Marketing in the digital age evolves at breakneck speed, and 2011 was no different. So let’s review some of the big events and trends of the year before jumping headfirst into the inevitable social media marketing madness that awaits in 2012.

Google-Plus: The Arrival of Social Media Fatigue

By far and away the biggest story of the year was the launch of Google+, the search behemoth’s no-holds-barred attempt to go toe-to-toe with Facebook. Or, at least, it got the most headlines. Whether or not Google+ will actually matter in the long run depends on if it can back up all the initial buzz. Growth slowed considerably after a blistering start.

Part of this may be due to social media fatigue. The human brain only has so much bandwidth, and social media has not done much in the way of making the earth spin more slowly and add an hour or two to each day. And Silicon Valley seems to produce a new glittering social media tool once a week these days. If a new social media tool can’t quickly and clearly demonstrate how it will make life easier or better for folks, they’re likely to react by deleting the app, pulling out a hardcover book, and tune out the digital age until spring.

The Lesson? Don’t feel pressured to chase each and every “next big thing.” We can help you know when a social media marketing tool becomes worthwhile.

Still, Statistics Show That Social Media Marketing Matters

For example, Facebook topped 700 million users in 2011. Try to wrap your head around that for a bit. And it’s not showing any major signs of slowing down. In fact, if Google-Plus had any landscape-altering effect, it’s that it made Facebook better. A few years ago, Twitter’s emergence led Facebook to introduce the timeline feature. Google-Plus encouraged the site to vastly improve user controls and privacy issues.

The lesson? Social media is getting woven into more and more parts of our lives — especially Facebook — and it’s hard to see that ever changing. Your company’s potential customers and clients are all over social media sites like Facebook. We can help you connect with them.

Especially… “Location, Location, Location”

That social media still matters is especially true for location-based social media marketing, because it’s everything that the glittering, useless social tools that fail are not: It’s so intuitive. So life-enhancing. So easy. And such a natural utilization of the smartphone explosion. It helps you find businesses. It helps you review them. It helps you recommend the good ones to friends. It connects you with everything in your community that you need. Different social media marketing players are still scrambling to figure out how to best capitalize on these new possibilities, and it’s changing the way we think about SEO in Dallas, but the principle is only going to expand.

The Lesson? A mobile web design is an excellent (nay, critical) thing to have when location-based social media marketing leads customers to your business. Our Dallas mobile web design specialists can help.

Here’s a shocker: A recent study conducted by the eMarketer shows that more and more folks are consuming more and more content on their phones as more and more newspapers and magazines (and the ads that fund them) find themselves headed straight to the recycle bin.

According to Web Pro News:

This year’s figures show that the average adult is spending an hour and five minutes on their mobile device, but only 26 minutes reading a newspaper and an even less amount of time reading magazines (18 minutes). Combined, traditional print media is taking up 44 minutes of your day, a full 21 minutes less than mobile activities.

Time spent on mobile devices is up a whopping 30% from last year. Generic “Internet” time is also up, 7.7% to be exact from two hours and 35 minutes to two hours and 47 minutes.

For the newspaper and magazine industries (and the paper industry, and the ink industry… you get the point), this is a huge problem. But it doesn’t need to be for you. It just means that you need to adjust your marketing strategy — more and more — around where readers are looking:

• Phones
• Tablets
• Computers

Unfortunately, not every medium is the same. Just as how ads your company would place in newspapers, magazines, direct mailers, or any other sort of paper-based marketing medium would each look different, so should your web marketing presence differ for each digital medium. A glossy magazine ad would look somewhat out of place in a newspaper. You wouldn’t roll up a half-page black-and-white newspaper ad and shove it into every front door in the neighborhood.

Similarly, regular websites just aren’t really designed to look good and function flawlessly on a tiny smartphone screen. Even tablets like the iPad are best utilized when websites are designed specifically with their unique features in mind.

