We’ve all, at one time or another, needed to find a phone number of a local tradesman, or business. Now, the first thing I do is google it. However, before the advent of google, the first thing you picked up was the golden pages or some other local directory. Even now, alot of local businesses just dont have a web presence so the only way to find them is through the Golden Pages. And even the companies that do have a web presence, can’t totally cut their directory listsings as many people’s first port of call is still the local directory.

Recently however, that has started to change. More and more companies (especially companies that conduct their business mostly online) have been foregoing a listing in the local offline directories and even the national directories like the golden pages. This is because they believe it is impossible to tell whether they have achieved anything from their ad in the golden pages. They don’t have the same transparency that they get from their visitors coming from Google, Digg or Twitter.

I believe this trend is largely similar to what we are seeing in other industries like advertising. A large number of advertisers are focusing on the forms of advertising where they can easily track their results. This is why big online ad companies like google aren’t seeing the huge hits in revenue that printed advertisers are seeing.

However, just the other day, during a discussion someone asked me if it was possible to find out how much traffic was coming from these offline resources. And although it might take a little bit of work I think it might be possible to tell. All you really need is a little creativity and some way to track your websites statistics – like Google Analytics.

The easiest way, first off, if you haven’t already run the ad, is to use a slightly different URL for your offline ad. I’d even go as far as to suggest a different domain. You can then redirect from this URL to you normal address with little or no fuss. You can then easily work out numbers coming from offline resources. And even if for some reason your offline URL is being used somewhere online, you’ll nearly always have a referrer. Since all of your ‘offline’ customers, will show as a direct connections, you can work out whether your offline ads are worth it. I believe a number of companies already do this. However it seems to be more tailored to specific advertising campaigns then to particular ads but the premise is still valid. You’ll often see companies like Coca-Cola have a different URL on certain ads – A different URL for each campaign. Its a way of seeing how successful a particular campaign was. I’m sure huge advertising companies have completed studies that are able to work out the number of people who actually see an ad from the number of people that actively go out and type out the URL, however this is beyond my means as a one man development team. Plus in our case, only the people that use the URL are important as they are potential sales, or offers, or whatever it is that you do. Coca-Cola also have the luxury of being able to correlate sales to campaigns, and I’m sure have very intelligent statisticians working it out for them.

This is not always going to work though. And it’s not always good in every situation. One situation where I’d advise against providing users with a different domain, is when the brand is ultra important and you’re trying to create brand loyalty. While its ok for Susan who owns and graphic design company to have a couple of domains, as its her name and work that is important not exact brand recognition. And its definitely ok for a huge brand like Coca-Cola because they already have all the brand recognition that they’re going to get. If you have to keep the exact brand, you could offer your offline resourses a slightly different landing page. In the offline ad list http://example.com/golden as your domain name. Again this has a couple of problems in that it has a much better chance of being found in the wrong manner and if that happens it might take a lot of effort to work out the approx numbers coming from offline resources.

As I pointed out earlier, Coca-Cola have correlation between sales and ad campaigns as a perfect measurement of ad success. If you’re deciding whether to drop that offline ad and suspect its doing absolutely nothing for you then the easiest thing you can do is drop the ad and see if there is a correlation between the amount of work you lose. Risky, especially if you’re wrong. But in certain businesses you’re going to be able to do this with very little risk.

One last thing to take into consideration however is demographics. And what a huge thing to throw in at the end. I could have written a whole post about demographics and will do so in the future. The key is to think about what your normal customer is. Are they an old couple from a rural town? Don’t bother with the web (unless of course you’re looking to change your normal customers – again depends on the business). Are they young “bebo-ers”? Don’t bother with offline directories – They’ve never picked up the golden pages. You need to look at your customers and work out who who want or need to target and work out your advertising from there. Not the other way round.

Twinkle. Still at the top of the list and still one of the best iphone applications out there. Brought to us by Tapulous, it’s a great twitter app with a little bit more on top. Anything more to add to my original post? Not really, its still a great app and one that I use every day.

