Social interactions are hugely influential on travel customers when they are looking a sorting out a holiday/trip, with recommendations from friends having more weight than a piece of advertising. This can also be thought of as your customers influencing their friends and effectively becoming ambassadors to your brand.

For the travel industry, the local aspect of SoLoMo is obviously important due to customers wanting to know information about where they are going or wanting to discover information once they are at the physical location. 1 in 3 searches done from mobile phones in 2011 had local intent, meaning that people are looking for information from their immediate area.

Back in September we said the 26% of the western population had a smartphone and that the number of people owning them was increasing by 3% each month. New predictions suggest that percentage of people owning smartphones will go beyond 50% in 2012. Add the fact that the mobile phone is one of the few personal possession that travel customers take on their holidays, you now have an extremely strong reason to engage with your customers on mobile devices.

As we look into 2012 and beyond we can see that travel customers are accessing information and sharing their experiences in real time from their location aware smartphones and tablets.

SoLoMo Strategy

Mobile websites and applications need to be robust, cater for all sizes of smartphone screens and have clear navigation. It is also important to has cross channel consistency because it is likely that visitors to your website might of been on your desktop site or seen your social media presence and will expect to navigate around your mobile site in a similar fashion to the desktop and for it to have the same aesthetics.

For local, the most important action is to make sure that all the location information about your hotels, attractions or destinations are correct. Without correct local information any strategy you implement will be immediately ineffective. Once all the geo-location information is correct then, thanks to location aware devices, your mobile website or application can access the user’s location in order to provide then with the most relevant information for their area. This could take the form of showing the user where your nearest hotel is, information about the local area or public transport information.

With a robust mobile website that can provide location based information the next step would be to integrate social functionality to allow users to easily share the information they have found or use services like Facebook connect to create a more personal mobile experience. Social media integration can go further than just sharing experiences, it can help users to ask for recommendations from their friends through the likes of Facebook and Twitter, rate a product.

Although we’ve talked briefly about SoLoMo as a whole package, they can also easily exist separately and paired together in order to achieve your business objectives. If you would like to discuss SoLoMo in more depth and how it can work for your organisation then please get in touch.

With the Tensar International website, we used the Sitecore system to build a multi-lingual site that used a strong visual navigation. With Sitecore we were easily able to incorporate a number of tools including Share Point and Sage CRM.

IMI Cornelius’ website includes a comprehensive e-Commerce system to complement its full catalogue of products available on the site.

Our recently announced Sue Ryder partnership will involve a Sitecore project and we look forward to other projects that will come from being a Certified Solution Partner.

Following on from our previous Mobile Showdown post, the Smartphone market is starting to once again heat up.

When it comes to the smartphones, nothing can touch the iPhone. It is by far the most popular handset in the world, has the highest number of applications in its market place and it can only be a positive thing that when every single smartphone is released comparisons are invarably made with Apple’s benchmark. The iPhone’s dominance is still strong but has stuttered recently with the ever increasing rise of the Android OS.

The iPhone handset may, individually, still be best selling in the world but 2010 saw the Android mobile operating system outsell the iPhone for the first time due to it’s availability on multiple handsets from Motorola, HTC and Sony Ericsson.

The announcement of the Android 2.2 update, code named Froyo, confirmed what a lot of people were hoping for from the update, Flash being available on a mobile device. This also tied in with the worldwide release of the free turn-by-turn navigation with Google Maps, which stuck fear into the hearts of Garmin and TomTom.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have an early release of Froyo for over a week now, giving me the opportunity to play with the latest update to see how well Flash works.

On a whole having Flash on your mobile does improve the online experience of the net while on the move. There is no need for multiple applications that give you access to on-demand television, watch online videos, or play your favourite online flash games because they are all accessible in the browser.

To say that Flash 10.1 works perfectly would be a lie. It has issues with ability to perform actions that require a precise click because we are working with a 3.7 inch screen after all and there is a noticeable lag when the browser is loading flash heavy sites. The update is not yet on general release and we can only hope that issues that have arisen will be sorted by the time it is available to the public.

