Geek Video of the Month

This month's Geek Video was sourced by Fiona Anderson, from the Flashlight Search Marketing team.

The 37 second video promotes a 'pro-type' smartphone which changes shape dependent on whether it receives a text, email or phone call.  The idea is that the flexible smart phone technology will provide visual cues as to what type of communication you are to engage with.  The 'brains' behind this are researchers at Queens University Human Media Lab in Canada.

Despite all the work that must have gone into developing this prototype, the flexible smartphone reminds us of those 'little red palm reading fish' (named 'Fortune Teller, Miracle Fish') that you receive in cheap party bags. If it curls up you are happy, lies flat bored, raised edges in love etc.  The fish are a novelty and we believe the above is too.

What do you think?   Can you envisage this technology being used elsewhere in the home or office?

Personally, rather than changing shape to tell me whether I am to receive a call, text, email etc, I would be more interested in the smartphone if it was able to jump out of my handbag  (or where ever I put it down!) and walk, or roll over to me, or even better, fly. (Harry Potter Talking Letters AKA Howlers!).

Now that would be smartphone progression!

Author: Sarah Griffiths (Sourced by: Fiona Anderson)

Geek Video of the Month

As we like to give focus on the blog to rising trends, this month's Geek Video of the Month, comes via the Hybris Software YouTube channel, titled "Shopping Gets Sexy with Hybris" the video includes technology such as in-store NFC tags, gesture-based product navigation and geo-fenced alerts.  The video highlights that "window-shopping" need not be a low margin activity and shows how window shoppers can socially engage with a product, even when the shop is closed.

For more information on NFC tags, read our latest blog titled is; NFC the next big thing?

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Social Mobile Local Global and the Olympics

Team GB uniforms by Stella McCartney and adidas

At the time of writing this, The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, or Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or more recently 'Team GB' are doing rather well at London 2012 Summer Olympics. With a haul of 26 gold, 16 silver and 14 bronze medals - it’s our best showing for over a century. With 204 countries competing, this Olympic Games is truly a global event and shared throughout the world on social networks.

Social - Twitter
Before the games even started a Greek athlete was kicked off the team for tweeting with a racist overtone and it’s been a story of highs and lows for Twitter ever since. After posting some pretty malicious tweets about the diver Tom Daley, a teenager from Weymouth was arrested and given a dressing down by the police. For a fleeting moment this story was global headline news and seems to have re-ignited the debate as to how the authorities should deal with social network incidents of this nature.

Adam Naisbitt set up @2012TicketAlert after he tried to get hold of gymnastics tickets for his fiancée. This unofficial ticket alert helped thousands of people get tickets and filled the empty seats that were causing such a stir in the media. Of course the people at Ticketmaster and  LOCOG didn’t like his code crawling their site and they put a stop to it. But 30,000 angry Twitter users ensured that the service was re-instated. The Ticket Alert profile now has 54,466 followers.

Google
Each day Google has been running little games on their home page that typically take less than 30 seconds to play. They look nice, well illustrated as with all Google Doodles, are easy to play and are relevant to the day's sporting events.

Any search involving the keyword ‘medals’ results in an up to date medal table at the top of the SERPS. Yep, the UK does seem to be doing rather well!

Facebook
After winning gold in the Women's Heptathlon, Jessica Ennis had amassed over 600,000 followers and counting: today it is 726,516 with 957,976 talking about this page. Chances are that at least one of your Facebook ‘friends’ has liked her official page. But that is still a way off from the American basketball player, Kobe Bryant’s who has 13 million 'Likes'!  David Beckham, Britain's most decorated football player of all time, has 20 million. There’s even a trend in celebrity chart  if you prefer that to the actual medal count! Naturally, Usain Bolt is the most popular Olympian today.

There’s an app for that.
Shortly after the first athletes started arriving at the Olympic village, 'GPS, location-based Grindr', an app, or also known as a 'geosocial networking application', that hooks up gay men with others in the local vicinity, crashed due to the increase in traffic. Both the BBC Olympics and the official London 2012 apps have proved extremely popular. The free BBC Olympics app for iOS and Android devices gives headlines, video features, schedules and details about every sport, country and competitor.

The Join In app for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry phones connect viewers with local news updates and information about everything that is going on, in and around the Olympics, such as maps, guides, schedules, information on cash machine locations, ticketing issues and wheelchair access.

Rule 40
“Except as permitted by the IOC Executive Board, no competitor, coach, trainer or official who participates in the Olympic Games may allow his person, name, picture or sports performances to be used for advertising purposes during the Olympic Games.”  In the interests of protecting big global business sponsors, this effectively barred athletes from thanking any unofficial sponsors on social media platforms. The athletes are considered 'labelled marketing assets' and Twitter as a 'marketing tool'.

