by Charlie White

This article first appeared on MASHABLE.

Those quick-response (QR) codes you see spreading far and wide give smartphone users a painless way to go to a company’s website, get discounts or gather contact information. But some QR codes are scanned more than others. Why? Is it because those winning QR codes are so creatively designed?

Researchers at Lab42 wanted to know “what makes certain codes so scanworthy,” so they conducted an online survey via social networks of 500 Americans over 18, and found out that many people don’t even know what a QR code is.

For those who are hip to QR codes and what they can do, you might not be surprised at the one enticement most likely to get people to pull out that smartphone and scan a QR code:

Infographic courtesy Lab42

by Erica Swallow

This post was originally seen on MASHABLE.

[via: Colorado Technical University]

by Josh Catone

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

The web, as we know, is a great place to market your business — but only if people can find you. Success in online marketing is contingent upon people being able to locate your web presence. One of the best ways to connect with current and potential customers via the web is to leave your footprint around the Internet and create a trail that leads back to your business.

Leaving your business footprint across the web has a number of benefits, including driving traffic back to your site, building brand awareness, establishing trust and boosting your search engine rankings. There are an almost infinite number of places around the web where you can leave your footprint, but here are four rules for getting the most out of your efforts and attracting notice.

1. Be Everywhere

Social media is a big place. That can be both a boon and a burden for small businesses. On the one hand, it means there is a virtually unlimited number of ways to leave your business footprint around the Internet, but on the other hand, it also can make doing so a very time consuming and overwhelming process. Still, it’s a good idea to be everywhere on the web that your customers are. Your customers will be having a conversation online — even about your business — whether or not you participate. If you’re concerned with creating a healthy, positive brand image, it’s better to participate in those conversations than to stay on the sidelines.

At the very least, it is important for almost every business trying to build their brand online to have a presence on the major social networks. Crissy Gershey, director of sales and marketing for Parties That Cook, maintains active accounts for the business on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, Foursquare and LinkedIn. Because Gershey’s budget is limited, it makes sense to focus on the social media sites where her clients are.

Further, stagnation is a bad thing. If you can’t actively maintain your presence, it might not be a good idea to register an account at all. Social media profiles tend to rank highly in search, so you want to make sure yours is active and properly filled out.

“Be sure to complete profiles on sites most relevant to your business. In my experience on many sites, including OpenForum.com, people do not complete their profiles. Simply completing your profile makes you stand out above the majority or listings,” advises Jeff Huckaby, the CEO of rackAID.

Jim Olenbush, a broker at Cantera Real Estate in Austin, Texas, agrees. “These pages and accounts will also rank highly for your company name, so make sure they present well,” he says. Olenbush also advises maintaining an active presence on local and business review and support sites like Yelp, Merchant Circle and GetSatisfaction. “Research your competitors by searching for their company names. The websites that have references to them or pages about them might also be good places to list your business. This includes review sites, business profile pages, and mentions of companies on industry blogs.”

2. Participate in the Conversation

It’s often said that social media is a conversation. It’s a cliche, but a truism, and getting involved in that conversation presents amazing opportunities for businesses to spread their footprint. From commenting on industry blogs to posting on discussion forums to conversing with your fans on your own social media profiles or your blog, there are plenty of ways to join the conversation and leave a trail back to your site. But there is one golden rule that all businesses should follow: always add something of value.

“It is important for businesses to provide quality input and selfless content,” says Season Lopiccolo, a partner at Noble Studios. “Nobody likes spam. Web users are likely to repel when they are feeling oversold or the content has no value to them. So always make sure your content is clear, concise and to-the-point.”

Mike Schwarz, founder of RibbedTee, learned that lesson the hard way. “When I first started contributing to forum threads, I was more focused on pitching our brand, and less on addressing the topic of discussion,” he recalls. “A few times, I got schooled pretty bad and came to the realization there was a better way to participate. In many cases, I would visit a forum and refer other competitor’s products if it was a solution to the person’s inquiry.”

His lesson? “Help others thoughtfully, and they will in turn consider your products at some time in the future.”

Of course, quality doesn’t mean you can’t be opinionated. Says Lopiccolo, “Allow people to be a little confrontational, even if it means they don’t agree with you. As long as you show that you are listening, clear in your messaging and open for change, the people on the other end reading will continue to stay interested.”

