Knovolo Mobile Marketing Reviews
Planting Vegetables with Microsoft Tag
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When I started working in the mobile sector, there was very little implementation of mobile technology in the United States. Sure, we’d all learned how to use T9 to type text messages faster, and my flip phone’s clunky browser was a good way to skim the headlines or read email. This was 2006: we’d gotten used to email and Skype, and the coolest new cell phone accessory was a wireless headset that connected to your mobile phone over Bluetooth.
Since then, an eon has passed in mobile technology development. However, I a still regularly surprised when I encounter mobile call to actions in new places … political campaigns, the Seattle Art Museum, and REI flyers, to name a few. Most recently, on a vegetable seed package.
I was getting a personal tour of my mom’s flower garden when a pack of Kentucky Wonder Garden Beans caught my attention. At the bottom there was a Microsoft Tag and some instructions that read “For planting and care instructions, videos, and more, snap the code with your smart phone after downloading the free app …”.
This means that now gardeners like my mom can bring their mobile phone with them outside and tap into information about the seeds they’re planting. That’s a use case that we never came up with in our brainstorming sessions, and we like it!
Scanning this MS Tag takes you to http://plantguide.lowes.com/mobile/plant.aspx?code=LSP0021, a nicely-constructed mobile webpage. It loads pretty quickly, displaying an image of the plant, some basic care and maintenance tips, and some excellent expandable sections near the bottom.
The Basics
| Organization | Lowe’s Hardware |
| Call to Action | Scan Microsoft Tag on seed package for planting and care instructions. |
| Date | Spring 2011 |
| Mobile Technologies Used | Microsoft Tag, mobile web |
Mobile Technology Rating
| Microsoft Tag | This Microsoft Tag was well-placed, pointed to a mobile-optimized website, and had a helpful explanation next to it. There is much debate about whether Microsoft Tag or QR Codes are better to use, but by providing a relatively small URL to type in, Lowe’s clear an easy path around the MS Tag to the content for those who need it. |
| Mobile Website | A+ to Lowe’s for their mobile plant guide website. In addition to a good look and consistent branding, the drop-down sections at the bottom of the page handle the load of information quite well. Having all of that copy appear on the first page load would make the page pretty long and tedious, but making it so that each user can view only sections that appeal is perfect. We’re docking one star, however, for how the site rendered on “feature” phones (non smartphones). |
| User Experience | The user experience here was seamless. A quick MS Tag scan or manual entry of the URL (lowes.com/plants) takes the user to a mobile webpage that appears to perform extremely well on the average smartphone. It appears to contain all of the basic information you need to know before planting. Had Lowe’s relied solely on the Microsoft Tag, the user experience would be much less seamless. Many smartphone users don’t have MS Tag, and adding the extra steps of downloading and installing the app can be prohibitive to accessing the information. By providing a URL (lowes.com/plants), however, Lowe’s allows any mobile device to get there rather easily. |
| Device Detection | I wasn’t expecting lowes.com/plants to be mobile-friendly, a simple mistake that many have made in the past. I thus award extra stars for having this URL detect my mobile device and serve me a mobile-optimized webpage. |
Final Rating: 5 stars
Lowe’s passed Knovolo’s mobile review with flying colors. There is very little to complain about here, as the device detection, mobile webpage optimization, Microsoft Tag incorporation, and URL presence appear to be the work of highly-trained professionals. However, something could be done for the feature phone users out there.
Learn more about mobile marketing at knovolo.com.
Also, learn more about planting and caring for the Kentucky Wonder Pole Bean.
Seattle Art Museum Incorporates Mobile for Picasso Exhibit
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I was quite pleased to see a mobile presence at the recent Picasso exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. I was leafing through a flyer while waiting to enter the first gallery and when I got to one of the pages near the back, my jaw dropped in excitement. On the page was a Microsoft Tag (Microsoft’s proprietary version of a QR Code) next to a nice little paragraph describing how to scan it.
Microsoft Tag at Picasso Art Museum
When scanned with the proper app on your smartphone, this Microsoft Tag would point you to a mobile web version of the entire Picasso exhibit, complete with images of paintings and descriptions. (I found that sometimes the descriptions on mobile had more than what was written on the wall!)
The mobile site was extremely well-formatted for my T-Mobile MyTouch. There was no extraneous left-and-right scrolling, and I didn’t have to zoom way in to read the content – it was already at the right zoom level and exact width of my device’s screen. This was clutch because many mobile marketing campaigns these days FAIL at this point. Believe it or not, many QR Codes and Microsoft Tags point to websites that are NOT optimized for mobile devices! This is one of my greatest peeves about mobile marketing: obviously, anyone who scans one of these code will be on a phone, so why serve them some desktop-sized website that’s not going render correctly on their mobiles??? GUUUH.
High points to SAM for, as simple as it sounds, having their MSTag point to a mobile website. On top of that, the site was very well done and essentially flawless in my opinion (although I didn’t get a chance to test it on any other devices).
The Basics
| Organization | Seattle Art Museum (SAM) |
| Call to Action | Read the wall labels for Picasso masterpieces on your mobile phone |
| Date | Winter 2010 |
| Description | SAM extended the Picasso museum experience onto mobile phones |
| Mobile Technologies Used | Microsoft Tag, mobile web |
Mobile Technology Rating
| Microsoft Tag
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| This Microsoft Tag was well-placed, pointed to a mobile-optimized website, and had a helpful explanation next to it. |
| Mobile Website
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| A+ to SAM for this mobile website. Sadly, the exhibit ended and they took it down before I had a chance to write it up in detail, but know that it was quite excellent and a worthy example for future mobile campaigns. |
| User Experience
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| The user experience here was seamless. A quick MS Tag scan or manual entry of the mobile webpage (more cumbersome, but doable) takes the user to a mobile webpage that appears to perform extremely well on the average smartphone. (We didn’t get a chance to test it on many devices though.) |
| No Bonus Star: mCommerce & Social Networking
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| No bonus star here because I didn’t see any mCommerce action on the mobile website. Once you get people looking at this stuff on their phones, it would be an easy leap for them to browse products and accessories from the museum gift shop, especially relating to masterpieces that they’ve just viewed.
Also, no bonus star because I didn’t see any social media presence. SAM has a Facebook page, so why don’t they make it easy for people to Like it from their phones? Mobile and Social Media are a hot combination. |
Final Rating: 5 stars
The Seattle Art Museum gets very high points for its innovative use of mobile in the recent Picasso exhibit. Even though social media and mCommerce weren’t incorporated into the campaign SAM still gets high points for a seamless user experience and excellent use of bar code scanning and mobile web design.
Learn more about mobile marketing at knovolo.com