Media - BBC
The BBC, as usual, have done us proud. The 'Danny Boyle, Isle of Wonders' opening ceremony had 27M UK viewers and not surprisingly, generated more tweets than the entire Beijing Olympic Games four years ago and amassed a staggering 9.66 million worldwide tweets . Nice touch honouring Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Web, in the ceremony. You can watch any event live on the BBC website. You can get involved with live comments and nowadays the BBC even retweet comments.

All the major newspapers like @Telegraph2012  have set up dedicated Twitter streams of Olympic coverage. Many of the newspapers regularly make direct quotes from Twitter posts.

The Olympics inspired blogs from all over the world, from sport clothing designs, jokes, politics, women's rights, celebrity to youth engagement ideals.

Transport
In addition to Transport for London’s (TfL) permanent Twitter account (@TfLOfficial) a number of Transport for London Twitter accounts were set up to provide additional local advice on how services and roads are operating during the Games @TfLTrafficNews, @TfLTraveAlerts and @GAOTG.

The 'social media accounts' and 'travel mailing lists' introduced by TfL are supplemented by a number of other online travel platforms. Concentra launched an interactive graphic detailing which Tube stations were likely to face the most severe disruptions on any given day of the Olympics; Google maps offered cycling directions for Londoners planning on cycling to work during the Games.

Mashable Tech did their own article on The Olympics of tech which makes some entertaining reading about achievements in digital, mobile, social and programming.

Mobile
Half of all the searches and video streams in USA and UK are coming from mobiles and tablets during the Olympic games. Social Mobile Local Global; it’s all the same thing!

It is amazing to see all the technologies, social and search all coming together. Here at Rocktime we feel very proud of the Olympians and we are reminded yet again what a great industry of digital development we work in.

Which social or technical innovation inspired you the most at the Olympics?

Authors: Foz, Fiona Anderson

Social Local Mobile and Google+ Local Search

It’s no secret that here in Rocktime’s Search Marketing Team; Flashlight, when it comes to Search, we do love Local and it’s not just us; Google loves local too! With the Google Venice update this year, which updated search results to give greater weighting to local search results, it's a great time for large organisations and even smaller businesses aimed at purely local audiences, to take another look at their local search marketing strategy.

Hand in hand with local search is mobile usage; it’s estimated that as much as 50% of mobile queries have local intent, therefore, ranking positions on both Google Places and Google's main search results are something that any business with a localised target market will want to consider.
Since 30 May, Google Places pages are being integrated with Google+ Business Pages and morphed into the new Google+ Local pages. This is all part of Google’s progress in becoming a leading social network for businesses, a way for customers to leave reviews, enhance the user experience and engage with brands and for businesses to improve their chances of being found in the blended and mixed media results.

So when you think of local and mobile it is natural to consider creating relationships with people and building trust and this is where social comes in to the equation, through the convergence of the social web, local-business with mobile; sometimes referred to as SoLoMo

Google Plus Business Pages combined with Google+ Local and being found easily on a mobile is a foremost method of getting better ranking on Google.
It is recommended to still give the same importance to local campaign strategies as would be given to a national or Global digital campaign. Investing time in the all important stages of keyword research, keyphrase positioning and competitor analysis, to determine the most competitive keywords to use in a local targeted campaign, pays off. A complimentary campaign to develop quality organic in bound links, press coverage, reviews and buzz is also worth considering. Content that people want to share is still the best way to get and keep visitors interested; it can now be advantageous to write about local knowledge, about a community neighbourhood and social customer services.

Local can be global and personal, including hyperlocal which is the search for businesses in a neighbourhood: Where shall we have lunch, which hotel shall we stay in, where is the best plumber, who can fix my car, where is a local garden centre, best value transport company in the area etc.

People are used to having their images stored on an external server and now more businesses are using cloud computing which allows them to access content when not specifically in an office, from a fixed location, or from a desktop. Mobile and tablets are adding to that virtualised approach where there is less often the need for a dedicated physical server.

The mobile phone is more like a computer connecting users to the internet and always at hand. Some businesses wisely let their employees use Twitter and Facebook and more often this is performed on a mobile. 40% of social media users access social media content using their mobile phone. Digital maps and geo tagging of images has been greatly improved with map APIs from Yahoo!, Google, Nokia, Bing, Picasa, Panoramio etc and businesses are encouraged to claim and optimise a business listing in a local directory, or niche directory, with geo tagged images, linked to a map and often user reviews.

The surge in location deals and location based social networks that are optimised for multiple touch data devices like tablets and smartphones can capitalise on traffic, brand engagement and product conversations. Businesses are recognising the 'benefits versus cost and effort' involved in maintaining a mobile presence.


There are a few simple tips to follow for local optimisation like:

• Using the local terms in HTML tags and page content. 
• Plan to include local focused content on the website as well as in the social and local pages. 
• Add simple geo tagging to images, micro-formatting and microdata tag improvements that identify the different parts of the address page, map markers and geo located content. 
• Links to the website that use the local search term in the text link, still remains an important factor to get good local rankings. 
• Businesses get listed at the top because they fit the geographical area of the search query; usually within 5 miles proximity radius to the area you are trying to target. 
• Other ranking factors in the local and blended search results are proper categorisation and matching keywords that show local results relevant to your business, have good relevant content and good relevant organic backlinks. 

