How to Use WeChat for Business

how to use wechat for business

Most of us believe that mobile instant messaging (MIM) is the next big thing in digital media. However, many marketers may find it challenging to figure out the best possible ways to engage their customers through MIM.  With the release of WeChat in 2011, even small companies are now emerging as major market competitors.

With more than 300 million users, the mobile phone text and voice messaging communication service supports text and video chat, video calling,  photo/video and location sharing, discovering new people, broadcasting messages, group messages and photo sharing. Many marketers find it a unique way to engage their customers and fans of their brands.

Use Verified Accounts

Individuals can follow verified brand accounts by either getting a member of their WeChat network to share their account or scanning a QR Code.

High quality creative content is key to attract audiences. The verified account allows a brand to post rich media content including audio messages, videos, photos and text to followers of their WeChat stream.

Use Membership Functions to Convert Followers

WeChat membership functions can actually convert your followers into members. The functions create loyalty programs where individuals can use their geo-localized membership cards to pair up with users by their WeChat ID or phone number. This allows brands to adapt their marketing content and highlight sales promotions to a certain section of consumers.

There are three typical ways to apply WeChat into your marketing activities:

  • Issuing a virtual VIP card.
  • Sending promotional offer notifications.
  • Delivering  e-coupons.

To initiate business interactions with your customers a welcome message is a crucial step, especially for newbies. You can also ask questions to convert inquiries to several sets of prescribed answers. To respond correctly to your customers, you can use five types of content including text, audio, visual, video and text+visual.

In addition, you can also choose to respond with a URL of a mobile-friendly site. Most importantly, the conversation remains confidential between you and your fans unless you or your fans wish to spread it out.

Use WeChat QR Codes to Promote Your Brand

You can actively convert fans through various means. One such means is to make your brand’s QR Code featured in all point of purchase materials.  Always give your consumers a reason to scan your QR code. A few inducements, such as top up promotion for a purchase, discounts, lucky draws, souvenirs or a free WiFi pass code are always appreciated.

Additionally, adding your QR code on your packaging is another great alternative. The best tactics to consider are to either feature your brand’s WeChat QR code on your Weibo page or promote your WeChat activities through wall posts to grab the attention of audiences.

Share Your Brand Images

Brands can get their due attention by displaying their logos on the subscribers’ personal pages. This allows brand followers a way to show off their personal tastes and preferences and you can choose whether or not to showcase your logo.

Incentivize to Entice Followers

WeChat’s API allows you to integrate the services into mobile apps to entice followers. However, consumers who follow a business on WeChat should be given a motivation to sign up. Offer prizes, POS promotions, pictures or entertainment to optimize your conversion rate.

Create a Mini Website

Apart from conversation based on chats, WeChat enables brands to set up a full mini website to complete their brand experience. This website can be divided into two-level menus which can work as a series of marketing purposes. These two-level interacting menus are an important tool to better manage interaction with your fans. This can be set up on the WeChat account panel or with the help of third-party services.

WeChat is a marketing platform where brands can geo-target their community and specifically categorize people according to their gender and location.



Why You May Have Waited Too Long to Talk to Your Accountant

If you’ve waited until tax time to talk to your accountant, you may have waited too long.

Keeping regular contact with your accountant throughout the year is one tip offered to small business owners by many in the industry. That’s according to Xero, an accounting software company catering to small businesses. The company released the results of an annual survey this week in which accountants were asked about their top recommendations for small business owners.

About one-third (32 percent) of the accountants interviewed said small business owners should meet regularly with their tax preparers.

Meeting regularly with your accountant can avoid costly errors. These regular meetings can be used to plan when to make important capital purchases. They can also be used to decide when to incur other expenditures to be sure you have adequate deductions.

About 44 percent of the accountants interviewed by Xero said that meeting monthly with your accountant is important. Just more than 20 percent said that weekly meetings are necessary.

In an interview with Small Business Trends, Xero Partner/CEO and Principal of New Vision CPA Group Jody Padar said that part of the blame for delaying meetings falls on accountants. The industry is set up around spending time once a year sifting through a small business’s paperwork. Instead, accountants should be staying on top of things all year round. And cloud accounting is making that more possible, Padar said:

“You can’t plan in April. If you’re only meeting with your accountant at tax time, you can’t plan.”

If your business uses cloud accounting software, you likely have a better idea of the real-time finances of your company. And your accountant does, too. That makes these meeting times more effective, Padar added:

“One of the benefits is that your accountant gets to know your business. The busy work is already done.”

