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I often joke with my new client’s that we (mobile phone companies) purposely make mobile phone bills confusing just to make it difficult for them to see exactly what they’re being charged.

If you’re often having difficulty making sense of the fees and charges that appear on your mobile phone bill then perhaps the information I’ve appended below will help you get a better understanding of how to accurately read and decipher your account.

HOW TO DETERMINE YOUR MOBILE PHONE CALL RATES

Probably 80% of the clients I meet don’t have a clear understanding of their mobile phone call rates; or what they believe they’re are being charged and what is actually being charged are two completely different things! To calculate your mobile phone call rates follow these steps:

a). FIND A 30 SECOND PHONE CALL
b). FIND A 1 MINUTE PHONE CALL
c). DEDUCT THE COST OF THE 30 SECOND CALL (a) FROM THE 1 MINUTE CALL (b)

This will generally provide you with your “real” call cost per 30 seconds. You’ll now notice that the new 30 second charge varies from the 30 second phone call cost (a) that you found in your mobile phone bill. This variance is due to an additional fee referred to as “flagfall” or “connection fee”. If you now deduct the new 30 second phone call cost from the original 30 second phone call cost (a) you’ll end up with a figure that is your flagfall cost per phone call.

WHAT IS FLAGFALL?

Flagfall (or connection fee) is what I call the “hidden fee” that many client’s either forget they’re being charged, or in some cases, were never told they’re being charged. Flagfall is a “single” fee applied at the beginning of a phone call every time you “connect” to someone (or something) on the other end. Simply put – if you make a phone call and someone (or something) answers, you’re charged flagfall. If nobody answers and the call “rings out” no flagfall fee applies. Many clients ask “what if I get someone’s message centre, am I still charged flagfall?” and the answer is “yes”. In this scenario your mobile phone call has still connected with something on the other end and therefore flagfall and call costs apply.

CHECK YOUR WHOLE BILL

Call rates and flagfall fees vary from carrier to carrier, plan to plan and call to call (see we really do try to make things confusing!) and this greatly depends on the type of plan or plans you and your business is subscribed to.

To give you a rough guide, in my experience CAP PLANS tend to have higher flagfall fees than BUSINESS PLANS and on occasions some BUSINESS PLANS may have no flagfall fee at all. You may even find that flagfall (and call costs) vary depending on the type of call that you make. For example, a call to a “landline” (office number) may be charged at a higher rate than a call made to a mobile phone, or a call in the morning may cost less than a call made in the afternoon!

So as you can see there are many variables that need to be considered when trying to accurately establish what you and your business is being charged for mobile phone calls.

I trust these simple “Tips & Hints” will help you make sense of your next mobile phone account.

Jason Hellyer
Mobile Guide

I’m sure you already know that everyone and their mother is on Facebook right? Facebook, that behemoth of a platform with 500 million users is number one. If you want to have visibility online and engage in the platform that offers the best source of social media traffic to your website or blog you need to be on the number one social networking site in the world.

What about the number two player? If you have a social networking campaign to launch or you want to engage and make “friends” so that you can eventually interest people in what you are doing online, where would you go after Facebook? Well, it surprised me in writing this article that the answer is StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site where people can “Stumble” web pages that peak their interest, write reviews, rate, and share their discoveries with their followers. We should all care about StumbleUpon if we care about what social media is making connections. The Social Media Examiner wrote a nice little article on how to use StumbleUpon, so I won’t get into how I am using it until the end of this piece.

When TechCrunch first reported StumbleUpon’s #2 ranking in April, they had StatCounters Global Stats graph from Mar 2009 to March 2010. Well, I did another StatCounter graph from Nov 2009 to Nov 2010, and the results still show StumbleUpon as the number two most trafficked social media site.

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We’re not talking members here, because StumbleUpon has roughly 11 million users versus 175 million Twitter users. We are talking about level of importance if the results from StatCounter are correct, and we are going to assume they are, because TechCrunch is influential enough to have done their homework. The conclusion is StumbleUpon is an important social media traffic generating platform for your blog and website. Similar to Twitter’s ReTweet, as you stumble-upon more content and discover fascinating new information that has yet to be stumbled, you will gain new subscribers who will see a plethora of the stuff you found good enough to “Like”. StumbleUpon requires you to do minimal self-promotion of you own site(s), and instead share information about new websites that you recommend. Align the content, and relationships you’ve created on StumbleUpon, with your burgeoning “StumbleUpon Station” correctly and the potential rewards for mega traffic back to your own website is almost guaranteed.

Now for my take on how to use StumbleUpon. If you really want to get your blogs and website to be eyeballed, get yourself StumbleUpons’s link shortener su.pr simply by opening a free account. Copy and paste your Tweets in the box supplied with the original link to the article, hit the shorten link button, check the Twitter and/or Facebook check-boxes and then click on “post” or schedule the post, and you are finished.

Your article will be posted by using su.pr shortening service to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. You can then click on the article snapshot and “vote it up”. After you have done this, simply go to your StumbleUpon profile and share the article with your other subscribers and if you are fortunate, they will also vote it up as well. Alternately, if you don’t mind your screen real-estate being infringed upon, you can certainly download the StumbleUpon Firefox add-on and the website will be available in the toolbar of your browser. The pay back for the browser add-on is it appears StumbleUpon gives more credence to the content you’re sharing when you do your stumbling and liking through the frame, because you are now fully part of the community.

Having been on StumbleUpon for a couple of years and having hardly had a go at it, I are now armed and ready to really use it in a manner that clearly works for a large majority of its subscribers.