This gadget is a Zen thing; an escape. Invested heavily into the best apps & music you can find, it’s the world you’ll find awfully difficult to leave. Yes we’re talking about the smart-est iPhone and its coolest apps.
Here’s a preview on some of the Best and Cool iPhone apps that keep your smartphone alive and in the mix.
The Best iPhone App
Visiting a new city without a clue as to where to eat? No worries. Just fire up your handy Yelp app, which locates all the nearby eateries, then browse by proximity, neighbourhood, price or what’s open now.
You also get rave recommendations and other customer reviews, so you can avoid any clunkers.
Not hungry? Then hop on to check out a whole host of other on-the-road necessities, such as bars, banks, gas stations and drugstores.
The Cool iPhone App
The newest coolest app in town, Namkis helps you discover the ‘great’ and the ‘not so great’ customer businesses or products around the world.
It’s popular ‘Smile’ and ‘Scowl’ feature lets you put an easy tick or a cross on your consumer experiences.
Happy with food in a restaurant – Smile at it, and add in a review. Not happy with customer service at the road end drugstore, scowl on it.
Sharing consumer experiences was never so easy and fun! Indeed.
The Best iPhone App
Ah, the commuter’s dilemma: subway, bus, or cab? HotStop makes the choice easy.
Just enter your starting and ending addresses and the app gives you detailed directions of how to get there via public transportation.
Rainy day? Taxi mode will estimate the time and cost of taking a cab, and give you information about nearby cab companies.
The Cool iPhone App
Urbanspoon provides you with many local options when choosing a restaurant for dinner. After using the phone’s GPS to detect restaurants in the area, Urbanspoon presents you with a slot machine-like listing of cuisine types and price. Not happy with the offering, give your phone a hard shake.
The Best iPhone App
Stamped, is an app where you can share everything you love and hate with friends.
Users can easily scroll through friends’ reviews and then take action.
The Cool iPhone App
Tiny Review allows you to snap, share and express your emotions through a picture. You do all this in a simple way, with one photo and three lines, where you combine words and images to make it more expressive and attractive.
The Best iPhone App
The Tello app lets consumers rate the local businesses they deal with.
You give a thumbs up or a thumbs down, plus a brief comment. It also lets you rate individual employees at a business, letting you alert folks about staffers who are uncommonly good or unacceptably bad.
The Cool iPhone App
Foodspotting is a visual guide to good food and where to find it. It’s the leading app for finding and rating dishes, not just restaurants. A feedback-based recommendation engine pairs with heavier social media integration to help make deciding what to order a much simpler task.
All these apps for iPhone are available for free in the iTunes App Store.
]]>Before we begin to unfurl unsettling facts for bright-eyed entrepreneurs, let’s take a look on how an entrepreneur defines failure.
What is an Entrepreneurial Failure?
The statistics are disheartening no matter how an entrepreneur defines failure. Shikhar Ghosh terms failure rate for start-ups as 30 to 40% with investors losing most or all the money they put in the company. Similarly if failure refers to failing to see the projected return on investment, then the failure rate is 70 to 80 percent. And if failure is defined as declaring a projection and then failing short of meeting it, then the failure rate is a whopping 90-95%.
“Very few companies achieve their initial projections,” says Ghosh. “Failure is the norm.”
Why Start-Ups Fail
Here are some fascinating insights gathered by Harvard to answer why start-ups fails, while others succeed —
Is Funding the Problem?
Yep! In fact these days, too much funding has the potential to turn a little failure into an enormous one. What funding does is cover up all the problems that a company has. It covers up all the mistakes, enables the co. and management to focus on things that aren’t important to the company’s success and ignore the things that are important. When you don’t have the money you reformulate the cat food so that the cats will eat it. And when you have a lot of money you can afford to argue that the cats should like the cat food because it is nutritious.
Are they jumping in too soon?
Yes, another reason for failure. Entrepreneurs often tend to be single-minded with their strategies, surging forward to climb the beanstalk without taking the time to realize that the base assumption of the business plan is wrong. They are all about the technology or all about the sales, without taking the time to form a balanced plan.
