If you rely on local customers visiting your establishment, then the odds go up dramatically that some customers will be trying to find you while they are on the go.  If you hope that your existing traditional website will be visible and give a pleasing introduction to your company then you may be in for a big disappointment. 

Some mobile device browsers such as the Opera Mini browser do a remarkable job in doing the best they can to make a traditional website mobile friendly.  However only a very small fraction of mobile users are using this browser.  Even if they do, a website that has been designed to give a good user experience at a typical screen width of 1064 pixels presents challenges at even 300 pixels.  It implies an unacceptable amount of downward scrolling.

Another factor that brings the mobile web closer is the increasing popularity of Twitter.  People are used to working with very small snippets of information.  One Web Is Here is how F J van Wingerde sees it.

This is not new.  Even back in 2007, Johann Burkard was encouraging all to Get your website ready for the Mobile Web in 10 steps.  His steps were:

1. Keep page sizes down
2. Add shortcuts
3. Use few images
4. Use less text
5. Avoid horizontal scrolling
6. Provide a handheld style sheet
7. Be careful with JavaScript
8. Get emulators
9. Get mobile devices
10. Keep mobile browser statistics

There some good suggestions there but this oversimplifies the problem.  What is required is a website designed specifically for mobile devices.  It must be very much simpler and ideally should require minimal scrolling.  SMM has such a mobile website at www.lbost.com.  It offers Local Business Online Smart Tips (LBOST). 

It uses a CSS stylesheet appropriate for mobile devices with one small addition that only operates on traditional computer screens.  In this case a maximum width of 300 pixels applies.  This means that even on a traditional screen, you see the website as you would on a mobile device.

This is achieved by the following lines in the CSS stylesheet together with putting the whole web page within a div with the id container:

@media screen	{	#container	{
		width:320px;
		margin: 0 auto;
			}	}

It is useful to see the mobile content in a more limited width like this. It is a constant reminder of the challenges that are faced in trying to keep it simple for a mobile device.

Communicating well with that growing audience of local customers who are on the go is not just a question of having a good mobile device display. As in the traditional Web, a big determinant of the number of visitors is visibility in the search engines. Google et al. are having some difficulties in doing local search effectively. Important showcases here are the Google Local Business Center and Google Maps. 

LBOST provides a window on this rapidly evolving scene.  To be on the leading edge, subscribe to the RSS news feed and get the news as it happens. 

If you accept that keeping up with the competition requires that you have a mobile Web presence then why not contact us now.

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Are You Mobile Web Ready?

If you want to understand the implications of the changes then an article, PageRank Calculation – Null Hypothesis, will provide a lead-in to the ongoing discussion.

What does all this mean for SEO clients who have paid their consultants fees for Search Engine Optimization.  The aimClear Search Marketing Blog has a good account of what they are telling their clients in a post, NoFollow noWorries: An SEO Linking Update.

Though this 180 degree about-face in what Google had been preaching (literally) to webmasters was poorly handled from a public relations perspective, presumably it was made because the tag was overused, abused and had the potential to skew Google’s rankings. No worries. We actually think the change will bring some positive changes to the SEO process, though as always there are tradeoffs.

Of course this has all been going on in a time of recession where companies are trying to make sure they get the maximum bang for whatever bucks they still have in their budgets.  Companies paying SEO consultants who have implemented PageRank Sculpting programs are now told that such programs were ineffective.  This only came to light when Google decided to spill the beans since it looked as though SEO experts had not spotted that the Google advice was no longer effective.

It is all rather messy but the bottom line is that clients have spent money that produced zero returns.  What recourse do they have?  Who should they be talking to?

Unfortunately the biggest culprit, Google, will provide the defense that they are providing a free search service.  Too much information given away would mean that webmasters could perhaps manipulate the search results so that less relevant web pages nevertheless  would appear high in the keyword query listing of results.  If any information is given out, then webmasters should do their own checking to be sure that the information works for them.  This is somewhat facile reasoning since it is very difficult to do Split A/B testing on anything other than simple changes to web pages.

If Google is off the hook, this leaves only the SEO consultants to listen to the SEO clients.  Here again the discussion is difficult.  Reputable SEO consultants use their best skills and knowledge to provide maximum search engine visibility to their client’s web pages but without any guarantees on performance.  In this case, they were following information put out by Google and which was never withdrawn or modified until very recently. They put in the effort.  Google rendered their efforts for naught.  It would appear that the SEO consultants are off the hook too.