The Google App is, of course, still there. And still very useful even if more semantic information is not hugely available around Ireland. Handy for Dublin, not so much for everywhere else.

The NY Times iPhone application is still my source for American news when I’m on the move and there still isn’t a better news application on the iPhone in terms of usabilty and functionality. The news stories aren’t bad either…

Another news application but one a little closer to home – the BBCReader from “New Way to See News“(The website is pretty dreadful by the way). A handy application that I use to read my favorite news site. It’s very handy and once opened will download all the headline stories in the background so you can read any news story even if you are out of signal or in a EDGE(instead of 3G) area. And as this happens more you would like his is very handy.

Eirtext from Vinny Coyne’s “Lack of Concept” software. It’s a very handy piece of software and very useful. Unfortunately, you have to move back and forward between the iPhone text and this software and for that reason I don’t use it an awful lot. However with many people now on “Pay as you go” iPhones this will become even more useful for those people.

All in all, There’s a very healthy iPhone application market out there, especially on the free apps side of things. The above apps are just the ones that I think Irish users will most appreciate. However, I have been known to have been wrong in the past… so let me know if there are any apps that you think should be in the list?

Let me explain a little: When I browse around the internet I rarely click on any ads unless they really appeal to me, I don’t really do the social networking thing(apart from twitter), and I never say anything to someone online that I wouldn’t say to their face. I was also taught as a child that “It’s better to be thought a fool, then to open your mouth and prove it”. So I really only comment on things that I understand and have an interest in. But I’m starting to think that its just me.

Go to any really mainstream site that people comment on – YouTube or The Boston Globe for example and take a look at the comments on some of the articles (The LHC Gallery is just one hilarious example). What is wrong with these people? Abusing each other and talking rubbish about a subject that they have seemingly no understanding of. In that example about the Large Hadron Collider on the Boston Globe Site, there are 4200 comments and after a brief read, I’ll take a stab in the dark and say 95% of these have no material value at all. They don’t add anything to the debate about the device or help anyone else to understand it.

I am by no means against people having an opinion or wanting to talk about it. I merely want people (probably naivety on my part) to think about what they are going to write first and decide if they really want to comment. I think that people should use a three step process before deciding to comment.

- Decide if they really want to comment.

- They should also question whether where they are writing it is really the best place to be adding their opinion.

- Then, if after passing that step, they should endeavor to write their comment thoughtfully and in a way that everyone can understand.

Hopefully I can elaborate a little on each of the above points…

Decision Time

Comments follow you around. They are nearly always permanent little insights into the type of person you are. And, in the real world, can sometimes come back to kick you. So much so that certain organizations and companies want to know your “handles” and nicknames and the various forums that you browse. The White House is one extreme example where as part of the application process for they ask for almost every internet posting you’ve ever made… but that’s in the extreme case. You have to think before you post as your comments may have consequences that you just can’t foresee.

Appropriate forum

Is the Boston Globe website really the best place to learn or talk about the LHC? Will any people who have any say in the matter be able to read or respond to your concerns? Nobody is going to read through 4000 comments. Are you just posting it for the hell of it or do you want someone to take note? Then post it in an appropriate place! If you don’t want tax money used for a certain process, there is little point in writing about it in the wrong place. And it’s not just this example. People the world over complain about things online where nothing is going to be done rather than write to their local representative or appropriate person where something might be done!

Give me grammar and punctuation!

I understand that for a lot of people that comment on the Internet, English is not their first language. And I appreciate the effort that they all put in to try and post in the language that I understand best. However, I have often been stumped on the web by English speakers that have written unbelievably badly written posts/comments. As a commenter or author it is your job to get your point across as well as you can. This means reaching the biggest audience possible without them having to decrypt what you mean from what you’ve written. I think everyone can ignore mistakes, because we all make them. Missing an apostrophe here or a comma there isn’t going to make your post unreadable. However, writing the entire post in caps and with no full stops or punctuation except for exclamation marks makes little sense and importantly, will make a lot of people discount you without even reading your point.