Are they too rigid?
“Instead of going into the venture with a broad hypothesis, they commit in ways that don’t allow them to change,” Ghosh says. He cites an example of the failed dot-com-era grocer Webvan, which bought warehouses all over the US before realizing that there was not enough customer demand for its grocery delivery.
A Matter of Timing?
The matter of timing is a huge issue that can determine whether a company gets funding or whether it achieves the start-ups elusive measure of success.
Do Serial Entrepreneurs have a Leg Up on First timers?
Sad, but true. Serial entrepreneurs are more likely to build successful start-ups. By definition, a VC backed entrepreneur who succeeds in a venture has a 30% chance of succeding in his next venture.
Can you go back to the same VC again, inspite of one failed venture?
Failed entrepreneurs are more likely to get funding than successful entrepreneurs from the same VC firm. Strange, but true.
Ghosh says boards of successful companies often seek out the founders and CEOs of failed companies because they value experience over a clean slate. After all, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, and Desh Deshpande experienced multiple failures before achieving success.
Are companies that are funded by top-tier VC firms more likely to succeed?
Yes. The reason being either because top VCs are better at identifying potential success or it’s because they’re able to add more value to companies they fund. The Harvard paper assumes both.
Where do most entrepreneurs get their ideas from?
Simple. From former employers.
In Silicon Valley, the fact that your enterprise has failed can actually be a badge of honor. The more that you can embrace all the little failures you have, and treat them as ways of improving the system, the less likely that the entire system will collapse.
Unfortunately (or fortunately!) there are plenty of SEO companies out there cantering to help you pick your jelly beans (the red ones! umm or the purple ones??) – to tell you exactly where to put in your SEO dollars. There are no brownie points for guessing as that answer just happens to be whatever the company/consultant is good at – whether link-building or on-page tactics.
So which is the right jelly bean for you?
To answer this I would say, once you are aligned, focused on your core questions and have avoided (the very engrossing!) meandering discussions, you’d realize that all jelly beans in the SEO jar are just “diverse”; For real results what you need is to audit and validate what your site is ready for and then to make the right distinction of your jelly needs.
Develop your SEO Strategy the Smart Way
There are numerous theories aligned to explain how should you or should not allocate your budget. To add to the confusion, “on-page” can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. But for clarity and for the purposes of this post, I would say it is anything you directly control in the code or content of your site. The following would help you make relevant distinctions of possible website SEO and help you in evaluating the website/s you’re working on.
The GOOD
70% On-Page, 30 % Link Building
The good authority is an established site with a solid, trusted link profile and usually a goodbase of content. In many cases, it’s a site that’s evolved ‘organically’ and because of the above factors has kept it ranking well. The problem is – that you’re sitting on a full-brim oil well of untapped potential. You site could be suffering due to any one of the following reasons —
- Keyword research is a million years out of date ( well in ‘e-terms’ a million = 5 years
) - Keywords are cannibalized across many pages
- Internal links have spread like weeds
- Site architecture doesn’t reflect business goals
- Old but valuable content is 404’ing
The good thing is that the authority gives you an upper hand to other competitor sites, but a shift to really planning and focussing on on-page issues, from site architecture to keyword research, could produce a huge dividend.
The Not So BAD
30% On-Page, 70% Link-Building
Here we put up with an almost ‘perfect’ site, which is following each and every webmaster rule as best they can. In the process, these webmasters are so obsessed in creating the perfect site that they overlook the macro economics of internet marketing. At this point, when your on-page is good enough — its time to get Google at your site — and that means building links. It’s important to develop content, but at the same time spend at least solid 6 months developing and implementing a link-building campaign.