If companies were doing their own SEO, then they would have paid the salaries and again would have seen no results from the PageRank sculpting.  Using SEO consultants or doing SEO in-house would have had comparable effects. Perhaps this is just grin-and-bear-it time.  Search engine marketing is on average very powerful, but its mechanisms are sometimes difficult to discern. The NoFollow confusion has just added to those ongoing difficulties.

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SEO Clients Deserve NoFollow Discounts

Canadian text message rates have a huge mark-up according to Srinivasan Keshav, Canada Research Chair in tetherless computing at the University of Waterloo.

In testifying before U.S. senators, he estimated the consumer mark-up on some text messages to be 4,900 per cent. The maximum cost of a text message is “very unlikely” to exceed 0.3 cents. Nevertheless the oligopoly of the large cellphone companies charge pay-per-use texters 15 cents to send a text message and, beginning next month, Rogers will join Bell and Telus with an additional charge of 15 cents to receive a text message. In the United States, carriers recently increased their per-message rate to 20 cents for those without a text plan.

It is unfortunate that the cellphone oligopoly pushes the pricing as high as the market will stand. This is stifling demand and in consequence Canada lags others in the development of the Mobile Web. Thess companies would be very much better off financially with more reasonable pricing multiplied by vastly increased usages.

The new Rogers CEO seems to understand this, but will his view prevail when for so long the dog-in-the-manger price gouging has been the rule.

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Canada Text message rates have huge markup

Tailor the Internet toward smartphones is the word from Rogers Communications Inc. It plans to recast the definition of the Internet and how it is used as more Canadians transition toward smart-phones.

Rogers chief executive Nadir Mohamed in the keynote address at the Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto said:

The notion of Internet at home [or] Internet at the office is changing to: your Internet, wherever you are. It is very powerful. Canadians’ appetite to communicate, access information and entertainment, and even make transactions through their wireless device is becoming insatiable.

He added that Toronto-based Rogers, the largest wireless carrier in the country, is moving quickly to bring mobile Internet to the masses.

By 2014, more than three million Canadians will be users of smart-phones, such as the Apple iPhone or the Research In Motion BlackBerry, which surf the Web and provide e-mail.

Rogers will shortly introduce the iPhone 3G S, Apple’s latest device, which is at least twice as fast as its predecessor.

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The Smartphone World

You can now search Google Maps for Android using your voice, making it easier than ever to look up places while on the go. Just speak your query and Google Maps will find it. The voice recognition engine currently understands English in American, Australian, and British accents. After you search, you will see a map of places. To help you decide where to go, business listings includes content such as store hours, prices, ratings, and reviews.

See Official Google Mobile Blog: Search by voice whatever your accent for more details.

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Google Mobile gives search by voice whatever your accent

Links are sorted by those that Twitter users are sending around the most, weighted in favor of links sent by more influential Twitter users. You can sort results over all time (going back to September 2008), last month, week, day or hour. Results show popular links and also the most influential users tweeting about that topic. Click on that user and you’ll see all their tweets about the topic.

Topsy isn’t looking at the number of followers in determining Influence. Rather, Influence is gained when others retweet links you’ve sent out. And when you retweet others, you lose a little Influence. So the more people retweet you, the more Influence you gain. So, yes indeed, retweets are the new currency on the web.

Getting RTs for serious topics

If your topic is particularly newsworthy or appeals to the masses, then getting a large number of ReTweets is not very surprising.  If you are writing on something that has a limited appeal, how do you get your readers to tell others via Twitter about it.  What  tweaked my interest was that a recent tweet about a blog post got 30 ReTweets at this time when checking via a Topsy search for ‘PageRank Null Hypothesis’ (note – some of these had different short URLs).  The Tweet was as follows:

Topsy even indicates that there were 16 associated ReTweets of the corresponding Sphinn entry.  Others may find the reasons for this good performance of interest and value.

Automatic Tweets from the Blogging software

If your blogging software is set up to automatically send a tweet to Twitter when the blog is published, then you should make sure that the Titles ReTweet Well.                       

You may wish to add appropriate hashtags to your post title as well, although we have more to say on that below.  Chris Brogan also had some related tips on how to Spread Your Wings And Get More Retweet Action.

Hand-crafted Tweets

There is no harm in letting the software do its job, but it may well be appropriate to take its output and make a more twitter-visible tweet.  Louise Doherty has a formula for getting retweeted and that is a good start.  However there are some further tips that are worth mentioning. 

