Mobile marketing has changed a lot in the past couple of years. Geo-targeting uses your smart phone’s GPS to find out where you are, allows you to “check in” to a location, and deliver targeted messages to you based on that information.

Leaders in the geo-targeting space include Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt (plus LooptStar). They are similar in many ways, but each offers a different twist on an increasingly familiar theme. They enable local businesses to find and attract consumers in new ways, such as offering coupons or special offers to regulars based on how many times they’ve come in. Like many start-ups, none have mastered the monetization aspect of mobile marketing, but there are clearly endless opportunities here.

In order to give people incentive to use the apps, various forms of social “rewards” are used that essentially turn exploring your city into a game. We are social creatures, and while some of these rewards may seem meaningless or frivolous, there is an attraction to them as they create an element of social status within communities. A large part of the appeal to people in large cities with lots of friends is to make sure you never miss the action, but I believe the jury is still out as to the real social value of this once the initial allure wears off a bit.

While this isn’t intended to be an in-depth review, I’ll discuss some interesting distinctions of each:

Foursquare – I’ve been on Foursquare for about a year now. It’s been amazing to watch the database of local places grow since it depended on the community to enter locations. Now it’s rare that I go somewhere that isn’t already there. The person who frequents a location the most becomes the “mayor” and some establishments give benefits for that position. You collect virtual badges for achieving certain things, like being in a place with at least 50 other people (Swarm) or hitting 4 clubs in one night (Crunked). You get the idea. Foursquare made a gamble by creating a new database of locations and friends, but it seems to have paid off. The most compelling thing about this is the special offers that are based on your location. When you check in somewhere, the app will tell you if there is a nearby special, or one at the place you are (a free drink for 10 check-ins for example). While Foursquare has exploded in the past year, I haven’t seen a congruent explosion of the specials offered by businesses.

LooptStar is a spinoff of Loopt, which was historically a more informational type of app. Their new entry enters the “rewards” space more heavily. The thing that LooptStar does that I believe will give it an advantage is use Facebook Connect to leverage the largest existing social network rather than wait for everyone to find their friends on yet another new one. They were later to the game, but I believe this will give them an edge in the long run. In LooptStar you become a “boss” rather than a “mayor.” But the rewards look to be more tangible than FourSquare.

Gowalla benefits from being on all major mobile smart platforms, including Blackberry and Palm. They also rely on partnerships with existing travel-related services to offer “trips” and share those with your friends. While Foursquare provides community tips based on your location, Gowalla focuses more on directly exploring your friends’ favorite locations to learn more about what they like rather than the community at large.

All of these apps feature basic sharing with your Twitter and Facebook feeds to let people know what you’re up to. Yelp has entered the space by adding check-in to its feature set and you can bet that Google is going to be all over this with its massive business database and Android mobile platform. The problem these sites have is that they have established brand and culture that make it harder to break into new areas.

While this space is fascinating to watch, it still has a long way to go. The apps depend largely upon smart phones such as iPhone and Android, which represent the minority of the mobile market. Also, I feel that any app that requires you to actively check in to a location rather than simply knowing where you are is going to appeal more to geeks and early adopters than the majority of people. It can be very distracting to interrupt your social experience. “Wait guys… I have to check in here first…”

What’s the alternative? Remember Minority Report, when Tom Cruise’s retinas were scanned everywhere he went? In that version of the future, you didn’t even need a device to tell the network where you were. Cameras were so ubiquitous that they knew anyway. Scary? A bit. Possible? You bet.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, ePiphany Featured Story

If your business has a website, you want it to be accessible to the widest possible audience.  In terms of viewing it in a web browser on a standard desktop computer, this means testing it in a wide array of browser (IE, Firefox, Safari, etc) and operating system (Windows, Mac) combinations.  The site design then often needs some tweaking so that it functions as consistently as possible across those combinations.  This cross-browser testing is a standard part of the site creation process, and something that a company like Astek will handle without you having to worry about it much at all.

In order for a website to display in a way that is at all useful on many mobile phones, a wholly separate site design is needed.  See Katie Hawkey’s article in this ePiphany for more on the actual details of mobile website formatting. The decision as to whether a mobile format for your website is necessary requires some cost-benefit analysis.  Lets consider some statistics and trends.  The percentage of total web traffic over mobile phones was at 1.26% by the end of 2009, having doubled over that year (source).  I was unable to find any more recent numbers, but given the trend it would be reasonable to put it near 2% by now.  A more telling number is that 35% of US adults say they access the internet with their phones, up from 25% in 2009 (source).

