Embracing Social Media to grow your business

Over the Easter break, a group of 8 enjoyed a beautiful dumpling feast in Windsor. Of the 8, I personally knew 4 people. Watching the interaction between old friends and potential new ones was eye opening.

Firstly, the group age was between 30 and 50. Secondly, the demographic of the group was personal business owners who turned over millions in revenue each year to managers of exclusive bars to personals trainers and a children’s book editor. Not a teenager amongst us and not a IT geek in the group (except for the wannabe IT geek in me).

Every person on the table had a smartphone, half of which checked into the restaurant via facebook’s check in service. Later in the night as new friendships blossomed, people did not exchange phone numbers, in the traditional ways that I grew up with, they were connecting as friends via their facebook profile.

Today I read that facebook are launching the long awaited facebook Deals service as a test in 5 cities within the USA, that will take on the giants Groupon, Scoopon and Catch of the day.

The difference is that facebook already has 600 Million users, many of whom are already familiar with the  Check in feature of the app, that now extends to providing discount deals.

Facebook, twitter, foursquare, LinkedIn are all social media services that only commenced operations in the last 3-7 years and have anywhere from tens of millions to 100’s of millions subscribers who live and breathe life through their social status.

Regardless of the type of business you have, the types of products or services you sell, social media has allowed small 1 person operators to receive the same exposure to the public as multi-national companies, however with much lower overheads.

For any company, social media is a great stepping stone to communicating with your existing and potential customers, it delivers new ways to increase exposure of your brand and drive greater loyalty with your customers without having to build a mobile app of your own.

As your clients grow on your social media accounts, you can then review how to own those clients by delivering  a specific mobile app that also integrates with the current social media services, ensuring your logo and services are front of mind.

Driving your brand and business through social media forums is a low cost marketing tool that can assist you in reaching and connecting with a global audience. All it costs to start down this path is your time to research and understand how best to utilise and monitor these services.

Social media however is not a set and forget marketing tool. It requires your constant attention, it needs to be nurtured and moulded and feed to ensure that it grows from strength to strength.

Recently a telephone carrier ignored the growing number of consumer complaints, including complaints registered social media forums with devastating results.

Around the same time, one of the largest retailers in Australia embraced the feedback from social media forums,  twitter and facebook and turned  a radio marketing campaign from a branding disaster to a media win.

My dinner experience was not an uncommon occurrence in today’s society. Smartphones, fast wireless networks, mobile apps and social media are driving the consumer demand of delivering information, products and services quickly, easily and cost effectively to the public. Consumers want this information delivered in the palm of their hands anywhere, anytime with the ability to share or brag about it to their friends.

Age, gender, religion, race, sexual preference or occupation may still form the demographics of marketing, however may not dictate social media marketing.

Any person of any age with any occupation are a potential revenue streams when embracing social media and smartphones to engage with your customers.

Embrace social media to thrive, ignore social media at your own professional peril.

Extending your business systems from your workers perspective

Providing direct access to your business’s core systems through mobile applications can help many companies align with the 5 top on-going challenges that keep your GM or CEO awake at night.

1.  How to increase the company’s revenues
2. How to reduce the operating cost of the company
3. How to optimise the assets your company has – especially the company’s mobile workforce
4. How to deliver better cash flow for the business
5. How to meet your company’s industry regulatory requirements

Most managers will scope out mobile app requirements with the IT department before rolling them out. To ensure the best success of mobile apps to your workforce; it is imperative to engage a cross section of the people who will be using the app in their daily work.

Have you ever thought that a mobile worker might see enterprise mobility from a different perspective than the company he or she works for?  The company might be thinking only about how to extend their existing back end systems out to mobile devices.  However, in order to maximize productivity, engaging your workforce during the planning phase can mean the difference between many refinements to the app after roll-out compared to getting it right the 1^st time.

