Purely Mobile Post

I spend roughly 1hr on public transport each day to get to and from uni. I use my phone as much as the next person on these joyful trips. So I figured, why not write a post using purely mobile tools and see if I can maintain the visual and layout standard which I expect across all devices while still writing relevant content. Whenever I'm using my phone on these daily trips I like to scroll through my twitter feed and read articles people have linked or get some work organised for uni. If a site I go to isn't optimised for mobile, it's immediately frustrating. I'm generally interested in or need to work with the content I click on so I don't leave the site straight away but most consumers would before the wasteful download of a banner ad even loads.

So why, as a producer of content would you want to inconvenience or frustrate your consumer from the get go? You wouldn't, and even though it's just pinching the screen to zoom in, that's the mobile world we live in. We expect easy to read, use and navigate user interfaces, and if we don't get these it annoys us.

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There is no question that we use our phones in excess and that it's a key platform to communicate and interact with consumers. But the fact there are still non-mobile optimised sites is pretty shocking. Even my simple free WordPress theme has an inbuilt mobile version, and it looks awesome. I shouldn't be impressed with mobile sites. They shouldn't wow me that a company displays their content in an easy and convenient way to navigate and read, but it does.

So if you have a blog yourself or a website and it isn't mobile optimised, then why not? It isn't hard to do and it will reduce that "bounce rate"  marketers hate so much. Most likely the only effort it takes it ticking a box that says "optimise for mobile devices" and you're in business.

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What's your experience with mobile optimised or non-mobile sites? Any sites that have gone a step further and done something different?

Also, this WordPress mobile app is pretty good! Almost easier than writing and formatting on a computer. Can you tell the difference?

How to use twitter to brand yourself

The most important way to look at twitter is as a multi-way conversation, not one way. I recently decided to “up my game” on twitter and start using it properly and found that my interactions went up 200% and my followers up 50%. One thing to remember though is that follower’s isn’t everything, the most important aspect of twitter is creating content which delivers value, whether it be in the form of your passion, knowledge, opinion or personality.  So here are some tips on making your own brand on twitter.

1. Identify your style. What do you like to see on twitter and what do you post. You can express this in your description of your profile, it helps those know what to expect but it’s mainly just what you tweet about for me it’s business, sports and personal tweets. Personal tweets help get your personality across and encourage engagement.

1. Follow. On twitter you can follow anyone, it doesn’t matter if you know them or not. Follow the type of people or twitter accounts that interest you, whether it’s sports teams, celebrities, news outlets, business reporters, bloggers or individuals. To get started you need to follow people so check out the “who to follow” section on twitter and follow anyone you think are mildly interesting at first, if they don’t post content that appeals to you then you can easily unfollow later.

1. Interact with the people. Reply and retweet tweets you find interesting; it helps people find you who also have an interest in the content that they follow from the person you’re interacting with.

1. Hashtag. If you’re joining in on a conversation, make sure you use the right hashtag but don’t always go too overboard with them if you want to be taken seriously.

1. Be creative. Whether it is an article, video, picture, fact, theory or observation, make your tweets creative and interesting and people will engage with you. My best one was photo shopping a tweet from Natalie Tran the popular YouTuber:

[embed]https://twitter.com/ChrisGordon_8/status/508520422451589120[/embed]

Finally, Twitter is a massive community and people will try and get follows for follows or you may lose some followers after you tweet about a topic that wasn't the topic they followed you for. Don’t worry about it; they will just miss the good content you post. The end goal for twitter if you’re trying to brand yourself is to create or join in on conversations and bring value with what you’re saying, whether it’s professional, personal, opinionated or humour, just be yourself.

Keep track of your Twitter analytics here

QR Codes, are they a failed tool?

QR (quick response) codes; you’ve probably seen them around and wondered if anyone has even used them. If you’re one of the rare few that have, you would’ve had to have searched for and downloaded an app first which looked really sketchy and unflattering. Then carefully lined up the barcode which sent you to a website where you were horribly disappointed. You then uninstall the app and haven’t scanned a QR code again. Well at least that was my experience and the feel that I’ve been getting when researching for this post.

(source: J6design.com.au)

So why do marketers use QR codes? Well the logical answer is because everyone has a smart phone and it’s easy to take it out and use. Plus it’s interactive which can be fun but mainly because it takes the consumer to the exact place the marketer wants.

It then leads to the question; do marketers put too much emphasis on the way a QR code works and its ability rather than getting the QR code to work as an effective tool? I say this because the time it took me to go through that annoying process to scan one, I was left so dissatisfied with it and the end product that I chose to ignore them from then on. What marketers should focus on is the ease of the user experience when scanning the codes and ensuring that the content is interesting, entertaining and worth their time. But for this to even be possible, the main smart phone software manufactures need to integrate a QR scanner into their stock camera app.

A friend of mine told me about one positive experience he had with a QR code a couple of years ago. He scanned a Halo poster on a bus shelter ad and won that poster and was ecstatic with the result. While he was happy with the product and experience, he hasn’t scanned a QR code since. Why? Because they’re “too annoying”.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvIJfUySmY0[/embed]

When searching for statistics for this post, there were a lot of positive stats in the 2011-2012 range though none in 2014 which showed a critical evaluation. The general feel was that QR codes are on the decline but marketers are still trying to hold them up as a successful tool for their potential.

Has the era of QR codes gone, or is it up to OS manufacturers to integrate a scanner to bring a revival or maybe technology has simply moved on to things like NFC (near field communication).

In any case, what has your experience with QR codes been?