The Messy n the Ugly
90% On-page, 10% Link-Building or
10% On-Page, 90 %Link-Building
The Messy miss comes about when she’s broken every single limb of ethical on-page SEO, which of course worked fine for a while, but then came ‘May Day’ and ‘Panda’, and now Google is even talking about penalizing her for optimizing too much. The Messy 90 % On-Page has let something spin out of control, including:
- Blocked crawl paths and bad redirects
- Massive URL-based duplication
- Aggressive ad-to-content ratio
- Extremely ‘thin’ content
- Nonsensical site architecture and internal linking
Whatever the cause, you need to start fixing the problems now.
Similarly being an Ugly Duckling is a curse – for he’s quacked out every rule in the Google link-building playbook, and now the Mama Duck (google) has noticed. This could be a large-scale devaluation or a big penalty, and at this point, all the on-page tweaks in the world won’t help you. The fix is tricky, depends a lot on the situation, but until the ugly is washed and wiped out – the mama duck isn’t going anywhere.
To summarize it all, both on-page and link building is important, but how important each is really depends on your current strengths and weaknesses. In long-term, you will need all the jelly beans in your bag (on-page structure, unique content, authorative links, social presence etc) to create that noise– but until then, you need to keep polishing each of them.
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Unless you’ve been trolling in some ‘Enchanted Woods’ this past 24 hours, it’s likely that you’ve heard about the latest gung ho from the tech world – the acquisition of the photo genius, 12 people, San Francisco based company called Instagram by Facebook for $1 billion in cash (or stock) .
For an iphone app that only took 8 weeks to build and ship, and which went live less than two years ago this makes for an exceptional rocket ship success story. Till date this photo-sharing smart phone application has been downloaded by more than seven million people who use it to add stylistic filters, frames, and effects to photos, which can – by tapping one of the 16 options – turn a simplistic snapshot of your pet dog into what looks like a weathered Polaroid time-capsuled frame from 1967.
So What are the Key Takeaways for any Start-up from the Instagram Acquisition
In looking through Instagram’s story, and what they’ve masterfully built and practiced, there are 5 clear lessons that we came up with that any new entrepreneur or start-up should look at while building their marketing campaign—
Be Really Good At One Thing
Before Mike Krieger joined hands with Kevin Systom (co-founders of Instagram), Kevin had built a prototype of an idea in HTML5 called Burbn. This mobile app was supposed to let you: Check into locations, make plans (futures check ins), earn points for hanging out with friends, post pictures, and much more. But when they decided to build a company together – they wanted to “FOCUS on being really good at one thing.” The locations, check-ins, points were all good but felt cluttered, and overrun with features. As they singled out mobile photos as an awesome opportunity, they began to spend their entire efforts solely focused on photos. Basically they went out on a single limb of Burbn, cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. And what remained was Instagram.
Develop the Simplest Solution to what your Customer is Seeking
Instagram is a definite case of exiting a mangled heap of hay rather than having a single grand idea upfront and persisting. In textbook customer development fashion, Kevin and his team learned a lot from developing the experience called Burbn. Despite feeling like the space was overrun from a slow, relative html5 app, the team pivoted to focus on photo applications. Central to the Instagram principles, was the idea of building a very simple user interface to the application. Cutting down the number of features, and streamlining the user interface to the essential elements, the Instagram team reinvented a “one button” application.
Open the app — Take a photo — With a “single tap” apply a crazy cool filter — drop a caption on the image and share out to all your social networks……
(Instagram geo-tags the location on all photos on its own)
Instagram – a one button application was a solution to their customer’s problem (where the value proposition requires only one button). Instagram focused on a key feature users always want—speed.
Build a Cost Effective Method of Customer Acquisition
If you peek into the employee composition of Instagram, you will find it’s mostly developers with a few community managers. No BIG sales team force (like groupon), absolutely no one in business development. Instead Instagram focused on building the sales mechanism into the product and having people understand and give feedback on the community. The smart research lead then to find the set of influencers that would love what they were doing; those people such as photographers with lots of twitter followers who would really be excited about the applications capabilities. A good focus and continued PR with great ways of capturing, keeping and referring customers was the key.
