Despite there being millions of web sites on the web, there are only a handful of sites that a typical person visits on a regular basis. The Periodic Table of the Internet presents a classification of popular sites based on select categories.
In a socially enabled, internet powered world, consumers demand respect
The sheer volume of information available on the internet is overwhelming. Everywhere I look, there it is. Even when I’m not looking, it’s there, waiting to be found.
Analyse the data thrown at you every single hour, every waking day:
Hundreds of emails, not to mention the junk mails
Information available through web sites, blogs, forums
Requests to join your social network from friends and strangers
Hundreds of Tweets
Searches on Google
By the end of the day, I don’t want to know what I don’t need to know.
This is where contextual marketing comes in.
According to a recent survey by Deloitte, 82% of people who use the web to research products, say reviews posted by others have influenced them to buy a different product than the one they had originally been thinking about purchasing. In my case, a friend’s recommendation has more value than a paid for advertisement extolling product virtues.
Here’s the bottom line. Your information isn’t only on your website, it’s across the web. Some of it you own, some of it you pay for and some of it is offered through your customers’ satisfaction with your services.
Organisations need to provide contextually-relevant content to their customers and prospects alike, when and where they need it – on the device of their choosing, at the time of their convenience, personalized and well delivered. In a nutshell, customers will dictate the terms of engagement. Contextual ads that provide consumers with utility, entertainment and value are more likely to succeed.
In a socially enabled, search-powered world, consumers demand respect. Do not expect customers to navigate through your counter-intuitive ‘knowledge portal’ built by people who cannot identify a positive customer experience. Do not expect people in a hurry to contact support, via chat, or email and certainly not via telephone.
Be smart enough to anticipate customer’s information needs and provide relevant, useful information when and where needed. You need to give people the information they need to learn about you and your products and as a result, a reason to come back to your website and buy from you.
You got to do it right – the first time, every time. Those of us paying the closest attention to consumers – using tech and data to anticipate their wants and needs – are going to figure it out first.
QR Codes are a fantastic new way to connect with your customers
A QR code, abbreviated from Quick Response code is a type of matrix barcode. QR Codes were first created in 1994 by Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave to track vehicles during the manufacturing process. More recently, the concept has become extremely popular due to its fast readability and comparatively large storage capacity.
The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. (as shown above). The information encoded can be made up of any kind of data (e.g., binary, alphanumeric, or Kanji symbols).
While traditional bar codes are linear one dimensional codes and can only hold up to 20 numerical digits, QR codes are two-dimensional 2D matrix barcodes that can hold thousands of alphanumeric characters of information. Their ability to hold more information and their ease of use makes them practical for small businesses. An astonishing 7,089 characters can be encoded in one QR code!
When you scan or read a QR code with your iPhone, Android or other camera enabled Smartphone, you can link to digital content on the web; activate a number of phone functions including email, IM and SMS and connect the mobile device to a web browser. What could be better than sending people from traditional, static media to digitally engaging content in one click?
QR Codes recently have become a hot subject for marketing agencies and social media practitioners looking to stand out from everyone else to do something creative, cool and novel campaigns.
The applications of using QR codes in business are limited only by creativity.
The recent Calvin Klein ‘Get It Uncensored’ campaign makes for a good case study. Calvin Klein replaced what some would call a ‘racy’ photo with a giant QR Code. If you scanned the Calvin Klein QR Code it would take you to a Calvin Klein ‘racy’ movie.
Starbucks has launched a QR code program designed to let consumers learn more about its coffee. This is bringing to the Starbucks consumer the ability to interact with the brand.
Inside the Macy’s “Star” a QR Code is embeded and it links to a YouTube video with exclusive content from many of famous and popular stars. You can scan the code and get tips from P Diddy, Jessica Simpson, Martha Stewart and even Tommy Hilfiger.
Some other common applications of QR Codes are:
On business cards
Brochures and other marketing materials
Print Ads
The sides of trucks and trailers
Product tags and packaging
Convention and event name tags
Restaurant menus
Event ticket stubs
Boarding passes in airlines
Point-of-sale receipts
Leverage YouTube videos
The potential for QR Codes is limitless. What’s most exciting is how they take what social media is doing now, bringing people together with technology, and extending it to enhance the experience.
The next generation of barcodes will hold even more information – so much that an Internet connection may not even be necessary!
QR Code Generators – There are a number of sites for generating QR codes and they’re all free. An Internet search for QR code generator will offer many choices. eg. qrcode.kaywa.com – You can use it to create QR codes that link to a web page, text, phone numbers, or SMS.
QR Code Readers – The QR code reader app that works well on an iPhone is i-nigma.com, which claims to be the most widely used reader in the world.
Global IP traffic is expected to exponentially multiply to ‘zettabyte threshold’ by 2015
With the proliferation of millions of networked devices, and the popularity of Internet video streaming through billions of handheld devices, the future of the web will go beyond terabytes and petabytes. It will be in the domain of zettabytes which is explained in the graphic below.
The question then arises. How will the bandwidth of internet cope with this increase in demand and what will be the delivery channels?
