HOTEL 718 – Urban Boutique Brooklyn, NY Hotel 

Background: In the heart of historic Brooklyn, NY a new gem is being developed – Hotel 718. With a free-spirit and sense of its community, this urban boutique hotel will embrace upscale style, comfort and the edgy and eclectic artsy-ness of its surroundings. Before launching into boutique hotel super stardom at its grand opening early in 2012, Hotel 718 needed a fresh, modern interim website.  With little more than a logo and color scheme, Screen Pilot was given the challenge to create Hotel718.com

The Challenge: Hotel 718 needed a progressive interim website with the ability to leverage Brooklyn’s community, its spirit and attract visitors who seek an alternative NYC experience while remaining close to Manhattan.

Result: Beautiful on the Inside & Outside – Stunning Design meets Innovative, Intuitive User Interface
Screen Pilot’s collective intellect developed a visually stunning website designed to accommodate just the right amount of information presented in an understated and clearly defined layout. The Hotel 718 project required a careful choreographed balance of well-planned branding, social networking integration and an elegant user interface using the latest CSS and HTML5 technologies.

The Good Looks – Design
To establish the mood of the site, images were painstakingly selected. Color choices balance the upscale, comfort and welcoming nature of the community-based boutique hotel whilst remaining on-brand. For this reason, the eclectic traveler searching for the “real” New York stay and the famous celebrity looking for a luxurious new boutique hotel in the heart of Brooklyn will equally indulge in the Hotel 718 experience.

Navigating through this modern, clean site is straightforward and effortless. Engaging pages capture the nuances of the Hotel 718 brand. The “count down” timer was designed as an invitation to join Hotel 718 once the long awaited boutique hotel opens its doors.

The Brains – Technical Innovations
‘Non-Geeky Speaky’ – Hotel718.com offers a web browsing experience that is intuitive and radically simple. Whether you are viewing it on a Mac, PC, smart phone or tablet, it loads quickly and has the same feel across fixed and mobile devices. Hotel718.com gets a gold star for its “intuitive user interface” which allows you to scroll through the interior by swiping your finger on the mobile screen. In techie-talk, the site was built using HTML 5 and CSS 3, along with progressive enhancement using jQuery and a hand-full of jQuery plugins. It has an intuitive user interface that doesn’t compromise the user experience. Everything on the site is pure HTML and it renders consistently across multiple environments without the need of third-party plugins.

Final Words on Hotel718.com
After carefully analyzing the Hotel 718 brand, location and background, Screen Pilot developed a fully customized, visually stunning and technically progressive website to communicate with the virtual and physical Brooklyn community and prospective guests. It provides an intuitive user interface, attractive design and an engaging social media strategy ensuring people can engage and interact with the brand before its real-world grand opening in early 2012. If an artist and a techie had a baby it would be Hotel718.com

The team here at Screen Pilot had a great time this morning at the Social Media Breakfast Charlotte (Twitter hashtag #smbclt). We heard from great speakers including the head of mobile apps at Bank of America. All in all a thoroughly interesting morning.

While back at the office grindstone we caught sight of a great little article thats particularly relevant to our mornings activities. And co-incidentally ties together 2 of our core agency functions – mobile and analytics. Including online to offline. The article link is below gives tips on:

1) Optimizing your website for mobile

2) Aligning calls to action with search behaviour

3) Tracking both online and offline conversions

Take a look at the article itself here on marketingprofs.com and let us know if it gives you any thoughts or ideas. Are you already doing any of this yourself for instance?

Apple lovers, geeks, obsessives, followers, fanatics and Steve Jobs stalkers the world over are currently hyping themselves up into a frenzy over the projected September release of the iOS5 and iPhone 5. At Screen Pilot we’re not so concerned about what the new operating system will do but how it can help us engage with consumers and what changes we’ll have to make.

Take for example the most obvious place to start – Phone wide Twitter intergration. This will see more photos and other rich media tweeted by iPhone users making twitter a more valuable tool for digital marketers. It could also see a surge in Twitter sign ups as new iPhone users jump on the bandwagon.

However the biggest marketing challenge will be the new Notification Center that is visible on users lock screens. This update has come about because of the number of notifications iPhone users receive has ballooned over the last 12 months. This led to a number of complaints to Apple. The Notification Center has been built to remedy this.

