Author: Julie Campbell

Social media marketing may have been misunderstood last year

Social Media Marketing Missed PointExpert smartphone and tablet marketers are wondering if companies missed the point in 2012.

One of the hottest topics in mobile is the crossover of social media marketing content and the SEO practices, with many saying that one simply cannot exist without the contribution of the other.

However, as much as this may sometimes be successfully applied for desktops, mobile may have missed the mark.

According to an Econsultancy publication, SEO and social media marketing content have come together to create a marriage between methodology and technology which currently cannot be broken. There had once been a time in which these were entirely separate thoughts, but that time has long passed.

Unfortunately, many mobile social media marketing campaigns have failed to make this recognition.

This has presented a significant challenge for companies and marketers that have spent the last few years developing strategies that use SEO and social media marketing separately. However, many are saying that it is now vital for those brands to break away from their old habits in order to encourage successes in today’s multichannel marketplace.

According to the data from Econsultancy, 97 percent of online marketers feel that social media marketing on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn can be beneficial to the successes of their companies. This includes everything from nurturing to lead generation. However, all too many of these same individuals are not seeing the connection between the two practices and are therefore failing to experience the full potential of each of those elements.

The report on the site went on to explain that for companies that recognize that the future of search is a combination of social media marketing content and the application of proper SEO techniques, has already arrived. Therefore, those who work to join the early adopters will be able to enjoy a considerable advantage over their competition, who has yet to catch on.

As SEO and social media marketing remain two pathways for driving leads through discovery and for boosting the highly valuable exposure through word of mouth, it is can be considered to be exceptionally important for marketers to see these two practices as a single methodology.

QR codes in picture frames give your guests wireless access

qr codes picture frameHosts can share their network and password details with the quick scan of a barcode.

Among the most commonly requested pieces of information from hosts by their guests is the network name and password so that they can access the wireless internet, and QR codes have now been discovered as an ideal solution to this request in one simple scan.

A new mobile trend has arrived, in which hosts have been framing the barcodes and hanging them.

These unique QR codes have been pre-designed in order to allow party and house guests to be able to simply scan them in order to gain access to the wireless internet in the home. This is proving to be both convenient and practical in today’s society where people feel the need to be connected at every moment.

These QR codes are hung in frames that can be scanned by guests so that they can obtain the data they need.

The trick to taking advantage of these QR codes at a party is to hang them prominently in one of the main areas of the home, and to display them in spaces where guests have a tendency of stepping aside in order to check something online or reply to their emails. Before this option, guests were required to ask their hosts for the login information; a process that could be rather frustrating.

As today’s network passwords need to be rather complex, they are often combinations of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols, and they may or may not use any recognizable words. This can make the exchange of the information rather time consuming and impractical. However, when all it takes is a scan of QR codes, it simplifies the process immediately.

This trend was started by a single person, who posted their successes online. It caught on quickly over the holiday season until it became much more common to see them at the Christmas and New Year celebrations and other parties that were happening at that time of year. It didn’t take long for smartphone users to catch on and start scanning the QR codes to receive the connection they needed.