Our previous blog post, Why Marketing to Mobile Users Matters, provided overwhelming evidence that mobile device users of Smartphones and tablets actively rely on those devices as shopping aids: to find the nearest store, to compare products and prices, and to purchase. Could your business use a boost from making it easier for walk-in traffic to find you?

In fact, how mobile-friendly is your business (desktop) website? To find out, see Google’s GoMo site, which shows you what your websites would look like on a mobile device and lets you test the functionality of your website on a mobile device. They also provide a PDF report of the results that includes some good general tips for mobile website design.

The first question to ask: to what extent should my website go mobile?

There are different ways to make your website easier to read on Smartphones and tablets. Your decision depends on:

Your goals for a mobile website: A travel business may want to provide full functionality, including self-service cruise bookings, on a mobile interface. Or, just use the mobile interface as a complement to the desktop website by making it easy for the user to press a button on the Smartphone to connect to a travel agent.

How many mobile users come to your site: Your web analytics can identify the type of browser visitors are using to access your site. In Google Analytics, you can find this information by going to Audience, then selecting the Mobile option. This will show you how many visits came from mobile devices and which kind of device. If a high percentage of visits are from mobile visitors, you may want to make your website more welcoming to small screens.

Which pages did mobile visitors try to access? Even if there number of mobile visitors is low, dig deeper.  In Google Analytics you can find out by going to Content and then filtering for Mobile via the Advanced Segments option.

This shows you the pages that mobile visitors accessed. There are other ways of slicing the data to determine how long they spent on each page and the flow of the visit. What information do you think those visitors wanted to see? Your store location? Hours of operation? Product prices? A phone number?  Job postings?

Based on a bit of analysis, do you need to revise your mobile website goals?

Back to that first question: to what extent should my website go mobile?

In order of difficulty, your options are:

1. Make sure your website presents and functions correctly on mobile devices.

This is the least amount of work and you won’t be serving up a desktop experience by any stretch of the imagination, but it could be sufficient for your needs. The most basic tweaks are to adjust for font size and viewport size. Nothing fancy, just prevent stuff from breaking on a small screen.

2. Implement Responsive Design

Also known as “adaptive layout”, this approach makes use of the ability of current browsers to query for screen size, orientation, and more. Your website targets a few specific resolutions and device sizes and “adapts” as the browser determines screen specifications. The example we showed in our last blog post of a site belonging to a web-savvy politician uses this approach. Smashing Magazine is also a good example to check out.

This option requires more planning because it’s not just a matter of adjusting for size. You also need to prioritize content and design your adaptive navigation to suit each layout. The good thing is that you are still maintaining only one website for both desktop and mobile. True, it’s a more complicated website but it’s still less costly than your next option.

3. Build a Dedicated Mobile Website

This is a major undertaking that requires research in order to make decisions about strategy, content, and target devices to address, to say nothing of tools and platforms to use for development. A dedicated website will need its own domain and offer a completely different, optimized experience for the mobile user.  Performance, navigation, minimal use of input keys – you will need to design for all of these factors. Below is how the IKEA desktop website looks (left) compared to their mobile website (right)

If you do implement a true mobile website, make sure you provide a well-placed link to it in your business website and vice versa. The IKEA main site has a text link on the upper-right to its mobile site (below).

This is hardly noticeable when viewed on a smaller screen (see above left again). An eye-catching button on the main site would help mobile users get to a more satisfying dedicated mobile web experience.

A mobile website can also be adaptive. The New York Times mobile interface is an example of a website that recognizes readers could be perusing headlines on a Smartphone or on an iPad while commuting in to work.

4. Build a Mobile App

All the previous options are browser-based applications where functionality and content reside on the website’s server; the mobile device must connect to the server in order to have any sort of functionality or content. They need to be compatible with the different browsers used by various mobile phones.

A mobile app is software that runs on a mobile device’s operating system and makes use of the specific features of the phone (think buttons and touchscreen, GPS, accelerometer, camera, other apps that ship with the phone). A mobile app lives on the device, so there can be features that are usable offline. Apps for gaming, personalization, calculations, or other functions that need direct access to the device’s resources, are best implemented as a native mobile app.

While a dedicated website needs to maintain compatibility with different browser platforms, a mobile app needs to support each mobile device natively. Each device you decide to target represents a different platform that is potentially a separate project, not to mention ongoing maintenance to ensure compatibility with newer versions of operating system, firmware, and any other resources used by the app.

Finally, remember that before you can sell apps through an app store, you must get approval from the device manufacturer. Manufacturers receive a percentage of every app sold, so there are lots of tools and forums out there to help you ensure compatibility and a smooth approval process.

Part 2 of this series will give you some of the essentials of designing for mobile devices. But as you can see, one of the first decisions you need to make is how mobile-friendly do you need to be? The good news is that with some planning, you can take incremental steps. Start with the first option (tweaking your website to present properly on mobile devices) and move to the second option (responsive design). If your business goals warrant it, take the plunge and move to a dedicated mobile website or a mobile app.