Leverage on Existing Networks to BootStrap your Own
Instagram didn’t just work to create its own network; rather its principal benefit was that it made easy to post great snaps to other networks such as twitter, flickr and facebook. This meant that the application had value for the first person that used it – not only just making the photo look good; but sharing the way people wanted to share. Another focus was of course the iPhone users and their existing network.
Don’t let the Ocean Waves Distract You
Instagram was launched for iPhone users – and here the focus was important. The team didn’t try to boil the ocean but until recently and stayed manically – yes! That’s the word – manically focussed on Apple iPhone – even to the extent that the web experience is minimalist compared to what’s in the iphone app. Further, iOS was the right choice for two reasons – it had the largest consistent platform at the time of launch and the gaps in the built-in photo experience fit well with the advantages of instagram (better photos, multi social net connection). The focus on iPhone also let the team keep performance for the user and simplicity of the experience at the center of what they did.
More importantly, Instagram cracked the code where Facebook itself failed: viral growth on mobile.
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As an adaptation of Snow White, the fairy tale, here, Julia Roberts, the Evil Queen finds herself trolling sites such Google, FaceBook, Match.com, Pinterest, You Tube etc. exploring the Kingdom’s social media websites in a frivolous attempt to win over the handsome Prince and consequently get rid of the fair and lovely Snow White.
The online promo shows to a hilarious effect what the story’s Evil Queen might accomplish.
This is not the first time where movies have blended with social media. Though studios have long used Facebook and Twitter as a promotional tool; only earlier this year there began a veritable rush into the social network.
“You sort of have this environment where you find a movie and watch it and go about your business, but there wasn’t much that was very social or fun about the process” says Galbraith, CEO of flick me.
Both casual and polished featurettes are highly desired by movie fans and encourage them to share with their networks rather than just looking at one sided reviews. For studios then, it’s a win-win situation, as social media recommendations offer an appealing way to crowd-source the marketing of their movies and featuring other entertainment content or segments.
]]>The benefits of an effective International SEO campaign are self evident: Increasing visibility in the search engines results in more traffic to your website, which leads to more qualified visitors making enquiries or sales on your website, which in turn generates more business and increases revenue.
Source: http://www.indolentindio.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Igorot-with-Laptop.jpeg
International Search
While the internet is a global space, different nationalities behave in different ways online. Complications with search engine marketing on this scale extend beyond the logistics of creating new web content. Small businesses especially, need to understand their target markets, overcome local language barriers and simply give global search marketing the care it needs.
And all this begins by an understanding of international search.
Google may undoubtedly rule the search engine market in the US and UK with roughly 90% of all searches taking place on a Google platform, but this is not true for every country. For countries such as China, Russia and Japan, the dominant search players include Yandex (in Russia), or Baidu in China.
When considering which search engines to target, take note: unless a user has unique personalized settings, most engines default to the user’s local browser settings. Meaning, if you are in Canada you will automatically be directed to Google.ca. As a result, it is essential to do keyword research as well as rank checking on a local level of your intended market.
However, regardless which search engines are applicable to your desired target market page optimization tactics will still remain similar.
International SEO isn’t as simple as Translation
SEO Expert Aaron Wall recently shared his perspectives on International SEO, Global marketing strategies and other important online marketing issues. In his exchange he was questioned –
What are the main similarities and differences between International SEO and local or regional SEO?
It is well known that search engines try to return relevant results matching the intent of a search. The three leading criteria that matter are the content of the page, the links to that page, and domain related trust. Besides these core elements in most search algorithms some big differences between locations are –
- The quantity of competing content. In smaller international markets it does not take as much work to be a market leader as does in large global markets.
- How well the search results are policed by the search engines in other countries. Google US English language is more likely to be well policed than a relatively rare language and country.
- Cultural aspects influence relevancy. Link building techniques that are common or easy in one area may not work well in another.
- In the US raw PageRank and domain authority count for a decent amount, but in international markets some other important elements are making it easy for search engines to know your site is locally focused. This can be done how you use language, using local domain extension (like .de for Germany), hosting your site on a local server, publishing your address on your site, and getting links from known trusted local sites.