A mobile website should be easy for folks to access while walking down the street without a WiFi connection in quick need of specific information like phone numbers or directions. A tablet-specific website should also feature a simplified design, and it’s important to make sure it works flawlessly on devices that don’t allow, say, Flash-based design. Ideally, it should function similarly to an iPad app.

Our Dallas mobile web design specialists are to help you capitalize upon the possibilities of this new mobile generation, and make sure potential customers and clients can find your company where they’re looking for it.

At this rate, you’ll soon be using your phone to pick up the kids, cook dinner, walk the dog, and dream sweet, peaceful dreams.

Google introduced its “Wallet” mobile payments app this week, which represents another important step forward in journey towards total, joyful smartphoneification (it’s a term) of life.

According to ABC News:

In the beginning there were coins. Then there was paper money. Google, a company that has profited as if it were printing money, laments that with only a couple of variations (the charge card, the check), there have been few other ways since the dawn of commerce to pay for things.

And so today it launched Google Wallet, an app on an Android phone that stores virtual versions of your existing plastic cards. Walk into a store or restaurant, tap on a terminal with your smartphone, and you’ve paid your bill.

“Our goal is to make it possible for you to add all of your payment cards to Google Wallet, so you can say goodbye to even the biggest traditional wallets,” said Osama Bedier, Google’s Vice President of Payments.
George Costanza (yes, that George Costanza) explains its obvious handiness for users:

But let’s say your business doesn’t actually sell specific products or services on your website — why does this matter to you? How should you respond?

Whether or not mobile payments will ever affect your business, mobile innovations like Google Wallet will only boost the overall use of smartphones for Internet needs. As folks begin to rely on their phones for more and more aspects of daily activities like communication, navigation, and e-commerce, they’ll expect to be able to use their phones for more simple tasks like browsing and looking up businesses that can meet their needs as well. The easiest way to stay ahead of these growing trends is through a mobile web design.

A mobile-friendly web design is something we emphasize often here at Masterlink. Simply put, if you have any interest in potential customers or clients being able to find you from their smartphones while out and about, you need one. A mobile website is basically just a simplified version of your standard site designed specifically for smart phones that makes it easy as possible for visitors to access the information they need quickly and easily, without having to “pinch and zoom” their way around a info-heavy standard site.

Other interactive marketing elements like local search engine optimization and social media marketing fit into the mobile expansion as well, but a mobile web design is a great place to start. Contact our Dallas web design specialists for more information.

We’ve talked extensively about the growing importance of mobile-friendly websites here on the Masterlink Interactive blog. The idea is simple:

• Smartphone use is exploding across the world, and it’s only becoming more popular.
• Smartphone users surf the web in a much different manner than when using a computer, often while multi-tasking and in need of quick information like phone numbers or driving directions.
• So it’s increasingly important for companies to invest in a mobile website — a version that makes it easy for folks to get the info they need on the fly.

But what about web content? Can you just throw out all the big heavy elements like pictures and incompatible elements like flash and still expect the site to do the job? Will people still “pinch and zoom” their way through a big block of text to find out why they should buy your company’s products and services?

The challenge for mobile web content is two-fold:

1. Get site visitors (who are often distracted) the information they need, without having to read through a big mass of content that isn’t read easily on a small screen.

2. Get site visitors to buy, sign up, come for a visit — whatever the bottom line goal of your website happens to be.

In other words, you can’t rely on the same 300 or 1,000 words to shrewdly promote your business as you would on your standard site. But nor do you need to go to the other extreme and abandon effective web content altogether — the sparkling kind that draws site visitors in, encourages them to look around a while, and effectively “sells” what your company is so proud to be selling.

Striking this balance is difficult, of course, and crafting content that appeals to both customers and local searchers requires a bit of delicate molding. It needs to include actionable information, a scannable design, and concise content that memorably communicates the compelling “big picture” that separates your company from the competition.

Our Dallas mobile web design specialists would love to help. Contact us for more information.

