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Consumers are buying smartphones at an accelerating pace and using them for more diverse activities, such as consuming media, doing their taxes and shopping. Mobile is revolutionizing the way consumers learn about, choose, and buy products of all types. But with this burgeoning popularity, firms are struggling to keep up, as small screens and limited input options inhibit the design and delivery of excellent mobile experiences.

So what’s the secret to creating and delivering excellent mobile products that consumers will embrace? The answer is consumer convenience. Consumers will embrace new products and services if they are fundamentally more convenient that is to say, if the benefits outweigh the inhibitors to adoption and usage.

In mobile, convenience will come in the form of services that off er immediacy and simplicity through a highly contextual experience.  is means delivering mobile services or content when consumers need it the most, ensuring services are easy to use, and making sure the content is relevant to the individual.

Shoppers’ Mobile Context in Mobile Commerce: context is defined as the sum total of everything your consumer has shared with you to date as well as what he or she is experiencing at the moment of engagement. Context primarily involves the use of information about the consumer, such as location, time of day, or past behavior, to personalize or tailor experiences to minimize steps and manual entries.

Companies will need to anticipate what their customers want to happen when they launch an app or mobile web site, and, to do so, they must consider their consumers’:

Situation: the current location, altitude, environmental conditions, and speed the customer is experiencing. As navigation is three-dimensional and involves direction, these specifics will help create a truly tailored experience. For instance, knowing a customer’s altitude can help identify what floor he’s on in a hotel or mall.

Preferences: the history and personal decisions the customer has shared with you or with his social networks.

Attitudes: the feelings or emotions implied by the customer’s actions and logistics.

For many, the use of context in the delivery of mobile services is not yet in play. Beyond using GPS for location-based  context to help consumers find the nearest “x” (ATM, gas station, store), most simply lack the staff expertise or do not view mobile context strategy as a top priority.

But by integrating location into the research purchase processes, some e-business professionals are making sophisticated use of context. For instance, in retail, companies are pushing alerts and offers based on location through geofencing technologies (that is, to within a specific geographic area). However, few leverage location beyond guiding consumers to their bricks and mortar stores, and even this still poses a challenge.

Richer Information: But over the next several years, contextual information is going to get a lot richer as mobile devices grow in popularity.  is combination means organizations must develop a mobile context strategy if they expect to build consumer loyalty and remain competitive. Building highly contextual experiences will be a journey, as organizations evolve their expertise. This development can be mastered throughout four phases of contextual evolution:

Basics: using location, time of day, and past behavior or preferences when delivering mobile services. But access to this
type of information is straightforward on smartphones (with the user’s permission) and should be the first tool to leverage when moving toward the use of context for improved experiences.

Layering in intelligence: the most sophisticated firms already can determine if a customer is in their store, in a competitor’s store, or at the customer’s home. But reaching this phase requires creating new back-end data and logic, without encroaching on a consumer’s sense of privacy. For example, if a firm offers variable or regional pricing, as a number of retail and grocery chains do, what price does it present to a customer in the store versus a web shopper who may just be considering a purchase?

Breaking PC context: The smartphone is not just a mini-PC; it’s a personal and intimate device that knows unique attributes of its user. And the merger of the physical and information worlds will take one giant step forward here when new sensor technologies are combined with sophisticated display and video elements. In this phase, the phone becomes an opportunity to deliver entirely new innovative services and products that have the potential to generate revenue. For example, sensors and other advancements will detect smells, enabling a grocery store to demonstrate to mobile shoppers that its produce is ripe. While the mobile device can act like a PC, it has the potential to do much more.

Motion as control mechanism:Phones today can already be controlled with motion, like Sony Ericsson’s motion
sensor that lets a user shake the phone to change a music track, or the phone’s screen orientation. So what will be different in three to five years? First, the motion-detecting  sensors will be on a single chip with a common programming layer that will make them easier to use in applications.