The user can see all notifications in a single place via the Notification Center from the home screen or from any app by swiping down the status bar. When the user gets a new notification it will appear at the top of the screen rather than a popup. The lock screen also displays the notifications so you can respond to them quickly with a swipe of your finger. From a marketing standpoint this change certainly makes the iPhone a less useful tool. We can imagine that deal apps like Groupon and Living Social will suffer as their daily updates go unnoticed more often. Its worth keeping an eye(phone) on when the new OS and iPhone 5 is released.

You can relax, we won’t be peppering this blog entry with Clint Eastwood and cowboy puns! Earlier this year we introduced you to QR Codes as a means to link your offline and online marketing efforts. In case you didn’t see that or need a quick catch up then check it out here. Since then QR code use has mushroomed. A recent report showed that QR code use has increased by over 4000% since 2010.

That increased use has meant that we have seen QR codes out and about a lot more recently. Here’s what we’ve seen around over the last few weeks…

Caribou Coffee – Caribou are using QR codes as part of their “Stay Awake For Summer” ad campaign.

Firstly the good – QR codes are still relatively new to most of the general public. Therefore it’s vital that, for now, we explain to consumers what they are and how to scan them in a simple and concise way. Caribou have done a great job of this. They explained what was needed and where to get a free reader.

They also incentivized the marketing message giving the consumer a reason to use the QR code – “Sign up for more weekly summer savings”. Most consumers won’t scan the QR code just because it’s a cool new tool.

Now for the bad – This can’t be seen from our photo but the signs were placed in awful locations. The codes need to be easily accessible and in obvious places. Caribou started well by placing the signs on a few tables. However there were also signs behind the counter and on the wall behind tables (blocked by other customers). And they were the 2 most obvious in the store.

The Hilton, Hilton Head Island – Unfortunately this was ugly pretty much all round. The only positive we can give is that the QR Code was very obvious and stood out. Everything else was poor – No explanation of what it was, no incentive to scan, it didn’t offer a free reader and it was in a pretty odd location (down a hallway in the middle of the resort). The sign didn’t even look professional; it was pretty much just a print out stuck to the wall. All in all a very odd piece of marketing.

Old Navy – Hazaa! By far the best use of QR codes we have seen. The codes were used as part of a competition to win tickets to the MLB World Series. The execution was superb. Signage was in all the best locations – Front door, by checkout and by the changing rooms. Everywhere customers were likely to stop for a few moments there was a sign.

They explained the code well, they incentivized it and their mobile landing page was simple and easy to use. As a campaign for generating customer email addresses it was seamless from beginning to end.

Have you seen any good or bad uses of QR codes out and about recently? Comment below and let us know. And if you’re thinking about implementing them in your upcoming marketing efforts then get in touch. We’d love to have a chat about what can be done.

So, the most recent data on who’s winning between Apple and Google on the operating system front is brought to surface by recent Nielson research. To summarize – 37 percent of mobile consumers in the U.S. now have a smartphone. Google’s Android operating system (aOS) is proving to be the most popular.  According to Nielsen’s April survey of mobile consumers, 36 percent of smartphone consumers now have an Android device, compared to 26 percent for Apple iOS smartphones (iPhones) and 23 percent for RIM Blackberry.

It used to be the case that even though Android OS device owners were gaining market share, it was shown that they weren’t as engaged in web activities and app hunting/usage but this recent research shows the lines between those iPhone users, who were always heavy data and app users, blurring a lot more. In fact, it’s nearly balanced out and the Nielson data suggests the consumption levels of data by aOS and iOS are showing signs of aligning with each other and even similarities in the type of data usage (i.e. app downloads, online gaming usage etc etc).

What does this all mean?  Well, for those of you thinking that mobile only means Apple iPhone, it’s time to think again.  We’ve always looked at what to develop for by looking at the market the site and/or app is to serve and what makes sense for the product/service pitched against project budgets. But, in the age of the “web app”, this data definitely provides some strategic thinking shifts when talking about mobile plays and what to develop for. For us, it’s never ever just been about the iPhone. Having been in the mobile marketing space for over 10 years, development x-device / x-OS was always scope for any projects. But if you were in the court that thought mobile just meant iPhone, then gone are those days.

For higher market penetration levels, you need to factor in aOS devices also and if you have existing mobile propositions, how does this new data affect your thinking. If you think it doesn’t – it should. First question, if you’ve developed a web-app or mobile site only designed for an iPhone, then how does your site look/feel/interact on Android devices.  Hint: There are numerous different screen sizes on aOS devices versus one for the iPhone. How does your mobile proposition look on smart-phones other than the iPhone?