So what can we do? If people can’t do the whole self moderation thing do we introduce a BBC type moderation on every comment on these sites? Is that even possible on many of these huge sites? Its certainly true that comments will start to have little value unless something is done.

Edit 17/3/2009 Well, I can’t say I didn’t bring it on myself. This post unfortunately gets about 500 spam comments a day. and while Akismet catches nearly all of them, every couple of days I have to go through a few pages of spam to delete them all. And as much as I love the keyboard shortcuts in WordPress 2.7 and how easy it is to go through the spam, I’m closing the comments on this post in an effort to stem the tide.

Twinkle

One of the best applications out there. Brought to us by Tapulous. It is the best twitter application that I’ve come across but with the added benefit of location aware twittering. Really useful for finding local interesting people to follow – especially now that so many people are twittering. It can be quite daunting to watch that “everyone” feed on the twitter website, so many people… so many people saying not a whole lot. This cuts down on the noise while still allowing you to find very interesting people. It has a nice filter ability so that you can change the range that you allow tweets to come from. Unfortunately the recently changed to local distance measurements. It used to be 100 miles, which allowed me to see updates from Belfast and a couple of other places (I’m in Dublin). Now, however, its changed to 100km which doesn’t reach that far. Not that much of an issue though as a good few Dublin iPhone users have found this great application. I should also point out that you can change it to 500 or 1000 or everyone but out that far and you’re back to the noise of the unintelligible crowd.

Palringo

The App that saves me a fortune in text messaging bills. It allows you to log into a number of chat applications(like gchat and msn to name but a few.) and instant message your friends. An easy to use interface, and native to the iPhone so you don’t have to have the browser open to use it. Apparently it will stay active even if the screen turns off, as long as its the only third party app running(This is an Apple limitation – linkage). I can’t exactly vouch for that as I’ve only used it for short periods of time to get a good few IM’s out.

Google App

Let Google help you find the nearest hotel. Or pizza place. Or bar. The possibilities are really endless. Location aware searching along with all the normal google goodness. Need I say more?

Facebook Application

As much as I lothe it, most of my friends spend their entire days on this website. The application has a very good messaging system and its for that reason that i recommend this one as its very handy for talking to users on facebook. And the messages appear in the profile chat box so you can add multiple facebook users to the chat. Something that no other chat app does on the iPhone as far as I can tell. I have a very brief profile for this very reason. And even though Bebo still owns the lion share of users in Ireland, Facebook is growing here and most people have both so it wont be hard to convert anyone that doesn’t over to it.

NY Times App

This is going to be a controversial pick for 5th place as its for a American newspaper. However, as a regular user of this application its great for those of us here with an eye to the Americas as well as those with interests closer to home. It covers international news and sports as well as editorial features which having read a few are quite interesting and entertaining. I have used this app to get through my fairly boring commutes on the train. Easiest way to catch the world news if you don’t mind missing the local stories.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Have I missed anything? Probably. Actually – Definitely. I’d love to be able to add the Pandora iPhone app to the above list but it isn’t available here(Either is the website, technically). Which is a real pity as its one of the greatest internet applications that I’ve ever come across. Post a comment if there’s anything that you think that Irish iPhone users would be interested in or if there’s anything hugely glaringly obvious that I’ve left out.

Edit 17/08/2008: As pointed out in the comments (Thanks Michael), I should have included EirText in here. Silly me. What a nice little application. Very handy if you want to text a number of people at the same time For Free. Very handy. However i don’t believe it is a replacement for then in built iPhone SMS application as it… well… just doesn’t look as good. And you have to go back and forward between the iPhone’s messaging application and the Eirtext application. Which, although would save you quite a bit of money, would get quite annoying. However I definitely feel I should be mentioning it here after using it to organise a night out on Saturday…