We would encourage businesses to think of each web page, or directory listing, as a landing page, with relevant content, a simple layout and call to action and a well researched keyword strategy. By doing this on the website and in local directories it makes it easier for businesses to prepare themselves for mobile website content, that can be socially shared, found in the local search results and define their brand values.

Mobile is becoming the primary way for visitors to search and purchase online in the UK, with 95% of smartphone users having searched for local information, Google is responding to the changing way visitors search by making local mobile search more relevant and appealing to advertisers with the 'Google + Local', integrating the business listings across the channels of search, mobile, Google+ and Maps.
Visitors see this as all one channel rather than individual channels, with 70% of UK mobile users being happy to compare prices on their phone. Product reviews form a really important part of the decision making process and 65% of users have checked out product reviews. Last month, PayPal introduced their mobile payments to the high street, so the whole buying process can be completed on a mobile device.
According to Google, 50% of mobile searches lead to a purchase, which is a great incentive for businesses and brands to make it easier for their customers to be better connected through social, local and mobile channels.

Businesses can follow a few established social media steps to harness the best of local and mobile:

1. Conduct a Social Media landscape review to determine whether the business should create business pages in Facebook, Google + or other leading social networks and where their competitors are being found. 
2. Social Planning for all members of the business to encourage the correct tone of voice 
3. Writing strategy for the channels 
4. Setting up channels 
5. Social Share Audit 
6. Incorporate social share icons on relevant content 
7. Plan blogger engagement; find networks of interactions, Twitter list management 
8. Add social media badges to the website 
9. Community page 
10. Set up a social hub page 
11. Create compelling content that people will want to share. Provide fresh, updated, local content. 
12. Develop email marketing campaigns with social share 
13. Think of customer services with real time responses and embrace the philosophy that customers are not transactions 
14. Investigate social commerce and social buying trends in social search 
15. Become a social business and project your social business personality 
16. Track social media monitoring and social crm 
17. Review the social analytics and traffic trends.

Google offers numerous free products to businesses and is always endeavouring to refine ways for businesses to be found in the search results, so it is certainly worth utilising these useful products for tracking site traffic in Google Analytics and diagnosing the site’s performance in Webmaster Tools for instance. We recommend conducting a full SEO site audit to be run at the same time as planning a local mobile social strategy. That way, a business can determine if the website is performing well in terms of SEO, structure, technology and business delivery to raise their online visibility.

Some benefits of the convergence of social networking, mobile shopping and local search for consumers:
• helps consumers save time
• location based deals
• mobile payments
• meetups
• valuable information
• user friendly maps

Some benefits of the convergence of social networking, mobile shopping and local search for consumers:
• availability of consumer data which can be gathered by businesses
• create brand advocates and peer influencers for products and services
• tailored geo targeted advertising is more cost effective

Therefore, careful localised optimisation is the key for 'local business marketing' through search and  is certainly becoming increasingly important at levelling the playing field between national and local businesses.

If you're interested in finding how Rocktime can help you with your website and local targeted search marketing strategy, then why not check out the work Flashlight does and get in contact with our Sales team.


Author: Fiona Anderson

Well done Domino's, £130k mobile orders in 1 day

We love this case study which was mentioned over at Mobile Marketing News earlier in the week. It mentions that Domino's Pizza's had a record month of mobile orders with 13% of their total orders coming in via mobile device, bringing in a sum of £130,000 in one day alone! What a fantastic statistic!

Domino's chief executive, Chris Moore, puts the company's sales into perspective:

"When we launched online ordering just over a decade ago, it was a huge ivestment, but one that has continued to pay off, year on year. To put this achievement in context, 12 years ago we took £100,000 in online sales a year, by 2000 we were taking £1m in a year and now we are taking £1m in a day."

Read more about the mobile application over at the Mobile Marketing website, which shares news, views and analysis of all things mobile.

This is a great testament to the value of mobile commerce and E-commerce, and shows the important of enabling customers to order and pay for their food no matter where the are.

Rocktime believes that companies who invested in mobile early will reap the rewards, but appreciate that tapping in to an unknown market has its risks. However the mobile market is growing at such a pace that today's business really needs to embrace the mobile culture or be swept aside by their competitoes, so developing a clear strategy is essesntial when considering mobile investment.

Dominos are a great example of a company who saw the market when it was in its infancy and decided to invest for the future.

If you want to discuss how mobile websites and/or mobile applications can integrate with your business, please contact the Rocktime Sales team.


Author: Martin Bradbury

Augmented reality and Aurasma

Aurasma is powered by pattern recognition technology; it represents the future of how we use our mobile devises, using some of the most advanced systems in the world to bring the physical and virtual worlds together.

