Social Media, a Business Priority

Posted on August 24, 2012 by mDefinite

Facebook’s stock may not be where Mark Zuckerberg wants it to be, but, make no mistake, Facebook and other social media sistes’ stocks are rising among businesses.

Booz Allen and Buddy, Media reported that 57 percent of businesses they surveyed in a joint study planned to increase social media spending, and more and more CEOs (38 percent) believe social media is a high priority.

David Armano, who has a pretty good track record regarding social media predictions and trends, believes that more and more businesses will try and integrate social media into real-life experiences. Armano also said more and more television shows like The X Factor will incorporate social media into their platform(s).

Social media guru Mari Smith also blogged about seven trends she see on the horizon. The public may not be buying much social media stock on Wall Street, but it is largely buying into the fact that social media has become the ultimate game changer.

For more information on up and coming internet marketing trends, call mDefinite today! They will be able to lead you marketing campaigns into the future. Bottom line is if you want to be available to the modern consumer, you need a mobile website.

For more information call mDefinite today! 888.454.8882

Twitter Bots Should Be Better Understood

Posted on August 22, 2012 by mDefinite

Twitter use has become common marketing practice and way for businesses to update consumers, clients and the general public. In fact, since bursting on the scene in 2006, Twitter now has over 500 million active users.

With Twitter now fully indoctrinated as a viable communication tool, businesses, companies, organizations and even some individuals have sought ways to maximize their presence on Twitter.

One such method is by creating a Twitter Bot. Like a robot, Twitter Bots are designed to watch and seek out various key words. Aaron Sumner wrote in his Stratepedia Blog “What are Twitter bots?” that once a bot stumbles upon a tweet with programmed keywords, the bot “either sends a pre-written response that may sort of look like it came from someone who legitimately read your tweet and has directly related to comment to it, or it follows your Twitter account.”

While there clearly are number of benefits to Twitter bots, businesses would be wise to study up on them before enlisting them into service.

For more information call mDefinite today! 888.454.8882

Mobile Website Popularity Rising

Posted on August 20, 2012 by mDefinite

Why mobile websites are important? Let us count the ways.

For starters, the infiltration of smartphones has revolutionized the way people access the internet. It’s estimated that there now are over 100 million smartphone users alone in the U.S. No need to wait anymore to get home of go back to the office to check email, browse the web or play that online game. All these applications literally – from Facebook to Twitter – are at peoples’ fingertips everywhere they go. Think Foursquare was created for people to use at home?

With all this in mind, businesses must put the consumers’ best interests in mind, which further validates the need for mobile websites. Handheld devices are small – most are between 3-4.5 inches. This means websites need to be more compressed to allow for better optimization and a better experience for the browser. Simply put: A mobile website needs to be more compressed than, say, a traditional website people would look at from a desktop or laptop.

Like it or not, mobile websites are here to stay. Businesses would be wise to join the movement.

For more information call mDefinite today! 888.454.8882

Facebook admits it doesn’t know how mobile works

Posted on August 3, 2012 by mDefinite

As Facebook moves inexorably toward its much-anticipated IPO, attention has focused on all kinds of things about the giant network with the $100 billion potential market valuation — including the earth-shattering fact that CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists on wearing a hoodie during his meetings with Wall Street bankers and analysts. But what investors should be more focused on is the problem Facebook highlights in the most recent amendment to its S-1 securities filing: namely, that its mobile business is noticeably light on advertising revenue and that the company isn’t exactly sure how (or whether) it can fix that.

So if it had already flagged the mobile business as a potential weak spot, why has Facebook changed the language around its mobile aspirations yet again in this latest S-1 update? It appears the latest update is designed to clarify that this mobile ad-revenue gap is at least partly to blame for the weak advertising numbers the social network posted for the first quarter and that it is going to affect the second quarter as well. While Facebook initially said the weakness in the first quarter was a result of “seasonal effects” in the advertising business in general, it now says:

“We believe this increased usage of Facebook on mobile devices has contributed to the recent trend of our daily active users (DAUs) increasing more rapidly than the increase in the number of ads delivered.”