The survey offers a few more tips for small business owners relevant to accounting and tax time. Chief among those tips is to avoid leaving money on the table, mostly through overlooked deductions. These deductions can include depreciation, out-of-pocket expenses, auto expenses, and office improvements.

Another tip is to avoid faulty deductions, since these are more likely to bring an audit of your return, according to the Xero survey.

Accountant Photo via Shutterstock



Stay Ahead of the Curve

Stay ahead of the curve in 2014 with these five benefits and HR trends.

Increased Focus on Accountability

With soaring health care costs, consumer and provider accountability are gaining attention as potential solutions. There may still be plenty to accomplish, but companies are taking steps towards accountability solutions that may truly help employees see lower or no-cost health care services.

Private Insurance Exchanges

Separate from the government marketplaces, private insurance exchanges present employers with a simpler way to offer comprehensive worksite benefit options. By giving employees a fixed stipend towards benefit options, this type of delivery model helps control costs.

Strong Consumer Safety Nets

As employees assume greater responsibility for their health care, their need for a strong safety net increases. Even if employees are covered by a comprehensive major medical plan, out-of-pocket costs can be substantial if a serious injury or illness occurs.

Unprecedented C-Suite Engagement

With health care reform nearing, the potential cost of being unprepared will require benefits strategies to be top of mind for executives and financial leadership.

Tailor the Employee Value Proposition to the Next Generation

As the baby boomer generation moves toward retirement, millennials have begun taking on managerial roles. Defined by their use and affiliation with technology, these employees are also more engaged online with their personal identity than any generation before them. In the years ahead, employers will continue to adjust retirement, engagement, training and communications programs to account for this changing workforce.

Healthcare Photo via Shutterstock



PHP poses threat to website integrity

"Patching no longer offers complete protection" says Professor John Walker, Nottingham Trent University

A new report claims that, with 82 per cent of websites using the PHP server-side scripting language today - and hackers targeting the code - the web hosting industry and its users have a serious structural security problem on their hands.

Originally developed back in 1995, PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, but the acronym now stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor, a type of code that is interpreted by a web server - and which then generates a web page on the fly.

Because PHP commands can be embedded directly into an HTML source document, they do not need to call an external file. It is this degree of self-containment that has driven PHP's success, and the reason why hackers have targeted the code architecture.

SCMagazineUK.com caught up with Barry Shteiman, director of security strategy with Imperva - the company behind the PHP report - and asked him what corporates can do defend against the structural security issues that his report identifies.

There are three solutions, he says. The first involves constantly patching a platform and keeping it up to date, which is expensive and time-consuming. The second involves patching around the CVE advisories from NIST, and the third is to install a Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Professor John Walker, a Visiting Professor with the Nottingham Trent University's School of Science and Technology, said that all of these security strategies are made vastly more complex owing to the fact that most organisations typically have a range of PHP-enabled platforms in active use - many of which are in different versions. 

"I've seen corporates using everything under the sun in this regard, so patching ceases to offer complete protection. This is all part of the bigger picture of companies failing to have a defined software and versioning strategy," he said, adding that this lack of standardisation is the real cause of problems in most PHP implementations. 

The solution, says Walker - who is also director of CSIRT & Cyber Forensics at Integral Xssurance - lies in ensuring that the company has a well-defined software and versioning strategy - and sticking to that plan. 

"Basically this approach goes beyond the PHP security vulnerability issue and involves tackling the bigger security picture," he said, adding that taking a wider strategy allows businesses to defend their IT systems without the expense of specific remedies. 

Walker's observations were echoed by Jim Taylor, head of penetration testing services with ethical pen testing security consultancy Pentura, who said that vulnerabilities in PHP and Apache - where vendors have released relevant fixes - are still found to be vulnerable on a daily basis. 

“Exploitable vulnerabilities are not just restricted to the command injection vulnerability previously discussed and it is quite regularly observed that a great deal of public facing Web servers are poorly patched,” he explained. 

Against this backdrop, Taylor went on to say that it is key that system owners patch and update systems in a timely manner following a stringent corporate testing and patching policy that enables them to secure their systems and reduce the attack surface open to attackers. 

“ In addition, developers should be encouraged to update old code and stop releasing applications with known vulnerabilities. A security-in-depth approach should always be followed," he said. 

Back at Imperva, Shteiman likened the PHP issue to where the IT industry was with Windows XP security issues ten years ago, and where Java sits in the security space today. 