It has been described as the latest ad recognition technology to challenge QR codes, it has the ability to bring static content / print materials to life.

PR Newswire reported early this week that, Aurasma had passed one million installs (PR Newswire, 10th July 2011), indicating that this is set to be the most broadly deployed mobile platform of its kind.

For more information visit the Aurasma website, which states that they have over 1 million users, over 100 partners, featured in major publications.


There is huge potential for social commerce and advertisers in using augmented reality technology, for example: if you hold the phone in front of cereal packets and get a lot more information, recipes, nutritional advice etc.

There is also huge potential for brand building too, where on holding the phone in front of a product a number of unexpected but brand building things can happen i.e. launches a video on how to use the product, how the product was made. The first ever print advertisement to come to life was in a national UK newspaper for a luxury yacht company, which you can find out more about here.

It's not just magazines and papers looking into promotion through augmented reality. London based football team Tottenham Hotspurs, with their new sponsors Autonomy, the owners of Aurasma, are in the process of giving their own team kit a touch of augmented reality.

We also had a go at the Aurasma located in the last weeks Stylist magazine, after seeing this tweet.


The Flashlight Search Marketing team are very excited about this technology and urge you to go and find out more over at the Aurasma website. If you would like to find out more about how your brand can integrate with Aurasma please give our sales team a call, who are watching Aurasma developments with interest.


Author: Alice Cheetham

Why you should mobilise your website?

Studies are indicating that people are increasingly likely to leave their laptops at the office and use their mobiles for web browsing on the move. We are advising our clients to mobilise their websites, so that their customers can find them from mobile search and most importantly be able to access and navigate their sites with ease from a mobile.

In creating a mobile site the Flashlight Search Marketing team are also encouraging social share of news, offers, and deals via the mobile site owners established social networks.

Along with talking to our current clients, the Sales Team are making new contacts with companies (local and national) that have websites, to gently encourage them to make the small step to consider creating a mobile site.

We have a blog coming soon from Fiona and the Technical Team on "How easy it is to create a mobile website" - watch out for it.

Talking to the Sales Team today, they let me know that when talking to mobile website prospects, they have found that people are generally surprised at the low cost of mobile website development and once the UK mobile statistics are laid out with the price of development, then they are then keen to begin scoping out the mobile website development further.

We would like to share with you a selection of the UK mobile statistics which the Sales Team use when a client, or prospect asks whether they should mobilise their website.

We have invited Sales to add further links to the latest UK mobile statistics on this blog (comments section).

If you would like any further details on why your business should create a mobile website, or alternatively, or additionally create a mobile application, then please contact the Rocktime Sales team to discuss:

Sharing a selection of UK Mobile Website Statistics

It was reported this morning on BBC Breakfast News that Ofcom is auctioning off parts of the air space to enable the adoption of fourth generation technology (4G) which will make mobile phones more internet ready than they are. They also reported that Smart phone ownership grew in the UK by 58% 2010.

Interestingly, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has decided to include smartphones and their applications (think "Angry Birds") within the UK inflation basket / consumer price index but has taken out mobile phone downloads. (Techradar.com, March 2011)

Over the past 12 months the number of handsets that have the (mobile augmented reality) enabling technologies has risen from about 8 million to just over 100 million,” (Windsor Holden, principal analyst at Juniper Research UK, 2011).

Note that Alice (at Rocktime) regularly talks about Augmented Reality Applications on our blog, do watch out for her posts.

In November 2010 the UK was reported as being the 5th biggest mobile internet market globally (Silicon Alley Insider, Nov 2010)

There are 15,375,945 mobile media users in the UK (3 month average to January 2009). (Source: M Metrics via Orange survey, March 2009]

7.1 million Brits now access the internet through their mobile phones (Internet Monitor Survey, 2010)

60% of UK online shoppers would be more likely to shop at a site that rewarded them for reviews or recommendations (Immediate Future, 2010)

14% of UK mobile user watch more TV because of mobile video access. (Orange, via The Guardian, October 2010)

15% of UK adults have mobile broadband (Ofcom, October 2010)

Take-up of mobile broadband increased by 8% among 15 to 24s and by 3% among 35-54s in the UK (Ofcom, October 2010)

Smartphone usage is up 70% and growing faster in the UK than Europe.
(comScore/GSMA MMM, via AOP Digital Landscape Report, June 2010)

AdMob reported 253,737,396 mobile advertisement impressions in the UK during January 2009. (AdMob, January 2009)

Around 70% of mobile internet users use a traditional browser, 55% use an app. (Orange, via The Guardian, October 2010)

47% of daily mobile internet users live in urban areas. (“Brandheld” study, Essential Research, December 2009)

11.5% of all UK shoppers use their mobiles to research before they shop (ITPro.co.uk)

Mobile advertising is expected to grow to £355m in Britain by 2014 (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2010)

In the UK, 81% of mobile media users access mobile media more than once a week with 46% using it daily (MobiAd News, 2010)

27% of children (aged between 5 and 15) owned a mobile phone in 2009. (Source: Office for National Statistics, November 2010)

89% of the UK population have (or use) a mobile phone.(Ofcom, October 2010)
– 14% live in a mobile-only household.

