I’ve been spending quite a fair bit of time on mobile seo over the past year, many brands and businesses don’t seem to realise the importance of this area of search and the implications of serving mobile users a bad experience.
There’s no doubt in my mind that mobile seo will become more important than online. If mobile web browsing is due to overtake desktop by 2015, where do you think people will be starting their browsing from?
It seems a little known fact is that Google has a different search ranking algorithm for mobile devices, they judge websites based upon how they render on the specific model accessing the site.
For example, if your website looks like crap on a Blackberry Bold 9700, filled with errors and incompatible mark-up, eventually you will slip down the page ranking for that specific model. So when other Blackberry Bold 9700 users search Google, you won’t be anywhere to be seen. Meaning neglecting that one phone model could affect the millions of identical handsets around the world searching the mobile web. Interesting hey? Really makes you rethink seo.
The potential impact this will have to a business can be measured in several ways, no more than a competitor getting mobile SEO right and overtaking their rival for higher placement. All the hard work done on online seo could potentially go to waste.
I think this really ties in well with todays news that Google is dominating the mobile search space, according to Pingdom Google is now at 98.29% market share. Globally.
This has actually increased believe it or not, last year Google had 95.58% of the market.
Let’s be honest, this is unlikely to decrease much in the next 2/3 years, especially as Android phones flood the market, using Google as the default browser.
So there should be serious some attention paid to how Google works on mobiles, defo time for everyone to swat up!
Facebook just announced a tiny little change that could have huge implications to how we use our accounts to communicate with websites and brands.
Publishers who use like buttons across their content can now ‘talk’ to the feeds of all people who liked a specific page. What this basically means is that if you like this blog post for example, I will then be able to publish my next blog post directly to your news feed.
Obviously this could go a bit wrong, you don’t really want your wall to be filled with spam and crap, so it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
But essentially it makes it a two-way channel, which is great for brands, if you like a pair of jeans, they could then send you a discounted matching t-shirt direct to your feed. Nice.
They’ve also implemented the ability to comment on the ‘liked’ item, turning it into a share button.
The Facebook blog has more information about implementation.
[Via All Facebook & @Webponce]
Video above: A common reaction to Two Girls One Cup.
I’m pretty sure the most basic rule of marketing for a global brand is to not use any references to the most disgusting pornographic video ever made in the history of mankind.
Apparently agency Lean Mean Fighting Machine skipped class that day and in their recent Facebook campaign for Dr Pepper they went all out.
Here’s the outline
“The agency’s latest campaign for Dr. Pepper was an app on the social network that gave consumers the chance to win £1,000 if they allowed the brand to take control of their status updates. Starting in May, Dr. Pepper fans allowed their status updates to be filled with such gems as:
“Lost my special blankie. How will I go sleepies?”
The messages were randomly generated and ranged in degrees of embarrassment. One of the more offensive updates ended up on the profile of a 14-year-old girl. The message read:
“I watched 2 girls one cup and felt hungry afterwards.”
Amazing! A Coca-Cola brand soft drink mentioning a poop-eating porno! The only time you should ever mention that porno is if you want to induce vomiting from your audience, I doubt that was in the brief.
I would love to have seen the look on faces when word got to head office.
So a Coca-Cola spokesperson tells The Guardian:
“We apologise for any offence caused. As soon as we became aware of this we took immediate action and removed the status update from the application.
We have also taken the decision to end the promotion. We were unaware of the meaning of this line when the promotion was approved and have launched an investigation into why it was included.”
If you’ve never heard of ‘Two Girls, One Cup’, rather than be responsible for your instant dismissal at work for trying to find it, I have a YouTube work friendly clip that will sum it up for you:
It’s that time of year again – the nominations for the D&AD Awards 2010 have just been announced for the mobile marketing category.
If you don’t already know, the D&AD Awards are a bit like the creative industry equivalent of the Oscars or something, they’ve been around since 1963 and it’s seen as a pretty big deal in the advertising world.
HOWEVER, there is a growing consensus in the mobile agencies I’ve been speaking to that these awards are a pile of shit, mostly due to the methods of judging and the relationships that already seem to be in place by the people who make decisions. But it’s always interesting to see what’s out there, lots of stuff goes under the radar sometimes and it’s a good chance to catch up.
My fav entries have always been those that mix innovation, reach and results, it’s one thing to develop amazing mobile tech that works on 2 phones but it’s truly epic when you can create something a bit special that works on all handsets and gets people engaging.
This year there’s the emergence of another mobile category, Mobile Applications. It’s a bit of a strange one because many mobile marketing campaigns use applications…so where do they sit? In Mobile Marketing or Mobile Applications? There is already one example below which is the IBM Seer Wimbledon app, which features in the Mobile Marketing category. Why isn’t it in apps?