Second, digital experiences will move well beyond the current paradigms of web browsing. Online tasks today are broken down into steps laid out in page sequences, menus, and navigation bars. Consumers will still buy airplane tickets or make payments on their phones, but they’ll do so more simply—with tools like voice-based control and authentication. While companies will move at different paces through these phases, depending on business strategy, mobile objectives, industry sector and mobile philosophy, for all e-business professionals it’s time to be proactive. For each of these four phases, there are three highlevel steps to consider: information architecture, designing new services that take advantage of context, and testing the impact of those experiences to improve the customer experience.

It will be important for e-business teams to take a leadership role when enabling these steps, as context will open up new opportunities to influence purchase decisions and increase conversions and drive sales—but only if realtime data is available, content and information are properly tagged, and the proper relationships and road maps are in place with key partners. For example, a retailer must not only know where a competitor’s store is, to identify when a shopper is in the rival’s store, but must designate that retailer as a competitor.

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Getting to the top of web search results on Google can pay off big for your business. One way to boost your business  is to attract online searchers seeking a service you don’t even offer.

Begin by researching which keywords potential customers use in online searches. Suppose your company only replaces parts  for products rather than doing repairs, but most of the people are searching for the keyword “repair” of those products. There maybe a potential to turn people searching for “repair” into customers. Prospects will find your website only if it uses the same terminology as they do and  testing hundreds of propositions about what will land a site a top Google ranking for a given search term.

As a example, take two important keywords “auto shop” and auto repair shop” as well as “muffler repair”. The tactics to use include building more links with sites run by “friendlies”, such as suppliers and distributors with whom you do business; adding relevant content to the home page, and improving linking structure among pages on the site.

Customer’s Lingo: It’s highly likely your prospects use at least some search terms you don’t use internally. To discover the terms your potential clients use,  brainstorm possibilities in-house and phone clients to ask how they search for what you sell. Then select “Get keyword ideas” at Google.com/adwords and enter a search string. You will see plenty of variations, with the latest monthly search totals for each one.

A Page for Each Popular Keyword: After identifying commonly used keywords, pick the most widely used ones relevant to what you sell, look for ones with commercial intent. If someone searches for “oil” ,it is too generic. But if they search for “oil removal” , there is commercial intent behind it. Create a landing page with rich content about the most popular keyword; then the second-most popular and so on.

Google’s Trust: search engine ranks pages more highly if it trusts them to deliver content relevant to users’ searches. It trusts a given page more as the page ages, provided it has links with other sites that Google’s algorithms suggest have relevant related content. By altering a page’s URL or even just changing the suffix  from ‘html’ to ‘php’, that becomes a new page, which has no age, no links and no trust. Setup a “301 redirect” for every renamed page.

Google’s Trust for the Home Page: Google trusts home pages more than other pages because they tend to have most links. How do you maximize your home page advantage by featuring lots of relevant content without compromising speed. You should run only the first few lines of each article on your home page with a “Read more”  button and the rest of the article on another page. Google indexes the entite content as if it was on the home page.

Location: Customers for a wide array of goods and services prefer to buy from a company with a nearby location. For any category in which Google figures searches are likely to care about where a seller is, it first uses the searcher’s URL to determine his location. Then a Google map is displayed on the top right of the first page of the search results showing the closest businesses matching his keywords even if he omits a location. Businesses should claim their Google Places listing.

Power of Google Places: Buy  a small Yellow Pages display ad, Google uses Yellow Pages listings as the basis  for Places and trusts them to confirm that you run  a real business. You will rank well only if you format your firm’s contact information identically in  Places and in the Yellow Pages. Also use all five categories for listing your offerings. You can also ask a few non-competing nearby businesses to add a page to their sites recommending your firm, in return for reciprocating. Google sees such “local citations”  as confirmation that a company has  a good local reputation.

Google Places and Organic Searches: Google now combines the ranking points from both so that each type of search affects the other. For any company where geography matters, it’s now essential to optimize your ranking for both.

