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This article by USA TODAY (@USATODAYtech)  tech reporter Jon Swartz (@jswartz) has implications for the future of bookstore retailers. Swartz writes, “The convergence of smartphone technology, social-media data, and futuristic technology such as 3-D printers is changing the face of retail in a way that experts across the industry say will upend the bricks-and-mortar model in a matter of a few years.”

"The next five years will bring more change to retail than the last 100 years," says Cyriac Roeding, CEO of Shopkick, a location-based shopping app available at Macy's, Target, and other top retailers.

Within 10 years, retail as we know it will be unrecognizable, says Kevin Sterneckert, a Gartner analyst who follows retail technology. Big-box stores such as Office Depot, Old Navy, and Best Buy will shrink to become test centers for online purchases. Retail stores will be there for a "touch and feel" experience only, with no actual sales. Stores won't stock any merchandise; it'll be shipped to you. This will help them stay competitive with online-only retailers, Sterneckert says.

Read this in full.

Below is a slide deck summary of psfk’s (@PSFK) report, The Future of Retail.

Also read about the possibility of Google providing same-day delivery and what IKEA is doing with Augmented Reality.

See our other blogposts tagged “Retail.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you navigate the revolutionary changes occurring in the world of books.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

MediaPost’s (@MediaPost) MarketingDaily lists the top 10 designated market areas (DMA) in which adults who personally own an e-reader reside:

  1. San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA

  2. Washington, DC (Hagerstown, MD)

  3. New York, NY

  4. Boise, ID

  5. Austin, TX

  6. San Diego, CA

  7. Seattle-Tacoma, WA

  8. Denver, CO

  9. Philadelphia, PA

10. Salt Lake City, UT

Source: GfK MRI’s (@GfKMRINews) 2011 Market-by-Market study

See the Market-by-Market List of 205 DMAs (pdf).

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your brand’s content in today’s digital publishing environment.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

On the ECPA (@ecpa) website, David Kinnaman (@davidkinnaman), president of Barna Group (@barnagroup), says new research shows pastors love books. “One of the nation’s most loyal book-buying audiences, 92% of all pastors in the US say they buy at least one book every month, and they average 3.8 books per month. That’s anywhere from 12 to 46 books a year. Compare that to the total population, where only 29.3% of American adults buy more than 10 books in the course of a year.”

·         Pastors, as a group, purchase between 8 million and 13 million books every year.

·         Pastors influence others — their staffs, boards, and congregants — to buy books.

·         Many pastors say they want to support the business and ministry of Christian retailers. But this sentiment — particularly for bricks and mortar Christian retail — is changing with the generations. Younger pastors are leading the shift to online buying, with 57% of Buster pastors (ages 28-46) expressing a preference for online.

·         When a pastor selects a ministry-related book, the most important factor, by a wide margin, is the topic. 58% of pastors say topic is the most important factor, while only 15% give top priority to the author of the book. This is consistent across all generations and across all church sizes.

·         By a large margin, pastors in the US prefer to read books in hardcover (55%). Only 24% prefer paperback, and 16% prefer digital.

·         E-reading devices have tripled in their penetration among pastors in the last 2 years.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Study: Christians are Embracing Tablets & E-readers” and other posts tagged research.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you reach pastors with your book and brand message.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Research tab.

A new global survey on faith and atheism released by WIN-Gallup International (not related to Gallup Inc., Washington, DC) says the number of people worldwide who call themselves religious is now 59%, while 13% self-identify as atheist — a drop of 9% and increase of 3% respectively compared with a 2005 study.

The poll  — based on interviews with more than 50,000 people from 57 countries  — asked participants, “irrespective of whether they attended a place of worship, if they considered themselves to be religious, not religious, or an atheist.”

The top 10 religious populations:

     1.    Ghana

     2.    Nigeria

     3.    Armenia

     4.    Fiji

     5.    Macedonia

     6.    Romania

     7.    Iraq

     8.    Kenya

     9.    Peru

   10.   Brazil

Top 10 Atheist Populations:

     1.    China

     2.    Japan

     3.    Czech Republic

     4.    France

     5.    Korea, Rep (South)

     6.    Germany

     7.    Netherlands

     8.    Austria

     9.    Iceland

   10.   Australia

   11.   Ireland

Ireland has the second greatest drop globally, in those claiming to be religious since 2005. In Ireland, only 47% of those polled say they consider themselves religious — a 22-point drop from the 69% recorded in a similar poll conducted in 2005. Ten percent self-identify as atheist. The only country that registered a steeper decline in religiosity is Vietnam, which has a 23-point drop from 53% to 30%.