The most important is of course to make sure the title has words that are likely to draw your readers interest.  In the above example, it is probable that the phrase ‘Null Hypothesis’ tweaked the interest of all those who have struggled through their statistics courses and wondered how it could possibly come up here.  If you can find a short catchy phrase like that, you are a lot farther ahead.

Working the Hashtags

A hashtag such as #google ensures that all those who watch out for tweets that have been labeled with the google hashtag are likely to see your tweet.  It is a way of targeting a particular audience.  Which hashtags are worth using?  Clearly popular hashtags are the only ones.  You can get an idea on this by doing a Twitter search for say #google. 

Check out how old the tweet is at the bottom of the search results page.  Currently for #google it is about 2 hours ago, which is fairly good.  You will get the same result for #seo.  #pagerank on the other hand is about 7 days ago, so it is still worth considering but is less popular.  Just to give a point of comparison, a search for a current trending topic such as “Swine Flu” shows tweets at the bottom of the page that are only from 2 minutes ago.

The other point that is worth mentioning is that the addition of hashtags does not seem to influence twitter searches so that a search for Google will include entries with #google as well.  In other words the ‘#’ is ignored in the Twitter search for the non-tagged version of the word.

Getting a little help from your friends

Having crafted the best ReTweet-able Tweet you can, all that is left to do is to seek a little help from your friends.   If you have done your work well, they will probably be delighted to do their bit.

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Tweet Tips For Max ReTweets (RTs)

… or perhaps that will soon be Frozen Fish and Data Chips. This month marks the 35th anniversary of the universal product code (UPC) and the associated bar code, that we are all accustomed to see on every item we purchase in a grocery store. A bar code was officially swiped for the first time on June 26, 1974, at a supermarket in Ohio and brought to Canada a year later.

The bar code has been recognized by the Smithsonian as one of the great breakthrough technologies in history. Such bar codes are now scanned more than 10 billion times a day. However UPCs will shortly be replaced by electronic product codes (EPCs), which will become the new industry standard. They can hold much more data and can be stored on radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, which don’t require direct scanning but can be read by a sensor.

GS1 Canada, is the not-for-profit organization that manages this technology. Here is how they describe the new EPC:

EPC is designed to provide a unique serial number for each item in the supply chain. In contrast, bar codes only identify a group of products. For instance all Coke cans have the same bar code whereas with the EPC technology, every single Coke can would have a one-of-a-kind identifier.

This one-of-a-kind identifier will provide greater visibility of items in the supply chain. Having more detailed and accurate information on products will improve movement of goods in real-time, inventory management and replenishment practices, resulting in a reduction of lost sales due to out-of-stocks. It could help reduce theft and prevent counterfeit goods. Readers could also capture the EPC number stored in a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag and transmit and report the item’s location, condition and status to an on-site information system or to a remote database via the internet.

The advantages and benefits of this EPC/RFID technology are so striking that its take-up should be rapid. If they do put one of these tags on your frozen fish and chips pack, then you can be assured that it has been handled correctly all along the supply chain until it reaches you.

It may have taken 35 years for the bar code to get the wide acceptance it has but it seems clear that over the next 10 years the EPC/RFID will likely become the accepted standard.

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Frozen Fish And Chips

Social Media is another such oxymoron.  Media most often is assumed to be mass media such as TV or radio.  Social on the other hand implies relationships between individuals.  The masses versus individuals – there is the contradiction

The social media scale

You are perhaps unaware of the social media scale since we are introducing it here.  The scale is defined by that oxymoronic name really.  In a way the two words represent the two extremes of the scale.

At the Media end of the scale, we have the minimally social ones, which merely allow you to vote on items that are classified by the medium. Examples of this are reddit.com and digg.com.

At the other end of the scale, we have social media that are online spaces where you can ‘meet’ and interact with others.  Facebook and LinkedIn are examples of this.  Others will be found to fall between these two extremes.  StumbleUpon for example is closer to reddit but does provide for messages between friends.

Where Is Twitter On the Social Media Scale?

The interesting anomaly in all this is Twitter.  Twitter itself was very much at the social end of the scale in its genesis.  The objective was to let your close  followers know your current status.  Many still use it that way. 

However some participants have abandoned that approach. They seek to get the maximum number of followers by following as many other people as they can.  Since some people have arranged that automatically they will follow anyone who follows them, this approach can almost allow you to create your own mass medium.