A German physicist Harald Haas, has come up with a wireless Internet solution to send data through an LED light bulb fluctuating in intensity faster than the human eye can detect. The invention, dubbed D-Light, takes the fiber out of fiber optics and can send data faster than 10 megabits per second, faster than the average broadband connection, simply by altering the frequency of the ambient light in the room.
Traffic jams may become a thing of the past and internet would be on the tap when you switch on your light! By 2015.
Since seeing is believing, watch this video with your thinking caps on.
Software as a service [SaaS], infrastructure as as service [Iaas], and platform as a service [PaaS] are all inherently more efficient models than conventional alternatives
Cloud computing is the new mantra in the business world. For many, it represents the platform for the next generation enterprise, promising low total cost of ownership (TCO), high scalability and an easy pay-as-you-go cost structure. These advantages and more are driving its adoption across businesses around the world and are causing leading IT companies to focus their energies on the cloud and the applications that can be derived from it.
This video explains why it is imperative to embrace cloud computing, sooner than later. It is good for your business and good for the planet.
A recent study conducted in US reveals that cloud computing offers solutions for businesses to be greener and cut costs along the way. Some of the key findings include:
US Companies plan to increase their investment on cloud computing from 10% of their overall IT budget today to almost 70% of the same budget in the near future.
Cloud computing reduces carbon emissions by almost 86 millions metric tons per year by 2020.
Annual economy-wide energy savings could be more than $12 billion/year by 2020 – that’s in the US alone!
Large companies adopting the cloud can reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by 30 percent. The better news is, small businesses even save more energy than the larger counterparts – up to 90 percent.
Access to the networked resources provided by ‘clouds’ enables companies to enter markets without having to meet the capital costs of building their own computer infrastructure. This is especially significant in the present sluggish market scenario, at a time when we are seeing an explosion in the number of portable devices with limited storage capacity. Access to clouds enables them to transcend that limitation and provide a level of functionality and cost effectiveness which would normally be associated with much larger machines.
Here is the bottomline: Cloud computing allows higher hardware utilization. Applications can be run on less equipment; less equipment means less energy to power and for cooling the equipment. Less energy means a lighter and happier mother earth.
1,000 cloud servers cut 50 percent of carbon emissions, equaling to carbon emissions produced by 261 homes or removing 444 cars off the road or planting 5,810 trees to offset carbon footprints. With the cloud will become mainstream in less than 5 years, the contribution of cloud computing to the environment is huge – so, you can now go cloud and go green at the same time!
The centre of gravity shifts from your computer to the cloud
iCloud is a cloud computing service from Apple Inc. announced on June 6, 2011 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. The service allows users to store data such as music files for download to multiple devices such as iPhones, iPods, iPads, and personal computers running Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows on computer servers owned by Apple.
iCloud can wirelessly push content to all the listed devices automatically and integrate with apps like Contacts, Mail, and iCal that were all previously handled by Apple’s old cloud service, MobileMe.
iPhones and iPads often store important and irreplaceable information. Currently, if you don’t regularly plug your iPhone or iPad into your computer you’re at risk of losing photos, contact info and more.
With iCloud, all of the information on your device is automatically backed up wirelessly on a daily basis. In case you break or lose your iPhone or iPad, you can revive all of your information by simply logging into your iCloud account with a new device.
The iPhone is the best Apple device to take photos with, but it’s not the best one for sharing pictures with friends and family at home. Transferring pictures to a computer or iPad now requires synchronizing devices or using third-party apps to transfer the images.
With iCloud, the most recent photos snapped with your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad 2 are automatically available to view on any other iOS device or computer. As soon as you snap a photo, it’s uploaded to iCloud and then downloaded to your iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad and/or computer.
With iCloud, users will be able to match the music they’ve purchased through iTunes, copied from CDs or purchased elsewhere with 1.8 million songs in Apple’s catalog. Instead of uploading several GB with of songs, iCloud will examine your music collection.
If your tunes are available from Apple, you’ll be able to download songs and albums from iCloud whenever you want. You can use up to 10 iOS devices with iTunes Match
If Apple doesn’t find a match for a particular song in its catalog, you can upload it from your computer to iCloud. This means you’ll only need to upload a relatively small portion of your music collection.
If you’ve been collecting music for several years you probably have a good number of songs that don’t sound as good as they could. When songs are matched from your collection to Apple’s iTunes catalog, they’ll be available for you to download in high quality at 256 Kbps.
What is the future for iCloud, you may ask.
A new report from RBC Capital Markets projects that as many as 150 million iPhone users could sign on to Apple’s new iCloud service in the very near future. The repercussions for this could be monumental.
Your business needs to be social now – not some day
Today, consumers want more than content online, they want to make a human connection. This means it’s no longer enough to push your product information out to your consumers. Today’s geo-located, email checking, text messaging, status updating, smartphone toting, trigger happy ‘social consumers’ are ready to engage with you. i.e. if you are ready to engage with them.
A recent study about small to medium sized organisations showed that 44% of entrepreneurs were using social media to attract new customers (35% Facebook, 15% LinkedIn, 10% Twitter, 8% blog, 8% YouTube). For overall marketing strategy, the top strategies were company website, search engine optimization and online social networking.