So, a really significant number of people are using phones to look at websites, although they probably still use their computers more often.  But if they check your website once and it comes out all jumbled on their phone, you have left a bad impression.  Another wrinkle is whether a visitor’s mobile browser even needs a separate mobile-formatted design.  Smartphones like those on the iPhone and Android platforms have web browsers which can view websites pretty much the same as desktop web browsers.  Other phones, including all current Blackberry models, have web browsers with a very limited way of presenting websites.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Gadget, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

Mobile sites are a totally different beast than websites meant to be viewed on a personal computer. An ideal mobile site is lean in content and file size. Stripped of superfluous information, ads and text, it’s designed for small screens, quick access to key information and minimum page loads. The design techniques for mobile-optimized sites often require a completely different layout than your typical website.

If you want to have a website that is truly optimized for web browsing on both personal computers AND mobile devices, you need multiple versions of your site. Just the idea of maintaining multiple versions of a website may be a non-starter for many companies. But wait! Did you know you can update multiple versions of your site at the same time?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Content is Water, Templates are Vases
A Content Management System (CMS) is key to easily managing multiple versions of your site. To understand how this works, let’s look at your site content – the text, images, pdfs, etc. – as being separate from the template it is wrapped in. This is the essential principle behind any CMS (check out my article on how a CMS works). Web pages consist of a template with a header, footer, and sidebars that surround the content. For example:

Think of your content as water that will fill the shape and size of the template you pour it into…

You can make your mobile template a completely different shape, size and layout from your original site, but, if built correctly, the exact same content that is populating your original site will “pour” in and fill your mobile site perfectly. When you make a change to your content in the CMS, that edit will “pour” simultaneously to both your website and your mobile site. In other words, you make a change in one place, your CMS, and it updates both sites.

Of course, like a small vase, your mobile site cannot handle as much content as your larger site. You will need to carefully select what content is available through your mobile site. Once that decision has been made, the template for your mobile site can be designed and built to only request certain kinds of information from your Content Management System. For example, perhaps your mobile site will only show upcoming events, contact information and an about page and will not show newsletter archives, board minutes or other less visited content.

Example: Fandango
Let’s look at one of the progressive, early adopters of mobile technology, Fandango, and how they “pour” their content into their regular website and a completely different mobile version of their site.

Here is a screenshot showing the content you’ll find on their regular Website under “In Theatres”/“Opening This Week”:

Here is the same content on the iPhone App:

You can see instantly that the App runs from the same central Fandango CMS as the website but the iPhone App uses templates that pull limited types of content and format that content in a way that is most easily browsable for mobile users. Notice how much more information about each film is given to the iPhone user upfront? This reduces the need for them to load multiple pages to gain that information. You can also see how the Fandango App has limited ads.

Can I Do That?
As Fandango shows, the same content can be “poured” into very different templates to give the user the impression they are having a completely customized experience. This idea can be applied to any website, (even yours!) If your site runs off of a CMS, like Astek’s Webany, then you can pour your existing content into a mobile template. All you have to do is choose the content you want to feature and build a few additional templates!

What are you waiting for? Create your mobile site today!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: How To, Marketing, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

Professional bloggers are busy people. Most professional bloggers pump out anywhere from 1-20 blog posts a day! Like reporters, bloggers are mostly word-smiths with photography and video production being a secondary (or non-exisistant) skill set. Unlike reporters, bloggers aren’t typically working in a newsroom with access to staff photographers and video equipment. The lack of multimedia resources and the pure volume of blog stories creates a vacuum that a smart web marketer can fill up with eye-catching photography and video showing-off their product or organization.

Now, the only guaranteed way to get covered by a professional blogger is to have a news-worthy story appropriate for their readership. However, providing high-quality photos and video can make a huge impact on the probability of getting covered on blogs (much more than in traditional print media) and will especially impact the length, depth and quality of the posts that they write about you. Though this is true as well for traditional press, it’s a much bigger deal in the blogosphere.

Tips on Photos for Blogs:

• Full color, professional photos are best.
• If you can’t afford professional photos do a little reading about product photos before you try taking them yourself. A couple easy tips: Outside shots taken on a sunny day are your best bet if you don’t have access to professional lighting. Be mindful of your backgrounds and the composition of the shot.