3. Share Your Expertise

“Whatever size business you own, you have the ability to influence countless followers by simply sharing your expertise with others. Everyone has expertise, if you simply decide to share it. And you’ll find that the more you share, the more you learn. Don’t try to hide your ideas, concepts, or creativity — talk it up,” advises Alan Guinn, managing director at The Guinn Consulting Group.

You’re probably an expert in something — after all, you won’t be very successful in your business if you aren’t an expert in it — and sharing that knowledge can establish yourself as a leader in your industry and help to build positive associations with your brand. There are many ways to share your expertise online, including blogging, posting on social media sites and traditional media outreach, but one of the best methods is guest posting on already established blogs.

“Great content is king and everyone wants it,” says Jennifer Nichols, CEO and co-founder of FlackList. “Reach out to blogs with advice editorials to see if they’d be interested in sharing with them their readers in exchange for pushing out the link to your email list or posting on your own company blog.”

“If you have a new idea, or a new way of doing things, write it up and put it online. If you have a new technique for approaching business, don’t be afraid to write it up and post it,” says Guinn.

4. Partner Up

Small businesses generally don’t have the same resources as their well capitalized, enterprise-level competitors, and that can sometimes put them at a competitive disadvantage. One way to mitigate that competitive imbalance is to join forces with other small businesses and create a coalition that has more influence en masse. This strategy can also work when spreading your business footprint around the web.

“One of our key initiatives [for] driving traffic is strategically partnering with other service companies that complement our painting business,” says Ricky Chu, the co-founder of Rayco. Chu has formed partnerships with other local home improvement businesses that target the same clientele. “Since we have implemented cross-promoting our services on our print and web collateral we have increased traffic more than 50%. This is very important because this 50% is coming from targeted customers who are getting work done on their homes.”

According to Matt Griffin, president and CEO of Baker’s Edge, the companies you partner with needn’t always be in your industry. “We like to team up with non-market related companies on projects. Being involved with new faces guarantees new exposure,” he says. “For instance, we have an office Trail Running Team. We like to sponsor local races and participate. It shows us [to be] a more dynamic company, and gets our image out there to places that other kitchenware companies have never thought to tread — have you ever seen a bakeware company sponsor anything aside from a bake off?”

by Aaron Maxwell

This article originally appeared on MASHABLE.

Aaron Maxwell is founder of mobile web design agency Mobile Web Up. You can find him on the agency’s mobile business blog, where he writes about mobile and social media.

Almost every business is gearing up their mobile strategy. No secret why: Mobile is really taking off. There are already more people on the planet who communicate with text messages than with e-mail and more people who own phones than have credit cards, according to the latest statistics.

The difficulty is that there are many facets of mobile technology. Apps, websites and SMS form the broad foundation. But mobile payments and advertising are rich topics on their own. Where do you focus first?

For many companies, the answer has been “an iPhone app” (notice I said iPhone app, not mobile app. More on that later). But people have also been looking into mobile-optimized websites. That has led to a kind of debate in some circles about which is more important. If you’re going to only do one, is it better to make a mobile app or a mobile website?

Apps have one clear advantage. In general, a well-made app can provide a far better user experience than even the best mobile websites are capable of right now. I don’t think this is controversial.

Really, though, what I often see missing from such discussions is cost. It’s often not that hard to make a web app that will work well on most smartphones (depending on the nature of the app — things like graphics-intensive games being an exception, etc.).

But making just a native iPhone app is usually harder than making an equivalent cross-platform web app. And if you want Android and BlackBerry users to be able to have a native app, too, you often have to build each platform from scratch.

Types of Apps

Let’s make an important distinction here. Apps can be divided into:

• Those that are meant to directly generate income, and
• Those that are built for purposes of marketing, branding, or customer service.

The first type is the topic of all those heartwarming stories about some enterprising developer creating an iPhone app in his spare time, from which he is making more than enough to quit his job coding TPS report generators at BoringBigCo. There are also real companies that do create and sell apps, quite successfully. The income comes from charging for the app directly, in-app purchases, and subscriptions, or less directly, through advertising (think Angry Birds on Android).