As the growth of the mobile device explodes with almost half of all Americans owning a Smartphone and 57% of those individuals using mobile devices as their primary source of internet access businesses have to consider this massive internet opportunity.

This is great news for all of us out there that rely on our websites to generate leads, sell our products or simply give our customers information about our company.

The bad news… is that when consumers are using their tiny little devices they often times have difficulty navigating or even seeing our full websites.

Web developers have been franticly trying to find solutions to the 79% increase in these devices in 2010 alone. They have found two solutions; build mobile device applications (apps) and now mobile websites using HTML5.

The question is whether one should pursue the road towards the mobile app or the mobile website.

This debate has been going on since the launch of the mobile device some years ago and in our opinion has begun to lean towards one side.

Let me begin by showing you the broad differences between the two:

This diagram highlights the areas that present the most concern when comparing Mobile Apps and Mobile Web. Highlight some details.

1. Development Cost – This can vary tremendously on the basis of how elaborate and advanced you want your app or Mobile site to perform. A very basic, let me reiterate very basic, App with extremely low functionality will run you in the ball park of $30,000. A basic five page mobile website will only cost you roughly $3,000.
2. Maintenance – When considering which mobile route to go you must consider what you are going to have to go through when you need to update or change something about your mobile platform. When you need to change, no matter how small such as updating a phone number or changing some text, with a mobile app this becomes very costly and time consuming.

With a mobile app you would have to rewrite the code in the program, test and then resubmit your app to the app store. With a mobile site and HTML5 all you would need to do is go to your content management system (CMS) and simple make the change. It would then be updated on your mobile site instantly and with virtually no cost.

3. User experience – You want to consider how your users are experiencing your brand through the usage of your website. With the use of mobile apps the user experience is very good considering that the application runs quickly on the device’s hard drive and that it utilizes all the functionality of the device itself.

Now with the development and advancement of HTML5 the same is true. The mobile site is able to use all of the functionality of the device in order to do things such a geo-tracking and utilizing RFID technology. With the advancement of 4g networks that support the device’s internet access, the speed at which the device accesses data is also increasing rapidly.

4. Mobile Device Compatibility – When going mobile, compatibility has been a big issue. With building a mobile app you have to build it specifically build it for a certain type of mobile operating system. You simply cannot build an app for the iPhone and then copy it over to Android and vice versa. And many times when you build an app specifically for the Android it may not even work on all the different type of Android systems. This can become very complicated, time consuming and costly to make sure all the mobile users are able to download and use your mobile app.

   With mobile web, this is not the case. Using HTML5, you can build websites and web apps that allow for a great user experience with anyone using a Smartphone with a web browser. The content is built once allowing for quick builds, saving time and money.

5. Performance – When moving into the mobile realm you must consider performance. Performance is part of the equation when considering user experience which translates directly into whether or not your lead is going to stay on your site long enough to convert. With mobile apps performance is quite good. There is little load time since the application is running off the mobile device’s hard drive and the apps are able to interact with the device giving the users most out of their experience.

When considering mobile devices again, I have to reiterate how the development of HTML5 and its advancement has begun to change the game dramatically. As it closes in on the predicted date of completion, HTML5 has enabled developers to create websites and web apps that have the ability to interact with the mobile devices. This will allow for greater web user experiences by allowing for the site to communicate with the device thus giving the user a greater experience.

There is one more thing that I have to mention that the mobile web developers do not have to consider. This is the constant worry of Mobile app store rejections. When a developer finishes an app they have to submit the app to the app store whether it is the Android app store on the iPhone app store. These app stores then have to preview the app and decide if they are willing to distribute the app. With app store such as Apple’s they are known to reject a large percentage of apps if they do not fit their qualifications.

So is the mobile app dying? It’s hard to say but one thing is for sure, the mobile web via HTML5 is on the rise. With increased performance and functionality, including low maintenance and costs combined with the roughly 154 million Americans using mobile devices to access the internet you don’t want to be the only business out there without a mobile presence.

