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Much has been made lately of the explosion in applications for the iPhone and its market-leading app store. We’ve just recently been trying our hands at it. I’m a developer, and I’m on the bandwagon. This is why.
Why is a simple, fairly low-powered platform a good thing? While it reduces the number of things that you can do, the restrictions of the platform also level the playing field. The internet has become so massive that it’s often difficult to start a new idea and compete without a large amount of resources. Mobile apps, with their simple platform, effectively put a cap on how effective the big guys are able to be. Indeed, there are many very creative independent developers taking advantage of the platform and producing some very successful applications.
This can be a double-edged sword. For instance, “Simple UI” doesn’t necessarily mean “Easy to design UI”. Apps with clunky or unintuitive UI are going to be left in the dust. UI is an area where the iPhone and Apple have really driven user expectations up. We’ve seen this recently with the unit conversion app that hit the Top 25 in the iPhone App Store, and I’ll delve deeper into that later.
This is the most obvious piece to this. Commercials for the iPhone do a very good job of reeling customers in because they really demonstrate that “cool factor.” I’m a developer, but even I’m often stunned into thinking “how did they do that?”. The recently featured “bump” app had this effect on me as a friend and I downloaded and tested it to determine how exactly it functioned. In this case, the verdict was that it wasn’t quite as magical as I thought (you can “bump” from across a room if you just do it at the same time).
Apps like this demonstrate that there’s still plenty of potential for exciting innovation. Unlike internet applications where you just have the keyboard and mouse, on the iPhone you get multitouch, a compass, a GPS, bluetooth, an accelerometer, along with the entire internet and all the amazing APIs available. Honestly, I’m still trying to come to grips with all the possible inputs. But the bottom line is that both developing for and using the platform is fun.
There’s plenty of cool things on the horizon as well. See: Augmented Reality.
The large amount of Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter apps out there demonstrate that APIs aren’t going away. But extending your site isn’t something only those big sites can do - it’s definitely possible to extend your own website with an iPhone app. If your website is interactive in any way, you can port some of that functionality to an app, similar to how the Facebook iPhone app works.
Look at your customers - is there a possible mobile application that could be of utility or interest to them? If so, developing it and branding it for yourself might be a good way to market yourself in an area where it’s possible few of your competitors have ventured.
Monetization is one of the biggest problems facing people with websites and web applications today who want to actually make money off of them in a non e-commerce fashion. Rumors persist of Facebook, Twitter, or Hulu turning to some sort of paid subscription model to become profitable. Money from advertisers may not be enough to satisfy infrastructure costs as web applications grow larger.
I’m reminded of one of my favorite new TV Shows, Shark Tank (fun, although somewhat cheesy). An oft-repeated maxim on the show is that all entrepreneurs must ask the question: “How am I going to make money off of my idea?”.
App stores provide a very attractive, easy alternative to the traditional ad-based model. Many apps don’t even provide that much more functionality than a simple browser does. But because the web browser on the cell phones will always be somewhat limited, many apps have evolved as a way to provide a much better UI. For instance, the iPhone Facebook app is simply a more attractive and user-friendly way to interact with their site than trying to navigate it with the iPhone Safari browser.
It’s obvious that there would be a huge uproar if Facebook began charging for its services. However, it wouldn’t be so out of the question for them to have released their Facebook iPhone app at $.99 (they didn’t, however). At this point, people still expect to pay for apps. The centralized payment structure makes it even more easy - not only for the customer but for the smaller entrepreneur or developer.
I’m certainly not saying that every app on the iPhone or other mobile platforms will make bushels of money, but it provides a very attractive alternative to those who are pessimistic about dealing with advertising as their main method of making money for their web application.
It’s also important to note that while the iPhone is attractive in it’s simplicity, ultimately the amount of money you can make off of a single idea is probably limited - currently, it seems unlikely that one could make millions off of a single idea. That’s a restriction that doesn’t exist as much on traditional web apps on the PC. This article has some additional perspectives.