"Hackers realise that PHP is popular - which is why they target the code. There's also a huge gap between the time of vulnerabilities being revealed and patches being developed - in some cases, up to two years can elapse," he said. 

"Most hackers also realise that many users do not patch their systems, so they don't need to develop a constant stream of exploits for PHP - they can simply re-use some of the older PHP exploits," he added.



20 percent of all malware created was coded in 2013

Malware may have reached its 25th anniversary last November, but research just published claims that 20 per cent of all malware ever created was coded last year.

The study comes from Panda Security and the headline statistic works out as the equivalent of 82,000 malware threats per day throughout 2013.

Delving into the annual report reveals that more than seven in 10 of the new threats seen in 2013 were Trojans - with 21 million new variants popping out of the ether during the year. Worm, meanwhile, accounted for 13.3 and viruses 8.49 per cent of the year's pile of coding misery for IT users.

PandaLabs - the security vendor's research arm - singled out the major data breach at Adobe last October as a key event of the year. As widely reported at the time, source code for several Adobe applications - as well as the credentials of 38 million users - were exposed. 

Nigel Stanley, CEO and principal consultant with Incoming Thought, said that the tidal wave of malware - which shows no sign of abating - indicates that the cyber-criminal business model is still succeeding. 

"It shows us that cyber-crime is still a very viable business, with the return on investment on creating malware clearly reaping dividends for everyone involved," he said. 

"Our observations suggest that malware volume trend is definitely on the up, and it's only going to get worse when Windows XP goes end-of-life next month - at which point Microsoft will cease to provide updates. And that's before we even begin to talk about the impending Internet of Things, where all our devices, from the kitchen fridge upwards, are connected to the net," he said. 

So does Panda's annual report for 2013 truly reflect the status f the security sphere? SCMagazineUK.com polled several industry luminaries for their observations. 

Jaime Blasco, director of AlienVault Labs, was sceptical, pointing out that the analysis does not mean that malware authors are creating 82,000 new malware threats every day, as the number gets impacted by the use of tools that slightly modify the malicious files - effectively making them unique. 

"And again, it doesn't mean that security companies have to deal with 82,000 new malware threats per day. That being said, I have to agree that the number of samples has been increasing steeply in the last few years and it makes our work more challenging," he said. 

Over at Lancope, CTO Tim Keanini said that malware is an essential part of the adversaries' playbook and the exponential growth not only does not surprise me, but we should expect it to continue on this non-linear path. 

"I also think it is important that we interpret these numbers for what they are. In the early days of malware, the package was authored as a package start to finish but in this day and age, most of the distributions are delivered in kit form," he said.

"One can now pick and choose components of the malware from a very long list of options which results in a combinatorial number of different end products. On top of that, evasion techniques are parameterised so it is completely feasible for each malware from a common strain to have millions of different manifestation," he added. 

"When you combine all of this with the introduction of the Internet of Things where new platforms offer even more variations for malware and the numbers will get astronomical," he noted, echoing Stanley's observations. 

Troy Gill, security analyst with AppRiver, said he found that claim that 20 per cent of all malware was created in 2013 somewhat difficult to believe at first. 

"However, after reading the report it seems that the figure also refers to new variants, or `variants of known malware conveniently modified to bypass security products.'  Considering the latter statement this makes the claim seem much more realistic," he said, adding that his research shows that 2014 - so far - has been a banner year for malware distribution. 

"Only 77 days into 2014, we have already quarantined nearly as many emails containing malware than in the entire year 2013. Malware distributors are constantly modifying their malware to attempt to avoid detection," he explained. 

Dana Tamir, director of enterprise security with Trusteer, an IBM company, said that the number of reported Java vulnerabilities jumped significantly between 2012 and 2013, adding that IBM's X-Force Threat Intelligence report indicates that - with this increase in vulnerabilities - there has been a significant increase in Java exploits as well. 

"This was a result of the discoveries of new zero-day vulnerabilities and the introduction of exploits into popular exploit toolkits," he said.



Trust users to improve security, say analysts

Despite the dangers of insider threats, Gartner analysts Tom Scholtz and Ant Allan believe that trusting people can go a long way to improving business security.

Speaking at the Gartner IAM summit in Westminster, London on Tuesday, Scholtz opened by saying that treating employees like responsible adults can have a positive effective, not least in reducing the risk of insider threat but also in helping IT departments to more closely monitor external threats attempting to breach the corporate network.

Scholtz - a research VP of Gartner who specialises in security management - was of course primarily talking in relation to identity management but his comments, to an audience of security professionals including CISOs, were directed more generally at IT security.

