Mobile Web Review: Walmart vs Canadian Tire

Recently Canadian Tire and Walmart have made forays into the mobile web world. I decided to take some time to review what they had to offer.

I asked myself a simple question:
If I received a link to one of these sites for a featured/sale product, what would my experience be if I clicked that link using my BlackBerry or iPhone? (For example if I had received the link in an email or tweet from a friend)

Walmart
I took a product featured on Walmart's home page, a set of transforming toys, went to the product page and sent myself the link. Unfortunately my experience came to a screeching halt when I clicked on the link because most of the page content was flash based, which is not supported on either device. After the first attempt I gave Walmart a second chance. On the second attempt, I sent myself a link to a product from their online flyer, which actually has a sharing feature encouraging me to share product links. This time I got a page, however it wasn't from their mobile site, I was simply loading their full website. As you would expect this took a long time to load, not all content showed up, and I was forced to zoom to read it. Walmart's Mobile Website (viewable on computer - blackberry version)

Canadian Tire:
Canadian Tire did better. I sent myself a link to a product featured on the home page, a 3-in-1 Lawn thickening mix. Clicking on the link from either Blackberry or iPhone worked well. The page loaded relatively quickly and I was able see the product details in a mobile formatted page and add it to my shopping list if I wanted. Good Job Canadian Tire. Canadian Tire's Mobile Website (viewable on computer)

To be fair though, Canadian Tire still has some significant room to improve and Walmart's mobile presence, though it's product pages aren't available, has some other valuable features. Canadian Tire's mobile website is primarily a mobile product directory, which is a great step, however with the mobile technology available today I'd like to see them highlight featured products and promotions, and utilize the mobile phone's GPS functionality (yes that can be done on a mobile website too, not just in an App). Using the GPS location from the phone, Canadian Tire's mobile site could highlight what featured products or promotions are at the closest store and tell you how to get there. Walmart's mobile site, though poor at supporting link sharing, already utilizes GPS for their store locator and also prominently highlights promotions and the instore flyer.

With customers sharing links on a large and growing scale it is important to consider how your mobile initiatives support this behavior. Without considering scenarios like the one I've highlighted here, you risk frustrating your customers by giving them an experience that does not live up to your brand.

Engaging your audience with new media tools: grow your circle organically

More and more often, we get questions from our clients asking us how they should use social media to widen the reach of their organization. Samara is a non-profit dedicated to strengthening the culture of public service in Canada (http://www.samaracanada.com). We built their public website and it's really neat how Alison Loat, Co-founder and Executive Director of Samara, has managed to drive a steady amount of traffic to her site. By using a variety of readily available new media tools, she has been able to engage her audience with a simple and intuitive strategy.

In this multi-part interview, Scott Snowden, Partner at Trioro, chats with Alison about how she uses social media to spread the message of her organization. In this series, we highlight how she does what she does - the tools she uses, type of content, frequency of posting, traffic measurement, and how offline efforts go hand-in-hand with online efforts. As Alison says, it's important first engage the group that's interested in what you're doing, and then slowly build your way out.


Part 1 - Samara and Social Media



Part 2 - Social Media Toolkit - Personal vs Organizational




We believe the same lessons apply to for-profit businesses because it takes time and effort to build a brand and create loyal customers, who will in-turn spread your message for you. It's important not to get overwhelmed and to understand that this is an organic process. We hope you will find this series of videos a useful starting point in creating or adapting your social media strategy.

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.