The above makes sense when you consider the following stats:
Over 500 million global users are active on Facebook every month
People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each week
During the second half of 2010, LinkedIn’s membership base grew, on average, by 1 million new members every ten days
Registered users of LinkedIn grew from 55 million at the end of 2009 to 90 million at the end of 2010. Page views grew from 2.8 billion to 5.5 billion
LinkedIn Today delivers a customised online newspaper that is assembled by algorithms, rather than journalists
Twitter is the fastest growing social networking site on the internet, with north of 110 million registered users
New users are signing up at the rate of over 300,000 per day
180 million unique visitors come to the site every month
Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API
Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day
Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day
Of Twitter’s active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet
75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications.)
As if the above is not enough, this is just in.
Pepsi has introduced a ‘Social Vending System’, a networked vending machine with large full-touch screen designed to enable consumers to connect with Pepsi brands (and one another) at the point of purchase.
Novel features of the system include provisions for a patron to ‘gift’ a friend by selecting a beverage, then entering the recipient’s name, mobile phone number and a personal text message and, if desired, a short video recorded at the machine.
The gift is delivered with a system code and instructions for redeeming it at any PepsiCo social vender. The recipient may thank the original sender by dispatching a gift in return, or ‘pay it forward’ by presenting a beverage to someone else. The machines are equipped for remote monitoring, giving operators the ability to manage inventory levels and schedule deliveries remotely. Digital content also can be updated online, allowing easy changing of messages and media content.
This certainly gives KISS a new definition, Keep It Social Silly.
A ranking of the world’s 100 best websites for global and multilingual visitors reveals that you need to possess multilingual capability in order to succeed internationally.
But language isn’t the only criterion that determines web globalization success. Some of the other factors that also count include:
The total addressable audience the site can reach
The spending power of the linguistic communities it supports
The incremental growth in demographics of each target segment
According to a recent research, out of a maximum ‘Global Web Score of 10′, Google led the list of top ranked sites with 9.56, followed closely by Facebook (9.53) and YouTube (9.51). Other companies that merit attention include Wikipedia (9.43), Samsung (9.11), Blackberry (9.10), and HP (8.97).
Any business pursuing customers online must consider the linguistic reality of the marketplace. It is imperative to factor in the following features when planning a global web presence.
Geo-lingual visitors, individuals who will be more likely to complete tasks on a website if content is adapted to his or her country requirements and/or linguistic preferences
Customer Experience Levels (CEL), a proscribed set of experiences common to all websites
Availability Quotient, what percent of world online population can take advantage of a given CEL on a particular website
World Online Wallet (WOW), the economic buying potential of online audiences
Meta-navigation, how a visitor moves from one country or language to another within the global web presence of a single company
Automated Geo-targeting according to IP address detection
Match the localization of content with respective country domains
Social media and multimedia engagement strategies for global and multilingual visitors
Make sure brand messages are not lost in translation
It is quite apparent that web globalization is now a mainstream business activity. Companies are learning that if they want to achieve higher levels of international revenue, their web presence must be global. It takes a combination of quantity and quality to create a compelling web experience for users that may speak any language and come from anywhere in the world.
‘Engage’ and ‘Converse’ replace ‘Sell’ and ‘Broadcast’
Consider this. More than 400 million people share their lives to an exhausting degree: They upload 2 billion photos, 14 million videos, and 8 billion bits of other information a month, and drag their identities and networks with them to over 15,000 Web sites a month through Facebook Connect.
The internet is fast becoming a place for a conversation. The rise of Ning.com as the world’s largest platform to create powerful, custom social websites bears testimony to this fact. The new mantra is – Build a social destination to create a community. Foster conversations, drive action and earn revenue. All in a matter of clicks.
One of Ning’s big goals for 2011 is to delight their customers. Through their open and transparent platform shared by developers, they intend to create an enduring customer-company partnership.
The ‘engagement’ and ‘converse’ matrix, at its heart, requires making the customer feel ‘special’. You can do that in a variety of ways:
Branding & Visual Design Freedom
Offer a plethora of many distinct and unique themes, to enable clients create their own design and custom CSS interface.
Unique Member Profiles
Let members customize their profile pages with their own dashboard, choice of widgets and profile applications.
Moderation & Privacy
Moderate members before they join. Moderate photos, videos, groups, chat and events before they are published. Privacy is paramount.
Invite and Share
Build a rich invitation engine, with full web address book and .csv file importing to enable existing members to invite new members. Everyone can also cross-post status updates on Twitter and Facebook, and share content across the Internet with additional built-in tools.
Latest Activity
A real-time, dynamic activity RSS feed of everything happening across your network, including status updates from members. Track activity and encourage more engagement.
Create Synergy
Create groups with images, membership, comments and a dedicated discussion forum. Give your members the ability to collaborate by sub-group; geography, committees, special interests.
Before you know, your social network will give you the power to mobilize, organize and inspire.
Go-Green.ae is one such endeavor where I have tried to walk the talk, where the default is social.