Some things to consider are:

• Start with business need – engage the users to understand their challenges and how to deliver maximum output with minimal input (that is to make the app easy and intuitive to use with minimal request to produce maximum access to information)
• Look at how mobile apps can enhance communications already in place
• Don’t just replicate what you have in-house – users don’t need access to all the information that have in your systems – deliver only what is relevant to their mobile needs - in other words decide what is most useful to the user and base the app on that
• Run a pilot prior to production launch to iron out any glitches and ensure smooth and simple access to the content they need

• Work with a specialist app developer – they provide technical expertise and offer valuable relationships with the wider industry
• If accessing multiple databases simultaneously, with the view to support different departments in your organisation (i.e. sales, service, maintenance etc) consider a platform approach to building the application (read my initial blog 2011 is a MEAP year for mobile apps)
• To minimise the work involved with managing and maintain the smartphones/tablets in the field consider a platform approach to mobile management (read my blog minimise the pain of smartphone/tablet management)

Some core functionality that your employees may need when out in the field could be:

• Dispatching work orders to a smartphone/tablet
• Step-by-step navigation from existing location to the next job site/customer visit
• The ability to fill out timesheet in the field
• Mobile access to the employee’s vacation and sick days information
• Mobile access to the account information of customers including out-standing debtor’s information
• Mobile access to the service history of customers
• Mobile access to shipping status, order history, specials, out of stock parts so they know when to schedule a return visit
• For field workers, the ability to know the location of parts needed for repairs.  Is the part in inventory in the warehouse, in a nearby company vehicle or down the street at a preferred vendor's location?
• The ability to geo-tag (capture GPS location and apply a barcode label) to the equipment being maintained, to assist with the exact location of all the equipment on the maintenance plan to uniquely identify it
• For sales employees, the ability to take orders, while on location, check inventory, special pricing etc
• The ability to collect payments while onsite with the customer
• Visibility of KPIs to compare with peers to improve performance

The point of the list above is to suggest that the mobile user, in order to maximize their productivity, may have different needs and different priorities than others in different roles and departments.  It is important to review the mobility needs of your entire mobile workforce first, before developing your company's IT priorities and mobility strategy.

Minimise the pain of smartphone/tablet management

Smartphones have fast become the most personable belonging in the history of technology. They are often within a meter of their owners 24 hours a day.

Smartphones are now an essential tool in all sections of society, from top government officials to businesses and consumers. They are famous for their versatility – in a single day a smartphone may be a contactless wallet, a barcode reader, a satellite navigation system, an email or social network client, a WiFi hotspot, an extension of business processes (access to corporate ERP, CRM, SharePoint etc) in addition to the traditional use of making a phone call.

Smartphone users frequently cross-over from one usage scenario to another. This in itself has important implications for the management of security risks for organisations. For example, a business smartphone with sensitive client data may be used for personal social networking during weekends and for handling sensitive email and access to corporate systems on working days.

Smartphones often contain valuable personal information such as credit card data, bank account numbers, passwords, contact data, and so on. They also often contain corporate emails and documents and may contain sensitive corporate data. Because they are carried around all the time and are always available, they have become the primary repository of personal  and business data.

This has driven the take up of Smartphone’s in businesses dramatically. Whilst the majority of society see the benefits they bring, there are those in a business who are struggling with supporting the growth of these devices – the IT department.

Every brand of smartphone can have a different operating system and different versions, making it almost impossible for an IT department to manage and maintain all the devices with the same level of security.

In simple terms, imagine a person that had to be able to speak 5 or more different languages fluently and also be able to understand all the different dialects of those languages and you may begin to understand the challenges faced by companies in securing these tools of trade.

Due to the explosion of smartphones and tablets, companies have now had to become experts in mobility and mobile apps, which in many cases may result in the focus of a company’s core business being affected.

In addition to this, the trend from overseas is companies supporting a BYO policy for employees, meaning that these devices are no longer in full control of the IT department. This complicates the ability to enforce security policies that are in line with the companies policies.

If managing smartphones and tablets are keeping you awake at night, then consider a platform approach to securing these devices via a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution.

MDM’s provide a single console for fast access to critical business information and makes it easy to perform complex device management tasks delivering high level views of your entire fleet of mobile devices, with the ability to drill down to the individual device level.

MDM’s allow you to manage and deliver governance to any mobile device, on any carrier or network, anywhere in the world.

With a MDM platform, you can secure, monitor, manage your entire mobile fleet. This includes features such as provisioning and enrolments, access to apps, profiles settings, VPN access, inventory and asset management, remote lock and wipe, lockdowns, password and encryption policies, GPS and mapping, exception notification and the list goes on.

