Digital Agencies of the Future

Technology Trends Among People of Color On September 16, 2010 Pew Internet Project Senior Research Specialist Aaron Smith spoke to the Center for American Progress Internet Advocacy Roundtable about three trends in minority technology use. The outline of his discussion (along with links to the relevant research) is posted below. One of the themes of the Q&A involved the challenges in studying the Asian-American population. For an overview of some of these challenges (along with other sources of useful data) see our blog post on the topic. Trend #1: The internet and broadband populations have become more diverse over the last decade, although key disparities do remain

10 Emerging Social Platforms and How Businesses Can Use Them At the Social Marketers Summit in Prague today, I spoke on 10 of the most intriguing, but lesser known, location-based, Q&A, press and microblogging social platforms out there and how more businesses can start using them. The PowerPoint presentation is embedded below, and the following information expands upon it, acting as a guide to how businesses can get their hands dirty with these platforms. If your business is already active on the platforms mentioned, let us know how you are using them in the comments below.

Checking in Hotel Web Design: 50 Cosy Hotel Websites and Trends Hotels go to great lengths to provide the perfect ambiance and atmosphere for their customers. However, most hotels overlook the importance of having an accessible website that serves as an alternative gateway to draw customers’ interest in staying at their hotel. Hotels mostly cater to an international crowd. Other than the frequent business executives who practically live in hotels most of the year, majority of their clientele have never stayed at their hotel before.

Mobile Web Design: Best Practices The explosion in user adoption of mobile devices has revolutionized the web. Though designing for the Mobile Web follow similar principles to designing websites, we must consider some notable differences. For one, current mobile device networks don’t run in the same speed as broadband devices. In addition, there are also a myriad of ways our mobile web designs are displayed in, from touch screens to netbooks, which make even the smallest desktop monitors look like giants.

Mobile Phone Use ‘Exploding’ in E-Commerce, Study Shows More than half of all online consumers in the United States either already are using or plan to use their mobile phones for shopping, according to a new study. Thirty-three percent of the 10,000 e-commerce shoppers questioned by ForeSee Results indicated they had accessed a retailer’s website using a mobile phone during the 2010 holiday season, compared with 24 percent in 2009. An additional 26 percent said they planned to use a mobile phone to visit a retailer’s website, mobile website or mobile app in the future. “Mobile purchase behavior is exploding,” the study said. Other findings of the study include:

How to Connect With Millennials Two recent pieces provide some context and insights for how to best connect with the Millennial generation (broadly, spanning ages 11-31, born between 1978 and 2000) – who we know to be key to many brands’ long-term business relevance, as well as significant consumers of digital media. A piece at Marketing Sherpa discussed consumer psychologist Kit Yarrow’s year-long research project on Generation Y, which yielded insights into their motivations and interests. These insights can be applied by marketers to develop messages that will resonate with this audience: Visuals and symbolism resonate: Gen Ys prefer to process visual information – including analogies and symbolic communication like stories, metaphors and charts – vs. verbal or textual information. Experiences designed for them should be intuitive and easily understood at first exposure (and sight).

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Read 360i’s Mobile Marketing Playbook « Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency 360i’s Mobile Marketing Playbook » Download the Mobile Marketing Playbook. Are you ready for the decade of mobile? 360i’s Mobile Marketing Playbook will give you a head start preparing for it. For the past decade, every year has been the ‘Year of Mobile,’ and marketers could understandably experience mobile fatigue even before planning their first campaign thanks to all that hype.

40 Quality Websites with Circular Logos During 2010 an interesting website design trend has risen. Before we get in, you might say “Thats just the logo, just because its circle doesn’t mean its a trend.” I understand and totally agree with thats statement. However based on the facts, web designers would like their logo to be round on the website, just so it smoothly fits in with the design. UI Guidelines for mobile and tablet web app design Official user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) guidelines from the manufacturers, links to which you can find below, are a source of inspiration for mobile web and app design. Here, you will find guidelines, samples, tips, and descriptions of common mistakes. Many of the guidelines focus on native application development, but we can apply most parts of them to mobile web design too. Remember to provide the best possible experience on each platform.

With Apps, First Impressions Are King. Here's 3 Keys to Getting Them Right Everyone on the web (read: that tiny subclass of "everyone" that gets paid to care about social networking apps) was shooting their mouth off last week about the latest'n'greatest app on the block, a $41-million funded doohickey called "Color." The brainchild of Bill Nguyen (a tech entrepreneur so adept at playing venture-capital roulette that he's successfully launched eight previous startups), Color lets you snap photos and share them in an "elastic social network" with people geographically close to you, with no checking-in necessary. I avoid Color like the plague and use Stellar daily.