It is vitally important, therefore, for business to research every target country thoroughly. The wrong approach is to simply translate U.S.-based content without incorporating cultural and language nuances of the target market. Foreign visitors will respond to different signals, have different needs, and ask different questions. A German landing page may initially interest German-speaking customer, but if the rest of the website is in English this targeted offering may be wasted.
How to better target Local Audiences
The most effective way to target a website for local audiences in a global website is to create country and/or language specific pages. Depending on the intent and scope of a site this may range from a few localized pages to versions of an entire website with focussed local content.
Considerations for businesses —-
- Review the original site before starting any international optimization. Any problems with the original site structure may get much worse as it is replicated or redeveloped for new markets.
- Provide the audience with content in their own language.
- Incorporate cultural and language nuances of the target market.
- Advocate for allocating proper local resources for country specific keyword research.
- Sites that use geotargeting are more likely to see their sites rank highly in SERPs. They have fewer issues with duplicate content, as this technique indicated which pages are intended for which recipients.
- Consider revising your design and graphics for individual markets and even the color scheme.
- Further some experts believe that local hosting for each version of a company website can also increase the value of links passed between sites.
- Establish links from local sites being relevant to that specific country.
While expanding internationally, employ the basic tenets of SEO (keywords, page optimisation, link building) but make adjustments depending on the region, country or language you are targeting. Remember, winning the trust and confidence of visitors can only be done by providing a professional, quality experience that is culturally and linguistically appropriate.
]]>Being Googled is the new millennium version of a reference check. It provides your colleagues, employees, managers, clients, hiring managers and executive recruiters with critical information about you. Apparently, just as you work hard to ensure the highest level of success in your career – and capitalize on your reputation – now you need to consider doingso with your online branding.
Why Build a Personal Brand?
You might already know the answer to this. There are a lot of answers, actually, but predominantly it’s about distinguishing yourself significantly from your peers in today’s competitive workplace.
Much like the brands we know – Coke, McDonalds’, Wal-Mart, your personal brand is a combination of the product you offer (i.e. job performance), the values you embody and how the ‘two’ work together to create a wholeness that is ‘you’. You might want to be memorable, and you might want to transfer your real world reputation online.
Moreover, reflecting a strong personal brand also consists of a strong mix of reputation, trust, attention and execution. You may like to showcase yourself as being helpful in nature, or being a dealmaker (Donald Trump), or being a creative writer (just as me ), or a creative thinker (Kathy Sierra, for instance). Whatever matters most to you – and you are capable of sustaining that image online.
The SEO Technology of Personal Branding
My friend and VP-Marketing, Ismoip – Pooja Mehra calls Google a “Reputation Management System”. Essentially when investigating a person, the first place most people will go is Google, so why not try to portray yourself in a positive light?
There are clearly certain types of results that professionals want to appear for a vanity search. Below, some examples of how you can use social media to help ensure ranking as highly as possible in Google for your “personal brand.”
Build up your Social Bits n Bytes
Having a profile you wouldn’t be ashamed to show your mother on all of the other social networks – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Profiles – is the first step in controlling your online reputation. Other than that below are some great tips to follow —
Beef Up your Blogging Skills —
You are what you write….. and by that written word blogging is an excellent method to build a strong reputation within an industry. More the people subscribe to read your content, the higher you appear in search engine results.
Most blogs are likely to be hosted on either a company or personal domain and the natural links generated should help to ensure this has a strong reputation in the search engines.
COOL 
: Make sure you have memorable eye catching business cards on you at all times, you never know who you are going to meet! Connect your blog with any social networks and use tools like Hootsuite and Social Sprout to stay up to date with what people are saying about you, your personal brand, your business, or your industry!
Use Twitter to your Advantage —
Similar to Blogging, Twitter is an invaluable platform to build a strong online presence. If your tweets remain relevant and valuable you’ll probably find that your profile page will be highly regarded in the search engines too. A twitter profile can be a useful online identity consisting expert advice and conversations which help strengthen your reputation.