He urged attendees to treat people as the “most powerful agent in the security infrastructure”, instead of treating “them like children” - an approach which futurologist Peter Cochrane says that often results in people acting in an immature way (he says: “If you treat people like children, they will behave like children”)

“97 percent of people want to do the right thing so why treat them like the criminals trying to attack us from the outside?” asked Scholtz.

As part of this, the Gartner exec said that companies should move towards to a people-focused environment, with less preventative controls, less bureaucracy and less focus on policy/compliance. Ant Allan agreed and said that - while primarily authentication remains key - there shouldn't be a desire to “nail everything down to the nth degree”.

By doing this, both Gartner analysts argued that people-centric identity management can improve staff morale, the agility of a team, save money and can help companies to use IT to achieve their business objective. “This is hypothetical, but the probability of [this] improving security is not pie in the sky,” claimed Scholtz.

To illustrate, he cited one unnamed company which had implemented a security environment where they didn't unnecessarily circumvent job controls, freeing up employees to get the job done. What they found, Scholtz says, was that IT departments had to filter a “lot less noise in the monitoring environment”, allowing them to focus more on malicious outside threats.

“When they were monitoring an environment, or detecting an incident - there was a much higher probability that it was a security problem. Ironically, they ended up with better security even though [IT] had less controls.”

Another company, a large industrial firm, gave users more access to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system than they really needed. “The lesson learnt was that people could be trusted, they could be given more access than they needed and wouldn't abuse it,” said Allan.

It's an approach born out of the “Shared Space” research from Hans Monderman, who helped build quiet areas in cities, with the aim of fewer accidents. Moderman stripped out traffic lights, signs, crosswalks and lane markers, with the intention that pedestrians, motorists and cyclists would be able to negotiate through streets by communicating with each other.

Scholtz believes that the same model could work in the security space, with users forced to make their “own risk-based decisions”.

You can still keep the bad guys out

Both men were keen to stress that affording more controls to the end user isn't about relaxing security, but simply about trusting them enough to do the right thing. And should they betray that trust, Scholtz still urged companies to be strong if need be.

“Obviously, you've still got to keep the bad guys out - we need to make sure employees have the knowledge and skill to behave in the right way. If people do misbehave, punish them effectively for the individual. Weak leaders are too scared to punish the individual,” said the analyst, adding that such leaders would often block access for a whole department.

“I am not saying that this [approach] suits all enterprises, but it can work in the right environment.”

Allan added that this would likely be down to establishing a baseline a trust, a need to protect the critical things, and urged companies to look to monitoring tools - like SIEM and big data security analytics, as well as recognition and authentication technologies, such as biometrics and voice recognition.

Allan concluded: “Corrective controls don't go away - you still have to monitor - but it's about being more focused on services rather than restricting an organisation and stopping it working.”



Snowden: NSA can record all telephone calls in foreign countries

The NSA is spending a great deal of money to get large numbers of false positives, says digital forensics specialist professor Peter Sommer.

The NSA reportedly has its own version of a Sky TV or TIVO recorder, but for entire foreign country telephony networks.

According to the latest leaked documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, not only does the US spy agency have a 30 day buffer on its whole-country telephony recording capability, but it has had the technology since 2009.

The Washington Post - which seems to have a direct line to Snowden since he first started releasing information last May - reports that the MYSTIC surveillance system is capable of storing "100 percent" of a foreign country's phone calls.

The fact that the system has been in place since 2009 means that the technology almost certainly pre-dates the migration to an IP backbone that most national telcos have moved to in recent years. Here in the UK, for example, BT's 21CN IP migration plan was only 50 per cent completed by the start of 2009, SCMagazineUK.com notes.

This suggests that the calls are being transcribed from an analogue into a highly compressed digital format. Even so, the volume of data storage involved is breathtaking. The UK, for example, generated 254 billion minutes of calls in 2010 (according to the last complete set of figures available from Ofcom), of which almost 50 per cent were mobile originated or terminated. 

Interestingly, The Washington Post cites an NSA senior manager referring to MYSTIC as a time machine - "one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance."

The paper has cross-referenced Snowden's claims with various reports/citations from the US Government and concluded that the MYSTIC platform does exist, even if its capabilities are still theoretical. 

The most interesting take-out from Snowden's assertions is that analysts listen to only a fraction of a per cent of the calls, although the absolute numbers are high, centering on millions of voice clippings for processing and long-term storage. 

