Bob Stohrer of Virgin Mobile talked with the Digital 180 series about the unique marketing challenges facing a company that operates without a customer contract. He also shared his thoughts on finding the optimal media mix and the importance of churn reduction.

To hear more insights from some of the top marketers in various industries, check out the Digital 180 channel and check back with the Compete blog for new interviews.

On Saturday, Palm released the Pre, the latest in a long line of potential iPhone killers. While the iPhone was not the first device to offer a touchscreen, its popularity has made the technology more common on major release Smartphones.

Many factors have an impact on consumer choice, particularly when buying something as complex as a mobile phone; price, network coverage, carrier, applications, and many others. But what about touchscreens? How interested are consumers in touchscreens versus a more traditional QWERTY keyboard? Touchscreens create a lot of interest, but are they top of mind for the average mobile phone shopper when they’re ready to buy?

This chart covers share of online interest in phones with a physical QWERTY keyboard or touchscreen on the “Big 4” carriers’ sites during the first quarter. Each bar represents one week.

Our data show that in the first quarter of 2009, touchscreens and QWERTY keyboards weighed in almost equally when it came to online interest. We’re also seeing that:

• Share of interest is trending upward for both features overall this quarter, although touchscreens have experienced a more consistent upward trend
• Share of interest in QWERTY phones averaged 37% and touchscreen phones 35% this quarter

But, according to our Q1 survey data, when it comes down to the purchase decision, touchscreens are not as important – at least not yet.

QWERTY keys were “important” or “very important” to 44% of those surveyed, while 37% said the same about touchscreens. We can see in the chart above, however, that 23% of respondents said that QWERTY keys were “very important”, compared to just 15% for touchscreens.

It’s not that touchscreens aren’t desirable for consumers – wireless shoppers on the web are clearly looking at phones with this feature, as we saw above. Still, they aren’t quite as influential as QWERTY keys when it comes to picking a specific phone to buy. Interest in these features and in Smartphones generally has been increasing.

It’s also important to note that while the data in the second chart shows us that QWERTY keys and touchscreens were important for 44% and 37% of shoppers, the corollary is that they weren’t important to 56% and 63%, respectively, when it came to their purchase decision.

So, even though a lot of the hype on advanced Smartphones is about touchscreens, QWERTY keyboards are actually a more important factor for most people when it comes to the purchase decision. Still, the majority of consumers don’t think either feature is important to their purchase decision.

In this tough economy where people are looking for value, the challenge for device manufacturers and carriers remains convincing consumers why these features are must haves for every wireless shopper, not just the early adopters.

How did the cable provider Comcast try driving engagement with its brand and ultimately online conversion through social media?

As I continued my analysis from my last post on Comcasttown.com, I wanted to see how engaged Comcasttown.com visitors were and if the experience drove more online conversion on Comcast.com. Last time, I highlighted how Comcasttown.com integrated with Facebook.com. In this post I thought I would see if Comcasttown.com’s engagement is even close to Facebook.com engagement as well as compare it to Comcast.com engagement.

Comcasttown.com averaged 1.1 visits per person in March and a little over 3 ½ minutes per visit. These numbers suggest the site was more of a one hit wonder than an engaging experience. Compare that to Facebook.com which averaged nearly 17 visits per person and 17 minutes per stay for the month. This isn’t surprising when only 5% of the Comcasttown.com visitors registered on the site and only those that registered could truly interact with the virtual world.

OK, so this isn’t much of a surprise when comparing Comcasttown.com engagement to Facebook.com engagement, but how did Comcasttown.com compare to Comcast.com? Comcast.com attracted more repeat visits with 3.6 visits per person compared to 1.1 for Comcasttown.com. However, Comcasttown.com visitors spent nearly a minute more on the site checking it out. Unfortunately, visitors did not necessarily return to the site within the same month.

While Comcasttown.com did not reach very many consumers, 2.5% of those who visited the site, submitted an order for digital voice, internet, cable TV, or a bundle of those services on Comcast.com in the same month. This conversion rate was nearly 50% higher than Comcast.com’s overall conversion rate in March 2009.

While Comcasttown.com’s visitors aren’t very engaged on the microsite, they are interested in purchasing Comcast’s services online. I have to wonder though if it was worth the cost to develop the microsite and the integration with Facebook for the limited number of consumers the microsite reached.

This analysis was performed using Site Profile on Compete.com and a combination of Compete’s Marketing and Landing Page Effectiveness intelligence.

In the last few weeks, the wireless world has been buzzing about location-based services (LBS), applications made primarily for wireless devices that use GPS, WiFi or cellular radio signals (or a combination of all three) that enable consumers to get information and advertisers to reach them based on their location. Some recent developments include:

• Buzzd, a new, featured application on RIM’s BlackBerry AppWorld that allows users to find nearby restaurants, shops, and events based on their location.
• Navteq was chosen by MetroPCS to be the preferred supplier of all maps that are used in Metro’s LBS applications.
• WeFi opened up its own app store to provide applications that leverage its existing WiFi access point community to move consumers who use bandwidth-intensive applications off the carriers’ networks and onto WiFi. This is key in light of the recent SlingBox and Skype mobile app denials.
• Skyhook Wireless (a technology provider for location-based services) released some data it had mined from various application stores about the growing quantity of LBS applications and the fact that almost 75% of LBS applications for the iPhone cost money rather than being given out for free.

After all of this activity in the LBS arena, is there any demand for these apps? If so, what are people using them for? And what are the opportunities for advertisers and carriers? Compete’s recently-launched Smartphone Intelligence product answers these and related questions, and a few highlights of the findings appear below.