If you’re charging for your mobile product, a native app is the way to go. A mobile website can’t integrate with iTunes billing, which — in addition to providing a ready market of 125 million mobile users — makes payment a snap. Charging for access to your mobile website will require rolling your own payment solution… a tall order on mobile right now.

While interesting and exciting, this category of mobile app is not really what we’re talking about in this article. What’s relevant is when companies produce apps in the second category, for the purposes of marketing, branding or customer service. Good examples are the Starbucks or Target Stores apps.

These are normally free, since the whole point is to get them distributed as widely as possible. And that changes the discussion completely. If we make an app, how many prospects and customers will it reach? That puts a ceiling on the potential success of the app as a marketing channel.

The Reach Of Different Mobile Channels

From a pure “how many prospects can I reach” perspective, the best mobile marketing tool is text messaging. About 68% percent of American cell phone subscribers sent a text message in late 2010, according to comScore’s mobile market share report.

Of course, you can do things with apps and websites that you can’t do with SMS. So how many people can you reach with an app? And how many with a mobile website?

For mobile websites, it’s easy. The best indicator is how many people actually browse the web on their mobile phones. As of late 2010, it’s currently over 36% of all U.S. mobile phone subscribers. So, about one half as many people as you can reach with a text message.

There is more to the story for apps. I was at the San Francisco de Young museum a couple of weeks ago. They threw a little shindig to celebrate the release of their official mobile app.

The only hitch: You could only install it if you had an iPhone. Those of us with Androids and BlackBerrys couldn’t play. That reflects a current reality with apps. An iPhone app only works on, well, iPhones. Your app has to be made separately for each platform.

In North America, the most important smartphone platforms right now are iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. How many mobile users are on each? Here are the ratios in the U.S., as a percentage of all mobile phone users, for the last quarter of 2010:

• iPhone: 6.75%
• Android: 7.75%
• BlackBerry: 8.53%
• TOTAL: 23.0%

In other words, if you decide to only make an iPhone app, fewer than 7% of all mobile phone users will be able to use it. If the app’s primary purpose is marketing, you’ll need to decide whether this reach is big enough to be worth it.

And if you develop three different apps to cover these three most common platforms, you’re going to potentially triple your cost. All so you can reach only a fraction of the number of people you can get with a mobile website.

To make things worse, I’m ignoring Windows Phone 7. A year from now it may have a very significant market share, thanks to Microsoft’s joint venture with Nokia. Most mobile websites will work fine on the new Nokia/WP7 phones the day they are released. But creating and pushing out a Silverlight mobile app is no small task.

Apps Aren’t Free

The costs for this can add up. There’s no such thing as a “typical” app, so it’s hard to give a meaningful average cost. But as a general working figure, we can say it costs at least $30,000 to design, implement and deploy a brand-quality iPhone app. I haven’t found published studies for the equivalent costs for Android and BlackBerry, but since the device fragmentation is greater, it would makes sense that the costs are at least similar.

All the above means that, at the end of the day, creating a set of mobile native apps that reach, say, 80% of smartphone users is going to be far more expensive than creating a mobile web app that reaches 90% of smartphone users. I don’t even mean twice the cost; I mean more like five, maybe even ten times the cost.

In many situations, that’s acceptable. As noted, sometimes you want to do things that just aren’t possible with a mobile website, at least with good quality. Or maybe it is possible, but you know you can create something of better quality with a native app, so that the result is more engaging. For enterprise-scale organizations like consumer banks and nationwide retail stores, they have the capital, and the ROI justifies it. But if your budget for mobile is under $100,000, it may not be a good approach.

How does a mobile website compare in cost? I haven’t found any published study of the typical cost for mobile web design and development. But from my experience running a company that does just that, I can tell you that it’s almost always less than the $30,000 for an “average” iPhone app.

What’s the ROI?

Given all this, how many prospects will a venture reach per dollar? At a conservative estimate of 234 million U.S. adults with mobile phones, here’s the breakdown:

In other words, you can reach nearly five times as many people per dollar invested with a mobile website rather than a native mobile app. And that’s conservative, assuming it costs just the same to create the BlackBerry app as it does to create the iPhone app (it doesn’t), or that a mobile website will cost the same as an equivalent iPhone app (generally, not even close).