Digital forensics specialist Professor Peter Sommer - who is also a Visiting Professor at Leicester's de Montfort University - told SCMagazineUK.com that back in 2003 the US Congress killed off a pet project of John Poindexter (then the US Deputy National Security Adviser) called ‘Total Information Awareness'. 

"The claim had been that if you collect enough material you get enough advance warning to make America safe," he said, adding that the notion was always flawed, among other reasons, because you need to know what you are looking for in the form of danger signatures. 

Professor Sommer went on to say that, without the danger signatures, all you are doing is spending a great deal of money and getting large numbers of false positives. 

Against this backdrop, he says, MYSTIC has the same problems and the likelihood of discovering `new or emerging threats' by this means - as opposed to more conventional intelligence analysis - seems remote.

"EU Data Retention policies, which are limited to communications data not content, are adequate to deal with the aftermath of an unexpected event, so looking back into history may be useful to identify a perpetrator and the nature of the problem," he concluded.



The Unexpected Benefits of Chit Chat for Business Networking

Do you avoid talking to people in business settings? Do you dread receptions, banquets, and other business related social events? Do you struggle to make meaningful, long term connections at work?

You’re not alone.

Many of us are apprehensive about these situations, because most of us either hate entering rooms where we don’t know anyone or hate spending time with people we don’t know well. With a little insight, practice and use of some helpful tips, you can be chit chatting at the water cooler, or your next networking event effortlessly.

Business Chit Chat Networking

Networking can be scary, hard and nerve wracking. But, it can also be fun, beneficial and yield amazing results. It’s all in the mindset going into the experience, regardless of your personality type.

Networking for business should be thoughtful, purposeful, strategic and tactical. If you are just going out to events to gather cards and then spam people, please stay home, save some trees and know that it doesn’t work.

Make sure you are attending events where the right people are gathering that relate to or represent your business goals and values and go with an open, adventurous attitude. We have all met key people at events we didn’t want to go to that turned into great resources and connections.

Here’s what I see master networkers do:

  • They master small talk or business chit chat to open conversations and establish commonality.
  • They show interest in others first.
  • They know how to keep a conversation going.
  • They know when to exit respectfully.
  • They use appropriate humor.
  • They follow up, even to say thank you.
  • They are informed about current events and topical things.
  • They never talk politics, religion or sexuality.

Meeting the right people, making quality connections and growing relationships is an art. Not everyone is good at or comfortable with meeting new people they don’t know. So being able to open conversations with business chit chat is a very good skill to develop.

Business Chit Chat Ice Breaker Questions

“Bring me up to date on your latest project.”

“What do you find to be the most enjoyable aspect of your job?”

“Tell me about your history with ________.”

“How long have you been a member of this group”?

Top Chit Chat Things You Can Talk About

The weather, hobbies, pets, travel, books, food, music, entertainment, sports, fun activities and movies.

We know networking builds strong communities of customers, mentors, advocates, cheerleaders and allies, as a valuable support system.  We don’t succeed alone. We succeed together. So having an active network makes the journey easier and more enjoyable.

Great networks are built not by amassing numbers of anyone, but about deepening connections with the right people. Master networkers find the commonality, uncover the synergy, join forces and make things happen. They work every day at making real relationships happen with a patient persistence.

Meeting great people can happen just about anywhere. Look beyond only professional settings to personal, social, community and random settings. Practice networking and developing your business chit chat skills.

Relationships will accelerate with people when you take the time to get more personal in your networking interactions and own and focus your time with people you meet - even if it’s 5 minutes.

It starts with opening the door with some fun chit chat, which can and does lead to many unexpected relationships and benefits.

So. . .what’s your favorite food?

Networking Photo via Shutterstock



Savory Spice Shop: Taking Advantage of the Latest Trend

Cindy Jones remembers a time when families didn’t grab food from the nearest take-out windows. Instead, they cooked at home where food and fellowship were part of a single tradition.

Jones grew up in a tight-knit Italian family where food was always part of a central bond. Today, there’s a trend again towards preparing food in the home as a way of reclaiming both family ties and improving health.

It may be bad news for some restaurateurs, but not so much for Jones and her husband Bob’s latest venture. The couple opened a franchise of the Savory Spice Shop in Raleigh, N.C. in April 2011. The store is part of a brand launched by entrepreneurs Mike and Janet Johnson of Denver, Col. specializing in offering customers 400 different kinds of spices and 160 custom blends.

Freshness is the cornerstone of the brand with a focus on those passionate about using spices in their own cooking. People Jones calls serious “foodies.”