Tips on Videos for Blogs

• Drive traffic to your website by putting a slide with your website address at the end of the video with a call to action (e.g. Get free tickets to the show at MyEventWebsite.com!).
• It’s not a bad idea to include your logo and/or web address in a corner of the screen throughout the video.
• Post your video on a site like YouTube or Vimeo that makes it easy for you to share with the bloggers and makes it easy for them to embed the video on their blog.
• Keep it short.

Tips on Providing Media to Press

• Do not attach large photo or video files to your pitch email unless specifically asked to do so. The email will either get swallowed by spam filters or you’ll clog the blogger’s inbox and make them mad.
• Recommended media formates:
  • Press Releases: PDFs
  • Photos: JPGs, less than 1MB
  • Video: Upload to YouTube or Vimeo for easy embeds
• Set up a press page on your website and provide bloggers a link at the end of your pitch email (E.g. “To download press releases, photos and video visit our online press room.”)
• Another method for distributing the rich media is to post the story on your own blog and direct the professional blogger to that article.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: How To, Social Media, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

My great and talented friend, Aarti Sequeira, proves that social media can help make your dreams come true. She turned her homemade YouTube-based cooking-variety show, Aarti Paarti, into a spot on The Next Food Network Star, premiering this Sunday, June 6, at 9p/8c on the Food Network.

Aarti’s show features original how-to recipes with distinct India influences that just about anyone can make. I was fortunate to interview Aarti and learned a few things I didn’t know about her fantastic journey from laptop to living room. Enjoy!

What first inspired you to create Aarti Paarti in early 2009?

I was floundering at the time — my career in journalism had evaporated, and I hadn’t had that fire in my belly to chase it. I had just finished co-producing Sand and Sorrow, one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life; I’d had the chance to work on a story that really impacts our humanity, for a Peabody Award-winning director, narrated by George Clooney and eventually bought by HBO. How can you top that?! I tried to find more documentary work, but that was right as the economy was shrinking, so there wasn’t money or interest in doing “another Africa documentary.” Isn’t that sad?

Anyway, at that time, cooking had grown into a real passion in my life. I had completed a part-time cooking program, interned at a James Beard Award-winning restaurant (Lucques, helmed by Suzanne Goin) and realised that restaurant life was not for me. I was totally stumped about what I supposed to do with my life, and it was depressing me. Here I was, a Northwestern graduate, a former CNN employee, a documentary filmmaker… with no drive to do anything but make dinner. Finally, one day, my friend said, “You need to do a cooking show, a cool one, where there’s someone in the kitchen with you and you’re chatting through the whole cooking process.”

My husband, Brendan, ran with the idea, and within a day, had written a complete one-sheet with a solid concept for a show called “aarti paarti”, where I would be cooking for a bunch of my friends, who we’d cut away to as the food simmered or roasted — since all my friends are actors/performers, they’d be doing something amazing. We shot it one day, and we got 13 hours of footage. It was unrealistic to try to put that together into a pilot by ourselves, so months later, I got so frustrated that I just picked up the camera and shot a quick 10-minute episode myself. My husband shot the next episode and we started incorporating the variety show angle, which I just love. And the rest is history! We’ve shot over 30 episodes so far, featuring everything from a uke-strumming juggling clown to singing puppets to a belly dancer!

(I made a cameo [4:20] in this episode, which for some strange reason has more views than any other…)

What equipment/knowledge/materials does someone need to produce a show like this?

We borrow the camera, a Panasonic dvx100, an older model that still shoots beautifully, but not in HD. It’s our dream to upgrade to an HD camera — can you imagine how good the food will look in HD?! Those cameras don’t cost more than a few hundred dollars these days, but you need a good cameraman to shoot, which normally is pretty expensive. Luckily, I’m married to one! Tape is pretty cheap, $100 for a box of 64-minute tapes. We also borrow mics whenever we can, because good sound psychologically makes your visuals look better.

I edit the show on my Macbook Pro, using Final Cut Pro, which is pretty expensive but wonderful. I taught myself how to use Final Cut by using the classes at lynda.com, which is somewhere in the neighbourhood of $20 a month. Food costs are pretty low, about $50 per episode, and we get to eat it afterwards!

What advice would you pass on to someone starting their own YouTube show?

Make your show look good — get someone who can really shoot, who’s got a steady hand, who can shoot from different angles. I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve seen where the cooking show host is just facing the camera head on for the entire video. So boring! And stuffy! Make your show as fluid as possible.