Although it is too soon to say whether Android will emerge as the dominate mobile OS it is setting itself up as the strongest contender and we are all looking at Apple to announce its worst kept secret, the iPhone 4G.

Well we developed an app for that…

The free Manchester Airport iPhone application is an essential tool for those flying out, flying in and even collecting friends or family from Manchester Airport. It has been designed to save both time, money and enable the traveller to plan their journey and time in the terminals more productively, be it exploring the many retail outlets or airport lounges.

The Manchester Airport iPhone application is the perfect accompaniment for both business and leisure travellers.

The key features of the application allow you to:

• Explore each terminal through the interactive map
• Car park booking – Save money and time by pre-booking your car parking
• View a Google map of each terminal and get directions to and from the airport
• Get real time flight information for arrivals and departures.

The Manchester Airport iPhone application is available to download from the AppStore now for free and more information about the app can be found at the Manchester Airport website.

For too long now events like this have been the property of London, dragging the digital world to capital and delivering a thoroughly mediocre affair. It’s about time the North had a platform to attract an international audience, and show our selves off a bit.

SAScon is a truly international event, with celebrated practitioners from the US, Spain, Holland, Belgium and Iceland sharing the stage with some of Manchester’s own, Paul Fabretti from Gabba and Neil Hardy from the Co-operative group to name but two. Personally I can’t wait to hear some more on the darker arts of SEO from Ralph Tegtmeier, who, according to Aaron Wall, is “one of the most insightful minds and original voices in the search game”.

A great deal of credit needs to go to SEMPO and Manchester Digital for delivering SAScon at a time when the digital landscape in the North demands it. We have some of the most innovative minds and cutting edge ideas, not just with the digital agencies, but with the digital departments of our regions forward thinking companies.

Up here in’t North have always been willing to take a punt, always keen support and embrace new initiatives, happenings and events, as the success of Manc Twestival proved. SAScon has the potential to be a permanent fixture on the digital calendar for digital marketeers from around the country. If you can make it, please go, it will be great to see you there.

www.sascon.co.uk

@sasconference

#sascon

The KMP Digitata Team

KMP Digitata is looking for an account executive with up to 2 years experience to join our dedicated client services team. Reporting to the Client Services Director this role is hands on, client facing with responsibility and accountability not only for creating and delivering digital strategies for our clients but developing and growing these client accounts through proactive, original thinking.

Your clients will be in the travel, financial, retail and manufacturing sectors.  A mix of B2B and B2C experience would be ideal.   Your experience to date will mean that you are proficient in managing projects/campaigns in areas such as website development and CMS, ecommerce, analytics, email marketing and social media plus mobile applications would be useful.

You will be a self starter but a team player and someone who ensures delivery from start to finish. You will have an interest and appreciation of the latest industry trends, geekiness is encouraged and you must love all things digital.

We stress this is not a project managers role because, amongst others, you will be working with our Studio Manager who manages the delivery of all projects through our Interactive and Technical departments. Your role will be understanding client’s markets, customers and business objectives followed by conceiving, developing and selling in strategic and tactical digital campaigns with amazing and measurable ROI and then facilitating their delivery.

Responsibilities:

Client Service responsibilities include

Demonstrates bigger picture understanding of client’s marketing strategy and can communicate how current data insights/tactics associate with longer-term strategy objectives

Anticipates client questions and has thought out answers/solutions

Ability to take complex ideas and explain to clients

Always thinking about how we can better serve clients and grow their business

Ability to manage difficult and complex issues

Owns area of expertise and can confidently answer client/team questions

Presents at client meetings and industry events as needed

Willing to go above and beyond the call of duty to delight the client and deliver excellent service

Demonstrates thinking/communicating from the client’s perspective as well as KMP Digitata’s

Account Management responsibilities include

Performs day-to-day client contact

Facilitates/leads weekly client calls

Prioritizes & sets expectations on deliverables

Manages all tactical client communication and cross team coordination

Multiple channel management as needed (web, mobile, search, email, etc.)

