We expect audience sizes to fluctuate (and likely decrease), as they may no longer include people on iOS 14, and we anticipate a push for healthcare brands to place higher value on their own lists and available analytics to understand who customers are and how they interact with the brand’s website.
For well over a year, people shared their beer of the moment, expressed approval or disapproval in short reviews, and amassed badges to celebrate their personal journeys through the beer world. That's great! But what does this have to do with marketing and media you say? Well, all that sharing, commenting and discovering was creating a rich community ... and lots and lots of data. Generally, the problem with data is how does it become relevant and useful on more than one level. It is helpful for me to get suggestions and recommendations on beer from friends near and far, but that is only one piece of the puzzle. What if the actual businesses behind that beer could see that data flow and understand what is really moving among their products and what is not? What if they could react in real time or address issues they find a consumer is experiencing? What if they could do this without the intermediary of Facebook, Twitter or websites? That is the essence of Untappd for Business.
The penetration of smartphones and other mobile devices, such as tablets, into the affluent consumer market offers luxury brands ideal platforms to target, communicate and engage with customers and prospects. And with roughly 61 percent of the wealthiest Americans owning a smartphone (those making over $330,000 in annual household income), luxury brands who haven’t optimized their websites for mobile devices are sorely remiss. Mobile optimized websites should be the cost of entry for luxury brands, particularly retail brands. Amazingly, they are not, as Chanel, for example, is the only brand among Dior, Louis Vuitton, Hermes and Gucci to offer an optimized web presence as of early May).
I admit it, I am a smart phone newbie. According to my teenager, my old phone was from somewhere in the Neolithic age – you know 3 taps to get the letter “o” in a text. So I joined the millennium with some trepidation – as I experimented with geo-location applications. My first experience was the new “Facebook Places” mobile application. Similar to Foursquare and Gowalla, users ‘check in’ on their phone when they arrive at a destination to let their friends know where they are, as well as take advantage of special deals the location may be offering. The Gap was one of the first major retailers to experiment with FB Places, offering free jeans to 10,000 customers to check into their store using the app on Nov. 5th. After so much bad press, I was rooting for a win for the beleaguered brand. I like Gap merchandise, and now I was armed with a smart phone, and hey – we all need pants.
As a modern marketer, I have been aware of and following QR codes for a couple of years – I was interested when Esquire did an entire issue earlier this year featuring QR codes – one feature with 30 “must have” items for every man included QR codes that would take you to styling tips for that item and where to buy them. Interesting, but not particularly compelling to me – a woman who has given up on styling her husband. QR codes popped up occasionally on movie posters, in hipster magazines and in handful of other pubs. I read articles about their functionality and their failures and occasionally pondered for which of my clients QR codes might work. But that was as far as it went. Until pennant fever overwhelmed me.
Innovative applications for Apple's iPad have got us thinking about how to tap their social marketing potential.
Location-based social networking has gotten a lot of buzz lately, particularly with the recent launch of Facebook Places. These services offer fun and entertainment to users. And with Foursquare alone reporting 2 million users, they offer a lot of potential for marketers...
Earlier this month, Fox announced the first-ever “Pimp My App” contest, challenging app developers to "the coolest, groundbreaking, mind-bending app for the Fox hit show "Fringe" and pocket a cool 10 large along the way". While user-generated content (UGC) and consumer-generated advertising (CGA) is nothing new, application development is. It’s the first “you do it for us” application developer contest that pays above-and-beyond the exposure the end product may deliver and the only one to be promoted on a broad scale.
Back in January, I wrote my first App Spotlight blog post here on Logical Juice, about Foursquare. Since then it has become one of the most popular apps available across all mobile platforms, and is now only days away from hitting the 1 million registered users mark. The popularity of the app gave rise to last week’s first annual Foursquare Day, the first globally recognized grass-roots celebration of the power of social media... And I was lucky enough to have received an invitation to join in the festivities.
In our increasingly smartphone-entrenched world, the mobile application extensions of our social networking-entangled lives can make or break a user experience. Twitter as a network depends on the user development of mobile and desktop applications to keep participation thriving. In some cases, app developers attempt to provide a seamless brand experience between the desktop and mobile world, while often the very best apps focus primarily on the screen for which they are developed. For mobile Twitter users, custom design for ease of use is paramount. Beyond the individual, an organization’s conversation managers need to be properly equipped, connected and ready to go.
No matter the platform, there are literally dozens of apps to choose from, making it a painful finger stroll through any given app store. To make things a bit easier for you, we’ve compiled some of our thoughts on a few of the Twitter apps currently available.