It seems you can’t open a magazine or newspaper without seeing an article about Pinterest, so here is our obligatory blog post on the fastest-growing social media phenomenon of the decade so far.

What is it? Pinterest is a social media site that’s a cross between social media and social photo sharing. Users can “pin” images to themed boards they create, which can be based on hobbies, events, lifestyle, and other interests. The social sharing aspect comes in when users browse other users’ boards and ‘re-pin’ images to their own boards or collections, ‘like’ photos, or make comments. Sounds pretty straightforward, so …

What’s making it grow? It’s really easy to use, and it’s useful as a personal organizer. A “pin-it” button for your browser bar lets you “pin” the page to your boards as you browse the Internet. Pinterest automatically includes the source URL to give credit to the owner of the image.This is the digital equivalent of ripping out pictures from magazines or catalogues; later, you can click on the pinned item to get back to the product page you liked. Yes, it’s a big, visual bookmarking system. But the other reason it’s addictive is that you can check out what others are pinning on their boards. If you are looking for high end stereo headphones, someone else will have pinned their choices on Pinterest and you can re-pin their item to your own board.

Why is it a viable ecommerce site? Pinterest launched in December 2009. By December 2011, the site made it into the top 10 largest social network services with 11 million total visits per week. In January 2012, it drove more referral traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+. Facebook hasn’t really taken off as a business site. It’s designed for social interactions and its users tend to share activities and news.

Pinterest users on the other hand, share stuff. Stuff they have bought, used, liked, want to buy, or are researching actively before they buy. The images on Pinterest are sourced from websites, so interested users who click to find out more about the dress, the sofa, the garden tool, the hotel, or the book end up on the website that promotes the item or service. Note: the demographics for Pinterest in the US is strongly female, around 83%. In the UK, males dominate at 56%.

How Pinterest is changing the web

Smart retailers are pinning. Smart retailers are creating a presence on Pinterest for themselves. West Elm, the home décor store has pinboards arranged by theme. The store features not only their own products but also other finds, to position the company as tastemakers; to date, they have 24,400 followers on Pinterest. Better Homes and Gardens and other magazines can really leverage Pinterest’s format to curate articles in helpful ways. BHG has nearly 48,000 Pinterest followers — and don’t forget the SEO value of links from all those user re-pins.

Web design. Website designers are jumping on the bandwagon to imitate Pinterest’s grid of images. Sometimes visuals are just more easy to digest than text. With some planning and categories, this can be a useful new way to present consumer products, as shown by Easy Living Magazine.

Contests. Pinterest offers high-engagement contest opportunities and companies are running contests for “best pinboard”. One example is Homes.com, who sponsored a Pinterest contest that encouraged users to create pinboards featuring their favourite homes from the Home.com site.

Next week: As with any social media site, there are rules and etiquette. Is it in Your Best Pinterest: Part 2 of 2 discusses How to Be(have) on Pinterest.

The Raw Stats on Mobile

• It took more than one year to sell one million iPods. It took only 28 days to sell one million iPads.
• By 2015, the worldwide shipment numbers for tablets is estimated at 326.3 million units.
• Three days after its launch on October 14, 2011 Apple sold over four million of its new iPhone 4S.
• In 2012 Smartphones will out sell desktop and laptop computers combined, worldwide.
• More than 50% of US residents will own a Smartphone (of any brand) by the end of 2012, and by 2015 more than 158 million smartphones will be in use.

These statistics represent a seismic shift in how a significant segment of the population chooses to consume information. Users want and expect connectivity right now, on demand, and painlessly. For those of you who figured netbooks were just a transitional technology, you are right. iPads are doing a better job of meeting the need for mobile, full-screen mobile Internet access that supports business apps. But those are the raw shipment numbers. The real question is: how do mobile users behave when it comes to browsing and buying?

In-Store Shopping Habits of Smartphone Users

Google has released the results of a survey that studies: the types of information consumers search for on mobile; how they use smartphones to find local information; and how smartphones influence in-store shopping process and behavior. The survey presented results from the USA, UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Japan; results from other countries will be released later.

The US findings show that of the Smartphone users who have searched online for information about local businesses or services:

• 51% have also called the business or service
• 49% have also looked up the business on a map
• 48% visited the business premises while 49% visited the business’ website
• 25% have acted on that information by making in-store purchases.
• 21% have acted on that information by making a purchase from the business online.
• Overall, 92% of users seek local information and 89% take action after looking up local content.

Furthermore, Smartphone shoppers are frequent shoppers. More than 3 out of 5 Smartphone shoppers purchase using their device at least once a month, while, 14% purchase weekly and 20% daily. This behavior is not exclusive to the US. In all of the six countries featured in the report, the majority of smartphone shoppers purchase on their device at least once a month.