In fact, Jones says the shop receives spices freshly ground in five pound batches delivered from the franchise headquarters in Denver weekly and tries not to order more than they expect to sell.

savory spice shop

She says the distinction from spices sold at grocery stores that may have been on the shelf for weeks isn’t lost on customers. Jones laughs:

“We’ll have customers come up to us and say ‘I never knew cinnamon was supposed to smell like that.’”

Jones and her husband are more than just connoisseurs of their product and of great cooking. They also happen to be trained professionals. As part of the buying of their franchise, the couple also traveled to Denver to spend six weeks of intensive training in what Savory Spice Shop calls its “Spice University.”

Today, the business includes three full-time employees, Jones, her husband and a full-time manager, as well as four part-time employees. They are in the process of hiring a fifth.

savory spice shop

Of course, there’s more to running their business than knowing how to order the right spices, opening the doors each day and taking money at the cash register. Jones says a key part of making the local shop a success is the outreach to customers. That involves commitment to constantly learning and helping customers with questions.

For example, Jones says, if a customer has been told to cut salt out of his or her diet, staff at the shop work to find potential replacement. Alternatives include spices like wasabi or pepper.

The shop also conducts regular cooking classes which also raise money for a local rescue mission.

Customers are also offered recipes supplied by the franchise chain and the Raleigh store also submits its own recipes to the company’s test kitchen in Denver for possible sharing with other franchise shops.

When asked why they started their new venture, entrepreneurs frequently give many different answers. For Jones and her husband, while both have an avid interest in home cooking and a passion for all things culinary, the answer was clearly - necessity.

After a career in corporate IT, Bob found himself with shrinking opportunities after turning 50. With one child still college bound and a desire to find a business that would require less travel for him, the couple settled on the Savory Spice Shop option.

Not only did Cindy and Bob Jones pick the right business model. They seem to have chosen the right location, too.

Raleigh, N.C. is at the center of the Research Triangle, an area of the state known as a major hot bed of high tech startups. The area draws a highly educated and affluent workforce. Jones also insists the area’s thriving foodie culture has hugely contributed to the shop’s success.

Finally, Jones said a strong Shop Local Raleigh program has been a huge boost. Jones said:

“We were probably one of the earliest businesses in the Shop Local movement [in Raleigh]. What we’re seeing is a real renaissance.”

* * * * *

iCIMS, a leading provider of talent acquisition solutions for growing businesses, is proud to be the official sponsor of Small Business Trend’s “Small Biz Spotlight” of Savory Spice Shop. Like iCIMS, Savory Spice Shop understands the value of providing quality products to meet their customer’s needs. iCIMS is delighted to have the opportunity to support the passionate drive and dedication of companies like Savory Spice Shop through the sponsorship of the “Small Biz Spotlight.” (Visit the “Small Biz Spotlight” series archives and stay tuned for more small business stories there.)

Images: Savory Spice Shop

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Google Says Underlined Links are “So 1990″

google underlined links

Visitors to Google’s search page might have noticed some changes recently. Among other things, the search giant removed the familiar underlines below search result links. It may seem like a small change. But the underlines were the last remaining design element that has stayed with Google since its humble beginnings in the mid 1990’s.

Google also updated a few other elements such as title size and line heights. None of the changes on their own will turn any heads. But together they signify that Google is changing with the times. The company is getting ready for the switch to a whole new way of searching: Mobile.

In a recent interview with The Verge, Google Lead Designer Jon Wiley said:

“We’ve increased the size of result titles, removed the underlines, and evened out all the line heights. This improves readability and creates an overall cleaner look. Google is also bringing over the new ad labels from its mobile site, and the whole search interface looks a little more consistent with its mobile and app variants. The changes might seem minor, but for Google it’s a significant change to a search engine that rarely changes its design. It also matches more modern touch-friendly sites that have opted for increased page elements as more consumers move towards tablets and smartphones.”

Mobile technology is becoming more prominent by the day. So it makes sense that Google would want to make its interface more user-friendly. Especially for consumers who’ve become accustomed to how the site works on their mobile apps.

No, it won’t change the way the site actually works. But the fact that Google is keeping mobile customers in mind is a good sign for businesses that rely on traffic from the search engine.

So say goodbye to underlined links - they’re just so 1990′s!

And say hello to a new Google search experience that should be similar no matter if you’re on a laptop, tablet or smartphone. The tech giant that started out nearly 20 years ago is still a big part of search. And alterations that take into account the growing mobile trend, should help the company hold on a little longer.

Image: Google

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