Still recovering from over a week of sleep-deprived days this month, but it was worth it. Attendance was up this year for Interactive, rumors have been flying that perhaps it was up around 30% over last year. There were so many events and panels this year that some even spilled out of the traditional convention center to neighboring hotels, as far as 6+blocks past to the Sheraton. Which as it has also been stated is where the “real” technology panels and talks happened, away from the fray of wild crowds and parties that surrounded the convention center.

Making a broad statement off of all the panels I attended this year. I have to say most were definitely either a hit or miss…none of which fell in-between, often dependent on the quality of the moderator or ability of the moderator to draw out insights and guide the panel, and since SXSW deploys the scalable way of voting up panels to determine who will speak this leads to panels that have popular speakers (but that doesn’t guarantee the best speakers) or topics, perhaps just ones that are deemed mainstream.

One primary example, well based off my experience, that stands out in my mind is the “SXSW panel: Fan to Fanatic: True Blood’s Marketing Hook” I will admit, I am a fan…Why else would I go, right? In short all I have to say is, Alan Ball was missed/needed. I found that for a show with such vision and impact, that has become so well known, and has such a brilliant marketing team behind it, that they couldn’t carry the attention of well… ironically, their audience. Fortunately, given the vast assortment of panels, the opportunity to find certain topics is available, providing you can easily get to the physical location. I did find the SXSWi app with schedule updater so very handy in planning my day-to-day activities and was able to jump topics on certain panels that ended up not capturing my interests for very long.

I found the importance of networking during SXSW and understanding various social networks very useful and almost bordering as a complete necessity. I attended SXSW when Twitter* first launched, yet this year there were no clear rivals or new-kids-on-the-block/breakout technologies. In my opinion it is because there is an over saturation of products, currently–while innovation certainly isn’t stifled the number similar or ‘like’ products is hard to fathom let allow encourage novices to sift through. (*however that being said Twitter is in it’s fifth year, and coined at hitting over 140 million tweets a day, that’s one hell of a network. Happy Birthday Twitter!)

Among some of the coolest tools I found was SMS/app chat, GroupMe (enables intimate discussions with your most immediate circle) and to which admittedly I have been using for over half of a year now and am pleased to note that it keeps my monthly texting costs at bay within my social circle, but it is NOT new to me. However, during SX it was definitly being heavily used and promoted by this so to speak “early adopter crowd”, even the press picked up on this new trend. * Check out Group-Me Panel highlight reel for info

What about mass broadcasting panels and topics to networks like Twitter, Facebook? Well again, I congratulate the developers behind the SXSWi app, as it was not only a fantastic tool for scheduling, but also went a step further to integrate Gowalla’s location check-in and direct topic post to feed through both Twitter and Facebook. I was impressed almost more-so than with the panels I attended.

This brings me to another point. I found my off-line networking experience to be more prominent in providing me with new resources and contacts then I had experienced in quite a while. While I feel that at times some clients express that online networking can seem like a bizarre and mysterious world to traditional ‘offline’ professionals.  That world is moving at such a rapid pace, but my response is you know more than you think. All social networking leads back to you, me and our interrelation. Many social networking users are loosing site of that including myself at times. It very easy to hide behind the screen.

Upon doing a little discovery on this progression, after one of my many social networking events this SXSW I came across a neat study that boils down off-line to on-line networking to a few base principles.  Here are five ways to translate your existing networking skills onto the Internet environment and vise-versa from Pundit’s entrepreneurs a guide for social media.

*Side note, being a member I have to state my excitement, that the AIGA Launched Design for Good this SXSWi, Asking Members to Donate 5% of Their Time to Social and Civic Causes. NOTE: A positive way to promote your company through social networking is to engage your followers!

1.  Never Sell at Networking Meetings (over saturation)
On the web, forums, comments, and social media sites are your ‘networking meetings’.  Leaving shallow comments at every tangentially relevant site and only recommending your own stuff is the online equivalent to that guy working the room with a thousand business cards.  It’s better to make just a few quality contacts who don’t think you’re a jerk.

2.  Perfect Your Pitch
Offline we learn to craft our speech, a 30 second commercial so to speak to get across who we are and what we do.  On this point, the Internet is definitely your friend.  The profile is your online counterpart to this high-speed sales pitch.  The wonderful thing is you have the opportunity to get these first impressions just right and to adjust them over time.

3.  Give Before You Get
The surest way to foster goodwill both online and off is by being generous with your support.  Want more traffic?  Post lots of links.  Need help with your site design?  Give away what you’re good at.  The key is to offer without expectation of reciprocation.  When you make a habit of giving, the help you need seems to show up automatically just when you need it.

4.  Make Appointments to Network
The Internet is 24/7.  There may be some live chats or forums where people agree to attend during the same real time, but for the most part your networking is not going to be done concurrently.  In other words, you’re likely to have conversations over a staggered period of time.  In order to carve out the necessary time to catch up with online contacts, schedule networking on your calendar just as you would the business building breakfast organized by your traditional professional association.

5.  Patience is THE Virtue
It takes time to build up a network, any network.  It can be difficult at first to observe the effects of your diligent networking when you don’t see your new contacts out for drinks or in line at Starbucks.  How will you know you’re making progress?  The truth is networking is an art, not a science.  It’s difficult to measure – online or off – how your efforts are paying off.  But ask anyone who makes networking a regular part of their professional life and you’ll get a handful of anecdotes about the power of schmooze.

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Bruce quickly dismisses the idea of separate webs. He presented the idea that there is no mobile web, there is just one web. Just like there is no desktop web or tablet web. He supports this with reasons why we should think of a more unified web. He says that rather than creating different desktop and mobile sites (which ultimately confusers the end user) why not create responsive web development using CSS. We are able to use CSS to detect properties such as width, height, device-width, device-height, orientation, resolution and color to name a few using CSS3 Media Queries. Using these properties, we enable our browsers to detect the device settings and offer up proper css styles and rules for a better user experience on the web.

Bruce also presented various tips and tricks for a better mobile web experience, which I will run through below:

1. No browser sniffing for the simple reason that over 100 new browsing solutions appear every day and there is no possible way to cover all those solutions.

2. Don’t use tables for layouts. Tables are heavy on CPU and battery usage on mobile devices.

3. Give width and height dimensions in HTML in your image tags 
( i.e. <img src=”/source/” alt=”" width=”xx” height=”xx” />).

This will enable your browser to make room for these images when loading, rather than guessing the size of these images.

4. Use the <a href=”tel:xxx-xxxx”></a> tag for phone numbers.

5. Future proof your CSS. You do not have to limit your prefixes to -moz and -webkit. You can also throw in -o for opera and -ms for IE, and once these properties are available on those browsers your site will already be CSS3 enabled in those browsers. So for instance when setting up the CSS3 transition property:

-moz-transition
-ms-transition
-o-transition
-webkit-transition
transition

6. Minimize HTTP requests to save on CPU and battery power by combining JavaScript into one file and combining CSS into one file. CSS sprite images can also be used to minimize HTTP requests.

7. CSS optimization:
- use ems instead of px for fonts (for browser scalability)
- use fluid layouts (for landscape and portrait mode flexibility)
- turn off fancy shadows and transitions to conserve on CPU and battery power

8. JavaScript optimization:
- put JavaScript files at the bottom of the source file and especially after CSS.
- if you don’t have you use a library (i.e. jQuery), use your own script.

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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.

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• 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.

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