Other findings show that users intentionally bring their Smartphones while shopping to compare prices and research more about products, and about one-third changed their minds in-store or while on-line based on information they found through their Smartphone.

Online Shopping Habits of Tablet Users

What about tablet users? Adobe Digital Index recently conducted a study of online buying habits of tablet users. Based on an analysis of over 16.2 billion online transactions of more than 150 U.S. retailers, 85% of which are included in the Internet Retail 500 Index, the report found that while traditional users (desktop, laptop) still have the highest conversion rate on retail sites (2.5%), tablet users run a close second (2.3%), three times more than Smartphone users ( 0.6%).

Plus, although tablet users convert at a slightly lower rate than traditional users, they spend over 20% more than traditional users and over 50% more per purchase than Smartphone users.

This higher average spend is due to the demographics of tablet users, who tend to be male and more affluent than the average online shopper. First, Tablet Visitors are more affluent than other online shoppers and tend to be males. The study also suggests that tablet users shop under more enjoyable, less stressful circumstances: at home and on weekends.

What This Means for Digital Marketing

The mobile market needs to be segmented into tablet and Smartphone shoppers. Smartphones are more portable than tablets, so users are more likely to visit a brick-and-mortar retail store after visiting a website and respond to in-store promotional offers. Tablet users, on the other hand, are like traditional users when shopping online but with higher disposable incomes. Online retailers need to deliver the most engaging customer experience possible to tablet users and leverage the features of the tablet for a seamless and positive site visit.

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Just because a Smartphone can access your site doesn’t mean you’re providing an experience that’s optimized for the small screen. To see a great example of what that means, take a look at this site belonging to a web-savvy politician. Drag your browser screen to resize it, make it narrower and see what happens: everything on the page, including the navigation, shifts so that you retain full functionality, but in a presentation that’s easy to view and use on smaller screens. Notice also that text gets larger and so do the buttons, which make the site friendly for small touchscreens.

Get listed in location-based social media sites. Mobile users go to different mobile-oriented social media services for recommendations and shopping advice, especially to find local stores and services. Make sure your store is easy to find, not just on Google Places but also sites such as Foursquare, Where, and Yelp.

Be data-sensitive. Mobile users are on data plans. Make interactions fast and direct. Use short URLs to minimize typing. Better yet, use QR codes to take Smartphone users directly to the specific product page or call to action. Make your designs lightweight, keep text brief, and be careful about image sizes. Avoid using Flash or large images on pages meant for mobile devices. Better yet again, offer Wi-Fi access in your stores.

From the company that made web analytics free comes a novel service that combines consumer research with monetization of Internet content. On March 30, Google announced Google Consumer Surveys, a self-serve market research tool. This is an insanely clever idea that kills two birds with one stone: how to leverage the Internet for cheap, accurate market research, and how to let content publishers finally make some money from the valuable information they’ve been forced to offer for free.

The premise is very simple: Google Consumer Surveys lets brands who want to do consumer research create a quick 1 – 2 question micro-survey. Content publishers host the survey on their sites. When a consumer tries to access information on the content publisher’s site, a “surveywall” pops up and asks the consumer to take the survey before they can access content.

• The brand gets back from Google some aggregated results in nice, presentation-friendly formats.
• The consumer gets to read valuable content without having to pay actual money.
• The content publisher makes some money for hosting the survey.
• Google makes some money for being so darn clever.

The pricing is simple as well: Google does everything on a per-response basis. It costs the brand only $0.10 per question-response to target a representative sample of the U.S. Internet population or $0.50 per question-response for demographic targeting using inferred demographic data such as gender, age group, and US geographic region.

Image courtesy Google Consumer Surveys

What’s Good About Google Consumer Surveys

Google is using their reach to leverage a crowd-sourcing approach to market research. Rather than select a small focused audience and ask them to answer 10 pages worth of questions, the approach here is to ask a couple of simple questions and put those out to a huge audience, then run the results through some algorithms for statistical weighting.

Good response rate. During trials of Consumer Surveys, Google achieved an average response rate of 16.75% compared to the latest industry response rates of less than 1% for most Internet intercept surveys; 7-14% for telephone surveys; and 15% for Internet panels. This was due to the brief nature of the surveys, where one or two easy clicks complete the survey, and to Google’s ability to infer demographic data, making it unnecessary to add those questions to the survey.

Good accuracy. Google’s secret sauce is their statistical expertise. They take the raw response data and run it through weighting and analysis algorithms to deliver results that turned out to be more accurate than results from the Internet panels used during trials. Google reported the average absolute error for non-Google samples was 5.29% across all benchmarks, while the Google Consumer Survey samples averaged a lower 3.76%. This suggests that brands can use Google Consumer Surveys instead of traditional Internet-based panels and achieve the same, or higher, accuracy.