If you want to check out some data on people using Twitter in this way, check out the TwitterScore website. More specifically check out the Top Users.  There are some very famous names there and also some top agencies such as CNN and the BBC.  Scrolling down you will see some people who clearly have worked hard to create an audience for themselves.  At # 200 at the moment, for example, you have Jonathan Nafarrete, who is “Just some guy. Photographer and social media consultant” and who has 63,553 followers.

The fact that Twitter is both social and a mass media is perhaps why many people are having a difficulty knowing how best to be involved.

Update

For a confirmation that Twitter is hard to classify on the social media scale, you may wish to read: New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets. For suggestions on how to work with social media of whatever type, try ‘With A Little Help From My Friends‘.

Post from: StayGoLinks

Social Media Is An Oxymoron

What he really means is that you need a good headline to stop someone in their tracks. The headline does not only exist at the top of the content. It is in the subject text of email, it may be in a twitter post, a rss feed, a digg headline, etc. It is that headline that must get the blogger’s attention if anything is to happen as a result.

Lyndoman talked about smashing a brick for that really great post you have written. However the same principle is at work for all that you write. Some call it the Attention Economy. We all have too little time to do all that we wish to do. This time overload is magnified now with the Mobile Web becoming more prevalent. Your window on the world may well be your cellphone. As you see even more of what is going on, what will stand out from the noise.

More and more people will only see your title or headline. How can you make sure that there is enough to draw their attention, even if they know you already. I suggest that every title you write should be very clear on what is the subject behind it.

The other important phenomenon is that many people are now seeing the world through the small Twitter window of 140 characters and spaces. As evidence, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, hinted that it could become a partner of the micro-blogging site, Twitter.

“People really want to do stuff real time and I think Twitter has done a great job about it,” Larry Page, Google co-founder said in a closing address at their Zeitgeist conference . “I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis.”

So what does that suggest for our titles. Often people may share a blog post link with their friends by retweeting. If you do the math and allow for the starting “Pl. RT” and the short URL, you may have only less than say 70 characters and spaces for the title, if someone wants to add some words of encouragement or some hashtags.

The title must get the attention of others who will only see that retweet so it should be clear on what they will get by visiting the link. It must signal the promise of something that they will be keen to check out. In practice, 70 characters and spaces gives much more than you really need. This post title takes only 24.

If you are convinced by the logic, why not support the principle by retweeting this post. All you need to do is use that Tell-a-Friend button bottom left (hover and click on Social Twitter) or copy and paste the following in your Twitter Status field.

Post from: StayGoLinks

Titles Must ReTweet Well

One high-tech cooking tool, however, has transformed the kitchen lives of many Americans: the cellphone.  It has become the kitchen tool of choice for chefs and home cooks. They use it to keep grocery lists, find recipes, photograph their handiwork, look up the names of French cheeses, set timers for steak and soft-boiled eggs, and convert European or English measurements to American ones.

Although restaurant chefs have often resisted new technologies, cellphones have now crossed the technology barrier from the office into the kitchen.

Chris Cosentino, the chef at Incanto restaurant in San Francisco, says his iPhone has greatly simplified the math in his cooking.  He said that he sees multifunction devices like the iPhone as the real technological revolution for chefs.

For amateur cooks, new cellphone software helps control the chaos of planning, shopping and cooking dinner at the end of the day.  You can always use software from BigOven.com, a Web site with about 167,000 recipes. BigOven has a free iPhone application, searchable by ingredient, by rating, and by course.  This has been downloaded more than a million times since it was released in October.

Of course there is a question of how much of the recipe and ingredients can easily be seen on a small cellphone screen.  Here you may possibly need Recipes reduced to their Twitter essence.  In other words all compressed into 140 characters and spaces.

Maureen Evans is the person who thought of this approach.  You can now follow her tweeted recipes at twitter.com/cookbook.  They are now followed by more than 13,000 people.  Evans is now fielding numerous calls from cookbook agents and the media.

While Evans loves her stacks of cookbooks with “verbose top-heavy instruction from celebrity cooks that tell you how every minute of the process is supposed to look and smell and feel,” she also sees a place for “just a small amount of assistance to get dinner on the table after a long day at work.”

Having such information readily available on a cellphone clearly meets a real need for many people.  Meals on the go just got even more portable.

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Cellphones, the latest kitchen tools