Read this in full.

Read the report (pdf).

Also see our previous blogposts, “The Global Church: Shift in the Christian Landscape,”  “Christianity: World’s Largest Religion,” and other posts tagged “Religion.” Another resource of trending religion statistics is the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you identify and analyze market research pertinent to your brand’s marketing message.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

As the above image shows, mobile marketing can be a bit confusing.

Advertising Age (@adage) columnist Steve Rubel (@steverubel) points to a report about the apparent shift to apps in the mobile environment.

“Flurry (@FlurryMobile), an analytics firm, reported that US consumers spend on average 94 minutes a day in their apps vs. 72 minutes a day in mobile browsers.” There is a less time being spent with PCs and more time being spent with mobile. And when people are on their mobile devices, they are using apps more than mobile browsers.

Read this in full.

But a difference of opinion is expressed on iMedia Connection (@iMediaTweet) by Eric Anderson (@unsettler), partner and VP of marketing at White Horse (@whitehorsepdx), who offers “10 Tech Trends You Can Ignore in 2012,” of which #7 is “Having a branded app for that.”

Having long been a loudmouthed proponent of prioritizing mobile sites over branded apps, I thought I might be in for another plate of crow when Flurry Analytics released a study showing that in 2011, smartphone users’ time spent on apps exceeded their time spent on the mobile web for the first time ever.

But does this trend indicate an overall preference for apps over the mobile Web? It does not. A whopping 80% of that app time was spent on gaming and the Facebook app, and the rest of the time was, sorry to say, not spent on your app. A separate study by Deloitte found that 80% of branded apps are downloaded fewer than 1000 times, which is not a piece of ROI analysis I'd enjoy presenting to a CMO. Branded mobile apps belong to a narrow but important set of use cases, based on activities your loyal customers engage in again and again.

Read this in full.

Over on Harvard Business Review (@HarvardBiz), David Armano (@armano) writes in his article, “The Future Isn't About Mobile; It's About Mobility”:

In the early days of digital, the core behavior we needed to understand was that people wanted information at their fingertips and the convenience that came with digital transactions. In the social era it was all these things plus social connectivity. Mobility means information, convenience, and social all served up on the go, across a variety of screen sizes and devices.

Mobility is radically different from the stationary “desktop” experience. In some cases, mobility is a “lean back” experience like sitting on a commuter train watching a video. In other cases it can be "lean forward" — like shopping for a gift while you take your lunch break at the park. And in many cases, it’s “lean free” when your body is in motion, or you're standing in line scanning news headlines or photos from friends while you wait for your turn to be called.

Mobility trumps mobile... don't put mobile tactics in front of strategy.

Read this in full.

And senior writer with GigaOM (@gigaom), Mathew Ingram (@mathewi), writes in “HuffPo, The Daily, and the flawed iPad content model”:

The dream that many publishers seemed to have was that the iPad would create a market for their individual apps, and that legions of readers would happily download and pay for them, creating a brand new stream of significant revenue. With a few exceptions, however — such as The New York Times and other publications that have strong brands or are targeted at a very specific market — that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you know when it strategically makes sense to create a mobile app and to help you think with ‘mobility’ about your brand and your content.

Be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard. And use our mobile website as your link resource on the go.

According to a new survey by Public Religion Research Institute (@publicreligion), white evangelical Protestants are significantly more likely than other major religious groups to use technology for religious purposes.

·         One-quarter of white evangelical Protestants say they’ve downloaded a podcast of a sermon or listened to a sermon online, compared to fewer than 1-in-10 white mainline Protestants and Catholics (6% each).

·         White evangelical Protestants are also more likely than white mainline Protestants or Catholics to report that their church uses technology or social media.

·         4-in-10 white evangelical Protestants say their church has an active Facebook page or website where people interact, compared to 29% of white mainline Protestants and 13% of Catholics.

·         Nearly half (49%) of white evangelical Protestants and about 4-in-10 (39%) white mainline Protestants say their church uses television or multimedia screens during worship services, compared to 11% of Catholics.

·         Nearly 1-in-5 white evangelical Protestants (19%) report having posted a status update on their Facebook page or other social networking site about being in church, compared to 6% of white mainline Protestants and 2% of Catholics.