Many of the companies that offer these platforms (Air-Watch, Mobile Iron, Tangoe, Sybase etc), provide options from web based hosted consoles to on premise server solution.

They simplify managing mobility, delivering the ability to secure, monitor, manage and support entire fleets of mobile assets. They are usually simple to deploy, use and scale within your organisation.

There is no industry standard for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and Symbian platforms and the reality is that this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

If you are looking to take back control of your assets, minimise the impact of resources to manage and maintain these assets and get back to your core business, then take the time to investigate the power of MDM’s and the benefits they can deliver to your business.

The power of Mobile Web Apps

Two articles last week caught my eye to inspire this week’s blog.

1.    A report conducted by Arc Worldwide, a marketing services firm, found that half of shoppers consult their phones while shopping. The report surveyed 1,800 cell phone users and studied 30 shoppers while they were out buying goods.

2.    A report from a study, Dial 2011: Navigating Digital Platforms by Arbitron and Edison Research has found that more than half of the adult population in America now has a profile on the popular social networking website, Facebook, with half of them accessing Facebook via their mobile phones.

Whilst I am a huge advocate for the benefits of companies delivering native mobile apps (apps built in the native language of the phone, such as Objective C for IPhone, Java for Android and J2ME for Blackberry), the simple truth is that many companies are unable to justify the costs, resources, infrastructure and R&D to dedicate for mobile app development, even with such cost coming down over the last several years.

The other truth is that the majority of users out there still don’t have Smartphone’s to access these native apps.

Native apps are brilliant in delivering an interactive user experience (integrate into the features of the handset, such as GPS, camera, contacts etc), where a user clicks a single button that sends off a request to access content from multiple data sources (ERP, CRM, web etc) and delivers this mash-up of information on a single screen that can then be drilled down into.

But what if all the information you want your clients to use is already available on your website and you want to make accessing this information easy? What is your strategy is to engage socially with your customers to increase your brand awareness and loyalty?

This is where a mobile web app can deliver to your company strategy.

There are web app solutions, such as mobi sites or the ability to build web apps using HTML5 that allow businesses to “mobilise” their websites. This means that accessing information from a standard website is clean and easy to read and navigate on mobile phones.

The challenge is that with mobi websites a new website is created that is designed specifically for mobile phones. With HTML5, it is still an evolving technology that has yet to receive a global standard, which still requires a developer to create the web app.

This means that companies are again faced with allocating costs, resources, infrastructure and R&D to re-engineer what they have already developed with their website.  There is also a lack of ability to integrate into the features of the handset, such as GPS, camera, contacts etc.

There are alternatives to meet these challenges, new companies have entered the market offering a platform approach to extending your company’s website content and information to the masses, quickly easily and cost effectively. Some even  have the ability to integrate with your phones features.

For example, Blink Mobile deliver a PaaS (Platform as a Service), which is a high-level platform-oriented approach to rapid and flexible mobile deployment of existing services and the creation of new, mobile-specific web apps that require no coding, developing, infrastructure or R&D to deploy your apps. Your existing web administrator who knows some HTML and the structure of your web site can use the web based tools to deliver the mobile web app that you want.

Try the following test to see what I mean.

From you mobile type in or click the link to Brisbane City Councils website: http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/ 

Now try navigating around this website form your mobile, not too easy is it.

Now from you mobile type in or click the link to Brisbane City Councils website that Blink created: myanswers.mobi/Brisbane

The website looks and feels like a mobile app, is it easy to navigate and displays the information quickly with minimal screen taps.

Now try this example

From you mobile type in or click the link to University of Newcastle website: http://www.newcastle.edu.au/

Now from you mobile type in or click the link to University of Newcastle website that Blink created: http://www.myanswers.mobi/uon

            Example 1                                                              Example 2   

    
 In a matter of days or weeks you can go from example 1 to example 2, with no coding, no re-engineering, no additional infrastructure and with complete control over the  look and feel of your web app.

If you want a cost effective method of delivering existing website  content and information into the palm of ANY person using a mobile phone with an internet browser, then you don’t need to spend all that time and money on a native mobile app solution may be overkill for your business.

Choosing the right partner with a good quality platform approach can deliver this to you.