The start of cross-platform interactions
We’re all familiar with social media symbols, but a 2012 Survey Monitor entry titled “Consumers OK with cross-platform calls to action,” reported on consulting firm Accenture’s study of the then-increasing use of social media presence on TV. Forty-three percent of participants said their greatest motivator for interacting with a social media symbol while watching TV was to obtain more information about a show, product or service. Others pointed to getting coupons or promotional codes (32%), entering a contest/sweepstakes (31%), interacting with the show or product on social media (26%) and connecting with others with similar interests (21%). One-third of U.S. consumers interacted with the symbols while watching TV by Liking the TV program on Facebook (20%), scanning a QR code (11%) or searching for the hashtag on the former Twitter (7%). Of those who did not interact with social media while watching TV, 60% said it was because they did not think they would be interested in the content. Others were not sure how to interact with social media symbols (23%) or had not downloaded the needed app for scanning social media symbols on their mobile devices (15%).
Mobile research goes mainstream
The July 2012 magazine published a handful of articles about mobile research. In the article “Why your research strategy needs mobile,” Dave King explained that a major difference between the use of mobile surveys and the rise of online surveys was that the researcher consciously chose whether to make online surveys available. “With the massive growth of mobile data usage you can’t be sure that the survey links you send out will be opened from a desktop. Many respondents will open the links from a mobile device, so if your survey is only designed to render on a desktop, the overall survey experience for mobile users won’t match up,” wrote King.
Leslie Townsend’s article “Is mobile market research finally living up to the hype?” established that mobile data collection had been steadily growing year by year. Many argued that mobile-based surveys would always be secondary to traditional desktop-based surveys. In 2012, while desktop devices were still more popular among survey takers than mobile and tablet devices, Kinesis Survey Technologies argued that 2012 was “the year of mobile.” They backed their claim by stating that mobile device usage represented 25.5% of the firm’s overall survey traffic, a figure pulled from the first quarter of 2012.
Entering a new era for media consumption
These days, we don’t have to be asked to interact with social media while watching TV. Most of us are already doing it as we consume something else on a larger screen. In the same issue, in an article titled “Why ‘mobile’ (as we know it) is the wrong focus,” Ben Smithee wrote “We have entered an era of second-screen media consumption, where content on the television or big screen will be largely supplemented and paired with second-screen content that is consumed via the mobile tablet and phone device.” He argued that to gain a better understanding of consumers, tablet and mobile phone use were the most important for researchers to understand.