Competitive analysis

Research

Application/ Campaign Management skills/responsibilities should include:

ROI arguments and case building

Application/Campaign planning

Application/Campaign execution

Site optimization

Delivery of Q/A

Strategy/Analysis skills/responsibilities should include:

Post campaign ROI research

Forecasting

Support Media/online marketing  strategies

Internal or agency needs:

Sales forecasting & budget allocation

Quality assurance

Accounting reconciliation

Deal making experience

Timesheet submission weekly

Qualifications:

Excel and MS Office proficiency required

Google Analytics or other similar analytics experience preferred

Exceptional written and verbal communication skills

Strong time-management and organizational skills

Strong client-service orientation and proven team player

Flexible to evolving responsibilities and last minute changes

Ability to easily work with data and come up with insights

Trained in client service skills where relevant

General knowledge of research tools

Education and/or Experience:

BA/BSc or equivalent experience required

Internet and/or traditional marketing experience preferred

Salary commensurate with experience

Apply to recruitment@kmp.co.uk with CV and covering letter stating your current salary

No Agencies

Ask questions at panels either during or at the end. All the speakers are more than happy to talk. Just so you understand the scale of  SXSW, there are about 15-20 events (panels, keynotes, lounges, trade show events) starting simultaneously each hour of the day from 9am to 5pm from the Friday through the weekend till the Wednesday. Then there are the evening sponsored mixer events of which there were about 3 or 4 each night, dotted around Austin starting early doors 6-8pm. The major sponsored events started at 8pm and went on till 2am. Believe me its a marathon not a sprint and there were several who peaked too soon!

My advice would be to pick a mixture of different types of events in advance. So some panels, some keynotes etc and try new topics or events with weird titles or unusual speakers. Have second choices as well because some get full quickly. Don’t get drawn into attending just events that you have a personal specialism in. Some people did that and came away frustrated that they already knew the stuff they had just listened to. The fact is if you are a bit of a social media guru already for example, you should be on top of your game anyway, so perhaps go to some of the more geeky stuff about SM and try out a few other new topics. You’ll be amazed who you sit next to and what you learn. Also I learned that if you don’t like what you are hearing it is perfectly acceptable just to get up and politely exit stage left.

Street art Austin style

Austin is a compact city and the convention centre, where the trade show and most of the events are, is central with some events spilling to the adjacent Hilton or Radisson Town Lake. Bottom line is you can walk everywhere as long as you stay in either the aformentioned Radisson Town Lake as I and most of the Digital Mission did or the Four Seasons or the Hilton or the Marriott Courtyard. This also affords walking in the evening to the famous 6th Street where most of the mixer events are hosted. Beware hotels out of town or near the airport as taxis take their toll. As I have said in previous posts about SXSW,  Austinness is extremely important to the success of SXSW. The city and its people are fantastic.

I now appreciate the US market and how to set up business there. I also learnt that usefulness is often better than innovation because of the sheer scale of the opportunity in the US.

Smart/engaging/ pioneering people to follow (There were so many but here are 4 less well known)

1/. Brynn Evans – Social Anthropologist

A great slideshow from Brynn http://www.slideshare.net/bmevans/designing-for-sociality-in-enterprise-search

http://brynnevans.com/

@brynn

2/. Max Ventilla – Rich smart guy whose business was bought by Google

User driven design http://ventilla.posterous.com/preaching-user-driven-design

http://vark.com/

@ventilla

3/. Valerie Casey – Inspiring co-founder of Designers Accord

Graphic of Val Casey's keynote

Surely the most inspiring speaker all week

www.designersaccord.org

@valcasey

4/. Clara Shih – Author of the Facebook Era and CEO of Hearsay Labs

http://www.thefacebookera.com

@Clarashih

What is going to be huge (if the following are obvious to you then apologies)

Spotify when they break into the US (No brainer, but Android mobile app looked great)

Twitter’s @store – Because everyone loves Twitter

Mobile video and open source video technologies (Down with YouTube and Flash etc) – Especially as mobile devices will overtake PCs globally as the method of choice for viewing video by 2013.

Social search –  Not only on the basis that networked people prefer to consult their network first before Google for knowledge, but there are now technologies out there that will select from your network based on social graph, your combined intimacy and their expertise who is best placed to answer your question.

