Two things are for certain:  1) the internet has changed how and why we do business and 2) smartphones are going to change how and why we use the internet.  With the ever-increasing popularity of using smartphones to access online information, the future of how sites will be built (i.e. how the iPhone has squashed the use of Flash online) and how consumers access your content is here and happening right now.

In a previous post on mobile web strategy, Joe discussed how to get mobile user data from your site’s analytics.  Most site’s analytics tell a much different story from reports as early as even 6 months ago.  The landscape has changed — and will continue to change as more business mobilize their content, developers push the boundaries of what is possible in the mobile web universe.  Takeaway here though is that users are already viewing yours site on their phones… it is not an uncertainty.

A big question for many businesses is “what is better — a mobile app or the mobile web?”  The answer, of course, is “it depends”… but for us we believe for most businesses the answer is “mobile web”.

In a recent article on the Mobile Commerce Daily called “Four reasons why the mobile Web is key to everything”, Bryce Marshall has summed it up beautifully. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Earlier this spring, comScore released data indicating smartphone users are accessing the Web and applications for content at about the same rate.

That is happening now.

Morgan Stanley’s Internet Trends report, and projections for 2010, estimate that access to the Web via mobile devices will outpace access from traditional desktop/laptop devices sometime in 2013. This is the future of Web access from mobile devices.

This data paints an exciting picture of the present and future of mobile connectivity.

But how smartphone users can make those connections, and what steps marketers take to facilitate them with their brands is unclear.

Applications or the mobile Web browser – what is the best way to experience the best of smartphones, and the best of the Web?

Applications undoubtedly provide compelling and engaging experiences for consumers, which make applications compelling for marketers. But the mobile Web is key to everything mobile for consumers and marketers for four primary reasons.

Flexibility

The mobile Web, leveraged effectively, in coordination with a variety of online (SMS, email, mobile search and banner ads, 2D bar codes) and offline (print, point-of-sale, out-of-home) media, creates differentiated and nuanced Web experiences that both support and improve all aspects of the brand-consumer relationship.

Web-entry points and access to content can be customized, delivering contextually-correct experiences. This can be the difference between a more traditional “home page” experience and deep-linking a consumer to product-specific information.

Flexibility means supporting and responding to consumers’ varying preferences in how they use the mobile Web, whether they are completing an online purchase, or finding a store location to help finalize a purchase decision at retail.

Efficiency

A mobile-savvy developer can produce device-specific, user-friendly Web experiences for the majority of mobile Web users at a fraction of the time and resources it takes to create an application experience for the same users across devices.

Add into the cost the additional oversight and compliance processes baked into app stores, and what it takes to promote the application.

More time and resources go into applications. For most brands and campaigns, the marketing objectives can be met with the Web.

Intuitiveness

To borrow a line from Apple’s iPad commercials, “You already know how to use it.”

Consumers already know how the Web works, so nobody is reinventing the wheel. Today’s consumer is hard-wired to go to the Web for any reason, every reason, and for no reason at all.

The mobile Web simply taps into established consumer habits and expectations. You need information? If you have a browser and an Internet connection, the world is at your fingertips.

The stickiness of applications is appealing, there is no doubt. But accessing applications is a habit that users of some devices have learned, and it can be unlearned. The Web is not about to be unlearned.

Inevitability

The greatest shortcoming of the mobile Web today is not the devices and browsers, it is the sites, pages and the content itself. Jumping onto the Web from a smartphone is still a hit-or-miss proposition – regrettably mostly misses in terms of mobile usability.

But top consumer portals and brands already understand that the traditional heavy, deep, flashy Web sites can be substituted with quick, accessible, bite-size Web experiences through social media and mobile-optimized Web experiences and with great success.

In the next 12-24 months, as more consumers go online via the phone, and mainstream brands adapt with mobile-friendly Web experiences, consumer adoption of the mobile Web will explode.

Will applications be dead in two years? No. Applications deliver fantastic user experiences.

When developed smartly, they can be mind-blowing in terms of elegance, simplicity, usability, and engagement.

Applications are the whispers of an exciting future world where everything is small and easy.

But it is clear that the stickiness applications have in the minds of consumers and marketers alike is manufactured (smartly).

We have been trained to abandon hard-wired habits for learned ones, but only temporarily. The mobile Web, for everything it will deliver in the next 12-24 and months and beyond, is the key to everything mobile.

Bryce Marshall is director of strategic services at Knotice, Akron, OH. Reach him at bmarshall@knotice.com.

We’ve been getting a ton of questions about mobile sites these days:

• Should my company build a mobile site?
• Are many people using smart phones to conduct online business?
• Are my customers using their phones to view my site?