·         Nearly 4-in-10 (37%) younger Americans (age 18-34) say they use Facebook several times a day, while about 6-in-10 (59%) seniors (age 65 and up) say they never use Facebook.

·         Younger Americans are significantly more likely than older Americans to report following a religious or spiritual leader on Twitter or Facebook (9% vs. 1%), or to say they have joined a religious or spiritual group on Facebook (10% vs. 1%).

·         Younger Americans are more than twice as likely to say they’ve downloaded a podcast of a sermon or listened to a sermon online (17% vs. 8%).

·         Younger Americans are also much more likely than older Americans to have sent or read emails during a worship service (16% vs. 3%), posted status updates on Facebook or other social networking sites about being in church (16% v. 3%) or used a cell phone to take pictures or record video during a worship service (20% v. 3%).

·         Among Americans who use Facebook, half (50%) say they don’t describe their religious beliefs at all on their Facebook profile. One-in-five (20%) Americans say their religious identity on Facebook is “Christian,” while 9% identify as Catholic, 8% identify as another Protestant denomination, 6% identify as “something else,” and 4% identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular.

·         White evangelical Protestants (53%) are more likely than white mainline Protestants (32%), the religiously unaffiliated (8%), and Catholics (3%) to identify simply as “Christian” on Facebook.

Read this in full.

Interestingly, one aspect of the above survey seems to defy the trend of prominent religious leaders using social media to build a following and a brand. Here’s another perspective on the survey. And see Christianity Today's (@CTmagazine), "Religious Self-Profiling" by Sarah Pulliam Bailey (@spulliam).

Also see our previous blogposts:

·        “Almost Half of Online Americans Use the Internet for Religious Purposes”

·        “More Than 1/3 of Online Adults Visit Church Websites”

·        “Study: Christians are Embracing Tablets & E-readers”

·        “Study: Religiously Active People More Likely to Engage in Civic Life”

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you identify and analyze market research for your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The above Infographic is by Psychology Degree.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you manage your social media marketing strategy.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Social Media/Word Of Mouth tab.

Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) says, “In another sign that the industry is moving toward a hybrid market, fewer ebook buyers reported buying only digital titles this spring than a year ago.”

According to Book Industry Study Group’s (@BISG) newest edition of Consumer Attitudes Toward Ebook Reading report, the percentage of ebook consumers who exclusively or mostly purchase ebooks fell from nearly 70% in August 2011 to 60% in May 2012. Over the same period, the percentage of survey respondents who have no preference for either ebook or print formats, or who buy some genres in ebook format and others in print, rose from 25% percent to 34%.

Read this in full.

Read the news release.

See a copy of the core survey question set (pdf).

The following are slide presentations of this year's and last year's reports:

Also see our previous blogposts, “Even E-reader Owners Still Like Printed Books, Survey Finds,” “EPILOGUE: the future of print,” and others tagged “Ebook.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market your content in both ebook and pbook formats.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

See the SlideShare deck page.

See the report in pdf.

According to a new survey, 56% of Americans have a personal profile on a social network, up 4% from 2011. And the number of people who say they follow brands or companies online has almost doubled in the last 2 years, to 33% of those polled.

These stats are from The Social Habit 2012 study by Edison Research (@edisonresearch) (SlideShare; Blog) and Arbitron (@ArbitronInc).

See The Social Habit website (@thesocialhabit).

WCG (@WCGWorld) highlights the following from the report:

·         Social networkers check their profiles often

·         Understanding the mobile experience is critical

·         Visual content is king

·         Users of social networking sites are following brands now more than ever

·         Facebook does impact buying decisions

·         It is not all about the coupon

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Report: Half of Americans Are Now Social Networkers.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically leverage and effectively communicate your brand message using social media.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Google’s Nexus 7 is the latest tablet on the tech scene, along with Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Microsoft’s Surface.

See a comparison chart above and another one by The Verge (@verge).

See all tablets compared at The Verge.

A new study by Gartner (@Gartner_inc) says consumers are choosing to use tablets now for some activities they previously used to use PCs for.

According to the findings, the “main activities moving from PCs to media tablets” included checking email, a shift observable among 81% of contributors, and reading the news, on 69%.

Over 50% prefer reading newspapers, magazines, and books on screens rather than on paper.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you use current technology to publish and market your brand’s content.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.