Reality Digital

A Tax Preparation Company Using Social Media?

Tax preparation would be one of the last markets that could utilize social media in their business strategy to boost sales…or so you would think.

H&R Block recently announced the incorporation of live video chat with a tax expert while using their online tax preparation tools. They also have a secure phone application where customers can take photos of their documents and send them to the tax expert to instantly review while in video chat. 

Not only can you video chat from your living room at any time with a tax professional, H&R Block ties their traditional stores online by letting customers find one of their office locations and schedule an appointment. 

H&R Block has seen their low-overhead, online competitors, TurboTax and TaxSlayer, eat into their brick and mortar tax preparation services and over the past few years have changed their online strategy big time. TurboTax and TaxSlayer’s online products only offer phone and email support, making emailing a document for review a hassle. H&R Block’s new social tools puts them light years ahead of their competition in terms of support, availability and response times. They were the most accesible tax preparation store but can they regain their dominance with an online strategy shift?

Since tax preparation is seasonal, H&R Block wins this year. TurboTax and TaxSlayer probably don’t have enough time to release a similar online support toolset this season but expect them to come back next season with more competition.

Facebook tax preparation application, anyone? Maybe next year we’ll see one.

Mobile Social Networking Audience in Europe Grew 44 Percent in 2011

ComScore just released new figures that show social networking through mobile devices grew 44% in Europe this past year. ComScore’s research, gathered across UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, also showed a 67% increase in daily mobile access to social media.

The report says most of the growth came from increased use of mobile applications. Accessing social media through apps grew 101%. Twitter and LinkedIn saw the biggest increase. Twitter rose by 115%, LinkedIn grew 134% and Facebook had a 54% increase in use.

Facebook Tab Application Dialog Placement

During a past Facebook tab application campaign, the user-experience required a video upload call to action on the landing page of the tab. A legal obligation also required a user to accept the application permissions dialog prior to clicking on the upload button.

This meant that users who land on the tab application are immediately prompted by the application for their first and last name and email address prior to being able to see what the tab application is about and what it’s using your information for.

After implementing this workflow you can see in the graphic above that in the first week of the campaign, only 31% of users accepted the permissions. Even as the number of impressions increased, it didn’t effect the number of accepted dialogs.

69% of people do not feel comfortable coming to an application and immediately handing over their information before seeing what it is going to be used for.

Tab applications should have at least one page explaining the application before requesting permissions to make users feel comfortable about where there info is going. Users are becoming more aware of where their private information goes, which is a good thing, but application experiences must compensate for the shift in the thinking.

Millward Brown’s Top 100 Most Valuable Brands

Millward Brown released their annual Brandz Top 100 Most Valuable Brands report.

Looking through their list, I counted 20 brands that Reality Digital has worked with to build social media and social video web experiences in the past year. All of the 20 brands but one have also increased their Brand Value from 2010 to 2011.

In fact, if you look at just the brands that increased their value from 2010-2011 you will recognize that almost all of them have a strong social media presence from Google+ to Facebook apps to social integrations on their websites.

Adobe Discontinues Mobile Flash

It must have been a tough decision for Adobe to kill mobile flash. Not only did Adobe’s executives have a public fight with Steve Jobs and Apple about the use of Flash on mobile devices, but as technology is evolving and becoming more focused on mobile discontinuing Mobile Flash is sending a message that one of Adobe’s core products is not headed in the right direction.

We do not know if this was a business decision based on if a product was not as profitable as desired down the road or if their recent cutting in staff and recent refocus on Digital Media and Digital Marketing left Mobile Flash the odd product out, and we may never know.

Adobe is changing their mobile focus to HTML5. Here at Reality Digital, we have built mobile social applications with our Opus platform for clients from Fortune 500 companies to ad agencies and we have never been asked to integrate with Mobile Flash nor have we ever needed to use the Mobile Flash framework for a project. All of our social applications on mobile devices run on HTML5. There’s a simple reason — All mobile browsers can view HTML5 and not all of them can view Flash. We will dive into the technical aspects of HTML5 and it’s capabilities in coming weeks.

Our small sample-size may be part of a larger sample that Adobe has based their decision to discontinue Mobile Flash. It may be belated and may have been a reluctant decision, but Adobe has come to the conclusion that HTML5 makes more sense across all mobile platforms.