Also, make sure you get close-ups of all the food and action, and capture any natural sound too — they make for nice breaks in the action, just like a little breath. And speak normally, in regular English… don’t try to be anything you aren’t. The more you try to fancy yourself up, the stiffer you’re going to come across.

How long was the show posted before it started to get attention?

At first, my videos got about 100 views, and that stayed pretty steady until I started doing videos for Goodbite.com a couple of months into it. Then the numbers rose to somewhere in the 300-400 region. I realised that when naming my videos, I had to include words/phrases that people would be searching for. For example, my samosa episode got about 1000 views, probably because people were searching for a good samosa recipe. Now that the Food Network Show is about to start, I assume I’ll get somewhere in the region of 10,000 views, fingers crossed!

(Great SEO instincts, Aarti! Learn more about SEO)

Is it difficult to keep up with the schedule and come up with new ideas? What keeps you motivated?

It *is* hard to stay motivated. Toward the end of each season, I inevitably feel like I don’t have any energy or ideas left. But having your husband as your producer is good (and bad!!) for that, because he pushes me when I don’t feel like I have anything left to give. Every season, we try to have the recipes and the variety acts planned out before we start shooting, so I’m not scrambling at the last minute. But, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the ideas for recipes come effortlessly. Sometimes it’s much harder. Usually that’s when I’m overthinking it. And Bren is great at coming up with the variety acts.

What other social media tools/sites/channels do you use to promote the show? Are these critical to its success?

I update my Twitter and Facebook accounts when a new video is up. I also created a fan page for Aarti Paarti on Facebook, and I put the video up on that page first. And, I send out an email to over 500 people with a link to the video. Oh! And of course! I write out the recipe with a back story on my blog, aartipaarti.com.

Why did you go with YouTube over other video sites?

I wanted to put them up on ONE venue so that I wasn’t splitting viewers between sites. I much prefer the video quality and layout of Vimeo, and the cool community of artists gathered there, but I found that some people’s computers couldn’t play their high-quality videos. I also wanted to garner the most eyeballs possible, and since YouTube is still the biggest outlet for videos, I figured that when people want to see online cooking videos, they’d go to YouTube before they went to Vimeo.

How much professional cooking experience/training have you had, and is that more or less important than just getting right to the experiments?

I trained at the New School of Cooking — I find that essential in understanding the science behind cooking, so that when I want to make food with particular flavours and textures, I know how to get there. It shortens the experimentation process. My journalism training definitely helps me write on my blog and stay comfortable on camera.

How important is collaboration for your show?

I couldn’t do my show without collaboration. Full stop. My husband is just as vital to the show as I am. And I couldn’t do it without all the artists who perform on my show!

Did Aarti Paarti help you get selected by The Food Network?

Aarti Paarti gave me weekly practice at my dream job for about a year! Every week, I got a little more comfortable talking to camera, whilst preparing food, which is a little bit like rubbing your tummy whilst tapping your head. That meant, by the time I sent in my application video to the Food Network, I had gotten pretty good at letting my personality and my food style shine through. Being on camera is much harder than you think!

Check out Aarti on The Next Food Network Star premiere this Sunday on The Food Network at 9p/8c, Sunday, June 6.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Marketing, Social Media, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

To quickly load up search engine results with your content and a message of your choosing, I would have to recommend video…

Our task for one particular client was to get page one results fast. We had a very specific phrase to focus on, with actual search counts.

In less than a week, we were able to garner nearly all of the page one results with our targeted keyword phrase using video.

Though YouTube is the tubby in the space – surprisingly, we have seen the same video appear higher in Google search results from “other” video sharing sites. Sites like guba.com and clipshack.com are outranking YouTube on Google – go figure…

A recent news item for our targeted keyword phrase is the only thing beating us today. And given the opportunity with some new videos we could probably own that top spot again.

Not to get to too much into the tactics of the effort… but the video focused on one keyword phrase and one variation, along with a single word description further explaining what the video covered.

A lot has changed in the last two years – like YouTube’s auto closed captioning and auto time code  - with downloadable/editable transcripts/captions – and real time language translation options – to name a few… 

And though our contract completed shortly after the uploads, two years later those optimized videos still own four of the top five results.

Using multiple video sharing sites was crucial to the campaign’s success. We used a free tubemogal.com account to post the video to multiple video sharing sites at the same time.

See Andrew Crowe’s post on getting started with a video, and get your message out there!

