eMarketing Trends|Verbal Acrobatics & Graphic Gymnastics

The growth in the Mobile Industry over the last decade has made it paramount for all businesses to have Mobile Sites in order to reach this growing new target market.

Current local (South Africa) trends show that:

• There are ten million mobile Internet users in SA (Five million PC Internet users in SA)
• One in six Google searches in SA originates off a mobile device.
• In South Africa about 40 percent of mobile phone users have WAP-enabled phones.
• The top Mobile Applications currently in South Africa are: Mxit – with 15 million+ users – and Facebook.
• Mobile search and eCommerce will be a large area of growth in 2010.

In short, this indicates an importance for businesses to target mobile searchers and users of mobile applications.

Some of the best Mobile Site examples I can give include BBC, the Goal mobi site, and College Humour (N/B: “these examples obviously look better on your mobile phone – feel free to suggest your favourite mobile sites below“).

However, when creating a Mobile Site it is also imperative to build and optimise the Mobile Sites so it is user-friendly and accessible on the Mobile Web.

Mobile Design and SEO Best Practices
When designing a Mobile Site one aspect to consider is that one must understand that mobile searchers/users are different from PC searchers/users. In order to cater for Mobile users designers must:

• Provide an elegant experience by considering whether individuals possess a smart phone (for example an iPhone with fully featured web browsing) or a standard mobile phone (with stripped site features).
• Consider that phones are not used like PC’s – users are usually on the go therefore the site should be more goal oriented – Relevancy and Simplicity is key.
• Mobile designs are to conform to the new W3C standards in order to create mobile-friendly style sheets (CSS).
• Mobile Sites must be small, lightweight and fast-loading site – (< 20kb / page).
• Consider User Agent Detection –  this is another form of transcoding which takes into consideration the type of mobile phone an individual uses to search and provides more uniform browsing experience for various device types.

Once the Mobile Site has been built, Mobile SEO steps can now come into play. These include:

1.    Validating the page with the .Mobi Validator or the W3C Validator
2.    Following ‘traditional’ on-site  SEO Best Practices such as:

• Major keywords in the title tagging
• H1’s and body text
• Rich keyword Meta Titles and Descriptions
• Keyword-rich anchor text for internal links

3.    Mobile Search results tend to reflect ‘Local Search results’ – your site must be optimized for local type searches. Also submit your business info to local directories making sure your site is verified and included in sites like Google’s Local Business Center.
4.    Get the Mobile Site spidered and indexed – submit to major search engines:

• Google Sitemaps
• Yahoo! Submit Your Mobile Site

In short, the above Mobile Design and SEO factors are to be strongly considered when building a Mobile Site. These aspects help provide a solid Mobile Site foundation for your Mobile Campaign or Strategy. For further Mobile Campaign or Strategy enquiries, visit our Virtuosa website.

Last week we saw the Virtuosa team heading to The Venue at Melrose Arch for the Habari Media Facebook Launch. The line-up of speakers  included Mike Stopforth a leading local social media expert, Blake Chandlee  a fairly important guy at Facebook and Mark Cohen.

Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.

Among some of the topics discussed were social media  and how it  is changing the online world, its evolution of discovery, and the Facebook story itself. The interesting bit for me was the evolution of the Facebook ad.

The Facebook advertising strategy has evolved from the common banner and text ad into something much more engaging and informative for advertisers. For them communication in media is changing because the user has changed.

Facebook ads are evolving to drive user engagement and connections just as social media does.

They encourage users to interact and share advertising with engaging ad formats which range from the following:

Facebook campaign formats include:

• Quizzes: Brands can ask questions about your brand  or find out what consumers of your product like.
• Contests: Brands can advertise contests and promotions.
• Coupons: Brands can give away free samples to the people that chose to interact with the advert.
• Gifts: People are able to give brands gifts or recieve branded gifts.
• Sign up forms: People can opt in from the ad to receive promotional material and product updates.
• Fan Pages: People can become fans of particular products and brands. These fan pages can then in turn create connections and can be used for PR, Customer Services and Market Research.
• Polling: You can find out what people feel about your product and what they prefer.

This allows the user to engage and interact with the ad allowing a unique dialogue between the brand and the audience as well as share the advertising to others within their social network.

On Friday the 11th of December, Virtuosa had their Christmas party and needless to say it was one that touched more than just the Virtuosa team member lives.

The day started with the team separated into groups and by participating in a game similar to the Amazing race – each group had different tasks to complete. While we were trying to figure out the clues running from one destination to another, each group had to collect a reward from one of the stopping points. One group had to collect and carry garden tools while the others had to pick up rolls of grass and trees for planting: it was clear from then on that we were not on our way to a party venue at all.

As the teams arrived at the final destination, we were surprised to be greeted by the school children at Witkoppen School – a “less fortunate” school within the community of Fourways, Johannesburg. The challenge for the day were to plant the grass and trees for the kids at this school and the Virtuosa team got straight to work as you can see below.

With a sense of giving back to the community, the whole team took up the challenge with enthusiasm. Virtuosa also volunteered to paint one of the classroom walls with the Witkoppen School logo & motif  (images below).

As a team, we are proud to be giving back something to the community and to have the opportunity to do something different for our year end party. What better way to build team moral and spent the whole day together as a team. It was totally AWESOME (describing my feelings in layman’s terms) to spend time with the children of Witkoppen School as they appreciated our presence and gift.

Since the partnership between longtail and Pixel8 in January, Virtuosa Newsletters have been sent on a monthly basis. This month is no different from any of the months before and in our December edition we are highligting the top 5 “most read” articles during 2009. Here they are:

Designing for Results Online
Creative Director, Bryce Hancock let us pick his brain in regards to the thinking behind the refresh of the Virtuosa website and we also convince him to part with some of his expertise …

Bang for our Buck?
Recently, one of our clients asked whether the cost of banner advertising is feasible and whether we are receiving “bang for our buck” …

Augmented Reality, say what?
Sounds like something out of a Steven Spielberg movie? Don’t worry you are not alone in your thinking, this is brand new technology that has finally stepped out of the box …

Kulula Jetsetters miss out!
It’s something that can happen to any popular website that receives a lot of traffic – it can crash. But try to explain that to unsatisfied customers …

What influences the SEO landscape today?
The pace at which Search Engine Optimization is changing is enough to make anybody’s head spin. Well, it is probably not as bad as that, but in our fast paced technological world …