Why Mobile Marketing is important for your business!

This Video is having some interesting statistic content on Mobile Marketing with Smartphones. The animation, music, and the style of presentation is awesome for the content. It explains about why mobile marketing and mobile websites are important for your business. 

The top 10 twitter profiles, I follow everyday

[caption id="attachment_847" align="aligncenter" width="432"] Top 10 Twitter Profiles, I follow[/caption]

Hi everyone! Are you using twitter? Are you tweeting every day? That’s great. But are your spending some quality time to read tweets from others? Well, you should do.

I read tweets from others using tweet deck in my smartphone. I can add important profiles and save some keywords search queries for anytime reference – it is a fantastic smartphone utility app for twitter particularly.

Here, I would like to share the top 10 twitter profiles I follow and read every day – I am sure, some of you are already following these people, but for others – I recommend, please follow them for regular updates. Their tweets are really impressive, informative and motivational.

1#. Robin Sharma: @_robin_sharma : Global Nomad+Author of the #1 bestseller The #Leader Who Had No Title.

2#. Guy Kawasaki : @GuyKawasaki :Author of APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. Former chief evangelist of Apple.

3#. Eugene Kaspersky : @e_kaspersky : Chairman and CEO of #Kaspersky Lab.

4#. Tim O'Reilly : @timoreilly : Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media.

5#. Robert Clay : @marketingwizdom : INTJ Entrepreneur; strategist; author; speaker and business mentor to aspiring market leaders.

6#. Pam Moore : @PamMktgNut : 50% mktg, 50% geek, CEO entrepreneur, social brand strategist, speaker, author.

7#. Kareem Shaker : @kareemshaker : Blogger, Geek, Project & Program Management Professional, Social Media Fan, Leadership Evangelist, a Theory Y Manager & Dreaming of a Better World!

8#. Avinash Kaushik : @avinash  : Author, Web Analytics 2.0 & Web Analytics: An Hour A Day | Digital Marketing Evangelist, Google | Co-Founder, Market Motive

9#. Ilya Pozin : @ilyaNeverSleeps : Founder of Ciplex. Columnist for Inc, Forbes & LinkedIn. Gadget lover, investor, mentor, husband, father, and '30 Under 30' entrepreneur.

10#. Paul Isakson : @paulisakson : Creative/strategist making things that matter. Interested in #Creativity, #Culture, #Technology and #Business. Especially where they intersect.

So that’s the first cut list – there are more in fact. Share from your following list, it can be useful to others too. And yes, my twitter ID is @gvmuthu FYI.

Have a great day friends.

Smartphone Security - An Essential Guide

Smartphone security from Muthu Kumar

6 success tips for business from your websites

[caption id="attachment_813" align="aligncenter" width="432"] 6 success tips for business from your websites[/caption]

The first thing is – a happy birthday to Internet. Yes, today is the 30^th birthday for Internet.

Internet Websites are an essential element for modern business days. It can be a personal, organization, product specific or sometimes service specific. A website is not just HTML information on internet, but it is a brand value of you / your company or your product / service. Many websites even act as online sales points through its e-commerce channels. A strategic report from investornews, pcworld and hubspot says that approx 571 new websites are created every minute throughout the world around us.

Well, do you have your website for personal brand promotion or to promote the brand value of your organization?  How do you reach international customers to create an awareness of your product /service? In my study, many non-IT Smallbiz and enterprises are having websites but those are just HTML pages. I see this scenario in many IT startups too.  The point is the website is live, but it is not active to its audience. It always provides some static information from their business catalogs, and images from their photo gallery.

4^th Week of Dec 2012 - I participated in a group discussion with Smallbiz owners. Some of them are from IT startups too. I presented a strategy model for them to create / improve their websites and active information management. The goal of the strategy is to increase the brand value and improve the business transactions through their website. I would like to share some of the important points from our discussion here.

#1: Simple Website: The website should be simple. It means it should be understandable to any kind of visitor. Simple navigations, and easily understandable icons / photos / information diagrams can increase the readability of content. Use Color wheel theories to understand the minimal usage of colors, and site-map model to build navigations. The content should be updated regularly.