It’s fast. It only takes a few minutes to set up a survey, and Google takes care of the rest: putting it out to their network of publishers, data collection, and analysis. If your brand needs to be aware of trends and shifts in the consumer mindset, it’s tough to think of an easier, faster way to take the pulse of your audience.

It’s cost-effective. The Google recommendation is to go for at least 1,500 responses in order to achieve a statistically significant sample. At $0.10 each, that’s $150; at $0.50 each, that’s a $750 spend on a small survey that could deliver timely and extremely valuable insights to your business decisions.

A better business model for publishers. It’s a more viable business model over the long term for content publishers than putting up a hard “paywall” for access to content. According to David Cohn, founder of Spot.us, a journalism crowdfunding site that tried a variation of this pay-for-access model, only 1% of users were willing to pay money for content, but this number rose to 10% when they could respond instead to a survey. Furthermore, the survey takers were willing to continue taking surveys, making their long-term contribution greater than those who made one-time cash donations.

What to Keep in Mind About Google Consumer Surveys

It’s good for micro-surveys. This service is ideal for A/B testing, binary questions, or questions with a few multiple choice responses. Do you prefer this name or that name? This logo or that one? This is not the place to conduct longitudinal surveys. Think of it more as polling.

Don’t expect analysis of relationships between survey questions. The nature of Google Consumer Surveys allows only one-question or screening two-question surveys. Google provides examples of multi-question surveys, where each question is set up as a separate micro-survey but this is not the same. As long as your survey does not depend on having the same 1,500 people respond to all the micro-surveys, this should not be a problem.

Image courtesy Google Consumer Surveys

Visuals make it better. While it’s easy to set up text-based surveys, companies with attractive visuals make a better impression and get higher response rates. In some cases, if there is a design choice involved, a good visual is a must.

Image courtesy Google Consumer Surveys

It’s only available for the US population. At this moment, Google has launched Consumer Surveys for US demographics but knowing them, other markets can’t be far behind.

Sample population is not ‘representative’. Google notes that their ‘representative US population sample’ is actually representative of the US Internet-using population, who tend to be younger, better-educated, and with higher incomes. At the moment, your options for slicing demographics are limited to age, gender, and geographic region because Google infers this data from IP addresses and DoubleClick cookies. So you need to decide whether this is an issue for the type of market research you want to run.

Survey allocation depends on content publisher inventory Also, while Google does its best to optimize how surveys get allocated to content sites, there can be limitations due to publisher inventory and survey deadlines. Again, this is where their secret sauce comes into play, algorithms that compensate for these factors.

Google’s content publisher network is not as large as their display ad network, but over time as more publishers sign up, it’s reasonable to expect that these issues will go away. Google may even be able to target surveys more closely to a required demographic as a broader variety of content publishers come on board: technology, science, lifestyle, sports, arts, travel, are just a few of the verticals that come to mind. Keep in mind also that this is Google’s first iteration of Consumer Surveys. For them, it’s a proof of concept, and if the concept gains traction, expect richer functionality for surveys because the logical end game for Google is to deliver full survey capabilities.

This first post covers an MIT Media Lab panel discussion run by Joi Ito. He’s a pioneer in the Internet world, starting his career with technology companies in the 1980s. Now he is director of the MIT Media Lab. This discussion offered interesting insights into how the Internet is affecting the way we work and the future of business. The most important message was that the world is moving so fast that traditional business practices are becoming less effective. We’ll need to learn how to adapt in order to survive.

Avoid Overplanning

Ito opened by explaining some of what he’s seen since the beginning of the Internet. He’s noticed that in the past companies have time and time again resorted to massive time-consuming research reports in order to make the appropriate decisions. Although these are necessary for particular types of organizations such as government, others regrettably miss time-sensitive opportunities. As the world speeds up, over-planning becomes a larger problem. It now costs many organizations more to plan than just to dive in. The only way to capitalize on opportunity, and adjust to problems is to adapt quickly. This is why Agile Project Management has become increasingly popular today. Agile methodology was a large theme at SXSW this year, and Ito hit the nail in the head.

“It’s no longer about the product, it’s about the eco-system” – Joi Ito

Plan for Change as a Constant

Here’s what it boils down to: In order for organizations to survive the next 5 years of business we’re going to have to learn to adopt the idea of change. Change management isn’t just a one-time event anymore. It’s going to become a constant in the business environment. We can already see this trend in the technology start-up industry. Things move so fast that one day a business model works and the next – maybe not so much. Perhaps one model isn’t scalable. To survive and succeed we’ll need to focus on the business ecosystem.

Get Agile

Agile project management can provide some of what our organizations need because it works in iterations. Reviewing and planning faster allows important decisions and actions to happen at more appropriate times.

Focus on Environment

MIT has taken a proactive approach by opening the Media Lab division of their institution. It has a program that fosters improvisation and change. It provides a creative collaborative space to promote new ideas; funding and support for new technological discovery; coaching for individual education; and more. They focus less on individual products and more on the environment because those who work in these circumstances are more likely to reach successful outputs.