There are two types of award:
In-Book - This means that the work will be published in the D&AD annual and is the equivalent of a bronze medal.
Nominated – This is work that is considered worthy of the Yellow Pencil award and is the equivalent to a silver medal. Truly outstanding work is award the Black Pencil, which as you may have guessed is the Gold Medal.
Unfortunately the list of nominations for the mobile marketing category doesn’t actually have any decent info about the projects, so I though I’d do us all a favour and cover them.
Title: Red Flag
Client: The North Face
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, Shanghai
Nation: China
Award: In Book
Outdoor clothing brand The North Face launched an integrated online and mobile campaign encouraging people to go out and explore new places whatever the weather.
Consumers in China and Bejing were given the challenge of planting a ‘red flag’ in each and every new place explored over the course of 18 days.
Participants used SMS to mark their location, this information was fed back into the campaign mini-site which included a map of challengers and up-to-date red flags.
The results were impressive, over 650,000 red flags had been planted by consumers in just 18 days.
Comment: My key take-out from this campaign is the SMS call-to-action which automatically provides the user location when they text-in. The most obvious benefit is that every phone is capable of taking part in the campaign and providing its location, without the need for GPS chips, applications or over hyped services like Foursquare. This information can then ultilised in a number of creative ways and mashed up with online services such as maps, social networks etc.
It’s actually quite an underused feature in mobile marketing, I hardly see campaigns utilise LBS SMS but it’s a perfect solution for allowing the user to provide their location without typing it in, they just fire off a normal text and the mobile operator passes their coordinates onto the brand. The main disadvantage is that the location provided by the operator isn’t as accurate as GPS but that isn’t always important.
Title: iidacalling
Client: iida
Agency: ground
Nation: Japan
Award: In Book
Iida is a new handset brand in Japan that caters more towards consumers who are more concerned with style rather than feature heavy mobiles. Iida wanted to target this audience with an interactive, innovative promotion that engaged consumers with the focus around ‘the ability to call’.
A mobile music generator called ‘iida calling’ was developed to allow consumers to create ringtones using their voice. This was then mixed with a famous DJ track and converted to a ringtone for the users to download as well as appearing on the main website. Each track was given a unique QR Code ‘sleeve’ and could be embedded and shared across the web and print, allowing others to download your mix by taking a picture of it.
The website was seriously engaging, the amount of content created by consumers and the way it was visualised was mesmerising. It was just a sea of on-screen CD sleeves representing thousands of ringtones, with each sounding different when you clicked play.
Within 2 weeks 18,000 tracks were generated and visits to the mobile and PC sites surpassed 2 million.
Comment: The first post I ever wrote on this blog was actually about this great integrated campaign. Even though the site was completely in Japanese it was still loads of fun to navigate and interact with the amazing visuals and music, I visited it several times over a few months because it was so cheery, surely a good sign when you don’t understand a thing on the site.
The mobile integration was outstanding, the way users created their custom track using a simple phone call was genius. Then of course you have the viral part of the campaign with users spreading tracks across blogs and social network. Win!
Check out this awareness campaign from UNICEF called Dirty Water. The challenge was the shock the public enough to spread the word about 4,200 deaths of children due to water-related illnesses every single day.
“With 0$ budget, we had to create mass media exposure alarming New Yorkers about the thousands of children dying daily from a lack of clean water, and the urgency to help with donations to UNICEF.”
Passersby could donate in the vending machine or via their mobile using SMS.
Great campaign, they even managed to hit the news.
Agency: Casanova
This is brilliant, wonderful, beautiful news for everyone in London, Transport for London has announced that it’s finally lifting all restrictions on the commercial use of its data.
What this means is that all that information swishing around the TFL servers about tube delays, bus stops, even riverboat timetables, will be available for others to extract and use how they wish.
The move is great because it harnesses the developer community, several thousand heads are better than one and will encourage innovation and the creation of new applications and services. I’ve got the feeling that some time soon we’re going to see an app that will become a must-have for a Londoner.
So what have TFL opened up? Well they’ve actually gone a lot further than I expected. The datasets include: (you can click the links to find more info on the APIs)
Live traffic cameras (How cool is this?)
Oyster card top-up locations (very very useful)
Live Tube Travel info and departure boards (absolutely vital)
There are plans to include bus stops and schedules too. Check all the info out here.
What are you waiting for? Travel to work in London? Think it’s shit and want to kill everyone in the mornings? How would you make it better with an app? Get cracking, i’ll post my idea on here tomorrow.