Well, hopefully you have Google Analytics installed on your web site to help you figure out how your visitors are using your site. If so, I we can help you answer the above questions and more. If you don’t have it installed, you should consider it. It’s free and gives you a lot of very useful information. If you’d like help or advice about getting Google Analytics or another web metrics package installed, give us a shout and we can help.

Back to the topic at hand, up until a few months ago, isolating mobile visits in a Google Analytics report was a bit trickier. However, about six months ago (at the end of 2009) the Google folks rolled out a new set of reports dedicated to tracking mobile visitors to your site. I’ll show you how to run those reports and, more importantly, what you should be looking for.

Let’s get started:

1. Step 1: Login to your Google Analytics account (http://www.google.com/analytics/) with your Google account user name and password. After logging in, you should be on the “dashboard” screen of your web site.
2. Step 2: In the upper right area of the dashboard you’ll see a date range, and to the right of the ending date, you’ll see a small arrow pointing down, click on that arrow and you can change the date range.
3. Step 3: Select a start date of 01/01/2010; an end date of the most recent Saturday and click the “apply” button. You should now have a date range from the beginning of this year through the most recent full week. This should provide us with enough data to help us answer our original questions above.
   

   Select a timeframe of at least five or six months, that will give you a decent trend for growth.

4. Step 4: Immediately below the date range, you can choose whether you want to graph by daily, weekly or monthly segments; select “weekly” to give us the best view of the data for trending. (If you’re reading the blog post some time in 2011 or beyond, you can select “monthly” if you prefer.)
5. Step 5: Now, let’s navigate to the Mobile report. In the upper left corner of the dashboard, you’ll see the main navigation. Click on the “Visitors” link to expand a list of all available visitor reports.
6. Step 6: There should be a link near the bottom of the choices called “Mobile”. Click on that link and you get two sub-reports, click on the one that says “Mobile Devices”.
7. Step 7: This is our report.

This chart shows a 3x increase in mobile visits since the beginning of the year.

What are we looking for?

• Growth – Look at the trend line (chart above) to see how rapidly your audience is adopting mobile technology into their web-viewing habits.
• Percentage of Overall Site Traffic – Growth is great, but if you are experiencing 4x growth by going from one mobile visitor a month to four, you can probably put mobile initiatives behind other site needs.
• Mobile Visitor Activities – Look at your bounce rates, pages per visit, time on site, etc. If these are lower than your site average, it could mean that mobile users don’t fing your site to be as usable on a phone as on a desk top. If you do decide to build a mobile site, use these numbers as a before-and-after benchmark.

Before making any key changes to your web site, look at your analytics. Nine times out of 10, the data is there to help you make the best decision possible.

We like to peruse the content over at the Harvard Business blogs – it makes us feel super smart.

A recent article entitled “How to Extend Your Customer Experience Through Social Media” offered some additional validation for concepts we’ve discussed here on The Right Click earlier – “Give It Time” “Dedicate Resources” “Define Some Goals” – but also has some interesting thoughts about social media policy development.

For companies large and small, exploring the brave new world of interactive social media can be daunting.  How should you react if someone says something unkind about your company?  How can you interject yourself into a conversation between two people about your company?  For these an other new frontiers it’s important to think through what you wish to convey about yourself, and then make sure everyone in your company understands and adheres to your vision.

Recently I saw a great example of how not to use social media.  On Yelp, a leading review site featuring “real reviews by real people”, a business owner reacted to negative comments with over-the-top angry and insulting responses.  He called the people who reviewed his business names, including using profanity, and generated a firestorm of response inside Yelp for his boorish reactions to what most felt were polite, if negative, comments about people’s experience at his place of business.  The ensuing community response was swift and sure – many people being pointed to his comments who otherwise may not have even seen them, most of them announcing their intent to not only never patronize his business but also warn others about what type of people work there, etc.

In another interesting phenomena of internet communities, some members started doing research into just who owned the business, and tried to ascertain what the exact relationship the person representing the business had.  It turned out he was listed as the “General Manager”, and the Owner’s contact information was rapidly disseminated.

I’m sure you can imagine the notes began flooding into the Owner’s inbox, all decrying the behavior of his General Manager.  Within two hours the Owner was posting apologies to the Yelp community, with assurances that all employees would be “retrained” in not only the proper etiquette of participation in online communities, but in customer service response to negative experiences at their place of business.  The Owner made inroads into undoing the damage caused by his employee, but it would have been much better to have conducted training before any of this took place.

The linked article above provides some starting points to developing some social media policies for your business.  It’s not as difficult as you imagine, most are common sense:

• Define what your company stands for and make sure all employees understand it.
• Make sure anyone with responsibility for posting to your website and social media outlets understands the importance of being polite and respectful, even when it seems most difficult.
• Honesty is the best policy – really.  If you think a complaint has merit, admit it and tell everyone what you’re going to do to prevent another occurrence.
• Be firm but fair.  Some people are just not going to be happy.  You can’t help that, but you can speak your mind and stay consistent.  Most customers appreciate consistency.