Imagine a currency backed by no government, bound by no national borders, never printed on paper or minted on nickel, legally ambiguous, and governed only by the faith and wisdom of the people who design and use it.

The bitcoin is a new, all-digital currency that you’ll never put in your pocket. It’s cash for the Internet-era. It’s fast, flexible, and well-suited for the mobile web use — a true techno-libertarian invention.

And it’s worth understanding, not because you’ll need to use it anytime soon—in fact, you probably never will—but rather because of what it can teach us about our new smartphone-saturated, mobile-web-marketing age.

The Economist explains:

Bitcoin, the world’s “first decentralised digital currency”, was devised in 2009 by programmer Satoshi Nakomoto (thought not to be his—or her—real name). Unlike other virtual monies—like Second Life’s Linden dollars, for instance—it does not have a central clearing house run by a single company or organisation. Nor is it pegged to any real-world currency, which it resembles in that it can be used to purchase real-world goods and services, not just virtual ones. However, rather than rely on a central monetary authority to monitor, verify and approve transactions, and manage the money supply, Bitcoin is underwritten by a peer-to-peer network akin to file-sharing services like BitTorrent.

Similar to real-world currencies, supply is limited in order to create scarcity and value. In fact, similar to gold, bitcoins are released into the public through a process called “mining” — basically, a labor intensive digital process that you’d need a supercomputer to complete. From there, bitcoins are traded like any other currency. For the most part, bitcoins are used to buy stuff online, but a handful of restaurants and stores accept them as well. Just take along your smartphone, transfer bitcoins from your account to the vendor’s, and get on with your day.

In fact, the always-enriching Planet Money did a insightful podcast exploring the bitcoin, including a scene where the reporting crew tries to actually buy lunch with the currency. (Listen to the whole thing — it’s worth the time for anyone trying to understand the future of e-commerce and smartphone-powered business).

So how does the bitcoin currently apply to your business? Well… it doesn’t, really.

If you can’t tell bitcoins from the itsy-bitsy spider, your business isn’t going to fall behind your competition the way you could without a social media marketing or local SEO presence. In fact, as you’d hear later on in the podcast, there’s a good chance bitcoins won’t even exist in five or ten years. The currency is facing some pretty steep, fundamental challenges.

But bitcoins are giving us an illuminating look at how the web can change everything in the blink of an eye, as well as enriching lesson about how currencies, markets, and commerce actually work.

And digital payment systems are, in fact, becoming an everyday part of how we do business, especially as mobile web use becomes more and more integrated into our daily lives. As we’ve mentioned in the past, companies like Google, Facebook, Paypal, and Square (owned by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey) are scrambling to make it easier and easier for folks to pay for stuff both online and in real life. It matters.

The bitcoin, of course, just takes it all a step further. It’s worth a look.

Kady Bentley: Hey everyone, my name is Kady, SEO Specialist and Project Manager here at Masterlink Interactive. Today my goal is to convey the importance of mobile websites and why they should be a part of your business marketing plan. We’re living in a world where we fly by the seat of our pants. We try to keep up with our day to day tasks and anything that makes it more convenient less time consuming is always a bonus and tools that do that are definitely worth your investment. Mobile websites are one of those tools that your customers will find useful in order ti find out your business information. Basically at Masterlink, we try to focus on different key features for mobile websites, but a few of them in particular I’d like to highlight are that it’s essential on a mobile website to feature your contact information and your driving directions so customers can find your information easily, they don’t have to search through your website so they can get to you sooner.

Displaying this information in large fonts that are easy to read is also a benefit instead of having to scroll, like on an iPhone where you can maximize font size, but if you already have it portrayed larger, it’s easier for the customer to see what they’re looking for and get to you.

Also, having simple navigation is very key. Since 3G is fast, but not super fast, if you have a navigation that is condensed and only focusing on the main things you’d like to highlight, it will make speed times faster and people will be able to find your information quicker.