This one speaks mostly for itself, and was a no-brainer for app stores to implement. Delivering upgrades and patches is always a headache for developers and the centralized store certainly simplifies the process.
I’m unsure how long this platform will last in its current form. As time goes on, most of the former points will be affected. More apps will get released, competition will increase and we might see a recession of paid apps in lieu of more advertising driven ones. The platform will certainly get more powerful and perhaps less accessible to the little guy as expectations rise. People eventually will get used to the hardware innovations and the cool factor, and perhaps they will effectively run out of hardware improvements after a while (how many more things can they pack into the iPhone?).
One thing to note about the possibility of increased competition - just because an app (or multiple apps) has been released doesn’t mean you can’t innovate and improve on the same ideas. Just recently a unit conversion app was released on the iPhone that made the top 25 apps (and $40,000 in sales in it’s first 2 weeks). There are countless unit conversion apps already available on the iPhone - it seems impossible that one was able to rise above the rest. Yet it happened, and it showcases how good UI design matters. There are many parallels here to the successful apple products - the iPod certainly wasn’t the first MP3 player but it was able to rise above the rest due to it’s very well designed UI.
For right now there are plenty of opportunities, especially for the small entrepreneur. We’re excited. If you or your company have a good idea, or want to put a spin on an old one, get in touch with us and we’ll see if we can make it a reality.
If you use Brands of the World (BotW) often, you might have noticed that they have a new logo … but the real question is, does this prized time-saving tool for designers worldwide have your new logo? BotW now has Elexicon’s mark on board, and they should have yours too. Here’s why.
Having recently supplied BotW with our logo (Side note: BotW would be better named “Logos of the World” since the site is mainly a high-resolution logo repository — logos aren’t brands but rather ingredients of brands.) I can identify with the unease experienced in the upload process. With perhaps too much old school marketer in me, I felt a little uncomfortable tossing our infinitely scalable and yes, infinitely editable vector logo into a giant, heavily used bucket of brands (albeit a nice, well designed bucket with a navigable UI and search function). BotW has over 2 million unique visitors and over 30 million page views per month; and when you understand the importance of taking steps to protect your visual identity or that of a client’s, being cavalier about this is not an option.
So contemplating the decision to upload your vector logo to BotW can look a little like the self-retorting banter of Wallace Shawn as the Sicilian villain, Vizzini in the iocane poisoning scene of The Princess Bride … It seems that no matter what decision you make; or how long you take to make it, you’re going to keel over afterward. If you upload your logo you’ll have the angst of imagining someone misusing your mark in an infinite number of high-resolution ways ranging from comic mischief to fraud. However if you don’t upload your mark, other companies realizing significant benefits from public relations and marketing expediencies, external links to their site and global exposure will leave you behind.
BotW has their own list of usage benefits, but for me what tips the scales to the upload decision (or drinking the upload goblet?) is that I’ve been THAT designer. Plenty of times, I’ve had to scramble for a variety of logos to complete creative work on mission-critical (but somehow forgotten about until the last minute?) group promotions in print ads or large format applications. Sometimes there’s enough time to track down quality logos for each company through the proper channels. Other times there isn’t enough time. This results in a loss for both the company and the designer who either has to live with sacrificed quality or take enough headache medicine to painstakingly refurbish a poor quality version.
It might be a utopian dream, but a single repository for the most up-to-date and high quality vector logos of all the companies in the world (hooah!) would likely save many organizations and designers from ghastly reproductions of web-snagged GIFs and JPGs – or from having to omit the company from the piece. As of today, BotW is as close as it gets to that utopia. As to protecting your visual identity, the question becomes: How are you protecting your identity if a designer working on a legitimate but time-crunched project snags a small 72 dpi logo from your website and enlarges it by 500 jaggy percentage points for a trade show poster? (I – ahem — heard of – uh — some other designer doing that before). And of course, you can also post your logo usage guidelines.