Remember, social media is a two-way street.  The best blogs, Facebook groups, Twitter accounts all get people talking.  Monitor your outlets, look to see who’s talking about you.  Get involved in the discussions in a positive way, and don’t just send out marketing messages.  Let the audience know that you’re listening, and reacting, to their thoughts.

Ford Motor Corporation.  Levi Strauss.  Chevron. Starbucks.  What do these big names have in common, besides being corporate behemoths?  They all are on the forefront in using social networking as an essential tool in reaching their customers.

A new article today in USA Today discusses how social networking has made significant inroads into the business world.   What’s nice about this article is that they provide some specific, real-world results of the efforts, something often missing from discussions about effective use of social media tools in the business world.

For example, Intuit, maker of the popular Quickbooks software, launched a new small business site, incorporating Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  The result was that customers flocked to the site and shipments of their flagship product were up 57% year over year.

Papa John’s Pizza launched a Facebook-based marketing campaign and gained thousands of customers, and saw traffic on their website soar by over 250%.

Companies like Comcast and Lenovo are using Twitter to conduct elements of their customer support, and seeing a reduction in call center traffic.

It’s heartening to see some companies realize tangible benefits to their investments in social networking.  All too often you hear more about the ineffective use rather than successes.  Who cares how many Twitter followers you have if it doesn’t benefit your bottom line?  As more and more stories such as this one come out, we expect that more companies will start to evaluate social networking for their own purposes, and we are here to help.

There are the usual caveats, however, as you read stories about these companies’ successes:

• Social networking is not a replacement for other, more traditional marketing tools, but rather an additional tool to leverage.  In fact, the key to success is figuring out how to integrate between all your marketing tools to get the biggest return.
• It takes time to build an audience.  Most all of the successful practitioners have invested time and resources into making sure that their efforts will lead to measurable benefits.  You can’t use the “check box” mentality in this effort, namely just saying “Oh yeah, we have a Twitter account” but not really using it to any specific end.
• Some companies are not particularly suited for social networking.  Most obvious are any industry with tightly regulated information.  Allowing customers to freely post their thoughts could quickly devolve into an administrative or even legal nightmare in such industries.

The article closes with an important warning for those who choose to dismiss social networking in their business plans.  “Companies have no choice.  This is where their customers are going.”

We came across an interesting and brief article which may help businesses decide if social media is worth their time and effort.  Most importantly, the article touches upon some of the points we consistently bring up when discussing social media efforts with out clients:

• How do I measure success?
• Which social media tools should I use?
• How much time and effort will this take?

Let’s face it, social media is an emerging force, and one which is constantly changing.  It can be difficult for companies to justify dedicating resources towards social media, especially when success is not clearly defined.  The use of social media can be a fundamental shift in corporate policy towards marketing, customer services and other areas, or it can be just another “checkbox” which gets token effort and returns token rewards.

Ask yourself some of the questions contained in the article, do the research they outline, and soon enough you’ll have clear vision of whether social media can add a quantifiable benefit to your business.

The answer is — nobody really knows.

Not a big surprise, the Email Standards Project gave Outlook 2007 a “poor” rating when it comes to email standards support –  I guess “piss poor” wasn’t an option.   Not only does 07 limit what we as designers can do from a creative standpoint but it creates a lot of angst with our clients who don’t want to pay for the additional time required to properly test and troubleshoot.

To try and (let’s say) “gently pursued” Microsoft to pay a little attention to the glaring frustration, Fix Outlook (http://www.fixoutlook.org), a Twitter mashup campaigning site, has been created with the goal of getting MS to finally hear the screams from voth the world’s designers and client marketing bugdets.  After 20,000 signatures responded to the campaign, Microsoft released a statement that they are going to stay the course.

So, just when you think we might have rounded the corner to safely wave bye-bye to Outlook 2007 in the rear view mirrors velcroed to our monitors (yeah, we have those), Microsoft has decided to stand with their belief that “Word is the best email authoring experience around” — so looks like MS Word will once again be used for rendering emails in Outlook 2010.

According to the Email Standards Project, “For the next five years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more.”

Good times.

Many of our valued Monkee-Boy clients are in the business of selling their businesses.  They go into business with a  clear path to increase the value of their company, sell it, and buy one of those really nice houses on the lake.  At Monkee-Boy, we often think of retiring 40 or 50 years from now — having too much fun right now to even consider it (but make me an offer I can’t refuse).

If you are considering selling your business it’s useful to look at your company from a buyer’s perspective. Improving your performance in five specific areas critical to a buyer increases the value of your company, leading to a greater selling price for your business. According to the Austin Dale Group, here are the first five “strategic value drivers” that can raise the value of your business. In our next electronic newsletter we will share five more factors to consider.