Conclusions

In reflecting on this session I’ve come to a few conclusions that are important for businesses.

Learn how Agile methodologies can improve our organizations. Every organization is different which means that they need to use different tools. Understanding the Agile frame work will give us a new tool for how to effectively manage our teams in the future.

Embrace change and improvisation. Communication is speeding up, brands are becoming more humane, and consumer demand is changing so quickly it’s hard to predict what’s next. In considering the idea of “survival of the fittest” humans and now businesses need to adapt to survive. Having the ability to proactively change and improvise under new and unknown circumstances is what will set successful businesses apart.

Be flexible with the long term. Planning is an expensive and time consuming effort. Make sure we understand when it is necessary and when it is not. There are always long term goals, but we need to be flexible in how we achieve those goals. The lessons we gain by jumping into a project and embracing serendipity may hold opportunities for the long term, so be prepared to adjust our long-term thinking.

Focus on the business eco-system (culture, space, resources, people, mentoring) not just the product. Trends and consumer demands change so quickly that it is difficult to predict how long they last and how popular they will become. Chances are that technology businesses will need to adapt, or in some cases pivot, in order to survive. Focus more on providing a team with the eco-system to succeed rather than a specific product so that when they need to they are more able to adjust.

Below are some of the cool MIT Media Lab projects that were presented after Ito’s talk:

http://www.Lumino.so

http://funf.media.mit.edu/

http://idcubed.org/

http://formlabs.com/

http://www.affectiva.com/

http://sourcemap.com/

In this blog post, we review some of the benefits and present some retargeting tips collected from our client experiences over the past couple of years.

What is remarketing?

If you use Google Adwords, remarketing allows you to target website visitors by continuing to display your ads at appropriate times later, when they browse elsewhere on the Internet. You are in effect identifying visitors who have come to your site and then showing them tailored ads on sites throughout the Google Display Network. A little bit of retargeting code on your web pages is all you need to remarket to those visitors.

Visitors? Which visitors? You set up your target visitors via an “audience list”. You have several targeting options: from blatantly repeating your ads everywhere the visitor browses to more focused placements based on topics, keywords, ad placement, or timing. If you want, Google can help you increase your audience list by automatically adding visitors who have landed on your site through organic search or direct access.

If you haven’t done so already, read Google’s tutorial on remarketing.

What kind of business could use remarketing?

When remarketing first came out, we felt it was best for products with a longer buying cycle, where customers need to do more research or price shop. In addition to staying visible to customers while they are making up their minds, the constant reinforcement of remarketing helps drive customers from the point of feeling this product is a “wanna-have” to rather than “must-have”.

But actually, most visitors to your website won’t make up their minds right away. So any business can benefit from remarketing to reinforce your brand and remind users to come back. B2B remarketing can be very effective, especially when you combine remarketing with custom landing pages that feature different messages to target different audience segments.

Keep an eye on your results with Google Analytics, and it’s easy to track the success of your remarketing campaign, whether your goal is conversions or the engagement level of returning customers; this helps you make decisions that control your AdWords bid pricing and maintain ROI.

Six Tips for Remarketing ROI

1. Create a ‘just purchased’ list. Visitors who followed through with a purchase are good targets for cross-selling. If Rita just bought some great evening shoes, she may respond well to a remarket ad for evening bags, with a discount if she makes the purchase within the next 7 days. You can set up this campaign to target this list for up to 7 days. You can also use this list to make sure you’re not remarketing to Rita with ads for more evening shoes.
2. Create a dropouts list. Work those audience lists. Create a list of visitors who started adding to their shopping cart but then dropped out. These are high potential prospects who had second thoughts. Perhaps they didn’t like the shipping costs, or felt they had to shop around some more, or perhaps they just got distracted during the purchase process. Remind them about your site and help them reconsider with remarketing ads that offer discounts, free shipping, or a bonus.
3. Remarket by brand or product type. If you carry different brands of product (shoes) or sell a range of products (shoes, handbags, and accessories), put remarketing code in pages by brand or by product type. Therefore, if Joe has been to your Nike page, whenever he navigates to another Nike page or sports footwear page, he will see your ad for your Nike sports footwear. If Jessica has been on your handbag pages, she will continue to see your ads for purses. It’s especially effective if your remarketing ads offer specials.
4. Offer an incentive. It costs less to attract a repeat customer than to capture a new customer. Take some of those savings and give customers a better reason to come back.
5. Experiment. Be relevant. Try different messages and campaigns as well as different combinations of audience lists. Stay current with trends or seasonal product opportunities. There is no such thing as a silver bullet but you will be able to find some messages that resonate better with certain audience lists. Keep on trying until you know what works.
6. Create custom landing pages. Custom pages or micro-sites are a real help when your main website is constrained to certain designs or too difficult to manage for quick response to marketing campaign needs. When you remarket, you can zero in on a slice of your target audience, so why not invest in a micro-site or custom landing page that speaks directly and more personally to that customer segment?