Furthermore, downloading a logo from BotW is contingent upon agreeing to their terms of use and penalties including disallowing use of the logo without the owner’s permission. At the end of the day, if someone is bent on using your logo without permission, they’ll probably do so without the assistance of BotW and if a designer is trying to use it correctly, BotW can help. So while all companies are unique and should review their own policies regarding the provision of high-resolution logo files, I think the benefits of utilizing Brands of the World generally outweigh the risks.
Happy uploading … and like Vizzini wisely said, “Never tangle with a jaggy logo when your brand is on the line!” (I might have modified that a bit).
Yesterday one of my Facebook friends posted a note that “Facebook has agreed to let third party advertisers use your posted pictures without your permission” and to copy the instructions to prevent this to everyone on your friends list. I followed the instructions myself, did a little research on Mashable and some of my Twitter feeds, and proceeded to let all my Facebook friends know how to protect themselves in their Privacy settings.
The whole scenario proceeded to become a bit confusing. We know that many Facebook users are seeing their own or their friends’ photos used in sidebar ads. Whether or not Facebook “has agreed” to allow this is a bit fuzzy. In their privacy settings for using your data in Facebook Ads, their copy reads as follows:
“Facebook occasionally pairs advertisements with relevant social actions from a user’s friends to create Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends. These respect all privacy rules. You may opt out of appearing in your friends’ Facebook Ads below.” (Got that? Good. You are then given the option of allowing this data to appear in your friends’ ads, or ‘”no one.”)
“Relevant social actions.” Does that encompass “photos” and wall posts? We can conclude that these “actions” include profile “Info” such as your favorite movies and books, and your “Pages” that you are a “fan” of or Group pages that you’ve joined. It also obviously refers to the countless quizzes, top five lists and games on Facebook feed the hungry FB data mining machine. At my gut level, I feel like photos and wall posts should be off limits to marketers, but with that ambiguous privacy opt-out statement it seems like Facebook is being squeamish about it at best and secretive at worst. Having said that I can clearly recognize Facebook’s difficult balancing act: protecting as much of the privacy of their millions of users while providing services to their paying advertisers who want as much access to those millions as possible.
Before I go further I’ll provide some links to articles that look at this issue through slightly different lenses. I’m not sure they’ll help you resolve whether or not Facebook photo sharing is a legitimate concern or not, but they do fill in many more blanks than I do above. Check out DowloadSquad’s initial article that triggered this controversy; and their follow-up article to AllFacebook’s return fire. An updated Mashable article wraps up the tos and fros of the debate as well.
Decisions, decisions
So after reading and considering all this, where should the line be drawn? Because clearly, a definitive line has not been drawn yet. As social media continues to skyrocket to stratospheric heights of influence, conundrums like this one are nothing new (Google’s catches grief for similar Gmail data mining exploits) and will continue. After I posted those instructions to turn off Facebook’s ads-to-friends sharing, I got “thank you’s” from my brother and high school buddies and some “Bro! What are you doing??!?” responses from some of my web marketing industry colleagues. As in: “Why are you biting the hand that feeds you?” Hey, I tell my clients that Facebook is an excellent advertising tool because you can advertise on FB members’ pages who have indicated that they may be interested in your product, based on their interests, their “fanned” pages, and their groups. Facebook users are at some level aware of this business model. However, since Facebook’s policy is so fuzzy anyway I usually don’t go into the fact that “by the way, we can eavesdrop on their wall posts too, if you want to get really aggressive with this whole data mining thing.”
