Following the key points described in the article below will benefit the design of your home page, landing page, or email marketing campaign.

Landing Page Design Trends for 2012 – Website Magazine – Website Magazine.

Today (or Tuesday in the USA) the announcements finally came out about the new iPhone which will be called an iPhone 4S (rather than an iPhone 5 which will apparently disappoint some people…?). It won’t have the new operating system (iOS5) on initial launch to the market mid October (in the US). iOS5 includes some pretty cool features, including some features that Android smart phone users have been enjoying for some time!

You can read more about iOS5 here.

You can read more about the new iPhone 4S here.

We’re delighted to have recently assisted one of our clients to make their website and online store mobile device friendly. You can check out the results (using your mobile phone of course) via: http://www.henrylangdon.com/

But why would you go to the trouble of making your website mobile device friendly? Browsing the internet via a mobile device is at an all time high, and increasing exponentially. Some statistics: in the US mobile data traffic increased by 260% from 2009 to 2010, and the sale of smart phones outsold the sale of PCs in Q4 2010 for the first time ever.

The availability of the iPhone 3 with it’s superbly easy to use interface, followed by iPhone 4, and the proliferation of HTC and Android devices together with improving data plans from the major telecommunications companies I believe has changed the way we think about browsing the internet. You can find out when a movie is on, answer your question or solve an argument immediately, check what your friends are up to, and find the weather report, all in a matter of seconds without even thinking about booting up your PC or Mac.

Click through to read our “3 preliminary steps for creating a mobile device friendly website“, followed by the “5 activities required to implement your strategy”.

Google has updated it’s Sitelinks functionality, which shows a list of links for a site that it thinks you are searching for, beneath the regular listing of the site. This functionality will help a person who is searching for that particular site to get to the place within the site that they are looking for more quickly.

This article gives more details about the change.

I’m looking forward to trying out Google Plus when it becomes more broadly available than the current field test stage which is only open to a select few by invitation only.

You can take the tour from here: https://plus.google.com/up/start/?sw=1&type=st to learn about it.

I think that the concept of Circles really fixes a difficulty with other social sites – the ability to replicate online the different “circles of people” that you mix with in real life.

As soon as Google Plus is readily available, we’ll be exploring it to see how it can help our clients’ businesses, so stay tuned.

Here’s a great article which considers the differences between Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, and what the advent of Google Plus may mean for social media.

What does the EOFY and the ski season have in common?

Here’s a link to an article which appeared in the Sunday Magazine on the 29th May, 2011 in which my comments are included on the topic of women needing to be assertive in the workplace in order to get ahead.

What do you think about the article / my comments?

Unfortunately they got the company name wrong!

I read the above statement in an article on Business 2 Business Community on the topic of 2011 PR Trends: Email and Social Engagement. The author was saying that the ability to engage with your audience through email isn’t diminished by the advent of social media and sites such as Twitter and Facebook, but instead the engagement can be augmented by making it easy to share your email message via social media as well.

A couple of years ago, we added Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter icons to images available in eNudge and suggested that you should use these to point people to your organisation’s presence on these social sites (review our June 2009 newsletter). Sharing your email content in this way requires you to hyperlink the icons to a version of your email message that you have placed on your website. However, to make this less work for you, we’re considering adding the ability to insert automated links to “tweet this” and “share this on Facebook” to your eNudge email messages. That will allow your contacts to share an online version of your email message (of course without the personalised content) which will be hosted on the eNudge server; a bit like the functionality to “View this email in a browser”. So that we can gauge interest, please let us know by commenting on our blog if you would like the social sharing functionality added!

Coles, Woolworths and Harvey Norman investing heavily in online stores

An article by David Ramli in the Financial Review yesterday with the title “Cole’s high-octane online shopping push” described Cole Supermarket’s trial program allowing customers to purchase groceries online and then collect their order at Coles Express store at a Shell petrol station.  It seems that customer feedback indicated that uptake of online grocery shopping in Australia has been slow, because customers don’t want to wait around at home for their order to arrive.  This new model will allow the customer to collect their order anytime between 3pm and midnight on the appropriate day.  The Shell service station will have large fridges installed to hold customer orders.

Personally, I can see the merit in their new distribution method, having been put off myself from ordering groceries online for the reason mentioned above.  Having groceries delivered to work is not usually convenient either, due to lack of space in the fridge at work and the awkwardness of getting the food home.

Will other retailers be able to piggy-back onto this new distribution channel, particularly those with temperature sensitive products??!  Will impulse buying move to the Coles Express store instead of the supermarket?

In the same article, reference was made to new and significant increases in spending on online stores planned by Woolworths and Harvey Norman (yes, the same Gerry Harvey who condemned online shopping because of it’s impact on Australian retailers).

What do you think?  Would you spend more or less if you ordered your groceries online?  Are you participating in the Cole’s Click and Collect 6 month trial?

You may have noticed some strange looking symbols in your travels recently, a bit like the image on the right. These are called QR codes (2 dimensional barcodes), and can hold a great deal more information than your average barcode, and can be read by a smart phone!

Go on… if you have a smart phone, download a QR Code reader app (see links below), and then read in the code on the right. So… what do you call a dog that shreds things? [you have to view the QR code to get the answer]

How can you utilise QR codes for marketing your business? There are a plethora of articles online giving many different suggestions. Thinking about our clients, we can see the QR Codes being used as follows:

Added to advertising boards for properties, to allow the person driving past the property to get all the details about it on their smart phone including contact details for the real estate agent.
Included in emails, to provide a special offer to use when you walk into the store.
Added to any printed material to provide your contact details in the form of a vcard (used within Outlook Contacts)
An in-store loyalty program – the cafe downstairs from our office is using QR codes in this manner.
Here are some other useful articles on the topic of QR Codes:

- 13 Creative Ways to Use QR Codes for Marketing
- Free online tool to generate a QR Code | Another online QR Code generator
- iPhone App to scan a QR Code
- Android App to scan a QR Code

Have you used a QR Code yet? Tell us about your experience by commenting below.