People that use Facebook on their mobile device are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users (Facebook, 2010)

In May 2010 90.4% of British mobile subscribers used their phones to send a text message. The second most used activity in the UK is accessing news (35.5%), followed by using a browser (35.2%). Social networking is used by 22.6% of mobile subscribers in the UK in May 2010.

According to an Orange study, when clicking on adverts on the mobile internet, the next stages which are most popular are: going straight through to the brand‟s website (47%); receiving voucher codes or coupons (43%); clicking through to another area of the site (36%); being entered in a competition (34%). (Source: Orange via Econsultancy Blog, March 2009)

If you would like to talk to us further about creating a mobile website for your business, or would like to discuss marketing your mobile website or application then please give the Rocktime Sales team a call.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

The above image is from the Rocktime New story: FJB Hotels lead the way in Mobile Marketing. If you are local to Rocktime, you may have noticed that we ran a short ad and article on Mobile Websites in the March edition of the Business Magazine (Dorset, West Hant, Salisbury), with an advert on page 5 and article on page 16.

eBay Fashion and Augmented Reality

We talked about augmented reality briefly with our Geek Video of the month, and here it is again! EBay has had huge success with its mobile e-commerce and now they’re trying their luck with something new; the release of their Augmented Reality upgrade to the eBay Fashion App last month.




The app is broken down into two main components; the ‘See it now’, as shown above, allows the user to take a photo of themselves, resize different styles of sunglasses to their face and then track the movement of their head, rendering the sunglasses appropriately.

For clothing, the ‘Outfit Builder’ allows users to designate favourite pieces of clothing and save them to their virtual closet. Using a photo of themselves the users can then mix and match clothing over the top of their photo as they please. Once the outfit is created, it can then be saved and shared amongst friends via email.

EBay is by no means the first large company to put together an augmented reality app; when it comes to clothing JCPenny and H&M have both had their respective apps on the market since late 2010. However eBay's venture into the market of augmented reality is one of the most technical so far, using the more conventional approach of real time streaming and rendering.

So what advantage does an app such as this offer the company? When it comes to clothing, one of the huge drawbacks of online shopping is the inability to see how the clothes look on you; and augmented reality could be just the ticket to solve that. Of course, there’s still quite a few kinks to iron out first and augmented reality will never truly replicate going to a shop yourself and physically handling goods.

For the moment, it remains to be seen whether eBay’s venture into augmented reality really hits off, or becomes just a passing gimmick. Nonetheless, given the exponential increase in the capabilities of the average phone and an ever growing uptake in the popularity of the smartphone, I don't think it's too unlikely that we'll be seeing more and more of these augmented reality mobile apps and this makes the Flashlight team at Rocktime extremely excited.


Author: Alice Cheetham

Martin shares his thoughts on mCommerce

This year one of our New Year Resolutions is to share with you more content about our personal experiences with online technologies. Martin Bradbury, Business Development at Rocktime is kick starting us off, as he talks about his experience and thoughts on mCommerce, enjoy.


My thoughts on mCommerce

I recently purchased an Android Powered smart phone, and I find myself very amenable to buying apps through the Android Market. The process of actually spending real money through my mobile feels uncannily natural and very easy, leaving me safe that I can trust Google Checkout with my hard earned cash.

So now I can browse through Android Market, find an app or a game worth buying (ok, that's sometimes a struggle!), click click and I've bought it and a minute or so afterwards, it's installed on my phone and ready for me to enjoy. So there you go, Google Checkout has my credit card details and I'm happy for them to have it. So where is this all going?

I'm mentioning this because it's got me thinking about how much mobile app's have done for mCommerce. It's not just Google Checkout or the Apples App store that has got us spending money on our mobiles. Many of the high street retailers such as Marks & Spencer and John Lewis have mobile versions of their websites that not only allow you to browse, but also order online from your mobile phone. So now you really can choose your next pair of golf socks while relaxing in the bath or if like me you have a penchant for neck ties, why not order a couple of Patrick McMurrays while waiting for the bus to turn up.

You may be thinking that these sites are just marketing fluff and should not be taken too seriously. Well you would be very wrong, they now form an integral part of many retailers revenues streams.

In fact one of the Directors at online fashion retailer ASOS recently tweeted that the company had taken in £73,000 in one day from its mobile site alone... no small apples then.

So is it feasible for SME's to develop mobile enabled sites or apps to create this additional revenue stream? Yes of course! Because of the their size, mobile sites are far cheaper and simpler to develop than traditional site and are not only good for extra income, they can add an element of coolness to your business and also allow you to break into new markets and engage with new audiences.