COOL : Follow and interact with companies and people you admire or you’d like to meet someday. If you tweet in a professionally appropriate way, include your Twitter name or profile URL on your LinkedIn profile too. Add value and more, to your conversations.
Post your Online Presentations —
If you’ve spoken at a conference, seminar or workshop, upload your presentation to SlideShare and Scribd. This will allow people to view and download your presentations, and showcase your oratory skills.
COOL : Optimize your profile by editing your details and strengthen the number of internal links to your profile page by connecting with relevant users.
Post your Cool Videos —
Similar to online presentations, to enhance your reputation online can upload any video recordings of conference or seminar speaking events you find appropriate to online video sites such as You Tube and Vimeo.
COOL : Try using a headline in the style of [Presentation Name by "Author Name"]. This will be used as the title tag and on-page heading and will help to optimize for your name as important keywords.
Social Media Networking —
Flick, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Google reader drive awareness. But beware; bragging on it isn’t useful to anyone but your own ego
As you continue to build your brand on these and other social networking sites, keep a track on privacy developments. Staying diligent about monitoring your online existence is as essential as dominating a Google query for your person.
]]>Launched in 2009, the site is growing like crazy, with over 11 million visits during one week in December of 2011. Still an invite-only social network, Pinterest has manoeuvred its way to the top ten most visited social networks of the past year and continues to gain prominence and following in the public eye.
No wonder then, brands and companies alike are keen to utilize this platform to their advantage.
But How?
Well, before brands decide to jump on the bandwagon, they should be aware that Pinterest is an image-based platform. Users create and name pin-up boards from anything to everything under the sun such as, places of interest, recipes, hobbies, creations, photography etc. and post relevant photos on corresponding boards. The photos are displayed in a run-through feed that is simple, yet visually stunning.
Here we come up with five suggestions that brands should keep in mind when using Pinterest –
Pinterest is a Visual BEE 
Pinterest offers the chance to reach a colossal, sharing-oriented new audience – but also requires a different, more visual kind of perspective. Its ability to put together a collage of appealing pictures in a grid-like format can help enforce a brands visual identity.
For instance Newsweek has a board named Vintage Covers where it encompasses all its front pages over the years. The New York Fashion week, the First Lady Fashion (Michelle Obama), and other multiple buckets enforce its visual identity, posting pictures from such and other top stories.
Emphasize Unique Traits of your Brand
For instance, WSJ (Wall Street Journal) has a board specifically for its striking signature hedcut drawings – the legendry dot drawings of newsworthy people.
Keep your Target Audience in Mind
When it comes to marketing on the Pinterest platform – there’s the end consumer you need to keep in mind.
A great example can be pointed towards Whole Foods, the grocery company which has already raked in more than 14,000 followers.
Given that Whole Foods is so much more than just natural and organic foods – its team wanted to represent the varied lifestyle of its brand. There’s an entire board devoted to dinner recipes – with beautiful imagery that elevates organic cooking into an art.
Careful curation of niche board topics can help you attract a much wider audience, via the search function and a pin’s natural course through the Pinterest ecosystem.
And because the point of Whole Foods isn’t to push products, but to help people explore and deepen their interests, consumers don’t feel like they’re being marketed to –a fantastic way to build connections with people around shared interests of cooking and wholesome food.
Let Your Community Participate
One of the reasons Whole Food got into Pinterest was to allow its users a greater engagement with the brand.
And this engagement has let its consumers contribute their own recipes and ideas of Whole Organic Foods to its identity and community. The connection-building experience makes a great impact, however granular the interests may be.
Be Flexible, Be Interesting
Given that Pinterest is a young, new, rapid growing platform, diving into its waves can give you a good chance to capitalize on it early.
By being flexible, and taking the time to hone in on the community, as in Whole Foods case, your participation and engagement will ultimately pave a way to an even larger audience and reap the value of your marketing investment.