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Many terms describe tools that share a person’s location. Geo-location services, location based services (LBS), and social location sharing (SLS).

Geo-Location Services: covers all types of services that provide the location of a device anywhere on the planet. These devices include personal GPS devices found in many vehicles and boats. Also included in this category are the handheld GPS units used by hikers, bikers, hunters, anglers, and runners. All use some form of geo-location service that presents GPS data in a format that is useful to the particular application that the user has selected. For example, runners overlay a route on their locations and save that route for later repetition. Some runners also add additional information, such as time of day, temperature, heart rate, average speed, and so on. Someone using a GPS in an automobile might overlay location with traffic information, road construction notes, points of interest, and so on.

Personal Locator Beacons (PLBs) used by hikers, light aircraft, and marine craft are also good examples of geo-location devices. PLBs share the user’s location only in situations where the user has turned the device on. PLBs are generally activated only when the user has an emergency and are intended to direct rescuers to the user’s location. Although PLBs aren’t social devices, I include them in the geo-location services category because they are not tied to cell phone service, as are other social location services.

Services such as OnStar (the in-car assistance from GM) or Lo-Jac (a company that helps locate stolen vehicles, motorcycles, and even laptop computers) are also geolocation services. These devices utilize GPS data and overlay it with their own data.

Location-Based Services: . LBSs are services that disclose the location of a user via a cell phone or other device that is connected to the cellular network. This term is often used when referring to social location sharing. However, I maintain that this is an incorrect usage. Location based services include social location sharing tools; however, they are much broader and include what are best described as passive location sharing tools. These include things such as the family locator services from cellular companies Sprint and Verizon in the United States. The GPS chip in that person’s phone is actively tracked via a service that ties numbers to one account. This service is primarily aimed at parents wanting to check on the location of their mobile-phone-carrying children, although it could also be used by small businesses to track delivery or service vehicles.

This technology has been extended to non-cell-phone devices that look like watches, or can be embedded in shoes for young children to enable parents to find their child if they lose sight of them. Some versions fit onto the collars of the family dog so that if it strays, its owners can locate it.

Vehicle tracking is a popular commercial use of passive location based services. Domestic uses include OnStar, which can provide turn-by-turn navigation instructions that are sent right to the user’s vehicle. Commercial applications include cell phones that transmit the user’s exact location, allowing, for instance, shipping companies to pinpoint the location of commercial drivers without asking them to check in.

Social location sharing: is the term I use to describe the various services that require a user to actively share his or her location with a network. This network is a group of people and companies with whom the user has agreed to share that information, as well as a broader network via connected social media platforms. It is the active nature of these services that sets them apart from the other services, which are passive in their nature. This active participation makes them so intriguing and so compelling for marketers.Why would someone want to broadcast their location to their own friends.

Foursquare seems to be a strong favorite. Facebook is  into social location sharing.

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Social location marketing has the ability to impact the purchase decision cycle at all points—brand awareness, brand elevation, brand consideration and purchase. The concept of the purchase decision cycle is best defined as the continuous loop through which customers become aware, consider, select and finally reconsider purchases.

In the pre-social media market place, the purchase decision cycle involved much less influence from strangers. Purchasers were influenced by a closer network of people. Purchasers were also unable to take part in the level of comparison shopping that they are able to do now. With the advent of the internet the travel requirement declined but it still took time to visit all the websites and make notes on which product had which features and which site was offering the best prices.

Price comparison sites quickly became popular with members posting coupon codes and special offers as they became aware of them. Social media took all of this to the next level. Twitter and Facebook users can post a question and receive hundreds of responses about the best deals, perhaps even getting responses directly from brands themselves.

What differentiates social location sharing from much of the rest of social media marketing is that it is specific to allocation. It happens as someone becomes or is in the process of becoming a customer,visitor, or user. When users check in at a specific location, they are publicly declaring an affinity with that location. Wittingly or unwittingly, they are making the statement that they use this location as part of their lives. Whether it is a grocery store, a clothing shop, a restaurant, or a hair salon, the effect is the same. They are telling the people in their networks, all of whom they have selected to share with, that this is a place they go to.