Online retailers like registration because they can maintain a purchase history and suggest other products the customer might enjoy – a service many customers appreciate. Registration brings other benefits to returning customers: check out faster, avoid re-entering the same shipping and billing information, or use discount coupons. Enterprises like registration because they can capture names to add to their prospecting database, and in return, customers gain access to useful information. For some sales managers, the rationale is that registration qualifies the visitor. Only someone who is really interested would go through the steps of registering.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? Or does it?

Are you losing conversions because you’re too insistent on collecting customer information? In a now-classic case study titled “The $300 Million Button”, a retailer found that 75% of shoppers who got to checkout never completed their purchase, dropping out when asked to register before committing to the purchase. The web designers changed the checkout process to make registration optional and put it at the very end, after the user completed purchasing. Within a month of making this change, the completion rate increased by 45% and revenues by $15 million. This ended up adding $300,000,000 to their revenues over one year.

Your conversion goal might not be a product purchase, and the payoff you look for may not be so dramatic, but here are some things to keep in mind:

Monitor the analytics: if you haven’t set up conversion goals in your analytics to track how well your forms are working, do it now. There is no other way to collect the objective data you need to help you decide how to refine your registration process. Create a trustworthy presence : what have you done to make a user trust you with his information? Privacy concerns these days make it that much harder to convince users to part with their contact information.

• Make sure your website is designed to convey a professional and trustworthy image.
• Make sure your own contact information has very clear information about how to contact you in case of privacy concerns.

Provide a benefit: Think of it as a fair trade. What does the user get in exchange for his information? Depending on your business, it could be:

• Retailer: a discount coupon for the next purchase, notification for upcoming sales. The convenience of not having to re-enter your information again, alas, is not that much of an incentive. Take a look at the Tim Horton’s site, which a good example of a page that provides lots of good reasons for registering a Tim Card.
• Corporate: download of valuable content, access to premium content, ability to ask questions or contribute to forums, receive notification of conferences or events, or receive a discount to attend valuable events. The key here is “valuable content”. If you would give it away at a trade show, it’s promotional. A candidate for required registration is information which cost you an investment: proprietary surveys, significant white papers, or webinars.

Keep it minimal: only ask for as much as you truly need. If all you want is to add the user’s email address to your newsletter list, just ask for name and email address. Resist the urge to dig for job title, company name, city, or which transit system they ride to get to work.

The more you give, the more you get: as a corollary to the above, if you are swapping something really valuable for the user’s contact information, you get to ask for more. This is why contests get to ask a lot of questions about you. You know and they know that a big reason for the contest is to collect audience demographics. But they’ll do it for a trip to Hawaii. Or even a gift card for coffee.

Is your registration form driving them away? Once you’ve nailed down what you’re providing to the user in exchange for however much personal information, take a look at your form design. Keep the flow logical and the design simple. Here are two examples, one short and one long. Both examples are minimalist and convey clearly to the user what to expect.

Here is the Speedly sign up for a free trial. There’s no doubt about the purpose of this page. The information they collect is minimal – not even a credit card number at this point. Not until you’re ready to make a commitment. This is a pretty safe way to go for Speedly since their implementation lets users play around and test indefinitely – until the they are ready to start taking real payments from real customers.

Here is the Litmus sign up for a 7-day free trial. Instead of one big long form, note how it’s broken down into three sections, each clearly titled so you know the reason why you’re filling out the section. Litmus does ask for credit card information but makes it very clear with a message below that the first 7 days are free, with a clearly-defined closing date.

So turn on those analytics and take a quick audit of the forms you use to collect user information. Whether or not a purchase is involved, this helps determine whether your current registration process is defeating your conversion goals. Then take a hard look at what you’re asking for in exchange for what you’re giving. Finally, make sure your forms are well-designed and walk the user through a simple, non-disruptive process. Let us know how it goes!

If you need yet another reason to invest in social media, here’s one: search engines are evolving to favour social media. Furthermore, social media sites are changing on-site search to account for member recommendations.

The goal of search engines has always been to deliver the most helpful and relevant information to users. Google’s success came from taking an approach that was radical in those early days: to curate for content quality by measuring the number of links to a page. The assumption was that if other web sites linked to yours, it counted as a “vote” of confidence.  The more often other pages linked to yours, the higher your search ranking.

Google and its emphasis on links changed the search landscape. Website owners paid more attention to content, creating useful, quality content that was formatted in compliance to Google’s standards. Social media is the new game changer and businesses who want to rank high in search results need to pay attention to their social presence.

How Does Social Play into Search?

