B1BLOG

Recent arti­cles, news and com­men­tary got me think­ing about how the whole land­scape of social media is shift­ing and that mobile is key to how peo­ple will use and inter­act with social media which will affect every­one oper­at­ing in this space, includ­ing Facebook.

See­ing this chart from Chetan Sharma Con­sult­ing makes me think that the world has gone slightly mad if there are more mobile devices out there than peo­ple who have access to fresh water.

It seems only yes­ter­day that I wrote my last post on QR Codes, but just checked and it was last Novem­ber and my god has a lot hap­pened! Maybe, just maybe, they’re catch­ing on.

Despite encour­ag­ing signs in 2010, there were many who just believed that QR Codes, or mobile bar codes, were purely an interim tech­nol­ogy wait­ing for the newer, funkier tech­nolo­gies such as NFC and aug­mented real­ity to get their act together and take over. But, as is the way, this hasn’t hap­pened yet. Sure, things have pro­gressed, but they still do not yet offer com­pelling rea­sons for mobile manufacturers/networks to make the invest­ment to uni­ver­sally include them. This is due to, amongst other things, some inter­op­er­abil­ity issues between Wik­i­tude and Layar tech­nol­ogy, the debate over user inter­faces and the pros and cons of real-time ver­sus cached data.

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In 2010 we saw plenty of inno­va­tion from the search engines and social net­works, but what’s in store for 2011? I expect the inno­va­tion to con­tinue with a fur­ther push into real-time dis­play, AdWords automa­tion and, ulti­mately, less focus on key­words and more on mar­ket­ing objectives.

Keyword-less search mar­ket­ing and Google Boost

Google is hard at work gain­ing more adver­tis­ers by low­er­ing the bar­rier (i.e. cost) for AdWords self-service. Over the years we’ve seen new mod­els such as cost-per-lead for com­par­i­son — and prod­uct list­ing —  ads. These, in my view, are only the first few steps into the keyword-less search mar­ket­ing expe­ri­ence.

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With the B2B mar­ket­ing crowd get­ting increas­ingly excited about All Things Mobile, we’ve been ask­ing our­selves what we should be doing about our online con­tent, to make it acces­si­ble through mul­ti­ple devices, par­tic­u­larly our blog.

I thought it was high time we took action, so I had a look at our ana­lyt­ics to find out exactly which types of mobile devices were used to access our site, what per­cent­age of our over­all traf­fic they rep­re­sented, and what the growth rates were.

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We’re con­stantly look­ing for ways to improve our vis­i­tors’ expe­ri­ence and have recently made a few small tweaks to the B1 Blog which we hope you’ll like.

First, we’ve added a ‘related posts’ sec­tion to the bot­tom of every post (using YARPP). It’s incred­i­bly easy to install and use and depend­ing on the weight­ings you choose, can tighten or widen the net as necessary.

Sec­ondly, we’ve added a ‘Tweet’ and ‘Like’ but­ton to the top of each post as we felt that the but­tons on the left-hand side­bar were per­haps not promi­nent enough. What do you think?

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2011 may very well be the year of mobile for mar­keters. A num­ber of fac­tors are com­bin­ing to make mobile as key and excit­ing a mar­ket­ing plat­form as online was in the early 2000’s.

Crit­i­cal mass

Dri­ving the rev­o­lu­tion is the fact that smart­phone pen­e­tra­tion has now reached crit­i­cal mass. Accord­ing to Comscore’s State of Mobile report pub­lished in June, 1 in 4 Euro­peans already have a smart­phone, so beyond SMS and pho­tos, web access and apps are now becom­ing key uses for  mobiles.

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