This week Twitter announced a bold expansion of its year-old Twitter Cards program, giving marketers a new way to directly obtain interested business leads via the social media service.
The new Lead Generation Card is squarely aimed at business tweeters, and it functions a lot like its name implies. Marketers can now embed a card within a standard Twitter message, generally promising some sort of promotional offer (such as "50% off on your first visit"). When readers expand the tweet by clicking on the embedded link, they're prompted to send their information to you. The neat trick is that the user doesn't have to fill out an "I'm interested" form. Their name, Twitter user name, and email address are pulled from their Twitter account, so getting in touch is a single-click operation. On the back end, you receive this information directly, after which you can follow up with the reader to make your sales pitch. In conjunction with Promoted Tweets, the promotional punch of the Lead Generation Card could be impressive.
The Lead Generation Card is currently in beta and launched this week to Twitter's managed clients. The company says it will be made available to small- and medium-sized businesses soon.
The Lead Generation Card is just the latest expansion to the functionality of Twitter, which originally limited tweets to a mere 140 characters of nothing but text. But now, as regular Twitter users surely have found, tweets can be embedded with all manner of extra goodies, including the popular Photo Card for embedded photographs and the new App Card for those who want to promote links to mobile phone applications.
The Lead Generation idea isn't a new one. LinkedIn pioneered the concept through its advertising system, which gives marketers an option to overlay their page with a lead collection pop-up that's similar to Twitter's Lead Generation Card. LinkedIn's Lead Generation prompt asks simply, "Would you like Bob's Donuts to follow up with you Indoor Positioning System?" As with Twitter's Lead Generation Card, potential customers can choose to send their information to the marketer with a single click.
This is a smart move on Twitter's end and potentially a great option for small businesses. It's a much needed step that may finally solve, at least for some businesses, a long-running, nagging problem with social media advertising. Many a business owner has now figured out that social media ads can make it easy to get additional followers on Twitter or Facebook, and then wondered what to do with them. For many business, followers and "Likes" are great, but they don't necessarily lead to increased sales. A case in point: Last month the New York Times reported on Coca-Cola's corporate study which took a hard look at its social media following. Despite 60 million Facebook fans and 700,000 Twitter followers, Coke "found that online buzz had no quantifiable impact on short-term sales."
Samsung targeted this midfield between a laptop and a tablet with its ATIV Smart PC range of laptops - essentially a tablet PC with a detachable solid keyboard and mouse trackpad. There's the ATIV Smart PC – which is the subject of this review – and the ATIV Smart PC Pro, which has a stronger kick to the teeth and your wallet.
But even the "starter" one of the two has a solid right-hook, albeit finely hidden. Let me explain: If you were to take a look at the specs, it might not sound all that great, but the real-life performance is quite impressive – listen to this: dual core Intel Atom processor, 2GB DDR2 RAM, 8 megapixel rear camera, 2 megapixel front camera, built-in wireless, 3G slot, S-Pen stylus, 11.6-inch screen, 1366x768 resolution, 128 GB built-in storage, microSD slot, and Bluetooth.
Like I said: on paper this doesn't sound all that impressive, but when you start to use it you'll be surprised at how well it handles. Much of this is due to Windows 8 being fairly light on its feet – you never get the feeling that the hardware had been partnered unfairly with the operating system.
Of course, the Pro version gets really serious. Most of the features between the two versions are the same, but the Pro has a few performance boosters: Intel Core i5 processor, 4 GB RAM, 256 GB built-in storage, and a 1920x1080 Full HD resolution screen. There's a small trade-off in the 5 megapixel rear camera.
Both come with three USB ports – one on the tablet and two on the detachable keyboard. The tablet part of the PC also has a mini-HDMI, a microSD, and a SIM card slot. Tucked into the bottom right corner on the back of the tablet you'll also find an S-Pen stylus.
Personally I found the stylus fairly cumbersome to use as it wasn't sensitive enough to – quite frankly – replace my finger when using in tablet mode and certainly not good enough to replace a mouse when using in laptop mode.
The star of the hardware show is the physical keyboard – it has solid, responsive keys and the trackpad works as it should. In fact, when you've got it connected to the tablet, you'll see no difference between what you have before you and a normal laptop.
There were two hardware design issues that completely burned the harvest for me though: the tilt-level of the screen and opening the clamshell "laptop" (the latter revealing a shocking lack of foresight in design).
When the tablet is connected to the keyboard and serves as the screen, you can't tilt it back past a certain angle. This is very annoying as it doesn't go back far enough for you to have the correct viewing angle if you're tall. I tried to see whether there is a reason for why they would design it like this, but for the life of me I couldn't find out any. It's especially annoying as Samsung has created tablet/laptop hybrids before and those could fold open flat.
The other rather annoying niggle is that the opening mechanism – when using this device in laptop mode – is badly designed. There's a lot of fumbling going on before you're able to flip the clamshell open.
These two elements are frustrating and disappointing, but far from show-stoppers as it's off-set so much by the ATIV Smart PC's other attributes.
Case in point is the battery life: Samsung claims a 14.5 hour Mobile Mark battery life (that's actual usage, not standby time) and 10 hours video play-time. Normally one giggles a bit when faced with such numbers, but we got very close to that – which impressed us no end.
Right, so how much does all of this cost? Indeed, that's the thing: the ATIV Smart PC has a RRP of R10449 and the Pro version goes for R18999. Yes, those are choke-on-your-pie kind of numbers... but is it worth it? Perhaps not... I love this laptop but the price is steep.
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