1. Customer Diversity: If too much business is concentrated in too few of your customers, the value of your business is reduced. If you have this problem (more than 10% of revenues with individual customers), start focusing on a program to diversify.

2. Management Depth: A buyer will look at the quality of the management staff and employees as a major factor in arriving at an acquisition price. Ideally you should assign your successor a year in advance of your scheduled departure date. If you have a strong management team in place, you should try to implement employment contracts, non-compete agreements, and some type of equity participation to keep these stars involved through the transition.

3. Contractually Recurring Revenue: All revenue dollars are not created equal. Revenue dollars from annual maintenance contracts, annual licensing fees, recurring retainer fees, and technology licenses are more powerful value drivers than projected sales revenue, time and materials revenue, or other non-recurring revenue streams.

4. Proprietary Products and Technology: This is an area where the valuation rules do not always apply. If strategic buyers believe that a new technology can be acquired and integrated with their superior distribution channel, they may value your company based on its projected performance after an acquisition. The marketplace rewards effective innovation over commodity-type products and services. Continue to look for ways to innovate in all facets of your business.

5. Penetration of Barriers to Entry: Owning hard-to-get permits, zoning, licenses, or regulatory approvals can be worth a lot to the right buyer. These may include liquor licenses, government contracts, municipal zoning permits, etc.

Source:  Austin Dale Group

Well, it’s (almost) official, the battle for search engine traffic, and it’s associated pattern-matching potential for advertisers, will be fought amongst two giants – Google and Microsoft.  There’s no ‘David’ here, just two ‘Goliaths’.  Hopefully, unlike those old Godzilla versus Mothra movies, we all won’t be running screaming from the two monsters as they duke it out.

As this article in Business Week points out, the big prize here is related to data mining the search habits of the users – trying to convince potential advertisers that you have special knowledge of what people are looking for and how best the advertisers can attract them to their sites.

As of today, Google owns roughly 65% of search engine traffic, and this deal effectively gives the remaining percentage to Microsoft to help boost it’s relatively new Bing search application. In the coming months we’ll all see what the net effect of this merger will be, but in general my hope is that the presence of two giants won’t preclude some other enterprising types to conceive and build a better mousetrap.

After all, when I first found Google and adopted it as my search engine of choice almost 10 years ago, it was merely the brainchild of a couple Stanford grad students, not the looming monolith of today. Google’s minimalistic interface, fast speed – and ultimately – search effectiveness won me over. Even in the face of their ascendance to major power broker, I’ve stayed with them because generally I find what I’m looking for.

Let’s hope this newly-defined battleground doesn’t turn us all into a screaming crowd fleeing as the monsters fight.

You may well ask, with the saturation of blogs out there – enough to require the creation of a new term to encompass them all (blogosphere) – why do we need to add yet another?

Great question!  Blogging has literally exploded on the scene in the past few years, evolving from virtual personal journals to powerful players in such areas as news reporting (especially political news reporting) and information exchange.  In the past year or so, blogging has steadily crept its way into mainstream business operations, adding an exciting new component to the way companies interact with their customers, and the public at large.

As with many new technologies, successful employment of blogging has been spotty.  For every interesting or useful blog, there are a plethora of useless ones.  As people begin to experiment, use and then rely upon technology, lessons are learned (hopefully!) and best practices are developed. We’ll attempt to demystify some of the terminology and help you make sound decisions, with posts such as our “5 Rules to Live By in the Blogosphere“.

Everyone here at Monkee-Boy participates in some sort of blog, whether as author, contributor or just subscriber, and the range of subjects is large and varied.  We’ve logged enough hours in these endeavors to formulate some fairly basic “rules of thumb” to consider when trying to decide if blogging can truly add value to your web operations, and your business success overall.

So why a Monkee-Boy blog?  We’re jumping into the fray to offer our customers and friends a resource to help them navigate the tricky waters of Web 2.0.  We know you trust us to build engaging and effective web sites, to develop sound, measurable marketing programs, and now we’d like to make sure that we offer you the opportunity to discuss with us whatever is on your mind.  We hope you’ll find our blog a useful resource for information and exchange of ideas, and that you’ll comment frequently. Don’t hold back! We want to hear what you’re thinking.

We’ll also publish articles about our work in the community, as it’s very important to us, and we think it helps define us as a company. We’ll also post about interesting things we see or experience related to our core competencies, such as web development and design, marketing and social media, intending to make sure our customers are kept aware of not only the most recent developments in these constantly-evolving fields, but also have access to our opinions about how best to employ them, if at all.

We hope that The Right Click becomes a part of your regular readership, and that you engage us with your comments and questions regularly.  We’re encouraging you to speak to us and our readers in order to gain the most information you can as you look to employ your online resources to the best of their abilities.

So what are you waiting for?