If you’ve been reading this blog over the past year you’ll remember me ranting on about how there is a genuine business case for restaurants, brands and retailers to take their PDF/email voucher campaigns and make them SMS.
The situation still remains the same, Pizza Express, GBK, La Tasca, Gap and all the other places you know and love STILL make you print vouchers that have NO UNIQUE codes on them. If paper isn’t tracked, why should mobile to start off with? When consumers gradually change their behaviour and begin to use these things THEN look towards EPOS upgrades and improvements, I’m not saying tracking isn’t important, but right now all you need is a single SMS without anything dynamic.
This doesn’t call for some expensive, 3rd party solution, it just needs to be something you can show at point of sale. Unfortunately the industry is littered with people who want to over complicate this by trying to license their technology, stalling any sort of progress with custom solutions that require some impact of the business, whether it’s EPOS configurations or coupon management systems.
Anyway, so it looks like YO! Sushi have taken the first step towards saving some trees and me having to buy ink for my printer – by introducing SMS vouchers instead of paper. JOY!
I’d been waiting for the day when I got my weekly Money Saving Expert email from Martin containing an offer using SMS and today it happened. Good offer too, check it out:
If you text in you’ll get back a unique code which you give to the cashier. YO! Sushi have fancy EPOS terminals so I’m guessing they can accept codes without too much effort? Would be nice to get some clarification on this anyone?
I think the iTagg are the guys behind this, good work!
Woah how about this then, PSFK reveals that Apple have filed a patent which uses special heartbeat sensors for the iPhone.
It states that the technology could measure the unique signal of the users heartbeat to unlock the handset. The pulse would be measured via the touchscreen, detecting the patterns and matching it to a pre-recored hearbeat in the phone’s memory.
This functionality could be available to developers to create pretty amazing applications off the back of it, such as financial institutions using it for authentication.
Nice.
Ahhh operators, you gotta luv ‘em. Just as it seems consumer behavior is really benefiting from the introduction of true smartphones and cheap ‘all you can eat’ mobile tariffs, they go and throw a spanner in the works.
O2 have just announced the end of its ‘unlimited’ tariff for smartphone users, this follows Vodafone last month and no doubt Orange will follow suit soon enough. Any new or upgrading customers will be shoved onto the new plans, existing customers keep the same tariff, but hey, you gotta upgrade sometime right?
There are a number of reasons floating around as what caused this change, one of them involves Apple. They’ve basically said to operators (these are my words) “Stop fucking offering ‘unlimited’ tariffs with the iPhone when you write “subject to fair usage’ in small print at the bottom of contracts, you anti-innovation bastards”.
However the O2 Chief Executive Ronan Dunne has stated another reason – they are seeing data traffic doubling every four months, this means their ‘flat fee’ tariffs aren’t making them any money if everyone is canning it more and more. Dunne reveals some interesting results about how this consumption is happening, apparently 97% of O2 smartphone users actually use less than 500MB per month and a tiny fraction use more than 1GB (0.1%). This means a small percentage of ‘super users’ are ruining it for everyone else by putting strain on the network, resulting in the new capped tariffs.
But wait! By the figures O2 reveal doesn’t that mean that someone who uses less than 500MB today, will in fact be way, way over that number by the end of their 12/18 month contract as usage is doubling every 4 months?
He had this to say:
“But at the same time, we’ll start to change customer perceptions about the value of the data they use; a vital part of ensuring that people share it responsibly and considerately.”
That is exactly the kind of attitude that stunts innovation, do you think we’d be in this great position today where people don’t second guess how much they pay to view a video or use an app if we still had limits and charged per megabyte? All these great things we’re seeing with apps, social networks, location etc would never of happened. I know operators are seeing very little return from the iPhone/Android eco-system, they make no money while developers and Apple make millions, but this is the wrong move. Changing customer perceptions back to the old days? Pssh.
Now back to the original point of this post, The Guardian writer Charles Arthur puts forward a really interesting argument to what the hell these 0.1% of super users could be doing to download gigabytes of data every month. He thinks it’s caused by P2P users who are worried about the new Digital Economy Act and have now switched their illegal downloading to their mobiles to avoid being tracked by the government/ISP and getting ‘three strikes’. Those users are supposedly taking the SIM out of their phones and sticking in a dongle to download their movies, albums and what not. As he says “the tiny number of P2P mobile downloaders are screwing it up for everyone else.”
Couple of things wrong with this argument, Arthur makes the assumption that these users are smart:
“someone who’s using their iPhone SIM as a dongle really isn’t worried about upgrading; they’ve probably got a PAYG SIM stuffed into their iPhone for their phone calls. They’re not stupid.”
