Mobile friendly websites are becoming crucial for your audience's experience

You’ve just scored a social media victory. The buzz about your brand / product is trending on twitter and it’s the hot topic for Facebook status updates. People are talking about you and they want more. Through their mobile phone your audience click on your link excited about what you have to say. However, the frustration sets in as they wait while the page loads, and when it finally does the tiny text and blank space, where a flash component used to be, serve only to create more frustration. Unfortunately this scenario is far too common.

Two trends are driving this frustrating user experience. First, people are sharing links on a huge scale, and second they are increasingly using mobile phones to access the internet. Consider this, the service bit.ly which is used by many to shorten URL’s for status updates on facebook and tweets, reports that their shortened URL’s are getting 2 billion clicks a month. (And this is just one of a handful of services to shorten URL’s) While at the same time mobile browsing has more than doubled its share of all browsing over the last year according to figures by Net Applications.
Are you ready for your audience when they click on a link to your site from their mobile phone? Or are you creating barriers for them by not having a mobile friendly site?

At Trioro we design, build, and integrate internet technology to help you connect with the people that are important to you, regardless of device. We have experience creating mobile web and mobile applications for clients such as Crystal Light, Kool-Aid, and Sweetspot.ca. Ask us how we can help you make these technologies work for you too.

To App Or Not To App?

As a marketer, you want to effectively reach the largest percentage of your target market at the lowest possible cost. iPhone Apps are all the rage these days and companies are spending lots of dollars creating fancy ones. Here's some food for thought.

According to Gartner, iPhone sales accounted for around 17% of all smartphone sales of a total of 41 million worldwide in Q3 2009. As you are aware, there are a number of other choices out there including RIM's BlackBerry, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Nokia's Symbian OS. Each of these platforms have sizable footprints which means that creating only an iPhone App could exclude a large portion of your target market.

So what's a better approach? People's behavior in how they access the web has been changing. The use of smartphones to access internet sites is becoming commonplace and some gurus are debating on whether it will become the primary method. As per IDC's estimates, mobile internet users will number around one billion by 2013; that's up from 450 million today. This means that while maintaining a standard website that is accessible by regular computers is a given, it is also necessary to have a mobile version for those smaller screens.

While Apps have the disadvantage of being tied to a particular platform or device, mobile sites can be can be built so that that are accessible through browsers on a majority of devices. Further, these sites can easily be made to sit as icon shortcuts on mobile desktops. Instead of creating Apps that must be developed and maintained separately for each platform, a well designed mobile website could enable you to reach the largest possible audience at a lower price point.

Admittedly, Apps that help simulate activities like beer chugging, ice hockey, or fishing will be hard to replicate. However, what you can do with mobiles sites is catching up quickly; it's definitely an option worth pondering.

SharePoint 2010: Promising Preview

SharePoint has evolved significantly over the past decade from a simple intranet/extranet content management tool set to include functionality from business intelligence to corporate social networking. Microsoft is touting the 2010 release as its biggest Server product release ever. From my perspective, here are some of the top enhancements:

1. Business Connectivity Services (BCS): The ability to access and edit data from external systems using built-in features is absolutely the biggest enhancement. While SharePoint 2007 could only retrieve data (editing was a custom development job), the 2010 release supports editing without writing custom code or installing external plug-ins. This bi-directional ability dramatically increases both productivity and the scope of what the system can do out of the box.
   
   
2. Elegant and Intuitive Designer Tools: The look and feel of SharePoint applications have been a sore point for sometime now. Starting with 2007, complete page layout freedom was given to .Net developers. However, with 2010, both SharePoint Designer and the Visual Studio extension have been dramatically improved. The simplicity and elegance of the ribbon-like contextual menu makes design and development a whole lot neater.
   
   
3. Search: The FAST search feature is simple and intuitive. The Bing-like interface with an ability to preview documents in-place as well as shortlist by a variety of filters (some of which are automatically and intuitively generated meta data) makes finding information a whole lot easier. The capability to index both structured and unstructured data (with minimal customization) will allow information to be found from many more places.
   
   
4. Deeper Integration with Office: Once you find what you’re looking for, you can edit Office documents in place without leaving the browser. The versioning and history is essentially taken care of automatically; this could be a huge time saver for end users. Further, cutting and pasting between Office applications like Word/Excel and SharePoint will be much less of a hassle.
   
   
5. Workflow Enhancements: Custom workflows can now be created with SharePoint Designer without custom code. These templates can be easily imported into Visual Studio for further enhancements. Additionally, Visio documents can now be opened and edited in browser in real-time (without a Visio installation on the end user's computer); interesting, to say the least.
   
   
6. Business Intelligence (BI): The BI Server was earlier sold as a separate product whereas it is now included as a part of SharePoint Enterprise Server. The claim is that users will easily be able to assemble dashboards to analyze data from disparate systems; sounds promising.
   
   
7. Corporate Social Networking: A lot of excitement here. The community features will analyze data from user profiles, Outlook accounts, organization positions, project involvement, and areas of interest to update and connect people.
   
   
8. Browser Compatibility: The range of browsers that will be able to render SharePoint sites properly now includes FireFox and Safari. This will come as a big relief to many IT departments and end-users alike who will be less constrained by browser requirements.