Does this mean you shouldn’t do an app? Of course not. There are many other factors involved. If an app user converts 10 times more frequently, for example, the difference is more than justified. But that’s a big hurdle to clear. And if you want to reach users across more than one mobile platform, you have to consider the extra capital investment as well.

Whether you go with a mobile website, a native mobile app, or both, you’ll probably benefit. The continued mobile explosion will make sure of that. Just take care that you get the most bang for your buck by doing what’s best for your business.

by Sarah Kessler

This article originally appeared on MASHABLE.

Name: Socioclean

Quick Pitch: Socioclean crawls through your Facebook profile photos, groups and wall posts, and alerts you to anything inappropriate.

Genius Idea: In a 2009 Harris Interactive study for CareerBuilder.com, 45% of employers questioned had used social networks to screen job candidates. Thirty-five percent of them decided not to hire a candidate based on what they found.

When this study started to generate press, Priyanshu Harshavat started to think about a way to help job candidates get their social profiles in shape before they were virtually audited by potential employers. The result is Socioclean, a program that scans social profiles for 5,000 words and phrases that are racial, profane, drug-related or alcohol-related.

After a user gives permission for the program to assess his Facebook profile (for now Socioclean is only offered for Facebook — other social networks are on the way), he receives a letter grade and a list of inappropriate items from his profile. Each item has a link to that item on Facebook so that he can easily delete it.

As a generally inoffensive person, I was shocked at how many flagged terms that Socioclean dug up from my profile. Wall messages left by other people were my biggest offense (I got demerits for “beer,” “booze cone” and “hell,” among others). The program also reminded me about the “Aaron Burr, you son of a b**ch” group I had joined sometime during my freshman year of college. I posted one mildly offensive status message to my profile before testing the program, naively thinking that it wouldn’t have much to find otherwise, and it found that as well. Most of my infractions were things that I would never have noticed, and many were innocent — discussing about a bon “fire,” for instance, was flagged as “aggressive.” But it definitely didn’t miss anything. There were enough flags to earn an overall grade of a “D.”

Businesses like Reputation.com and Brand-Yourself also help polish online reputations, but these startups are taking an SEO approach that helps push down negative and pull up positive search results for your name. Socioclean is the only service we know of that focuses on deleting offensive items from your social profiles.

About 5,000 other people and I have run our profiles through the program at no cost. To help make it profitable, the company is currently courting job website and dating website partners. The hope is to offer a social profile scrub as an option to applicants and daters to make them more successful on their respective online services. Socioclean’s developers also created a version of the product for employers who want their employees to self-monitor their social profiles.

Yet another potential revenue source is to sell site licenses to universities to use in their career services departments. Some universities have already expressed interest in helping spruce up their graduates’ online resumes — Syracuse University, for instance, purchased subscriptions to Brand-Yourself for 4,100 of its graduating seniors.

Even if schools decide to teach students to set their Facebook privacy settings instead of similarly embracing Socioclean, there are likely enough situations in which a squeaky clean profile is necessary — college applications, job applications, dating and professional networking included — to keep Socioclean in business.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, thesuperph.

by Christina Warren

This article first appeared on MASHABLE.

The Mobile App Trends Series is sponsored by Sourcebits, a leading product developer for mobile platforms. Sourcebits offers design and development services for iOS, Android, Mobile and Web platforms. Follow Sourcebits on Twitter for recent news and updates.

The mobile application space is exploding. Users increasingly turn to smartphones and tablets to consume and create content, whether on the go or on the couch. The iOS App Store and the Android Market both have app collections in the hundreds of thousands.

Like web or desktop apps, mobile application design is often trend-driven. As mobile platforms have evolved over the last few years, some of the common design practices of the past have ceded to new styles and techniques.

We’ve scoured the App Store and Android Market to highlight seven of the hottest trends in mobile app design.

1. The “Instagram” Effect

In the words (we think) of Pablo Picasso, “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” That adage is true for most creative endeavors and it can certainly be applied to the mobile phone space.

In the past few years, we’ve seen apps like Facebook for iPhone and Twitter (new Tweetie) influence the direction and UX paradigms in mobile applications. Loren Brichter introduced the pull-to-refresh gesture in the first version of Tweetie for iPhone back in 2008, and the technique has since become so commonplace, it has been adopted on multiple app platforms and applications.

