Before you Go Somewhere New, Learn from Where you’ve Been
Ten years ago, who would have guessed that our lives would revolve around the Internet? Personally, I was thinking we’d be flying cars by now; but that’s beside the point. The bottom line is that our lives are digitally saturated. Of course, with everything humans create, there comes plenty of drama. As our Chief Buddy noted in the previous post, take the Adobe vs. Apple debate…not to be outdone by iPhone vs. Android…then there’s the Facebook privacy issues. The list goes on and on. Which leads us to the question: Where exactly are we going next? As one of the Associate Directors of Development at The Buddy Group, here’s a screenshot from the frontline:
Your Second Chance at Digital Marketing Success
The Internet as we know it is quite different than it was a few years ago or even six months ago. I mean, do you remember MySpace? Neither do I; but companies were chomping at the bit to find an agency that could create a marketable MySpace page. Many were able to use this online tool to catapult their brand. So what killed MySpace? Facebook and its little brother Twitter. These two sites are drastically changing the behavior of everyday Internet users and the way companies approach marketing. If you missed out on MySpace success, you now have a second chance at digital fame. Smart brands are using Facebook and Twitter to bring customers to the stores, online or off. Our team refers to the strategy of leveraging such platforms as Audience Engagement and as someone who implements and captures all the data tracking let me tell you…it’s working. Facebook, for example, has over 400 million active users. Twitter is highly successful, too, thanks to its fast pace and refreshing brevity. The widely used term “TL;DR” (which means Too Long, Didn’t Read) sums up Twitter perfectly and is an increasingly important part of the Audience Engagement mix. When used properly, Facebook and Twitter not only give its users a platform to speak, it gives your company a platform to listen. In the early days, we only had traffic numbers to rely on to let us know how our sites were performing; today we have near real-time data that lets us quickly address user feedback, sometimes within minutes. But it is not just the real-time benefit that has us excited. The long-term effect of apps, mobile pages and open platforms such as Twitter to your Search Engine Optimization Strategy (SEO) is becoming significant. There have been a series of major moves by Google and others to integrate Twitter results into search queries and brands who utilize the right keywords and voice can reap the reward with increased organic traffic and relevance. Now that there are so many different avenues to get to your brands content, it’s only a matter of deciding where your users will end up and providing the path to get them there; which takes us to mobile.
Mobile Web: Moving Faster than Ever
Not only are we consuming smaller bits of information but we’re consuming it with smaller devices. With the release of the iPhone, things have gotten interesting. All of a sudden there’s all these weird ‘apps’ that allow us to do stuff in different ways. Quick and easy one-touch features are the new user experience. And we love it. LOVE IT! One sticky point: The app market is quickly becoming over-saturated. As of this writing, there are over 200,000 apps in the Apple App Store. Unless your app does something completely unique or adds tremendous value to the end-user, don’t expect it to break the top 100 list. Sometimes, creating an app for your project may not be the best investment. It might make more sense to create a mobile version of your Website instead of clawing your way through Apple’s application approval process. The same holds for the exploding app market for Android and other mobile devices. You have to ask: Are we building apps just to jump on the Appwagon? Here are some really interesting numbers on market share for mobile phone operating systems. I think you might be surprised at who actually holds the top two spots. http://ow.ly/24j4W
Ask yourself if your brand will really benefit.
You Need to Know the Code
There was a time when icons appeared on Websites that said stuff like “Best viewed in Internet Explorer” or “Get Netscape now to enjoy this Website.” Thankfully, those days are long gone. When we code a Website, we no longer have to develop for every browser on the market. Sure, the current crop of browsers handle certain things differently, but all-in-all, it’s “write code once, deploy to all.” Flash came in and took it a step further in that there were no browser incompatibilities. It was truly one code-base that worked across all browsers. Web developers, no matter what language they use, have been trying to get to this Holy Grail for years. All we want to do is write our code one time and deploy it on IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, etc. Wouldn’t that be the life if we truly had full cross-platform usability? I think that AIR gets us really close, but there is one big sticking point… Apple. No one knows the real reasons behind the feud between Apple and Adobe, but the fact of the matter remains that Apple has chosen not to support Flash or AIR on their devices, including the iPad. So here we are back to the early days of developing our apps at least twice if we want them available on all platforms. Another interesting statistic is the actual number of developers that work on these platforms. It was a surprise to me to see that there are quite a bit more Android developers than iOS developers. This shows a significant shift in what developers are choosing as their ‘tool of choice’. Android is far more open with their technologies than Apple and they don’t require their developers to jump through endless hoops to get their app in the Android Marketplace (not to mention the possibility of getting your app pulled from the Apple App Store for any number of insignificant reasons). It also shows where the market is trending in the mobile sphere. Since we as developers are constantly on the search for the Holy Grail I mentioned above, we’re going to always start the budget and planning talk with the path of least resistance at least until compelling reasons can be presented outlining the short-term benefit of having multiple platform support. We usually start the conversation with Google’s mobile Operating System Android. With Android supporting Flash and AIR, it opens up endless possibilities of what we can produce for these devices. What’s really cool is that if we create an AIR application, it’s going to run flawlessly on your PC, Mac, Linux, and Android device. If we create an Apple app, it’s going to run on the iPhone and iPad…and that’s it. We understand that Apple has a very specific design approach and that they want all of their applications to look and function the same way across the board (maybe that should be across the “bored”), but limiting our design team’s creativity because of Apple’s desire to make everything uniform just doesn’t sit well with me at all. We should be free to create; we should be free to conceptualize new ideas, new navigation techniques, new ways of displaying content, but Apple seems to think they’ve nailed it so we must conform to their standards. This is stifling innovation at its worst. With Android, we’re free to decide what we want to do, not what we’re allowed to do, and this is innovation at its finest. With the market trending over to Android anyway, it’s pretty clear where we’re headed. While it may not even be Android or Apple that ends up ‘winning’, the eventual winner will no doubt be the one that allows us the most flexibility.
I’ve focused mostly on the mobile “app” world. There is a new debate happening that brings up a really interesting viewpoint. Since the app markets have become so saturated, it’s calling into question how long these app marketplaces will actually survive. Let’s say you have a website that services your customers really well. It gets a good amount of traffic, you get good feedback on your site and your sales numbers are increasing, but you really need a way for people to check something out while they’re on the go. Does it make sense to develop an app that requires your users to download and install it? Or does it make more sense to make your already successful website mobile smart? Making your website mobile smart not only keeps you out of the fluctuating and sometimes frustrating app business, it’s a cross-platform solution. No matter what device your users are using to view your site, they will get a nicely packaged and cleanly formatted version of it; and unlike an application, it has a specific URL that you can promote.
Luckily at The Buddy Group, we’re total geeks. We eat this stuff for breakfast, lunch, dinner—and sometimes a midnight snack (yes, we’ve been known to work through the night!). No matter what platform prevails, sleep well knowing we’ve got it covered! Looking forward to “Buddying Up” with your brand.
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