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Tom Lynch Categories: Search Engine Optimization, ePiphany Featured Story

It’s true.  The availability of cheap cameras, editing software, and online video hosting services has set an extremely low barrier of entry to the world of digital video.  However, to a beginner, putting all the pieces together might be a little intimidating.  Not to fear!  Getting a video on the internet is only as complicated as you want to make it, and you can maybe even do so using resources you already have.  If you use the one-take editing technique, you can skip the video editing software part altogether.  Just shoot your video, and upload it directly to a free hosting service like YouTube.  Let me outline the basic choices you have for each of three main areas: cameras, hosting services, and editing software.

Cameras

Webcams and Mobile Phones
I start with these together since you may already have one or both!  These days, many laptops and monitors come with embedded webcams, and most mobile phones can take video.  Some phones, like the iPhone for instance, can upload video directly to YouTube.  It doesn’t get any easier than that!  And if you don’t have a phone that takes video, or an embedded webcam, buying a webcam may well be the cheapest way to get started.  You’re not going to get HD quality at the low end of the price scale, and you’ll be constrained by having to be connected to your computer, but you can find useable webcams for around $20.
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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, Gadget, How To, Social Media, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

How do you Google? Chances are you start most of your Internet research at Google.com. You might also have a Gmail account or use Google Calendar to manage your life. And it’s a safe bet you’ve used Google maps and have your own opinion about the street view trucks making sure everyone can see your house. But there is much more to Google than meets the eye.

Google is many things to millions of people. What started as an innovative way to search the Web back in 1998 has grown into one of the world’s largest and most successful companies, now delivering results for more than one billion searches every day using its highly guarded secret sauce. Put simply, Google is what makes the Web usable.

Recently Google has taken great strides to integrate its numerous products and services into a suite of business applications called Google Apps, which can help you with corporate email, shared calendars and documents, groups, websites, and video.

The services are all Web-based, which means you don’t have to worry about servers, maintenance, etc. Just make sure you have a Web connection, get through the basic set-up, and you’re good to go. All the services are seamlessly integrated with each other at a fixed low per-user cost. Google even provides a handy cost savings calculator if you’re using Lotus or Exchange.

As much value as the Business Apps give you, Google’s free apps can deliver even more value. I encourage you to look into:

• Google Analytics to see how your Web site traffic is doing to improve marketing strategy
• Google Alerts to have industry or brand-related articles and comments delivered right to your inbox
• Google Reader to keep all of your blogs and RSS feeds in one place

While Google’s unofficial slogan has emerged as “Don’t be evil,” prominent tech leaders such as Steve Jobs have publicly objected to Google’s claims of holistic do-gooding. Let’s face it, Google is still an enormous company with responsibility to its shareholders. Good and money don’t always line up conveniently in that model, despite the best intentions.

Google continues to face challengers in the search space, such as Facebook, especially as social media continues to fundamentally change the way people access the Web and search for information. More and more people would rather get answers from people they know than the search giant. But stay tuned — Google may just master social search yet.

Keep your eyes open for Google’s latest experiment to revolutionize the way American’s access the Web with the fiber-to-the-home network.

Let me know if you have any questions about Google for Business or increasing your search rankings!

 This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles 

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

People have been serving customers in “real time” ever since there have been customers. So this is not a new concept. In fact, we’re using technology to correct a problem that technology introduced–distance between company and customer.

If someone walks into your store with a problem, you fix it immediately. If a customer calls you on the phone, you talk to them (hopefully) immediately. But what if someone posts something negative about you on Twitter or to an Internet Forum? What then?

Real time search allows you to monitor those types of interactions, complaints, and complements. It’s still your responsibility to respond, but the time needed to find such messages has been greatly reduced.

The lines between marketing and customer service are blurring. Quickly responding to someone on their own turf in a respectful manner has potential not only to set them straight, but also increase the likelihood they will tell other people about your remarkable effort to make it right. And your public response will serve as a permanent record for anyone else who sees the comment.

Twitter is currently the primary source of real time content, but expect others to get on board quickly. Twitter’s success has driven the major search engines to add real time search features to their products. But Twitter still manages the majority of real time traffic, so you can use Twitter’s built-in search engine as a place to hear what people are saying about you. Otherwise, expect popular online listening tools to start accommodating real time search in the near future.

This certainly won’t pre-empt any traditional forms of customer service, but people are out there talking about you online one way or another. You’ll be better off if you’re aware of it, since it’s not just going to go away on it’s own. At the end of the day, you should view this as an opportunity to serve people better.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story