Sustainability in interactive design – As interactive and technical  designers begin to consider the overarching sustainability of the systems they are scoping and implementing.

What’s still got a way to go

Location based services – monetization, monetization and monetization, yep same old same old. However I believe privacy is a bigger issue here.

Thanks

Chinwag team for organising a great Digital Mission – Sam, Emily, Juliet, Benjamin and Ed. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rki37vgGmwk[/youtube]

Shawn O’Keefe (no relation I think)  - Along with Hugh Forrest, Shawn is Event Producer for SXSWi, which means he is quite a busy chap but he still found time to come and speak to the Digital Mission on the opening day of SXSWi to give us some tips for getting the best out of the event.

Miles Galliford of Subhub, Chris Lee of Qhub, Rob Smith of Blueleaf, Jonathan Palmer of Mobilized, James Mayes of TweetJobs, Ted Han of VideoJuicer, Karen Barber of AudioBoo, Jasper Westaway of OneDrum, for keeping me entertained

Rackspace,  Mashable, Rudy’s, the worst BBQ in Texas (their line not mine)

Rudy's - Worst BBQ in Texas (Their line not mine)

Until next time. Its been memorable. Goodnight SXSW, Jon Keefe has left the building, please move towards your nearest exit.

Finally I will leave you with the Unicorn Kid, great headgear. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tQ7ZYo7a3s[/youtube]

Yesterday (Saturday) was another full day of selling, networking and information upload. I discovered that BcToolkit is well liked and has merit, even the chaps at AKQA thought is was great and are going to give it a whirl. Thanks guys

There is a lot of talk from service-based companies trying to move away from services and into products because of the revenue visibility, IP and low direct costs. This is another notion that satisfies me seeing as as that is where we have been for the last 12-18 months with Ackura and Bctoolkit. The other thing that I learn’t is that unless you are trying to build a billion dollar corporation fast, then your product doesn’t have to be that staggering or innovative because there is space in the market.  What is important is that your product has to do what you say it will, and do it well. Focus on those core issues. A good analagy I heard was if you are going to open up a hot dog stand, focus on the hot dog not the stand or the mustard or the bun because without the hot dog you just have a “Stand”. There are tonnes of small business owners with one or two “me-too” tech products sold SaaS style that make a nice living thank you very much. The differentiator is often the niche markets that they are being sold into. I met a guy whose name I didn’t catch, he had a CMS for car retailers. The only unique thing about it was that he had packaged it as “The” CMS for car retailers. The web is the small guys friend in this respect because it allows them to compete in a way that wasn’t there 10 years ago.

Last night was the official opening party for SXSW as the film buffs have all started to arrive. It was held at The MACC (Mexican and American CulturalCentre) and it was an outdoor extravaganza which was basically a one night festival type gathering. One entertaining point in the evening was when a budding script writer approached myself and my partner in crime Miles Galliford @subhub and asked us if we would give him feedback on his script synopsis. Hmm maybe we shouldn’t have been so straight forward, anyway I hope they got him down from the roof OK.

Crowdsourced car from Local Motors

On the way to the event Miles and I happened across the latest crowd-sourced car from Local  Motors, the car manufacturer aiming to turn the car industry up side down by building cars based on the most popular suggestions and ideas from the likes of you and I. So if you fancy a car like this then sign up because the top voted contributors all get to buy one.

At these places you bump into interesting entreprenurial people who otherwise, let’s be honest, you would probabaly never meet. For example I enjoyed conversations with Alicia Navarro co-founder of Skimlinks, the simplified affiliate marketing company (which by the way is a great concept), Michael Smith co-founder of Hotbox which went on to become Firebox and Charlie Osmond from SM people Fresh Networks.

Finally I’ll sign off with some short iphone video of Natal ( this is a link to an official Microsoft video), which was well used at the event. It is, if you want my humble opinion, going to revolutionise the way we decorate or build houses because in a couple of years time every house will include in it somewhere a massive plain white wall. Enjoy[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fameGvjMTC0[/youtube]

The announcement was made on the 10/11th of August that Google had been working for months on a new update for it’s search engine. Code named: Caffeine.

