When they were first tried in campaigns by OEMS in late 2009 early 2010 they basically failed. Why?

Simple really, the smartphone adoption needed to drive a successful campaign was just not there! The number of smartphones was only a few % points, so simply not enough scanners out there to drive success.

Now in June 2011, with pretty much every phone being sold to the demographics of interest for some time now having been smartphones, there are enough embedded scanners to try again.

Tesco and others are assuming scanner apps are there (just check out the TV adverts).

So what’s the ideal?

A QR code scanned by the smartphone that uses the users details stored in the smartphone to not only go to the website, but to also fill in their details leaving only the submit to do.

Of course the user would need to agree to this at some stage, but that’s just 2 clicks as opposed to completing a form.

Has to be a winner?

Could not agree more with this! Let’s just hope they take the skin approach and leave the majority to work with and interface that’s proven to work!

Read the full article using the link below

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/05/switched-on-as-windows-loses-its-windows/

At approximately 12.15pm today, Skype crashed for many users around the world, now it's too early to speculate what the issue is or what has happened but this is a key example of how social media is controlling the spread of news around the world.

As soon as my Skype crashed, I was on Twitter (which is very rare, I may update my tweet on average once a week - usually because I forget or am just too busy...) - trying to gain information. The graphs below taken from the Real-time news feed from Google at approximately 12.40pm shows:

Google News Feed mentions of "Skype" on Twitter

Google New Feeds mentions of "Skype Crash" on Twitter

Now the questions that are raised here are as follows:

1) Just two weeks or so since Microsoft brought Skype for $8 Billion - Will this outage be blame on Skype or Microsoft?

2) Is the IT industry too dependent on one solution for all it's VoIP needs

3) What can we learn from this?

well my answers are as follows:

1) People are blaming Microsoft already, so Brand/company loyalty is everything to people... will people begin to find alternatives to Skype though?

2) I use Skype, Everyone I know in business uses Skype, It's the only VoIP and messaging system i feel that has a wide-business like feel to it (MSN for example, to me feels like the software of emo teenagers). so yes, maybe the industry is too dependent but are the alternatives too small to compete against it?

3) That Customers expectations are huge! Let them down a little bit and they will bite your legs off (metaphorically mind!)

Thanks for reading and if you would like to comment on this or even give me your answers to the three questions above I’ve raised then please do or feel free to twitter me @TEECPS

You will most likely be very upset by this article posted on businessinsider

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-i-will-never-ever-hire-a-social-media-expert-2011-5

For me this is what happens when hype takes over.

Sound almost science fiction! But MRI scans are nowhere near as uncommon as they used to be

The nirvana of web site development is to be able to measure accurately what people not only do when they are visiting a site, or other display media, but also how they feel about it  and to do this without having to run huge focus groups which are needed to make the results statistically relevant!

The good news is that a group size of 8 gives and accuracy of 85%. So using MRI is not as costly as what people think.  Therefore by teaming up with research facilities netway and TEEC have a solution that has become financially viable.

The even better news is that because measurement is being undertaken in the un-conscious (sub conscious) mind the same people can be used time and again and the results are not as language specific as you might think.

The trend continues for Microsoft to lose Browser share (in non business browsing at least) but is Google playing fair?

Of course not, why would they! As the world’s dominant search engine they touch everyone almost every day and don't have the same restrictions placed them as Microsoft does.

I personally, now use both Bing and Google as search engines because they do give different results. 

I also use multiple Browsers types, because as a company we have to design for them all.

It seems to me that Chrome rise is due to share of screen time and adverts whilst in mobile it's driven by smartphone adoption. What's it's really doing is not giving user more choice - they all do much the same. But it is making web site development more complex.

I've seen many sites that don't work on chrome and Safari, but only a few on IE.

Reality is that when there was one, the whole web worked, now there are many and quite a lot is broken again.

Who pays? only those that own sites as they have to recode to get chrome, safari etc.

PS I'm not a big Microsoft fan but sometimes having a standard does help!

The idea is that by understanding some of what's shown in the examples, websites can be better constructed

The examples are in a small presentation which you can review using the link below

http://www.teecmf.co.uk/presentations/BehavioralSciences2examples.pps

I'm also colatting the results so I can publish them here later, So please enter your results there

http://marketing.theenterprisecompany.com/mk/get/examplesurveyanswers

Like all technologies before “Cloud computing” makes claims it can’t yet meet.

Although I am a proponent of using the cloud (TEEC itself offers what is effectively a private cloud environment for centralised hosting of SAAS solutions etc.) I find the claims being made very hard to believe. Especially the 100% uptime! 100% is and always will be an aspiration – just look at what happened to Amazon recently when they had an outage that affected 1000’s of companies.

My personal belief is that companies who need to rely on websites and the internet are much better dealing with people. That means Cloud computing needs to have human faces so that when (rather than if) something goes wrong there is someone who can react, explain,  help and knows something about the companies systems.

Right now I would rely on the cloud for

1) Deliverying static assets (like images)

2) Streaming Video

The rest requires very serious planning

An article in the Sunday Times 10th April 2011 reported about parents concerns and advertising to children - See parents concern's below (data derived from TNS poll of parents.  I noted that mobiles peer to peer and like buttons are disliked by parents.

I’m rapidly coming to the opinion that people jumping on the social media bandwagon have not really taken into account all the basics needed to ensure success – See the blog extract from a fellow Marketing Technology blogger "Douglas Karr" - I've quoted him verbatum as I pretty much 100% agree

This time – in my opinion – Mr. Baskin nailed it. Every company has been jumping on the social media bandwagon, increasing marketing spend in that arena, but few are seeing the returns they had hoped for.

Burger King has grilled through a couple of CMOs and fired agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky after producing Facebook campaigns and viral videos that got lots of attention while the business witnessed six consecutive quarters of declining sales. via AdAge

At conferences and with colleagues, I’ve challenged them on numerous occasions to provide me with irrefutable evidence that social media campaigns can be carefully designed, planned and executed with an expected return on investment. The key here is expected… I can set expectations from email, pay per click and search engine optimization campaigns over time… but never social. We’ve not uncovered the magic algorithm to tap into the social psychy yet.

It’s not that I don’t believe there’s value in social media… I do. But I think there are two key elements of leveraging social media effectively:

1. The company wishing to leverage social must already be social! Inviting everyone to a conversation and then not responding, hiding, or trying to spin the response can do more harm than good. Many, if not all, of the successful social media campaigns that pundits write about belong to companies that were already social… before the mediums ever hit.
2. The company wishing to leverage social must have an effective online marketing strategy already in place. That is, they should have great sites, solid blogs, high converting landing pages, great search engine authority and an effective nurturing email strategy.

If you’re trying to leverage social media before you’re effectively utilizing, for example, a nurturing program to close leads that you’ve already developed a relationship and who are subscribed to you… you’re simply nuts. It’s much easier to close business off of established relationships than to throw some fancy, expensive application up on Facebook and expect a better response and return on investment! (Dueling chickens didn’t help sell burgers.)

I believe that social media is an amplifier. When you want to amplify a message – you must first have a relevant message, an audience to distribute it to, and a location for those listeners to come. Get all of your other branding, inbound marketing, search engine optimization, and even corporate blogging in place before you start throwing money at an expanded social media program!

I don’t believe social media is dead as a marketing strategy… I just think it’s always been misdirected as a center of a strategy when it should not be.