#2: Fast Loading: The fast loading website gets more attention from users. I always suggest avoiding flash and shockwave content in business websites. It is required only in specific sections for example:  a workflow demo of your ERP product. JQuery is good for simple web slideshows, photo galleries and UI designs. JQuery loads fast, provides impressive results with its new versions now days. Similarly HTML5, AJAX and other JavaScript frameworks helps improving performance of websites.

#3: Understand your visitors: Analytics is the best way, to do a reach on visitors and their actions. Google Analytics is the free one available, but there are many paid analytics systems to help us – some of them are not costly. Every website should be connected with an analytics engine to capture visitor activities. It required very less programming knowledge to integrate an analytics engine, but to evaluate the results from analytics engine, you need a strategist. A strategist can guide you about content planning, goal setting, bounce rate management and visitor count management.

#4: Connect with World: Social Media is an active marketing space in India from 2010 – but very fewer companies are utilizing it for business brand promotions. Facebook, YouTube and Blogs should be connected with your website to create more visibility. The URL of the website should be promoted though Social Media channels with every post and campaign.  Create engagement programs through social media and guide the users to website for more details: for example – to download an eBook or watch a video. Search Engine Promotions are also required – you can use free plug-ins available to download. A strategist can help you to build promotion strategies and insights analytics.

#5: Think about Mobile: Approx 30%* of visitors use their mobile devices/smartphone to browse internet now days. If your website is not responsive, it may not show content in expected way. Make sure, the website works for all required mobile device resolutions, and changes its shape accordingly. There are many free validation tools available to test the website with various resolutions. The alternative idea is to create a sub-domain for mobile users [m.yoursite.com] and redirect them to it via a small code script. Mobile website development needs some frameworks to build fast loading and content delivery – for example Wordpress for Mobile-sites. A strategist can help you to build technically qualified mobile version of website.

#6: Build a small web-store: E-commerce is for selling products / services online. But a web store can provide something even for free [for example: EBooks, PPT, PDF files etc]. Let the content be relevant to your products / services [example: manuals, learning books etc]. It creates a reason for visitors to increase their frequency every time. Talk about your updates in social channels to improve awareness. Take the suggestions from a strategist for more ideas.

I hope the above mentioned points are useful to you too. If you have questions and suggestions – please communicate with me.

UX – the strategy for successful mobile solutions

[caption id="attachment_804" align="aligncenter" width="432"] UX – the strategy for successful mobile solutions[/caption]

“Mobile is the new face of Engagement” says Ted Schadler and John McCarthy, in their White Paper on ‘How enterprise mobile systems are going to empower customers and employees with context-aware apps’.  They estimate, by 2016, Smartphones and tablets will put power in the pockets of a billion global consumers. I am seeing wide range of articles and discussions on Enterprise mobility management, Enterprise Content access and collaboration solutions, and also on mobilizing UCC (Unified Communications and Collaborations) with Mobile Office Development.

It clearly shows the extensive range of opportunities for Mobile solutions development, and numerous start-up companies already started to work on cutting edge technologies to provide solutions.

As a part of my strategist profession, I also do reviews of many beta versions of such solutions; and I found a surprising gap between the requirement and solutions. It is nothing but End-User-Experience. The majority of the Mobile solutions are developed to solve the functional requirements of a business cases, but unfortunately they are missing the User Experience part of it.

[caption id="attachment_805" align="aligncenter" width="700"] The User Experience wheel [Image Courtesy: Diego Lago][/caption]Well, what is User Experience? Wikipedia says “User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership, but it also includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system.”

Being a mentor to many mobile development teams, I strongly suggest developers to use basic standards of User Experience in their solutions. Most of developers do ‘Coding’- and they think that’s all their job is. In my cases, I involve the developers in UI design phase too. They should understand at least the basics of clickable parts of the app, the application navigation from the end-user point of view, searchable content design, styling the UI components and visual feedbacks. In one of the recent discussion with an android app development team, I explained how they can design apps with multi-device compatibility using UI factors – which is an important strategy to reach more users.