Instagram is already proving itself to be the Tweetie or Facebook of 2011. Photo sharing apps are exploding right now, and Instagram is leading the pack in terms of features and user interface.

Need proof? Check out the recently redesigned Picplz for iPhone. The navigational structure of the app has been augmented to mirror Instagram in terms of functionality (which is great, because that makes it easy to use both apps). Likewise, the app now handles filters in a similar way.

We fully expect to see photo apps adopt Instagram’s navigational structure, feed browsing display and instant effects preview well into 2011.

2. Bold, Primary Colors and Gradients With Minimal Gloss

Color is becoming an increasingly popular way for developers to make their apps stand out from the competition.

The first wave of apps created for touchscreen devices often mimicked Apple’s native iOS applications. This makes sense. After all, those components are included within Xcode’s Interface Builder.

What we’re seeing more of, however, is a move away from the iPhone blue and gradient stripe background and a shift to bolder primary colors and gradients. The glossy button look popularized by the Web 2.0 era has been eclipsed by more matte finishes.

Having strong colors in an application can create emotive responses from users, sometimes deeming an app more memorable. If a user remembers an application, he just might pick it up again.

3. Retro Photo Viewfinders

Apps like Hipstamatic and 8mm Vintage Camera [iTunes link] are a great example of how modern technology can be retrofitted to the past.

The real-time video effects within 8mm help create the experience of using an old analog movie camera to capture video. Likewise, the smaller lens window in Hipstamatic — which obscures the full capture area, just like on a real toy camera — is a dead ringer for using an old Holga.

Apps like Instagram and Picplz have shown that applying filters is a great way to make sharing photos more fun. The apps that apply filters in real time, as an image or video is being captured, usually invoke more retro-realist design choices.

4. Texture, Texture, Texture

Along with the trend of bolder primary colors, app developers are also shifting to using textures and patterns in their application backgrounds.

Wood panels are a popular choice and semi-transparent menu items often look great on these types of backdrops. Some apps, like Jamie’s Recipes use textures in the overlapping elements as well.

Texture-driven app designs often use inset text and various levels of transparency.

Texture can add a tremendous amount of personality to an application, but developers should be mindful of how text and button elements look on top of the background. The wrong color choice can make content unreadable or buttons hard to find.

GO Launcher for Android is a good example of how a textured background and shelf paradigm can be applied to the standard Android homescreen.

5. Smooth, Clean Gradients and Shadows for Depth

Some of the trends in mobile app design can be directly traced to the same trends in web design. A big trend in web design is a move towards clean, minimalistic designs.

We’re seeing this in mobile apps as well, particularly with menu and navigational headings. Rather than using the standard iOS or Android menu paradigm, developers are creating their own layouts that, while still appropriate for a finger, look more elegant.

Using shadows to create the perception of depth can give these buttons and interface elements a more “touchable” look and feel, while also appearing more striking.

These shadows can work particularly well in apps that don’t have a simple list view interface. For instance, in the XfinityTV app, the left channel bar can move independently from the main programming section. Rather than just use a grid, Xfinity added shadows to clearly designate both sections. The user can instantly sense that the elements are separate and can be controlled independently.

6. Text Driven Interfaces

We can credit Microsoft and its Windows Phone 7 for making text a mobile design trend.

The earliest mobile apps, of course, were largely text based because text loads quickly over a slow connection and doesn’t require an advanced rendering engine.

Modern mobile apps don’t need to rely on text but as Microsoft has shown us, when used appropriately, text-driven interfaces can be highly usable and great on the eyes.

The best apps that embrace a text-centric approach are those that use text appropriate in context. Text works best when it is large, easy to read and unencumbered by other interface elements.

For example, Weather Quickie is a very sparse weather app that simply tells the weather in the context of current conditions. For instance, “colder than yesterday” or “tomorrow will be warmer than today.” By not showing specific temperatures or forecast conditions, the app is easy to read and understand on the go. Icons can add context for conditions like rain or snow.

Likewise, Trickle is a Twitter app that display tweets in a very readable way, one tweet per screen. You can then choose to favorite or retweet that message before scrolling off to the next. By showing only one tweet per page, the app can be used much more passively than traditional Twitter clients.