Overall, 1 in 3 smartphone owners currently use a Location Based Service at least once a month. An additional 20% of smartphone users said that they would be interested in using LBS if they knew more about what was available and how to use them. The chart below shows some specific types of LBS applications consumers are using now (shown in the dark blue bars) or would use if they had more information (light blue bars):

As seen in the chart, weather and directions/navigation applications are the current leaders in the LBS space. Two thirds of survey respondents who already use LBS said they use a weather application while slightly over half told us they use a navigation app.

However, when asked which types of LBS they would prefer to use if they were available or knew how to use them, we saw some interesting results, particularly appealing for advertisers. It turns out that consumers are also interested in getting local alerts and special offers or promotions from nearby stores or other retailers. This presents an opportunity for advertisers to reap the rewards by serving up compelling and relevant ads that will likely see higher clickthrough rates and subsequent engagement. Also, ROI from these types of promotions would be easier to measure as the benefits are more immediate and trackable to a specific customer interaction than many other forms of advertising.

In addition to being valuable tools for local businesses and advertising networks, LBS services are also important to carriers who provide the data packages and may possibly split the application revenues. It turns out that smartphone owners who use LBS are more likely to spend more each month on their total wireless bill. In the chart below, we see that LBS users (red bars) are less likely to be spending $75 or less on their monthly wireless bill and more likely to be spending $125+ than smartphone owners who do not use LBS.

So, in addition to being a good segment for advertisers to target, LBS users are valuable customers for carriers as well. It will be important for carriers to decide how to best leverage all the different app stores to maximize subscriber use of LBS.

It looks like consumers are ready for new LBS applications, and we’ll be watching to see what advertisers, device manufacturers, carriers and application providers come up with in the next few months.

Social media networks represent significant opportunities for brands to directly connect with specific segments of consumers more than ever before, but many struggle with how to make those connections relevant, engaging, and influence sales.

Comcast recently tried its hand at increasing both reach and engagement with its brand using a virtual reality microsite, Comcasttown.com, which could be directly linked to users’ Facebook profiles. After my senses were piqued by this campaign, I decided to find out how effective it was at attracting consumers.

In March 2009, Comcast promoted Comcasttown.com in a multi-platform marketing campaign that called on consumers to create and share their personalized multi-media virtual living rooms. Radio advertising played catchy jingles and TV promos showed people singing in their virtual rooms or strolling the animated character filled streets of Comcast Town. Magazine and online banner ads showed “HD monsters” and spacemen “future hopping” down sidewalks.

Sample Comcast Town TV commercial and banner snapshots:

Comcast Town itself is a virtual world. Those who registered on the site could create their own living room by purchasing various items with virtual currency. If users take a registration shortcut using their Facebook profile, their Comcast Town purchases appear on their recent activity tracking on Facebook, publicizing the microsite to their entire network.

The social media angle was important because Comcast didn’t seem to invest too heavily.in offline marketing. Using TNS Media Intelligence’s Adscope™ product, I discovered out of the sample of 207 Comcast campaigns (on TV, radio, and print) observed in March, nearly 13% of them were Comcast Town ads.

Looking at Comcasttown.com’s Site Profile on Compete.com, the site attracted less than 100,000 unique visitors in March, and reached just 1% of Comcast.com’s unique visitor traffic.

Facebook was an important traffic driver to Comcast Town. As shown in the chart below, over a third of referrals, the site that a visitor was on before they went to Comcasttown.com, came from Facebook. Although Comcast may have used display ads on Facebook to drive awareness of Comcast Town, Facebook’s profile activity tracking / newsfeed likely helped to build it too. Facebook users share their interactions with Comcast Town on their walls, which led to their friends to checkout Comcast Town as well.

Comcast’s main website was the second biggest source of traffic to Comcast Town, which was promoted on the home page with a small banner.

Comcasttown.com is a small town and would have a very limited population if it weren’t for its integration with Facebook. Check back next week for Part 2, where I’ll look to see how active users were on Comcasttown.com and its effectiveness in driving online purchases on Comcast.com.

Smartphone applications have been receiving a lot of buzz lately. Banks are not sitting on the sidelines: according to ABI Research, a technology research firm, the number of US banks offering mobile banking will jump from 245 in 2008 to 614 this year. The supply of mobile banking applications is increasing rapidly, but what does demand look like? Do Smartphone owners want to manage their finances from their phones?

As an avid iPhone user, I frequently surf the new apps in search of anything new or exciting. I never downloaded my bank’s free mobile banking application because I never saw the need to check my account balance or transfer funds while waiting in line for coffee. Apparently, I’m not the only one.

In our quarterly Smartphone Intelligence survey, Compete asked Smartphone owners how they are using their mobile devices to manage finances. Of the people surveyed, 82% do not currently use their mobile device to manage their finances. The chart below shows the most frequently selected responses when we asked these people why they weren’t using mobile banking.

We can see here that 53% of Smartphone owners said that they saw no need to manage their finances from a mobile device, while about a third said they didn’t trust mobile banking security. Other reasons, like concern about the cost of mobile banking, not knowing the service exists, slow Internet connection on their phone, and not having Internet on their phone were less significant for users.

So banks are confronted with two big challenges when it comes to mobile banking: convincing their customers of why they need to bank on their phones as well as building a sense of trust in mobile banking security.

Changing both of these things may just take some time, as it did with online banking, to get people used to the idea and integrate the service into their regular routines. But it will likely also take some marketing on the part of the banks to increase trust in security for mobile transactions and to help customers find ways to try and use the service on a regular basis.

The other day, I downloaded the BofA application to test it out. The app features a simple and user-friendly interface. However, I rarely find myself in a situation where I need to perform a financial transaction, or even find a nearby ATM, from my phone. I might be one of those people the banks need to convince.