Apps are key

The stats on iPhone apps show that most apps are downloaded not onto a laptop and uploaded onto the iPhone, but directly onto the machine. Not only that, but stats from companies show that if there is an option of an app and a mobile web version the app is significantly more popular.

Why?

When you create an app, you are creating a program. When you build a mobile site, it has a URL that you need to navigate to. The app appears to the user as “native” to the platform (e.g. an iPhone) and the mobile site must be viewed in whatever browser is available and reaching this requires inserting a URL, or finding the bookmark.

Usability of Apps

In the eye of the app user, an app is significantly easier to use, even if it has the same functionality as the mobile website exactly. It’s not about quality or anything like that, but perception.

So, if you build for a mobile audience, you must build an app.

App Platforms

There are 3 major platforms to build for. iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.  The vast majority of apps that are “in the wild” are developed for the iPhone, and this is the primary platform that consumer based applications are developed for. It’s not the biggest user base, but it’s the most developed market.

Android will increase it’s share as more android devices come out, and Google will push this option. Blackberry is primarily a business based platform, and as such, there will be useful apps coming out, but so far, not many developers have grabbed hold of this market, and it’s likely to never be as large as the major 2.

See this BBC article for some more info: BBC article on Mobile Apps

We’re being asked about mobile apps more and more

This is an increasing marketplace and more companies are recognising that they need to build these apps. It will be as big as the internet in 10 years so why not start now?

Talk to us about developing mobile apps for your business or idea.

With the growing use of twitter comes a need to send web addresses (URLs) around the internet. However, if you only have 140 characters, you can’t send some of the long URLs.

So you have to use URL Shorteners. There are many out there already, but I wanted to create one to support one of the projects I think is worthwhile – Saving Bletchley Park – so I created stnx.at.

http://stnx.at

Use it!

I’ve been keeping an eye on Social Media for the past few years. It’s a buzzword for sure, and along with things like “User Generated Content” (UGC) and blogs, wikis and everything else, has become a major component for many company’s marketing.

However, most people just simply don’t understand it. Why is it so important? Is it more important than Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

SEO

This is simply (although it is not simple) making a website/page better for search engines to index and therefore bump up the page in the search engines (almost always Google) for specific keywords. It’s been a good earner for some people (mostly Google actually) for years, but it’s always smacked of slightly underhand if you ask me.

In my opinion, it’s important to optimise a website for SEO, but if that’s the only strategy, then frankly, you’re deluded.

Social Media

Social Media is essentially about generating and being involved in conversations. Mostly this is online and out of your control, but it’s becoming clear that it is an achievable goal to try to generate positive conversations and also keep an ear to the ground regarding negativity.  Dealing with those situations is nowhere near as simple as SEO and anyone that says it is, is lying.

Social Networks are all the rage, with getting pages on Facebook and applications, as well as the now obligatory twitter profile, but the interesting thing that most people are interested in is numbers of people.

Social Media is not about numbers

It’s about conversations. If you are aiming to get 10,000 followers on Twitter and 25,000 fans on your facebook page, good luck to you, but you’re probably barking up the wrong tree.

Focussing your energies on generating conversations will have much more of an effect than just numbers ever could. Getting people talking is much harder than bumping up numbers.

Conclusion

SEO is about ranking on Google and that’s fine. But Social Media is about amount of conversations and managing those conversations. Very very different.

That same friend was sending it to me as a joke. Why? Because my value to my followers on twitter would be significantly reduced if I started advertising anything.

Advertising is not about Eyeballs

At least, not totally. Social media (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo) has allowed friends to come closer together online and share their lives. This has caused a massive issue for advertisers who were used to magazines where you buy space.  The advertisers thought that they could just follow the crowds and buy space.

Not any more! Social Network Etiquette seems to say that If you are on a social network and build a large list of followers, unless you have built that followership on the basis of a business such as being a blogger, then starting to advertise services or companies that are unrelated is a bad thing.

Advocates, Conversation and Brand Personality

This is where advocates come in. If you can generate a brand loyalty and create brand advocates, then social networks will become a powerful tool in the arsenal of the marketing department. However, to create brand advocates, you need to understand the conversation.

