day on the world’s most popular website.

Hashtags May Be Coming to Facebook
A Twitter staple, the Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook has plans to bring the hashtag to its service, offering users the ability to index conversations around a particular topic, just as they currently do on Twitter. Sources ”familiar with the matter” told the Journal that while Facebook is working on the feature, it wouldn’t necessarily be released anytime soon.

Technology

Invasion of the Low-Cost Tablets
Two weeks ago, I received a press release from a company called D2 announcing its new 16-gigabyte 7-inch tablet running Android Jelly Bean 4.1 and priced at $89. This is sold exclusively at Big Lots and went on sale March 1. This new tablet also has a micro SD slot so you can upgrade its memory, making it a very versatile, yet low-cost tablet solution..

Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Android’s Life
With Google‘s official blog, a peculiar but consistent rule prevails: the more boring the headline, the bigger the news. So when CEO Larry Page posts an item titled “Update from the CEO,” you can be pretty sure it’s not going to be a mere update from the CEO.

Apple CEO Required To Testify in NY E-Books Case
NEW YORK (AP) — Apple CEO Tim Cook has been ordered to testify in a New York court case the Justice Department brought against the company over the pricing of e-books for consumers.

Mobile

Galaxy S4: Samsung launches new smartphone that takes the fight to Apple
Samsung’s long-awaited new phone finally launched in New York last night, with the South Korean giant looking to capitalise on Apple’s recent woes with a device that is expected to pose the greatest threat yet to the iPhone.

Nielsen Launches Mobile App Ad Measure
Nielsen has launched a solution for measuring the ‘resonance’ of brand advertising within mobile apps. The tool forms part of the Brand Effect product suite.

Confirmit Unveils MyMobile Research App
Online research software and solutions provider Confirmit has launched a mobile feedback and research app called MyMobile, allowing businesses to feed insights back to stakeholders via any type of mobile device.

New Mobile App Launched To Tackle Forced Marriage In UK
London: A new government-funded Smartphone app has been launched in Britain to protect potential victims at risk of being forced into marriage, including those of Indian-origin.

Gamification

A Comprehensive Overview of How Games Help Healthcare in 2013
Gamification and healthcare may be the next best thing since the invention of bread and butter. I recently read an article on 3 different ways that video games can improve health and immediately became curious as to other research going on in this area. Since GSummit 2013 is fast approaching, I would like to take the time to provide a brief comprehensive overview of how games and healthcare are converging in harmony in 2013.

How Companies Use Big Data & The Quantified Self Movement For Insight

The quantified self-movement (QS) is a hot topic in 2013 and focuses on using sensors and other trackers to acquire self-knowledge for the end goal of gaining deeper insight about personal habits.

-aggregated by Philippa Craig-Humphreys, Panel Development Manager

It is not news that mobile has emerged as a key platform for data collection. It has the unique advantage of gathering in-the-moment feedback through multi-media such as photo, video and audio uploads. But before we get caught up in technological promises, it is imperative to take a step back and discuss how we can maintain the integrity and quality of our research. In our latest whitepaper, Managing Mobile Research Projects, uSamp explores the implications for researchers and project managers in terms of designing, targeting and fielding surveys. It is with this understanding of the nuances of mobile market research that we, as an industry, can create new standards and outline best practices that will define the future.

For the full report, please contact lauren@usamp.com, or visit our website to download a copy.

How do we address privacy concerns?

It is completely understandable that some people may have privacy concerns associated with geofencing. The way we address these concerns is by being fully transparent about exactly what information is collected. By educating users, we empower them to decide if and when they would like to participate, and are able to preserve their privacy choices. Our Mobile Army^TM is our most valuable asset, and we take all steps possible to preserve our relationship.

Does geofencing cause significant battery drain?

Any app that uses your device’s location will cause battery drain. The more frequently that app checks your location, the more battery it will drain. After months of development and testing, however, we have established a geofencing solution that has almost no noticeable effect on battery life. To date, we have not received a single complaint regarding battery life from any one of our mobile audience members. If you are considering running a geofencing project, be sure to ask the technology provider what steps they have taken (if any) to preserve battery life, and then download their app so you can experience it yourself (more to come in a future blog by uSamp’s Co-founder & President, Gregg Lavin).

Why is geofencing so versatile?

Geofencing allows us to capture in-the-moment insights in ways that we have never been able to before. Whether prompting someone to take a survey as soon as they enter or exit a location, or passively monitoring ad exposure, geofencing adds a fresh new dimension to consumer insights.

For more on mobile, watch  our videos on rich media features and real-time reporting or download our whitepaper on the future of consumer insights.

One of advertising’s greatest pain points is measuring ad effectiveness from the point of impact to the point of purchase. What if we said that geofencing could link an ad’s influence to purchase behavior? Geofencing is a powerful tool that can provide this feedback while adding a whole new dimension to mobile research. Here are some ways that we are using geofencing to provide valuable insights today:

• Out-Of-Home Ad Effectiveness: By setting geofences around out-of-home advertisements, we know when someone in our Mobile Army™ (our robust mobile audience), is nearby and “exposed” to the ad. By setting geofences around specific businesses, agencies can better gauge ad effectiveness by comparing store visitation of exposed consumers to those who were not exposed.
• Real-time Feedback: Whether it be a trip to the grocery store, or a movie that just came out, its imperative to gather feedback as close to the time of the experience as possible. With geofencing, we can trigger an alert as someone enters or exits a location with an invitation to answer a few questions while the experience is still fresh in one’s mind.
• User Behavior Monitoring: We can track store visits, time on site and other key metrics vital to retailers and advertisers. Combining this with other collected data, i.e. web-browsing and purchase activity, helps identify the true impact of the OOH ad exposure.

These are just a few examples of geofencing applications. Imagine how geofencing can apply to competitive analysis, field research and in-store missions. The opportunities will continue to grow with the technology and methodology. Geofencing is truly an innovative method for gaining insight into customer behavior because researchers no longer have to rely on a user’s activation since surveys can now be automatically triggered.

Our final post will explore some of the challenges seen with geofencing, what can be done to address them, and why 2013 is the year of mobile maturity.