Here at Rocktime we love mobile tech, and we are really excited about the pace in which mCommerce is becoming part of everyday life.

Developing stand alone mobile sites is something our tech guys have been doing for some time now and they will happily talk to you about it until the cows come home. So if you fancy a cuppa (or two) and a chat about mobile commerce or mobile apps then give me a call. Alternatively, browse to the Rocktime mobile site on your own mobile device (it's really easy and quick), just open your mobile browser and tap in m.rocktime.co.uk.


Author: Martin Bradbury

Top 10 Mobile Marketing New Year Resolutions

The Flashlight Seach Marketing Team at Rocktime would like to share with you their top ten mobile marketing resolutions for the New Year. Need any help setting up yours?

Then feel free to get in touch with Rocktime Sales to arrange a meeting.

Rocktime's top ten mobile marketing resolutions

1. Educate others to think of mobile marketing as a strategy
2. Assist others to understand more about how their website will look on mobile devices
3. Understand more about who uses what devices
4. Educate others on how they need to integrate analytics to their mobile apps,
don't just track downloads
5. Embrace the 'KISS' principle when designing mobile apps and mobile sites
6. Keep abreast of the mobile marketing statistics & trends including QR code technologies
7. Review the ROI of our own mobile campaigns and pass on learning to others
8. Establish our expertise by asking questions
9. Increase relevant visitor traffic to our mobile app and mobile site pages
10. Set some big goals and analyse the metrics to increase sales & leads

Why not head over to Mashable to take part in their poll to find out 'how others plan to change their life this year in the world of gadgetry and technology': Tech-Related Resolutions Poll at Mashable.



Author: Sarah Griffiths

SEM New Year Resolutions for 2011

This week the Flashlight Team will be sharing with you their Search Marketing (SEM) New Year's Resolutions for 2011, focused on SEO, PPC, Social Media and Mobile Marketing.

Sarah (@sarahgriffiths), 'Head of Search' at Rocktime says:

"We are very excited about our 2011 plans and throughout January will be setting some large ROI targets to grow the Flashlight division further, a large focus for our team this year is Local SEO/SEM and Mobile Marketing strategies".

The Flashlight Team hope you can steal some ideas from their 'Search Marketing New Year Resolutions' and would like to mention: where you don't have the resource in house, why not contact them to see how their online marketing expertise can fit in with your business.

New Year Resolution blog posts focused on Search Marketing, Social Media and Mobile Marketing will be delivered to you Wednesday to Friday this week.

In the meantime the Flashlight team would like to recommend that you visit this article over at Mashable, where they have listed 10 websites to watch in 2011, worth a look to gleam some inspiration for your own website development plans.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to wish all our blog readers a prosperous New Year.


Author: Alice Cheetham

The Future of Search: "Mobile will be big"

Thought to share with you this video from this time last year, when Matt Cutts (Google's Head of Webspam team) answered questions about the future of search in the next few years.

He ends the video with a few words about mobile search, saying that he sees a lot of potential growth in that area of search. "You're going to see all kind of changes, but mobile going to be a big part of it".

We are currently building sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools to assist our clients ranking in the Google Mobile Index. Videos seem to appear quite often, wondering (as early days) if we should create a YouTube video to link to our own mobile site..,Hmm now that's a thought.

We have heard from our friends in search that the Google Mobile spiders takes about 2 weeks to find your site (after submission of sitemap) we will be keeping an eye on him and will feed back our learnings.

During Google Searchmasters Conference 2009 one of the presentations we saved: was 'Building mobile friendly websites' you can view this here on Google Docs and then save as PDF.

If you want to talk further about the future of mobile for your business, feel free to give our sales team a call. We are going slightly mobile crazy here at Rocktime right now, so we will share new mobile web statistics shortly.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

Marketing Mobile Apps

More companies are noting in their web analytics that an increased number of people are using their mobiles to access their site, along side this there are increasing news reports highlighting that more and more people are using their mobiles to perform extensive research before making a purchase. Following these trends it isn’t surprising that Rocktime are receiving an increased number of calls for the development of mobile apps and mobile websites. Talk to the sales team to find out more.


Theses mobile stats help explain the trend further:

- In October 2010, the UK’s Internet Advertising Bureau (IABUK) reported that 26.6 million people (59% of mobile phone owners in the country) had used mobile media such as apps or downloaded data to their handsets.

- Mobile web use is up sharply in the UK. About 31% of internet users said they went online via mobile phone in 2010, compared to 23% in 2009, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported

- We also heard today (via: @ITworld) that end users under the age of 35 prefer to use mobile applications, rather than a web browser, to use specific functions on smartphones and other mobile devices. Read more here: http://www.itworld.com/internet/129261/mobile-users-ditch-browsers-use-apps-instead

In following this trend, the Flashlight Team at Rocktime have been putting together a marketing document to help clients greatly improve the public’s interest, engagement and attention for their app / mobile website once it finally launches. They are working closely with the Sales team and Technical team to integrate marketing thoughts into the site build.