If you’d like to learn more about mobile websites and how they can help your business, we are definitely here to help you contact Masterlink and we’d be happy to get you to the next level of marketing.

Millions more people bought smartphones last year. Millions more dollars worth of 3G infrastructure was built.

In fact, as we mentioned a month ago here on the Masterlink blog, nearly half a billion smart phones are expected to be sold worldwide in 2011. And in 2012, smartphones are expected to steamroll past computers as the primary way the world surfs the web.

According to comScore Senior Vice President Mark Donovan:

“2010 was a game-changing year for the mobile industry. Smartphone adoption, 3G penetration and unlimited data plans drove a surge of mobile media consumption across geographies and deepened the integration of mobile devices into everyday life.

And, the coming year has the potential to be even more exciting. As the mobile ecosystem continues to develop, including progress in mobile advertising and commerce, it’s clear that mobile is destined to become an increasingly important platform for digital marketers across all industries.”

Millions more people, therefore, began gorging on the glorious trough we call the world wide web from mobile phones — people who want your products and services, but who just want for you to make it as easy for them as possible to get them on the fly.

Is your company ready for this new reality?

At Masterlink, we’re telling every small business that will listen that a mobile-version of their website is an absolute necessity in order to thrive in this new age. Mobile web design is specifically tailored for the strengths and weaknesses of smartphones with a few important elements:

• Easy access to essential information like contact info and driving directions.
• Large fonts for easy reading on a small phone.
• Simple navigation to make up for slower 3G speeds.

So let’s imagine a couple ways your company could suffer without a mobile site:

– Let’s say you own a small Thai restaurant in Dallas. You do all the basic Internet marketing things you should—e.g. you get listed on Google Maps and Yelp, etc., employ a solid SEO strategy that moves you to a page-one ranking, and earn rave reviews as a true green curry garden—but you don’t have a mobile-friendly website. Your heavy, thick-with-content regular website overwhelms a smartphone user—let’s call him Hungry Hal—who ends up looking for a website that’s a little bit more digestible.

Meanwhile, a competing pad Thai palace features a simplified mobile website, with clear driving directions and contact information, a mobile-friendly menu, and a single, eye-popping plate of pad krapow that hooks Hungry Hal and lures him in.

– Or let’s say you own a store, just down the street from a competitor. A shopper there can actually scan a barcode with their smartphone (or, thanks to recent innovations from Google, just simply snap a picture of the thing), and immediately pull up a list of prices for the same product not only from sites like Amazon.com, but nearby competing stores like yours.

If you don’t have a strong web presence, you won’t show up on that list. And if you don’t have a mobile website that makes it easy for the shopper to find your store’s contact information, driving directions, and essential info about your products and services, they probably won’t bother making the extra effort to stop by and buy.

The point is simple—mobile web usage is exploding. Don’t get left behind. Contact one of our Dallas mobile web design specialists for more information.

If your company’s face, contact info, primary sales pitch, and product and service information can’t be easily accessed from a palm-sized black box just about anywhere in America, then, well, you might be about to fall way, way behind.

According to CNN:

Smartphones have been growing at an unbelievable clip over the past year but they still account for only around a third of all phones in the US and an even smaller percentage internationally.  In developing countries, the price of smartphones, aside from some ‘quasi-smart’ Nokias are out of reach for all but the elite. India and China each have billion plus populations and growing middle classes, but neither country is even at a 10% market penetration of smartphones.

Globally, market intelligence firm IDC counted 269.6 million smartphones sold this year, compared to the 173.5 million units shipped in 2009.

In 2011, we might see half a billion phones sold worldwide.  Smartphones will likely blow by traditional computers next year as the way most of the world gains access to the Internet.

Incredible, right?

