Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

While at Google’s offices recently, I had the pleasure to hear a Google Product Manager present the company’s view of how information retrieval has changed with the rise of mobile and smartphone adoption.

They are calling it “micro-moments,” the premise being that as smartphone adoption and use continues to skyrocket, consumers increasingly have small bursts of interaction with their phones across search, social, video and email, as opposed to prolonged periods in front of a desktop.

This viewpoint represents a shift from the linear “sit, search and act” desktop mentality that characterized the early days of the internet, in which research and action were typically performed in one sitting while in front of a connected internet device.

These days, according to Google, more searches are done on mobile than on desktop in many countries, including the United States, Japan and United Kingdom.

Google’s micro-moment perspective posits that discovery and action are decoupled as discovery comes in multi-session bursts, across channels, on a mobile device, while action (conversion/purchase) often takes place later on a larger screen, a laptop or tablet device....