They share some quick tips below, and are happy to talk to you to discuss your mobile app / site marketing needs further.


QUICK MOBILE APP / SITE PROMO TIPS FROM FLASHLIGHT TEAM

During build of your mobile app / mobile site

1. Consider your customers online needs in building the app / site review your web analytics

For example: a hungry for Pizza customer may be interested in:
• Order a pizza online
• Pick up the pizza
• Find a pizza takeaway shop
• Pizza offers
• Call for pizza
• Access favourite pizzas


2. Explain the benefits:

For example a news website could push: “This new mobile site will allow you to browse through news and lifestyle headlines or articles on your mobile phone without having to load the full website” “With push notifications, the app will enable you to keep up to date with the latest news in your area”


3. Consider a mobile phones current functionality in the design of the app:

Click to call
Geo location
Camera
Music
Video
Email
Calendar
Payment Devise
Social network sharing


Tips in promoting mobile apps

• Get early attention and grow interest.

• Discuss in your news pages about your work in progress (where possible invite your customers to contribute to the final development).

• Show a teaser video on how the app will work > and how it seeks to make their life better (see above video)

• Possibly create a landing page for the App and if it is very exciting ie: not just a mobile version of the website, then promote it to the App fans out there, see what they think – and let them talk about you some more.


Keep learning

As a final tip, we recommend you read this article here from Marketing Week 'Are you making the most out of mobile?' which looks at how four retailers have brought their brands onto our handsets: http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/disciplines/digital/digital-strategy-supplement/are-you-making-the-most-from-mobile?/3020898.article

The Flashlight team are pretty excited about mobile developments and if you are a current client then I am sure you will hear from them soon, as they determine how mobile can fit with your overall digital strategy.

Author: Sarah Griffiths

An Introduction to QR codes

What are QR codes?

QR (Quick Response) codes are similar to bar codes, but they are two dimensional and therefore these codes can hold a lot more information than a standard barcode found on many products (up to 10 numerical digits).

QR Codes allow everyday items to become a website (print to mobile to web messaging), a QR code can be used to store information such as text, URLs or any other data. If the QR code is being used to store numerical data only 7089 digits can be stored. For alphanumeric data up to 4296 characters can be stored.

QR codes can be used anywhere that printed material may exist (magazines, signs, webpages etc.) as a convenience way of allowing users to access some information without having to type any text, all the user needs to do is scan the QR code with their device and the QR code will be decoded and acted upon based on its content.

Who is using them?

QR codes have been around for some time now, a few examples of QR codes being used in Marketing can be found over at a Mashable Blog post (Jan 09).

Currently the majority of QR codes are used to provide a “tell me more” function with the QR code appearing on albums, posters etc. which when scanned take the user to a URL which provides more information about product.

But the codes can be used for E-ticketing applications. In this case a code can be generated and sent to a mobile phone, when the owner of the mobile phone arrives the QR code is scanned and then marked as used so it cannot be re-used. This reduces the requirement to print and post actual tickets and if the recipient loses their code they can just request a new one via text or email.

Coca-Cola have been using QR codes to allow Japanese customers to collect loyalty points for free drinks.

The Flashlight Search Marketing Team at Rocktime report, that they have seen QR codes used on a number of offline items including:

Business Cards
Posters
Products
Art and Tatoos
Fashion Items

The most exciting campaign they (Flashlight) have seen (to date) using QR codes was back in August 2010, where a Russian mobile provider MTS launched a digital campaign inviting consumers to play a weekly adventure game using their smartphone in order to win a prize, see above picture and read more about it over at the Brand Republic website.

Even Facebook has its own QR Code community, full of interesting oddities, ideas and discussion.

How to activate a QR code?

Many modern phones now come with a QR code reader installed as standard, these include Android phones, Nokia phones running S60 3rd Edition or newer and Blackberry’s with Messenger 5.0 or newer.

There are a number of free QR code reading apps available for both iPhones and Android Phones. These can be obtained via the iTunes App Store and the Android Market. These apps allow the user to scan the QR code and perform an action based on their content.

Android: Scanner often installed as standard.
iPhone: Apps available via the iTunes App Store.
Blackberry: Scan a group barcode option in the BBM menu.
Nokia Symbian: Has a barcode scanner which can read QR codes.
Nokia Maemo: Uses “mbarcode” to read QR codes.


Rocktime and QR codes

We can produce the codes and then our clients can print them somewhere, we can then provide statistics about the number of times the QR code was used within the clients content management system.

If you need any help or inspiration in using QR codes in your business.

Contact us




Author: Andy Edwards (Ed)

Social Media and Mobile Platform

MePlease has announced the launch of its social media and mobile platform, which enables businesses to connect with customers on their mobile, along with offering very easy social media sharing. This integrated social media and mobile platform, will help transform relationships between businesses and customers via social media & mobile marketing.