7. Thin Sans Serif Fonts

As mobile apps evolve, developers are shifting away from the standard app fonts and utilizing more custom weights, styles and sizes. Like shadows and depth contours, many of the design cues for typography in mobile apps come from the web.

Thin sans serif fonts — usually with some level of drop shadow — are increasingly common place in desktop web design.

On mobile devices, the combination of thinner type and high resolution screens often makes for a more readable experience. It also helps differentiate apps. Thin sans serif fonts are often coupled with text-driven designs or with designs that utilize background texture.

Although some apps are including their own custom fonts for logos or header elements, simply changing the weight and size of a font can make the system default (Helvetica Neue on iOS and Droid Sans on Android) appear totally different.

by Steve Allan

This article originally appeared on B2CMarketingInsider.com

Every day you can find an advice blog on how to improve your social media content. What to tweet. What to post. How often. When.

Much of the advice is helpful and full of common sense tips. The talk about engaging your audience, developing content people care about, listening and responding. I have been guilty of this, too. (See What Makes Great Social Media Content)

Social Media is a hungry beast that is never sated. In order to be a part of the conversation you have to be there every single day. One could make the argument that you need to be visible and relevant several times a day. That requires a lot of content.

How do you fill that void on a consistent and compelling basis?

One word – involvement.

No one knows your business, brand or nonprofit better than you. The goal of social media is to humanize and personalize your operation so your followers feel more connected to what you do. The creation of this emotional bond is at the core of what drives great social media.

The challenge is that most organizations are not equipped to handle this level of information development. Social Media content is a relatively new addition to the workload of many organizations. What eventually happens is that the responsibility for social media content falls on the already overloaded desk of one person. It becomes yet another daily task.

What’s worse is that most organizations do not have a cogent and well communicated plan for what they are going to talk about.

Here is a simple way to solve that problem. Empower everyone in your organization to be a content developer. From the front desk to the back room your people see stories and situations – every single day – that can be translated into solid social media content.

In essence, you want everyone to think like a reporter. They should look at what they do and what they encounter as an opportunity to share. From personal stories to brand benefits to simple acts of kindness or humor – there are a million stories in the Naked City of your organization. You just need to coax them out.

How to do that?

Make social media a team effort. If you make this an organizational mandate it will eventually filter down into everyone’s responsibility list. Once they are actively looking for social media content you will have more than you can handle. And, once they start thinking this way they will generate new and better ideas. In addition, encourage everyone to monitor your social media platforms. They can help you  watch for spam, negative comments and positive opportunities. This has the added benefit of making them more aware of what your organization is doing and saying.

Make it fun. For goodness sakes, do not make it seem like work! Don’t set weekly quotas or benchmarks. This should be a process that people want to participate in. They should get a visceral thrill of finding something post-worthy. If you want to prime the pump set up a weekly or monthly contest for the best content idea. The winner gets a free lunch. Or a day off.

Brainstorm. Have a staff lunch where you ask your people to come up with ideas. Remember, in classic brainstorming sessions there are no bad ideas (even if there are). When you use these ideas be sure to give credit where credit is due. This is a team effort. Your staff is already engaged in social media – most likely during their working hours. Use this to your advantage.

Get visual. Encourage your staff to take pictures and shoot videos. You never know what they’ll find and it adds a richness to your content.

Establish a gatekeeper. This content stream should flow through a narrow funnel of one or two people who know own your organization’s image. Empowerment does not mean anarchy. The last thing you want to do is give everyone admin rights to your Facebook page. There does need to be some order in this chaos.

Set guidelines. While you don’t want to cramp their style you do want to make sure that every staff member realizes they represent the image of the organization. This applies to what they post on their own time. Remind them that if they wish to post for the organization outside your social media space they need to be aware of what is allowable. Using your staff’s personal social networks can help spread your message but you want to be sure they are posting appropriately. The use of the ‘@’ function in Facebook posts is a powerful tool when used wisely.

I realize the title of this post is about improving your social media content in one easy step. Despite all the bold points above that one easy step is getting everyone in your organization – from your CEO to the receptionist – to realize they can have a stake in advancing the goals, cause or image of your organization.

Making this a part of your company’s DNA is a process. It does not happen overnight.

As the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu said: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Start yours today.