SEO experts hold their breath everytime an Algorithm changes because it affects rankings and they could see their months of work, getting higher up the rankings and developing techniques to beat their competition in the SERPs, all destroyed in a matter of minutes. Others may experience a caffeine kick and jump up the listings.

So the SEO community breathed a sigh of relief when it was announced that the Caffeine Update is similar to the Big Daddy Update back in Dec 2005 and that the changes made were “under the hood”. Google describe this update as;

“A next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.” – Google Blog.

Since the initial announcement we have had a month to test the New Google to see how things compare to the old. You can see how your site ranks on both the current Google and Google Caffeine here. WebProNews also managed to get an interview with Matt Cutts about Caffeine at San Jose Search Engine Strategies 2009, where he explains the changes made to the new structure of Google.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovbjCsQtfCk&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fuser%2Fientry&feature=player_profilepage#t=41[/youtube]

What does this mean for the average Googler?

The answer: Not really that much. The aim of this update, as with all updates, is to improve the users experience and find more accurate results for them. The person using Google wont notice the fact that speed of the search listings has now be increased, with results returned in 0.19 seconds rather then 0.3, and the number of indexed sites has increased from 752,000 to 1,220,000 (searches done on my name, we all do it), but it does show that the update has improved the indexing capabilities and this should improve the ease for the user to find what they are looking for.

As mentioned earlier on the Google Blog, the new infrastructure is just the first step, meaning that there are more changes to come. Does this mean an algorthim change? Maybe a more decisive move to take on twitter and its ability to provide breaking news?

Whatever Google has planned for the future, the search engine community are watching carefully and preparing for when the Caffeine Update goes live (date yet to be announced).

All about browsers

To start with, so we’re all on a level playing field I thought we ought to describe what a browser is, so for those that don’t know:

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser

So what exactly is graded browser support?

By their very nature different browsers will render pages and sites differently. This is be because the specifications have been interpretted differently and because of visual aspects such as form fields that have different border colours or shapes. Graded browser support is the process of providing a level of support for browsers in relation to the features they can can or cannot display. This in no way should affect the ability for a user to access the content though, it is primarily for visual appearance.

At KMP we’ve begun implementing graded browser support on almost all of our recent projects. The reasons for this are wide and varied but include: helping our clients save money by cutting down on our development time and allowing us to learn and use up and coming technologies such as HTML 5 and CSS3. Companies like Yahoo have been doing this for a while and have implemented graded browser support tables.

Let’s look at an example

If you are viewing this site in a browser like Firefox or Safari you will see the main content areas have rounded corners and have some transparency, however if you’re viewing the site in Internet Explorer the content areas have square corners and a solid fill colour, this is what we mean by graded browser support. It has also been called Progressive Enhancement or Graceful Degredation.

Why should websites look different in different browsers?

A primary reason for websites looking different between browsers is that by doing so we can cut down development time, which helps both us and our customers save money. For example, if I needed to create the exact same layout of this site for Internet Explorer 6 I would have to either use Javascript or write a lot more HTML. Jeremy Keith wrote a good article about this last year on 24ways.

Another reason for browsers not having to look the same is that our users are primarily interested in the content of our sites not how it looks. This is especially true with the content distribution taking place with RSS feed, meaning that a user may not even visit your site to read your content, it could be viewed in Google Reader, Bloglines or any other RSS aggregator.

Conclusion

To wrap up, it’s our belief at KMP that sites should be usable and acccessibile across all browsers and devices but they don’t have to look identical. You don’t have to just take our word for it though, even the government’s own guidelines say the same thing.

You should check that the content, functionality and display all work as intended. However, there may be minor differences in the way that the website is displayed. The intent is not that it should be pixel perfect across browsers, but that a user of a particular browser does not notice anything appears wrong.

http://www.coi.gov.uk/guidance.php?page=212

We’d love to know your thoughts on whether browsers should look the same in every browser, so why not get the discussion going by leaving a comment below.