Your personal XML file
A few years ago, before Web 2.0 and Facebook and YouTube took hold, and Amazon and eBay were gaining full strength, there was a lot of talk in the industry about somehow, some way, getting every consumer to generate their own “personal XML file” — an über-demographic schema. You would populate this file with everything about you and your family that was relevant to future purchase decisions and perhaps include some social demographic data as well. You would agree to post this XML file would “somewhere” on the Web and based on its content, you would receive not only Internet ads but also TV ads and even out-of-home digital signage messages based on your personal metadata, your demographic DNA. The benefit to both consumers and advertisers would be more efficient communication of relevant information: The right content to the right person at the right time.
Well, fortunately this scenario didn’t play out as planned. This rather generic approach would have resulted in the commoditization of a lot of products and services and decreased the influence of good brands, not to mention a huge hurdle for small businesses. Instead, the concept of a personal digital fingerprint grew beyond this original blueprint to become Facebook and Google profiles. Especially in the case of Facebook, something interesting happened: consumers willingly and voluntarily WANTED their friends to know what cars, music, TV shows, fashions, vacation destinations, and coffee shops they were “fans” of. The Facebook info, profile, fan pages and groups are a user’s XML file, and advertisers use that data, and members aren’t all that concerned about the ads, and they follow the fan pages. Everyone is happy, brands thrive in a whole new frontier, and fascinating new opportunities surface for smaller brands farther out on “the long tail.”
In conclusion, I think you’ll see Facebook more clearly define “social actions.” What I’d like to see Facebook write into this definition is a better description of the vital user-consumer-marketer-advertiser ecosystem that these social actions (whichever they are) help nourish. An ecosystem where consumers help marketers and marketers help consumers to be in position to deliver or receive the right messages, learn about desired brands, find the best prices, explore relevant business or career opportunities.
Could you imagine what it would be like if you weren’t able to travel on the roads, but everyone around you could? Think about how difficult it would be to get from place to place. The ability to gather and communicate, and heck, do business would be greatly limited, wouldn’t you think? I think that this same concept could apply for a business or organization that is considering a website, but hasn’t put one together yet.
Think of the Internet as your road (it is the information super highway after all) and you’re (potential) website or business as a customer’s destination. If you’re still relying solely on print advertising and word of mouth to expand your company’s marketability, it’s like trying to get from place-to-place in your car without driving on roads—it’s clunky, slow, and in the long run it’s going to be expensive. (Can you imagine the repair costs for driving your sedan off road?!).
This isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for those types mediums of advertising anymore. There absolutely is. But take a moment and consider a few reasons why you should consider adding a website to those mediums you may already use.
Cheaper and more flexible than print advertising
Having a web presence is much different than print advertising in that web space is cheap, and your ‘advertisement’ is more accessible for a longer period of time. Also, content can be changed easily (either through a content management system or your web master) and you can reach a global audience instantly.
All day, every day.
Don’t you hate when you have to turn a potential customer away because they call 5 minutes after your shop closes? Think about how many people you may have missed because the office was closed for a public holiday. With a website, you’re ‘open for business’ all day, every day of the year, and all it takes is a click of the mouse.
Convenience
When was the last time you actually looked up a phone number or information in the phone book? Isn’t it easier to simply search for a company’s information on the internet? By offering this type of convenience, you create a point of reference, and with that touch of individualized customer service, you add value to your offering. As a result, your customers experience a higher level of satisfaction.
These are just a few reasons why having a website is important for companies. Talk with someone at Elexicon for a more in-depth look at how we can put together a web strategy that is sure to add all these things and more to your organization.
By definition it may seem that the answer to this question is yes. It’s simple. A user starts a web browser, enters your company’s domain name, and your website appears. You have hopefully spent some time thinking about those users, but making sure your site is connected to the web means more than viewing your site in a web browser.
Search Engines
The most obvious example is search engines. Companies write software called “Spiders” that visit your site and ask for every page. You have probably invested some money into “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”. One goal of SEO is to make it easy for the spider to find, prioritize and index the important content on your site. This is accomplished by improving the HTML code behind your web pages.
HTML is one language of the web, but a more powerful language is XML. For instance, to optimize your site for the Google spider you can add an XML sitemap file to the root of your website. This tells the spider where to find content, what content is important, and when content has changed.