What I've described here is just a tip of the iceberg. The product's value to a firm could increase exponentially as data from disparate applications can easily be brought into one place, and then shared and modified using its toolkit. At Trioro, we are quite excited about this release and look forward to uncovering its full potential.

The Sound of Found (Bing!) with SharePoint 2010 ?

Honestly, we all are guilty of wasting a little time. But what about when you’re actually trying to get something done?! According to IDC, the information worker spends an average of 3.5 hours looking for information and not finding it. Further, an average of 2.2 hours is spent on versioning issues and an additional 3 hours is spent on recreating content. If you add it up, more than nine hours a week are spent on low value tasks. For business owners and managers, this could amount to over $13K for an employee who makes $60K.

Microsoft is aiming to solve part of this issue with its improved search and tighter integration with Office in SharePoint 2010. First, an easy to use visual Bing-like interface of the FAST Search feature provides centralized and contextual results that includes documents, people, and other unstructured information. Further, a number of external sources can now be easily added and indexed. Additionally, the phonetic search engine seems to do a pretty good job of returning relevant results even if you make spelling mistakes.

With easy to use filters on the left navigation, search results can be short-listed quickly by document type, author, job titles, project, tags, etc. Each filter also displays a count of results for better information. Microsoft appears to have made improvements in the way meta data is generated, handled and managed thereby increasing relevance of search results. Importantly, the social behavior of the users has an impact on the relevance of the results returned. (See search demo)

What's cool is a preview feature that allows you to slide through documents in place. Once you’ve determined it’s the right one, depending on the format, you could edit the file right in the browser; the version issues are taken care of by SharePoint. Besides Enterprises, SharePoint could start to make economic sense pretty quickly even for SMBs .

However, a search engine is fueled by data. And data is fueled by people and processes. How your data is captured, processed, and managed play a crucial role in this equation. You might know what you're craving for and the ingredients might be available but hitting the spot largely depends on the recipe.

Engaging Media – Value of the online newsroom

As the media landscape changes - reductions in traditional full time media and an increase of a disperse set of bloggers and citizen journalists - public relations professionals (our clients) are getting more creative in order to generate earned media. Whether it’s High Road (client) tailoring their ‘media events’ to accommodate bloggers’ day jobs by planning an after work bloggers reception for FORZA Motorsport 3, or Media Profile taking a laser focus on piquing a journalists attention in five words or less, change is in the air.

The creativity however, doesn’t stop with traditional word smithing and event planning. Instead, industry leaders are challenging their colleagues to make the experience for traditional journalists, bloggers, and citizen journalists better, while saving time in the process. They’re asking:

• How do we continue to engage media after the face-to-face interaction?
• Media liked what they’ve heard, now how do we make it easy for them to access the information they need to write their article/blog post?
• With so many bloggers and citizen journalists, how can we save time providing digital resources like photos, fact sheets, etc?
• How do we connect with our audience when they’re using social sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flikr?

Though the audience and engagement strategy will differ by client, we found that an online newsroom tailored specifically to the clients engagement strategy can be a great enabler and launching point to get creative in answering these questions.

Here are a few good examples to get you thinking:
http://news.microsoft.ca/
http://pressroom.toyota.com/
http://www.timhortons.com/ca/en/about/about_media.html

When PR professionals approach us to help them unleash their creativity, whether for an online newsroom or something else, we take down the technical barriers and fit the technology to their strategy – not the other way around.

4 Ways to Improve Your Web Body Language

We've found that using body language as a metaphor for website usability is helpful, and makes the rather broad concept of "usability" easier to understand. Here are 4 ways to improve your web body language:

1) Nod-show you’re listening

• Display additional content that is specifically related to what visitors are viewing

• Structure your site from the visitor’s point of view with tag-based navigation

• Never ask the visitor to enter the same information more than once

• Provide areas for comments and feedback

2) Uncross your arms-be open

• Create clear, topic based navigation

• Ensure the visitor doesn’t get lost, by creating clear navigation points

• Display relevant content, even if it comes from a different source

• Make it easy to browse, search and show off what’s new and popular on your site

• Integrate applications with other systems, networks, content sources, etc.

• Make it easy to share your content with others

• Give options for personalization (favorites, voting)

3) Smile-give positive reinforcement

• Use green checkmarks (or another symbol) to indicate successfully completed steps

• Greet a person with their name when they log in

• Give prominence to user ratings and comments

• Email confirmations of important interactions

4) Be engaging-gesture

• Create motion on screen

• Display social media feeds on your site to "show off" what others are saying about your brand/site

• Use colour deliberately to indicate where action can be taken by users

Enjoy The Ride Rewards with Sweetmama.ca

A recent article from Media in Canada touts the success of the new Huggies EnjoyTheRideRewards.com campaign.

As the article mentions, Moms can earn points towards Huggies rewards by participating in various online activities. One of these experiences was delivered through Sweetmama.ca. We thought we'd share a few more details about that program...

Trioro delivered the Sweetmama.ca integration with a seemless user experience for Sweetspot Insiders. Create a profile or login to one you already have with Sweetmama and those Huggies rewards are at your fingertips.

The Huggies environment on Sweetmama is not only built as a natural extension for Sweetspot Insider users, but it also provides a user friendly handoff of your reward codes to the EnjoyTheRideRewards.com microsite. It's a fast, easy and fun way to "Enjoy The Ride".