The new language in the prospectus also hints at another aspect of the problem: namely, that the mobile environment is substantially different from a desktop one, and the decisions that make sense for the regular version of Facebook — particularly when it comes to things like ads, page views, etc. — don’t necessarily apply to the mobile version. As the S-1 says of the trend that has seen daily active users increase faster than the number of ads:

“This trend is driven in part by increased usage of Facebook on mobile devices where we have only recently begun showing an immaterial number of sponsored stories in News Feed, and in part due to certain pages having fewer ads per page as a result of product decisions.”

Mobile Options

Those product decisions are crucial for the mobile version of Facebook, which has already been criticized by many users as cluttered looking and cumbersome to navigate. More than one critic has argued that the mobile app Path — developed by a company co-founded by former Facebook staffer Dave Morin — is a far better mobile social network than Facebook, at least when it comes to design and usability. Of course, Path doesn’t have any ads at all, so figuring out how that works isn’t really a problem. Facebook doesn’t have that luxury.

For more information on up and coming internet marketing trends, call mDefinite today! They will be able to lead you marketing campaigns into the future. 888.454.8882, Mobile Web Solution & QR Code Solutions. Bottom line is if you want to be available to the modern consumer, you need a mobile website.

For more information call mDefinite today!

Mobile Websites:Basics

Posted on August 2, 2012 by mDefinite

Mobile Websites

Within the next year, more users will access the internet with their mobile device. However, 99% of websites are not formatted for mobile use. This means they do not function properly when you open them on your mobile device, such as your smartphone or tablet.

The problem lies with the fact that 61% of mobile users will never return to a website if they have a poor experience on their first visit. For a company, this is problematic because 52% of individuals browse the web on their mobile device.

Mobile websites need to accommodate the slower network speeds, limited processing power, and smaller screen sizes of mobile devices.

Companies need to understand their customers will directly go to their competitor if they are unable to use a mobile website successfully.

What this all means is that if you have a business and you want to be available to consumers today, you need to have a mobile presence; a presence that offers a top-notch experience for the consumer.

For more information call mDefinite today! 888.454.8882

Studying Mobile 101

Posted on August 1, 2012 by mDefinite

mobile devices, smartphones, mobile evolution

The Evolution of Mobile Devices

Bringing new technology into a university environment can be challenging, but colleges are learning that if they want to attract new students, they need to meet them on familiar ground.

Modo Labs, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup providing open source mobile platforms, said that since its launch last year, its Kurogo platform for building mobile apps has been adopted by more than 200 universities across the country, including Harvard, Boston College and Villanova University.

In many cases, the company said, the schools’ motivation for going mobile was to provide current students with schedules, campus updates and tools for keeping in touch with faculty. But, later, the schools started to realize that most of their traffic was coming from off-campus.

That observation was backed up by a February survey from the National Research Center for College & University Admissions and consulting company Noel-Levitz. It found that 52 percent of prospective college students said they viewed a school’s website on a mobile device in 2011 – more than double the percentage from 2010. Of those students, 48 percent said the mobile site experience improved their perception of the school. Last fall, a survey of nearly 500 IT leaders from the Campus Computing Project found that 55.3 percent of public universities had activated mobile apps or would do so in the coming academic year, compared to 32.5 percent in the fall of 2010.

But while schools are using mobile platforms to recruit new students and help current students manage their college experience, it will be very interesting to see whether mobile devices will help the educational process.

“There’s a huge debate over how the mobile experience will change learning,” said Yu. Digital textbooks from Chegg, Apple and and Amazon are bringing tablets into education, but he said the smaller screen of the smartphone poses challenges for delivering educational content.

For more information call mDefinite today!

Mobile Web Solutions

Monthly Archives: August 2012