We are very excited indeed !!

Last week we heard (via: New Media Age) that MePlease had partnered with Pizza Express to help power the voting of their recent “Create Your Pizza Challenge”. If you happen to visit a Pizza Express Restaurant between 18th October to November 14th, you may note an on table display to vote for one of five pizza finalists. People participating will also have the option to post their opinion directly to Facebook, to further encourage viral spread for the brand.

Why not pop into a Pizza Express next week and try it out, alternatively view this video for a demonstration on how Me Please works in situ.

MePlease In Action at PizzaExpress from MePlease on Vimeo.

Although MePlease is similar to sites such as FourSquare (which we blogged about back in June), the difference about MePlease is, that it's largely powered by SMS, so it will work on any phone (ie; not just smart phones), suiting both National brands and small businesses.

MePlease is such a great idea !! Secretly wish it was ours...

The mobile platform provides business to customer engagement via voting, competitions, generate customer feedback and will also encourage customer acquisition, retention and most importantly drive footfall. A number of high street names have already signed up, and as we consider letting our clients know about this portal, we are keeping up to date with the Me Please news over at their blog:
http://mepls.wordpress.com/

The only critique we would give is the name ‘me please’ as you can imagine a lot of people saying this in social media (which will appear in search engines). “can you review this site for me please”, “can you look at this link for me please” etc...However after writing that, although Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) would help if you had heard about the brand and wanted to be part of it, SEO wouldn’t be as relevant as the activity would be virally spread.


Interesting stuff....

If you want to discuss more about mobile marketing and social media strategies and how they could fit with your business, feel free to call the Rocktime Flashlight team, so they can then view your integrated approach potential.

Author: Sarah Griffiths 


iPhone Applications on the move

Expect over the next six months to start to see a major growth in development of iPhone applications.

The stats to support this include:

607.5 million people globally accessing social networks by 2013, which is 43% of all mobile internet users (eMarketer)

50% of mobile phone users will access the mobile internet at least monthly by 2013 (eMarketer)

Also recent studies (from America) shows the % of people accessing websites via mobile phones are increasing: in January 2010, 25.1 million mobile users accessed Facebook via their mobile browser, up 112% from 11.8 million mobile users in January 2009. Twitter also experienced high growth attracting 4.7 million mobile user in Jan 10, up by 347% versus previous year. (Source: ComScore, Feb 2010, Facebook and Twitter Access via Mobile Browser Grows by Triple-Digits in the Past Year).

Content on the go

If your consumers/clients would benefit from content on the go being pushed to their phone (via 3GS) then talk to Rocktime Sales about Mobile Application development. We can create mobile applications for the iPhone, Android, Windows mobile and more. A benefit of working with us is that as we develop everything in house you will also be able to have complete control of the look and the feel of the application. The main design considerations we review to in creating your application with you, is to make sure it is easy to read, easy to navigate, fun or/and extremely useful to target market.

Recent iPhone development

Rocktime recently developed an iPhone application for Local Food Advisor linking into their site database, to share 4000 award winning producers, suppliers and farmers markets in the UK & Ireland read more about the iPhone app integration here>


How to get your app noticed?

There are over 100K 3rd party applications available to download, so the big question is how to get your application noticed? As part of social media optimisation we would advise you to network with your communities on social networks before launch and during launch. If the application development was based on feedback from your community then thank them and make them feel involved, they too will then share the love of your new application. If you have employees on Twitter talk to them about the new app let them know test dates, let them spread the word too around their own networks. Join in with application developer forums, get their feedback and continue to spread awareness of your application once launched.

Location based apps growing

Tech journalists and bloggers anticipate an increasing number of iPhone applications will become location based: so as tweets, blog posts, site content are based on a specific area the content will then be delivered to the iPhone application when required. On upload of the application it will ask “would you like to use your current location”, you may have already seen this already on sites such as http://gowalla.com/ and http://foursquare.com/ (see above blog post image).

Via 3GS and interaction with the location targeted apps, local businesses are benefiting as they are able to serve up adverts that are specific to the application users location ie: a coffee shop may tweet out to Four Square members, “Why not pop in to our branch on the High Street around 3pm and have Coffee for half price”. Pretty amazing yes, indication that web technology is continuing to empower the consumer even further, as they not only check for real time offers whilst on the move but receive them automatically too (Push & Pull notifications).

Be inspired

It is worth your while exploring iPhone applications even if you don’t have an iPhone, what works well on a phone could work for your site. The application store is also a great place to help create or build on new ideas, especially if you read the feedback pages.

If you are totally new to mobile phone applications and would like a little insight into how they function. look and the benefits to the user, we would recommend you go visit this post at Mashable, who in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, shared their top 10 free iPhone applications that promote continued environmental awareness, hopefully they will be of interest to you. For extra advise and guidance in this growing market of mobile phone applications pick up the phone to talk to Rocktime Sales.


Author: Sarah Griffiths