XML can take different forms and that’s where it gets interesting.
Feed Readers
Many people read their favorite sites without ever opening a web browser. Instead they use a Feed Reader.
Many websites offer their content in XML formats called “Real Simple Syndication (RSS)” or “Atom Syndication Format (ATOM)”. A feed reader, which may look like an email application, checks your site for updates and sends the information back to the user. Internet Explorer 7 has a feed reader built-in and you will notice in the screenshot below that the content of the Elexicon blog looks very different in the IE feed reader.
Mashups
As soon as you provide an XML feed, other websites can combine your content with other sources to create a new experience. The richness of your data enables unforseen value as others start to piece it together with additional web resources. Here are some examples:
Widgets: A web feed allows users to put your information on their site. This is great for SEO and for your user. If your company has a dealer network, each dealer site could host your news widget and drive traffic to your site while adding value to theirs. In the screenshot below, you can see a simple widget displaying the Elexicon blog feed on my Google home page.
Geocoding: If your data has a geographic connection you can include the latitude and longitude. Many digital cameras will geocode and timestamp every photo when it is taken. If you upload your photos to the Flickr website, then sites like flickrvision can combine the Flickr feed with a map and you get a fascinating worldwide photo tour in real-time.
Aggregation: Others may chose to load your data and analyze it for patterns and trends. For instance, Twitscoop reads all the words from the microblogging site, Twitter, and creates a real-time tag cloud revealing the most popular topics of conversation on the web at any given moment.
Here is a Mapdango map of Grand Rapids, Michigan, which pulls together weather, events, photos, history and more.
Sites like technorati are trolling for content and if your information is tagged properly, it will likely be included.
Visualization: Besides aggregation, advanced visualization is another trend. Software is used to analyze data and create new ways of seeing things. SpatialKey is a new company doing some nice work in this area.
Application Programming Interface (API)
Another level of web integration is providing an API. An API allows others to develop even more robust web applications with your data. It will be easier to do business with you and it will offer valuable exposure for your company. A great example of this is the UPS API which provides information about a package in an XML format. Web users have used the API to create multiple ways to track packages, by map, IM via Twitter, and more.
What you can do
It is not enough to think only of people visiting your site with a web browser. You need to think about what rich information you can provide to the web. Organizing your data will benefit your company and you may be surprised what it inspires in the web community. There’s a lot going on; just look at the full spectrum of sites in this analysis dubbed The Conversation Prism.
I really, really like State Farm Insurance’s new “Intersections” television advertising campaign featuring customers describing their situation in life (new father, father whose daughter just got driver’s license, etc.) while standing on a big red “spot.” Kind of like if you zoomed in on one of those maps with a big “You Are Here” spot to find that, well, there you are at the crossroads.
I’ll bet a focus group or survey would reveal that just about everyone picks up on the fact that the elliptical shape of the red spot matches the ovals in the State Farm logo. And to top it off, the “I’m there” slogan is a wonderfully minimalist update of the 65-year old company’s “Like A Good Neighbor State Farm Is There” classic jingle.
Finally something clever as opposed to the clichéd, sappy, over-the-top, or patronizing approaches from the relentlessly pervasive advertising for the FIRE (finance/insurance/real estate) industries.
More background and info: State Farm web site. (Doesn’t look like the campaign has found its way online except for this press announcement, unfortunately. There’s lots of potential…)
McDonald’s has so many billboards and such a well-known brand that it is not much of a risk for them to have some fun with the medium. Gizmodo pointed out a new McDonald’s billboard outside Chicago that functions as a sundial.
Billboards can be an eyesore, but this is a novel approach that apparently was dreamed up by the Leo Burnett agency. I guess they had to search high and low to find a billboard location with just the right orientation.
Elexicon is an interactive design and development agency based in Grand Rapids, Michigan...More>