Perhaps at times they want to promote a local business because of the great service they have received from them. They believe that by announcing this location and its great service, they are helping to promote and prolong the business. All of these motivators can be leveraged by marketers and all have their place within the purchase decision cycle.

Brand Awareness: Making the target audience aware of the existence of the brand. This is traditionally something that is associated with advertising, but in the current environment of a society that is more “word of mouth aware,” getting existing customers to be your advertisers/advocates is a much more common effort. Social location sharing tools are
most definitely achieving that. These tools broadcast the fact that the user is not only grocery shopping but is shopping at a specific grocery store.

Brand Elevation: Making the target audience aware of a brand is not usually enough to trigger a purchase. Rather, having made the target audience aware of the brand, the next step is to move the brand into the consideration stage of the purchase decision cycle. To do that, the brand needs to position itself as a better choice than its competitors. Again,
social location sharing tools play their part here. Having an advocate in the form of a social location sharer share her decision to make a purchase at a location immediately aids that business in providing a reason why it is different from its competitors.

Consideration: This stage can be immediately before purchase or can be several months, even years ahead of purchase. Much of this depends on the immediate need of the purchaser, the price point of the product or service, and the amount of information available. A customer looking to buy a pair of jeans is unlikely to spend the same amount of time in the consideration phase as a customer buying a new car or even a home. However, social location sharing tools can and do play a part in all these decisions. Users checking in at the Apple store, for example, are stating a preference for a particular brand, but they are also stating a preference for a particular type of technology.

Purchase: Checking in at the time of purchase, and announcing that a purchase has been made, is obviously the most powerful use of these tools. Each of the tools allows for this in different ways, but at the most basic users can tag their check-in and in doing so start a conversation on other platforms such as Twitter.

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Google+ social network  home page just like Facebook consists largely of a news feed or a ‘Stream’. The Stream is organized a little bit differently to Facebook though- stuff that you’ve hit +1 on commented on previously will rise to the top of your feed if there is a new comment. So Google knows that you are interested in becoming more visible.

Like Facebook, you can make a status update, or share photos, video and your location. Unlike Facebook, you don’t have to do it on your own profile to make an update. There is a drop-down ‘Share’ menu in the upper right corner which allows you to share from any Google+ page. So you don’t have to open a new tab to share something, or navigate from the page you are using.

There is another menu on upper right for notifications. This works similarly to Facebook in that it changes colour when you have a notification, and drops down when you click on it. Unlike facebook, you can reply to comments within that menu.  So you don’t have to navigate away from whatever you are doing.

Circles: Google  reckons that ;people have different “social circles”. When you add someone on Google+, you put them into at least one circle using a drag and drop down system. Sometimes you might want someone in more than one different circle,  ‘family and ‘friends’. You just need to drag and drop into a second circle.

Categorizing people into groups can be done on Facebook, but it is hidden within Facebook’s  settings. Google+ makes creating those filters easy, so you don’t have to share anything with anyone you don’t want to. Every time you share something on your Stream, you get to choose which people to filter in or out.

Sparks: You can search for anything that interests you, and any Google News that applies to that interest will show up in your Sparks news feed. In short, Google+ is doing some simple keyword and tag search

Hangout: is Google’s video chat feature. When you start a Hangout session on Google+ , it starts you default webcam and broadcasts  video to your circles. It opens up in a pop-up window.  You can invite people to join the video chat.

Google+ Android App: Android users can download an app to assist them while they are away from their keyboard. It has just five icons on the main screen- Stream,  Huddle, Photos, Profile and circles. There is a bar across the bottom of the screen that tells you if you have any notifications.

Using Huddle from the Android app is a handy way to communicate with a group of people- it is basically a reply to all email function.