What is the conversation? Young people are now expecting to be able to “friend” brands in the same way that they can with their friends. So what’s needed is a brand personality to be able to friend. Without that, the conversation between a brand and it’s customer base is limited.

Your Brand needs a Personality

If you don’t have one, make it up! We did just that with @JackTheCar at a company I was part of. It was highly successful.  The hardest part was creating the identity in the first place.

Social Networks aren’t new

They are just better engineered websites that allow for a user’s personality to come out. That is the key, allowing user’s personality to flourish. That’s why they are compelling for friends and that’s why they are compelling for marketers.

However, the oldest still used wide appeal technical social network is email and that’s massively important. However, there is a change to needing to focus into niches with the social space, and that’s where applications come along.

Applications and Widgets

There is now a need for simple applications that add value to a user’s social networks. These can be full-blown applications, or widgets that sit within a user’s social network profile.  These applications can be vital to allowing a brand to get itself “out there” on mobile devices or for generating brand awareness on a social network.

Application Development

We at Vida can create social applications and widgets for you. We have transformed our business from building forums (many years ago) to building full blown social networks.  However, the landscape has changed again so now it is the users who choose what applications and widgets they use and they are on the networks. The networks want to keep them, so how do we engage with them there?  Developing widgets and applications.

Vida can develop strategies for social applications and widgets, and as such, we can provide the development resource for this as well.  We do social applications.  These are very different from normal websites, and are more complex to develop, and therefore will be costed differently, but they are very achievable for a marketing campaign or longer term for brand awareness.

Get in touch for your applications

iPhone applications, android applications, facebook applications, myspace applications, opensocial applications and widgets are all going to become much more important for brands, and marketing agencies need to become aware of them now.

For more information on how it can transform a brand, and generate a Return on Investment, contact Vida.

Agencies are going to have to increasingly focus their attention on
hiring really fabulously experienced senior, client facing people
who can think as business people as well as account handling.
Clients now really understand digital … as a component of the marketing mix, they
understand digital as a business delivery environment. What they need help
with … is bridging the gap between marketing the brand, retail, their customers,
their internal stakeholders, technology and making the whole thing work seemlessly.

That to me seems like the challenge now which is a sort of funny hybrid of business
consulting, brand strategy and marketing.

Tom Adams of Mook – NMA Podcast
http://www.nmapodcast.co.uk/podcast-56.mp3

I was listening to the NMA podcast and came across this quote. I find it very revealing about the state of the digital industry that there would be a significant comment that shows companies want something different from digital.

What is Digital?

Digital is the marketing channel that uses digital technology in it’s various forms, mostly the web, email and mobile (currently) but also including interactive TV and now social media.

It’s become increasingly important in the past few years, given the rise of the ubiquity of the internet and the increase in data to mobiles has now made digital marketing an essential part of any marketing strategy.

What’s interesting is…

That digital marketing is not about being clever creatively any more. It’s far more than that. Some of the most innovative campaigns are the simplest, and this is often missed. A large proportion of digital agencies think that it’s imperative to spend serious amounts of money on “creative” when actually, this is not the case.

Far more important is the business case for the work, and especially now.  This is why it’s vitally important for companies to change their outlook on account management.

As a company, we are very used to managing blue-chip clients and creating a business case for campaigns over and above the normal metrics and ideas that are created.  We have a strong understanding of the part social media plays in marketing and have done for over 7 years.

We aim to take agencies and companies on a journey into the cutting edge of digital and want to take maany more companies there. I think the quote above shows that digital is changing from being an extension of marketing to being something altogether more intuitive and fast-moving.

We’ve experienced both scenarios within our business, and also acted as an outsourcing agency in that regard to our clients. We believe that there is definitely a place for outsourcing, but that the key is not that you outsource, but what you outsource and how you do it.

Expertise

It’s often overlooked that the skills that are outsourced require a certain amount of expertise. We have in-house expertise to manage any outsourcing requirements, but the worst thing to find is when outsourcing is taken on without the understanding to be able to manage the quality and properly test what is returned.

There are many things that have been good and many things that haven’t worked.  Here’s a quick checlist of pros and cons to help you figure out whether it’s right for your project.