In a previous blog post titled Conversion Optimization: Testimonials are Dead: Long Live User Reviews, we wrote about the way user generated content (UGC) sold products more effectively than anything else. UGC matters more and more in search, and not just for product reviews. If you think about it, social media is all about user-generated content.

Search engines now are trying to incorporate people’s opinions rather than rely exclusively on mathematical algorithms. Search results can be affected by the number of tweets, retweets, Facebook likes, and +1 votes – all with the goal of delivering more personalized results to the user. Both Google and Bing have stated publicly that pages whose URLs are shared on Twitter and Facebook will rank higher.

Microsoft Bing has a partnership with Twitter and is a major investor in Facebook, giving the search engine provider ready access to real-time data from both social network sites. Bing factors in Facebook “like” data. So pages that a  user’s friends have liked will rank higher, and you are able to see who has voted for something you’re searching on, such as a product or a hotel. Bing also mines Facebook data so that pages with high popularity overall in Facebook show more prominently. They call this leveraging the “Collective IQ”. As for Twitter, Bing has been experimenting with a “Social” category that pulls up the latest tweets and news on a topic, similar to what social monitoring tools provide.

Google incorporates publicly available reviews from sites such as Expedia, Tripadvisor, and other sites with rich UGC into search results and into Google’s Hotel Finder and Shopper features.

Unfortunately for the alpha dog of search, it never reached a deal with Facebook; and ever since the company’s deal with Twitter expired in July 2011, it had to take down Google Real-Time Search. Google has been using a “scraper” to collect and process publically available social media information. This takes longer than direct feeds from Twitter and Facebook, but Google has launched Google+, its own social networking service. A social network’s value lies in its user population and it will take some time before Google+ users reach the same levels as Facebook or Twitter.

So What Can You Do?

Social media does not replace good SEO practices – it does enhance what you are doing to drive up your search rankings. The direction search engines are taking is nothing but good news for companies who want to improve their rankings organically, because it means that taking care of your social media program also benefits your SEO efforts. You still need to:

Build great content: this is the cornerstone of good SEO. A good website that’s easy to navigate and which provides information that is useful and well-written will make it easier to convince visitors to “like” or tweet your URL.

Research keywords: when you write your content, use keywords that are meaningful to your target audience. Make sure you also use keywords in your page titles, image alt attributes, and URLs.

Build links: where appropriate, reference other pages within your own site and use links. For external link building, here are some common tactics:

• create pages with useful information that other sites will want to reference
• submit articles and press releases to online news sites that are relevant to your industry
• submit your site to reputable online directories
• review related products or articles on other sites – often people who read the reviews will also come to your site
• maintain a blog and link to other blogs that you feel are good resources for your audience; often the other blog will return the favour

Why have all those ingredients in place before making use of social media? Because the Internet is instant. If your site contains high quality, useful content, the visitor who tweets about it informs his social network in real time. If your visitor gets a bad user experience or thinks he’s been misled, well, one bad tweet that gets re-tweeted can ruin your whole day.

Build a professional Facebook page: think of your business Facebook page as a mini-site, one where you can invite your audience to share and comment. Post useful information daily. It can be as easy as posting a link to an interesting article that’s relevant to your audience. Monitor posts from your Facebook friends and “like” or write comments on their posts. Build up trust with your audience and you’ll get the “likes” and comments you need to bump up your social cred.

Tweet useful stuff: the goal is to generate conversation around your brand, so tweet a couple of times a day about industry news and events, not just your own products and services. Respond and engage with individuals that want to talk to you; and announce contests or special deals (deals get re-tweeted a lot).

Most important of all – remember that the primary goal of your social media program is to be helpful to your target audience, not to bump up your search results. If you do a good job of providing useful information, you’ll get the “likes” and re-tweets you need to increase your search ranking. If you tweet and post trivia too often, you’ll just annoy your audience.

Mobile is moving incredibly fast and with thousands of apps being created and discovered everyday it’s difficult to have any idea about what’s going on. That’s why we at Smartt wanted to make things a bit easier for you. It’s time to get your apps in gear and get up to speed with the latest and greatest applications in mobile.

Pinterest has to be the most popular, over-hyped, and shared picture-sharing network on the planet. As annoying as it is to constantly hear about it, Pinterest is actually a fun and easy-to-use platform with loads of opportunity for businesses. Pinterest works like a multi-faceted dream board. It allows users to extract, save, and categorize their favorite online pictures. The Pinterest mobile application even allows users to snap photos on the go. Businesses can tap into Pinterest’s high frequency of sharing to increase site traffic. It also allows businesses and users to add product details and links so that if you stumble across a gift you like, purchasing it is just a few clicks away.