The best User Experience makes the application user friendly, and it improves the usage of the application compare to other similar apps for same purposes. The User Experience is a business strategy too for impressing many users.  The organizations should focus to train their developers on User Experience through their designers or though a design expert. This cross functional training will definitely help in improving quality standards of mobile solutions.

Well, share your thoughts friends.

How foursquare can help branding?

[caption id="attachment_798" align="aligncenter" width="432"] How foursquare can help branding?[/caption]

I am using foursquare. I use it in every important place I check-in. It may be offices, client places, public meeting places, vacation sports, restaurants, shopping spots, business seminars and sometimes even on the way to a relaxing location in weekends. One of my business clients noted and followed all my check-ins in foursquare [Thanks to Facebook Activities] and showed interest about it. He wanted to understand how this tiny app can be used for his Smallbiz brand promotion. Well, it’s an opportunity for me too – by explaining about personal branding and Smallbiz branding strategies.

Let me share few key points I discussed, and I am sure this will be useful for any personal branding and Smallbiz branding practices.

I am using the status message of foursquare check-in to mention about my business services mostly. For example: if I am in a client place for UI design assignment, I ‘Check-in’ and put status as “Working on UI Design of a brand new mobile application here”  - that messages helps me to advertise my services in all foursquare connected social networks too (mainly Facebook). Friends & Friend of Friends notice it, and through that I get more business connections.

I create places in foursquare, and I frequently check-in to those places. I post photos of that place, advertise information about that place (well, free of cost) – and that makes me the “MAYOR”. The Mayor badge is not having any special benefit from foursquare (looking for some impressive offers J), but It helps me to access the management of that place and introduce myself, mention about how I am promoting their place and services. Many times, I received positive feedbacks – and this improves my connection strength high. Of course I get official discounts too along with business opportunities.

Promoting “YOU” as a brand is very important in social media – for various purposes. What is your life-style, what you do, what you like, what you say – everything is having a meaning in social media. It improves followers and friends. It improves your personal and business value [For ex: Robin Sharma – my Guru]. Foursquare is a way to track our business / personal activities and share a thought though it. Remember – your brand value is your value in business and now days, it is also your personal value.

So, that’s about it. The recent good news is, today morning I got a new opportunity to build a personal branding website for the client and that will be used to display his social activities too.

Microsoft ASP.NET - Platform for Mobile WEB Apps

[caption id="attachment_794" align="aligncenter" width="432"] Microsoft ASP.NET - Platform for Mobile WEB Apps[/caption]

Mobile WEB Apps – the next big business word for Start-up Smallbiz communities. Well, everyone is talking about these web apps, accessible through mobile devices for quite long time – but how many Indian start-ups really made business out of it. There are few mini social networks and shopping sites showing good growth but very less in other areas for example: productivity, travel, etc.

Mobile Web App is not just porting the existing Web app into mobile device for flexible access. I see many products are not considering about benefit able UI for mobile device, performance issues, etc. When I discussed in forums, many companies accepted that they are using the same web development strategy for their mobile web apps development too.

Recently I met a small team of developers at Coimbatore. They are in .NET programming for past 3 years – pretty fresher community, and I discussed with them on best practices in mobile web apps development through ASP.NET / SQL Server as technical background.  They invested for a Windows Web Server hosting and their products are mostly on LBS + M-Commerce.

Microsoft ASP.net for Mobile is an excellent platform - you can download Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Express or Microsoft Web Matrix for Development and start developing apps. Build you knowledge in HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript / Jquery for advance Mobile Web Forms Development and rest all with ASP.net & SQL server programming  [of course you have to do a little study on mobile web controls too]. I used Microsoft visual web developer 2010 express for my practices. MSDN support is always available and developer community meetings provide great help.

The UI and performance strategies should be improved and there, I am supporting the Smallbiz teams. They take care of development of a product and my job is to make it perfect for users. For more information on using Microsoft ASP.NET Mobile WEB development – send me an email and follow me on twitter.