In addition to growth from emerging mega-economies like China and India, the surge will most likely be led by Android phones, thanks to their increased variety of carriers and flexibility (in 2010, Android phones grew from 30,000 activations a day to 300,000 activations/day—a number that might triple in 2011). Don’t limit your expectations for Steve Jobs’s gang, though. Verizon’s addition of the iPhone to their lineup of phones will probably attract many customers who had been waiting for such a move to happen before jumping into the smartphone game (in other words, folks who have been eager to specifically get an iPhone, but who have been hesitant or unable to leave contracts with Verizon).

The bottom line? Mobile sites matter. Why?

More Mobile Shopping

Another study recently released demonstrated that shopping done on smartphones, quite naturally, is exploding right alongside the general smartphone growth. More and more, customers are figuring out how to use smartphones to compare prices, check reviews, and look up product specifications—in addition to looking up basic info like phone numbers and driving directions.

According to Web Pro News:

People are using mobile phones to access websites and apps more than ever before, with 33 percent using their phones to access a retailer website, and an additional 26% indicated they plan to access retailer websites or mobile apps by phone in the future, according to a new report from ForeSee Results.

“It looks like more than half of all shoppers will soon be using their mobile phones for retail purposes,” said Kevin Ertell, vice president of Retail Strategy at ForeSee Results and author of today’s report.

“Any retailer not actively working to develop, measure, and refine its mobile experience is leaving money on the table for competitors.”

The report also noted that shoppers who enjoy their mobile experience with a store are 30 percent more likely to buy from them offline as well. 11 percent of web shoppers reported making a purchase from their phones (over just two percent last year).

Even if your business isn’t in retail, these reports still show just how much smartphones are changing the landscape of web-usage. By making it easier to access information like contact numbers, driving directions, and service availability, a mobile web design simply makes it easy for willing customers and clients to find you.

Make sure your company doesn’t get stuck behind the curve on these trends. Our Dallas mobile web design and mobile marketing experts can help.

New year. New possibilities. A fresh look for your company might just be a great way to start 2011 off on the right foot.

Let’s review for a bit what’s possible, what’s emerging, and what you should demand from your company’s web design:

Catchy, Competent Content and Design

We use flash animation to grab attention. We build attractive sites that accurately reflect your company’s capability, history, and service to society. We use compelling web content to inform visitors, pique their curiosity, pull them further into the site, answer their questions, and satisfy what it is they came to find. We design our sites to be intuitive and easily navigable, based on user-tested navigation patterns. And we employ a host of cutting-edge e-commerce applications that make it easy to get on with the actual business of doing business.

Cutting Edge SEO

Search engine optimization, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, is the process of making a website rank high in the search results for certain relevant term. For example, if you own a auto body shop in Dallas, you’ll probably want to see your site at the top of the results page when someone searches for “Dallas auto body shop.” In other words, you’ll want to be there when customers come looking for you.

It’s a tricky process, however, because the big search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) are constantly tweaking their search algorithms to perfect their own functionality goals—and they’re not exactly eager to tell everyone what they change and when they do it.

The last thing most business owners we work with want to do is spend their days tracking these endless, minute changes and figuring out how to stay atop a search results page. But at Masterlink, we’re a little bit obsessed with it, because we understand just how important a healthy search ranking is for our clients. And we employ a multi-pronged approach to optimized web design, seamlessly integrating into our clients’ sites (and updating) all the elements that search engines love.

Mobile Websites

We talk about it all the time here on the Masterlink blog, but mobile websites simply matter. Increasingly. Smartphone usage has caught fire, and with each passing year, more and more people expect to be able to surf the web and find the information they need (from companies like yours) while out and about.

At Masterlink, we design mobile versions of websites that are uniquely tailored to the needs and expectations of smartphone users—and these days, we offer iPad and tablet-friendly web designs as well.  This means simplified sites featuring larger text, fewer graphics, easy access to information like phone numbers, maps, and driving directions, and easy opt-outs to the regular, more detailed sites. And we design these sites without sacrificing your company’s well-crafted marketing angles that shrewdly pull visitors further into your site.

Check out our online web design portfolio, or contact our Dallas web design gurus for more information. Let’s make it a great year.