If these guys aren’t stupid, why the hell would they using their phones for P2P downloads? Surely they would be using VPN’s, Proxies and dozens of other Digital Economy Act avoidance tricks are much less hassle than having your SIM out of your phone and actually cost a lot less than a dongle. Some methods here revealed by a 5 second Google search.
So now that we’ve established that anyone with a brain wouldn’t use their phone for trying to avoid the Digital Economy Act, what are these users doing? Oh, this is so easy …
PORN.
Come on now, had you forgotten about the old king of the internet before Facebook was around? What do you think happens when phones get bigger screens, faster internet and superior video-watching ability? Yes that’s right, people use them to watch porn from free online streaming sites like Xvideos, Redtube and probably a million more, aaand wouldn’t you know, the two I mentioned have mobile sites too, here and here (warning: porn). In fact just add ‘mobile’ or ‘m’ to any porn site, they’re probably mobile optimised.
I figured I better try and back up my argument with some facts:
An article from 2008 -
“In the last six months internet searches for iPhone porn have increased nearly fivefold according to Google Trends”
“It’s by far the porn-friendliest phone,” Devan Cypher, representative for San Francisco-based Sin City Entertainment, told Time magazine.
Tech Radar 2009 : Mobile porn slamming networks’ capacity
and those are out-dated! Think about where we are today.
So there you have it…my conclusion is that the 0.1% downloading over 1GB every month are simply….massive wankers.
If you’ve purchased a Nokia handset in the last couple of years you might remember being prompted to join the MyNokia service when you first switch on the phone. The likelyhood is that you didn’t even notice it as you hammered away at the ‘next’ button to fly through the tutorials and other on-screen crap to begin actually using the phone.
The service supplies users with tips, tricks, support and information about their Nokia handset in the form of one or two SMS messages a month.
Here’s the problem, when you switch phones Nokia still send you the SMS messages, with no indication of how to opt-out! I’ve tried replying STOP, OPT OUT etc, none worked as the sender number cannot be replied to.
The last Nokia I had was 12 months ago, I’ve been getting these messages since then. The last two messages from Nokia have been exactly the same too, asking me to download ‘Free Sat Nav’ (picture above).
A quick search on Google shows many others asking the same question “how do I opt-out of this Nokia spam?”. Poor Dave Hall had a torrid time with Nokia customer services trying to stop the things coming through. They even lied to him and tried to say that his operator was sending the things out:
“I called Nokia back. This time I was kept on hold again for around 20 minutes. As soon as the call was answered I demanded to speak to a supervisor. After further time on hold I got to speak to a supervisor. First he tried to tell me it was coming from Optus not Nokia and that I needed to contact them. Next I was told to use the My Nokia menu option, which I explained I didn’t have. Finally he suggested that he could login to the My Nokia website and unsubscribe me – finally I was getting somewhere! Then I was asked for my password, I explained I didn’t have one, “that’s OK sir, you can go to the website and sign up for one”. It was clear after almost another hour lost this was going no where, so I cut my loses.”
What is a ringback tone?
It’s a good question, everyone knows what a ringtone is, even if you don’t, the name pretty much tells you everything. But when it comes to ringback tones, most people won’t have any idea what you’re talking about.
A ringback tone is the sound plus your callers hear when they call your mobile, but instead of the ‘ring ring’ they hear music and custom sounds.
I guess it’s partly to do with the name, ‘ringback tone’ doesn’t actually make any sense, I mean, what would you call the things?
Good pals at mobile & digital agency Movement put together a couple of clever videos to explain the whole thing in less than a minute…with SOCKS!
Pah this idea is so simple and great it makes me jealous.
Agency DDB Stockholm created an interactive billboard game for McDonald’s where menu items bounce and fly all over the screen. If you managed to be quick enough to snap one with you’re phone, then you get it for free at the nearby McDonald’s!
How do they avoid cheating I hear you ask? I don’t know, but it’s still nice.
[Via Adfreak]
Fed up of the crappy view from your bedroom? Want to suddenly live opposite a hot girl that undresses several times a day? Then you’re in luck, for under $3000 you can have your very own set of virtual windows which display amazing scenery at 1080p quality. Aaaand it comes with a iPhone app!
This is so so good.
Got forwarded this by good pal @frasiocht, a great video digging into the science of motivation and why so many smart, highly skilled individuals put so much time and effort into things that are given away free, such as Linux and Wikipedia.
Conceptual and creative thinking is inspired by 3 factors once you pay people fairly and get money out of the way, autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Fascinating stuff.