Pros

• Genuinely cheaper daily rates
• More resource and more available resource
• Quick turnaround times
• Will often accommodate changes more readily (generally for a fee)
• You get what you ask for (!)

Cons

• You get what you ask for – if you don’t scope properly and provide a comprehensive specification, you will end up with an incomplete product
• Quality can be very hard to assess
• Design work (for websites especially) can sometimes be of a significantly low standard that it’s better to design in the UK
• Following accepted methodologies (agile, Prince2, UML etc) is no guarantee of ability
• Can be difficult to manage remotely
• Relationship between yourself and supplier can be very complex
• Language can cause an issue (if the supplier does not have a native English speaker for example
• There are a lot of companies out there, and not all of them are good – finding a good one is worth taking time over

Is this your experience?

We are experienced in this area, and these are just some of the things that we take into account when looking at outsourcing outside the UK. It can definitely work, just go in with your eyes open!

And The Top Mobile Social Networks Are…

which outlines how many mobile social networks are really impacting the mobile internet space.

It seems that users are wanting to use mobiles to interact on their normal social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace, instead of wanting something mobile specific. This makes a lot of sense, since most people’s social network is on a website, why would you try to put all your friends on a new one?

Transporting Your Network

All social networks are intended to keep you on their site, so most of them will not allow you to transport your network. Some, which are email based, do let you move the emails across, and others try to utilise your email network by contacting GMail (other email systems are available!) and the like.

It makes sense to aim to control the network, as Facebook does, because it decreases adoption of other networks.  This research seems to reveal that what users want is not functionality but their friends, and they appear to be willing to accept some non-mobile features to view information about their friends.

Strategy rethink for Mobile Social Networks?

So it seems that mobile social networks need to consider their strategies for how they are going to move or enhance their user’s desktop social network and provide services other than on the mobile. Without that, the companies that have the large desktop based social networks will just add on social mobile services. But maybe there is still a way…

If you want to discuss this further and how Vida can help with mobile social network strategy, then get in touch.

Social Media is a term encompassing all the different ways that it is possible to interact with something/someone else over the internet.  It’s rise is due in part to the term web 2.0 – in other words, an iterative development of the way the web is used. There’s no point in fully going into the definition of Social Media, but this Wikipedia article on Social Media does a pretty good job.

Case Studies

There are many different ways social media can help a company, but we thought we’d try to put together a list of Social Media Case Studies on this blog. Mainly for the benefit of the customers we interact with, but we wouldn’t be being very community-minded if we didn’t make this available for everyone.

This won’t necessarily be a blog of all Social Media case studies in the world ever, it may just be links to other lists of case studies. It is, however a starting point if you want to find out more.

• http://nowisgone.com/case-studies/ – A list of social media case studies
• http://www.chrisbrogan.com/help-someone-understand-social-media/ – Chris Brogan with some helpful insights to help you or your customers understand Social Media
• Nintendo Wii/Wii Fit Give Away – Looking at how Nintendo promoted Wii Fit
• Cases 2 – A list of some case studies on a wiki
• Case Study on Social Media Relations Twitter case study
  
• Harnessing Social Media – some research into how different websites use Social Media
• Giving up on work Email – Using Social Media as your business connection platform
• Will it Blend? – innovative use of video to promote a product
• Running a business on Google – a Twitter from Ryan Carson of Carsonified
• Doing Research with Social Media – and you can get involved with building Social Case Studies
• Headshift Case Studies – a list of Social Media case studies from Headshift
• Search for Social Media on Slideshare – in case you are looking for more of a presentation format for social media – especially this research presentation
• Blog on the backchannel - Thinking about blogging and it’s effect on presentations and conferences with special reference to backchannels
• Delicious search for links tagged with socialmedia and casestudy
• Blogs from Enterprise 2.0 in Boston in the Case Study category
  

This will never be a complete list but we just wanted to start to bring some of these people’s ideas and thoughts together in one place. We’ll use it as our external starting point even if no one else will!

Would you like a case study to be added to this list?

Send us your case studies – or even better (and more Social) why not put them on the web and write a synopsis in a comment and link them?  I’m sure my social graph has many more case studies than I do!

We will be posting interesting content and updates on the company as often as possible, so watch this space.