]]>Forrester estimates that $917 billion worth of retail sales last year were “Web-influenced.” It also estimates that online and Web-influenced offline sales combined accounted for 42 percent of total retail sales and that percentage will grow to 53 percent by 2014, when the Web will be influencing $1.4 billion worth of in-store sales.
Increasingly, consumers are taking advantage of the sophisticated capabilities of smart phones to do more of this online research while in a store or on the go. Location-based technologies in mobile devices help on-the-go consumers to get directions to local stores, look up product availability and check in for special offers.
Further, some of the most innovative location-based services send shoppers automatic alerts and deals if they are near a retailer’s store. Imagine if you are able to get a special sale feature of the hottest items in fashion that only last for 24 hours in the store. Shoppers can enjoy tremendous savings by shopping for designer brands on the go.
However, a flipside remains as retailers will need to address consumers’ privacy concerns for these services to become main-stream.
What Is Driving Local Commerce?
We all know the influence of internet and mobile devices to find information online. This is now also being used to find information about nearby stores, restaurants and other businesses. Shopping at a “local” retail store from the consumer’s perspective is more likely lead them to a purchase.
Consumer awareness, use of location-based digital services and targeted local advertising and marketing initiatives are all driving local commerce. The retailer further has embarked on an exciting journey where he can send the consumer relevant offers based on their location and product needs that influence their in-store purchases.
How do Such Devices Augment In-Store Shopping
Retailers are doing a better job to woo online consumers in their physical stores. In fact, these retailers see this as an opportunity to enhance the in-store shopping experience.
- Mobile in-store research enables consumers to compare competitors’ prices, read customer reviews and access special offers while at the point of purchase.
- Retailers now offer mobile apps that help customers feel more confident about making purchases, and some have even equipped their sales associates with iPads to help customers make purchase decisions.
- Mobile and social are becoming important sources of local retail and product information. Mobile shoppers in particular are turning to social media to check prices, read product and business reviews, and get coupons and deals from local stores.
- Local shopping cues and opinions about local retailers and in-store deals influence the shopping decisions of today’s consumers.
Smartphone Users are ready to Buy
A user who looks up local information from their desktop PC is removed from the act of shopping. She/he might be in an early stage of online research which may precede an actual store purchase by hours, days or even weeks. In contrast, on-the-go mobile shoppers are ready to shop i.e. have an urgent need, in the act of shopping, ready to fulfil that need. Thus the connection between research and a purchase is much closer.
With mobile in-store shoppers, who research while standing before a product under consideration, these two actions are occurring simultaneously. For marketers, a mobile user with local intent presents an opportunity to influence a person who is ready to buy.
Mobile in-store shopping is in the early stages of consumer adoption. They not only help on-the-go shoppers find local retailers and products but also augment their in-store shopping experience. Retailers on the other hand, will earn customer loyalty if they enhance the shopping experience with digital tools, as well as offer targeted coupons and deals.
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One of the features included is a new banner just below the profile information that stretches across the page and the ability to pin a tweet at the top of each brand’s stream. The result is a valuable opportunity for brands to showcase their dernier cri and to have a more distinctive presence on Twitter. These changes are definitely a spin in the right direction, but we need to still ‘watch the birdie’ to see as to how much flight it actually gains.
Twitter Brand Pages Launch
As part of the comprehensive redesign and growth strategy, what Twitter realized is that its users simply do not spend as much time (as Facebook!?) on it. So in order to encourage more interaction and keeping them glued in for a longer time, Twitter takes one step forward by launching its Brand Pages.
With Brand Pages companies (and not users) will have much greater creative control over how their profile looks and feels to its users. Brand Pages incorporate two key elements wherein a large header consisting images can be used to display their logo and tagline more prominently. And – where now brands can also choose to keep a particular tweet at the top of their time line. Further that top tweet also auto-expands to reveal an embedded photo or video from Flickr, YouTube or other sources, without requiring the user to take action.
Additionally, they separate out a brand’s @ replies and mentions, which is an important move for customer-service companies like Bing, which frequently responds to users but wants a way to keep its messaging from getting diluted.
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