Banjo ensures you’ll never miss a coincidental meeting ever again. By scraping all public geo-messages and check-ins Banjo will populate a Google map of all you near-by friends. If you’re particularly close to a friend you’ll even get a little notification to make sure you know there around the corner.  The app also allows users to check-in using Foursquare and message to Facebook and Twitter. This makes sharing seamless. To some this, can seem like a stalker’s paradise while for others it’s fun and different. Users will be able to identify familiar faces in their area, or take advantage of local events they would have missed otherwise. It’s new, different, and definitely worth a download.

Zite takes the best of the best, of the absolute best online news and creates a customized digital-newspaper experience. Probably the best Flipboard alternative I’ve come across. Zite will actually learn your reading habits so that you don’t have to waste precious time sifting through countless irrelevant articles. Whether you’re into web design, technology, politics, art, or countless other categories, Zite has something for you. It’s really easy to use. To make things easier Zite has provided users with Twitter and Facebook sharing capability so users can continue to be social dynamos. If you’re anything like me do yourself a favor, download Zite and save your time.

TaxiNow makes grabbing a cab easier than easy. Say goodbye to being on hold and long, distorted elevator jazz music! Instead, say hello to just clicking a few buttons. It’s really that simple. TaxiNow will gather your geo-location, show you a map of all near-by cabs that are also using the app, and if you wish, alert them of a potential fare. If a cab accepts, the app will tell you how long you’ll wait, the phone number of the cab, and more.  What I found best about this application is that it gives an idea of how many cabs are in the area and if there aren’t any will give you the phone numbers of popular cab companies. As a bonus, most cabbies using the application are interesting, tech-savvy gentlemen who can carry on a conversation about smart phones, apps, and tech. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have that than the awkward silent type. If you’re a frequent cab rider make sure to check this out – I promise it ‘ll be a breeze.

Finally, Path is a personal journal network that allows you to easily capture and share the best parts of your life. What I find most interesting is that Path identified a major problem with content capturing – it takes way too long! So they created a user interface that makes navigation fast and easy.  To save even more time, it syncs with all the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc.) so that you only need to post in one place. You can capture and share locations, photos, notes, wake ups, good-nights, meetings, music with your closest friends.  The problem I see with most networks is that they’re huge, cluttered and overwhelming behemoths. Path isn’t. It’s a small, mobile-only network that makes sharing with a group of friends much easier. Check it out, and start saving your time.

Remember those guidelines for writing press releases? Start with the most essential information in the lead paragraph: the who, what, when, where and how of why this is a newsworthy announcement. Then move on to information that substantiates the lead paragraph. In the days of print, this format made it easier for news editors to reduce word count by chopping text from the bottom up.

Now that online distribution of news has taken over from print, there are changes to this hallowed practice. Intel maintains a traditional format press release format, but summarizes the announcement with a few key bullet points at the start of the announcement. This concise version of the release is a real help to editors who have to wade through hundreds of releases each day.

Intel also places social media links prominently, right under the headline. The “likes” and votes show editors how much interest there has been in this announcement, something else that could be helpful.

Meanwhile, SAP has developed the “SAP Newsbyte”, a mini-release. The fact that a particular announcement is delivered as a newsbyte instead of a full press release means SAP has positioned its newsworthiness. Nothing ruins credibility with editors like sending out press releases that lack news appeal.

With the “newsbyte” approach SAP is keeping their audience updated, but also communicating that they know this is not a big news item. This helps a busy editor differentiate between major and minor announcements and who knows – if it’s a slow day, the newsbyte may get coverage after all.

But take a look at this press release from Oracle. Instead of a traditional paragraph style press release, information is organized by category and written as bullet points:

• News Facts: the essentials of what is being announced and why it’s useful
• Benefits: solution goals and how the target audience will benefit
• Supporting Quotes: more supporting statements, but expressed as quotes from senior management

If your conclusion is that savvy PR departments have streamlined their writing to be more digital media-friendly, you certainly would be correct. There is, however, another dynamic behind this transition.

Traditional industry publications are hurting, especially in the technology sector. Their value lies in providing news and analysis. In an online world where information is freely available, circulation and ad revenues have declined sharply. Where a magazine might have had several editors, each covering a different “beat”, they can no longer afford a large full-time staff to stay abreast of specific topics. Editors now cover a range of topics in an ever-more dynamic market, and most of them also have to blog. They don’t have time to dig deep and become experts in every topic.

The Oracle press release is an example of how a company has made it easier for editors and analysts to digest, understand, and repurpose news.

Is it time for you to make some changes to the way you write your online press releases? You may not need to adopt the Oracle style, but here are a few tips to consider:

• Keep it brief, keep it factual. This is not an editorial
• Use bullet points as much as possible
• Avoid long explanations and background information; use links to other resources or definitions to keep down the overall length of the press release
• Remember to optimize for keywords whenever possible – but not at the expense of good writing
• Include social media tags and make it easy to share
• Keep your company boilerplate (the final paragraph that describes your company) short. Link to a longer company description
• Include links at the bottom to other resources: other related information, images of products or people, videos; always include the email address of your company spokesperson