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.

2011 – Is a MEAP year for mobile apps development

There isn’t a day that goes by without a news article about mobile smartphones or mobile apps. The mobile app market is the fastest growing technology mankind has ever known. Don’t believe me? Have a look at these stats:

• Television was commercially available in Europe in 1929. Over 80 years later there are 600 million TV subscribers globally.
• Mobile phones were commercially available in Japan by NTT in 1979. Over 30 years later there are 5.1 billion users globally.
• The internet (World Wide Web) was commercially launched in 1982. Less than 30 years later there are 2 billion users globally.
• In 2006 people asked “What’s a mobile app?”
• In 2008 people asked “Have you heard of the AppStore?”
• In 2010 Apple alone has had almost 10 billion apps downloaded from their AppStore.
• In 2011 there are already 394 million smartphone and tablet subscribers

In less than a decade, there have been more downloads of mobile apps than there are TV, mobile phone and internet users combined globally.

2011 is set to experience even more growth of mobile app downloads as more people upgrade their basic mobile phones for smartphones and tablets. The growth potential for mobile phone subscribers migrating to smartphones and tablets is enormous!!!

Many businesses have been scrambling to build and release access to their products and services via mobile apps. Whether to increase brand awareness, to increase revenue or to add value by providing access to services for clients on the run, it has become essential for many company’s business strategies moving forward. And why not, with success stories from companies such as Domino’s Pizza (increased sales of 2 million in the first 12 weeks of their iPhone App release) and Australia Post (had the number 1 Australian iPad App within weeks of launching)

The process involved for a company to design, build, deploy and maintain mobile apps is not a cheap or easy one. Many companies have “dipped their toes in the water” by only releasing mobile apps on iPhone or iPad. With the exponential growth in Android smartphones and tablets, such as the upcoming launch of the Blackberry Playbook, the costs to replicate that development to support these new form factors and operating systems start to become a real challenge and concern.

For the majority of companies that have released a mobile app into the market (fast food, banking, finance, retail etc) or are thinking about it, it is NOT their core business. As a consequence, they must invest money and resources to keep up with the release of upgrades to existing operating systems every 6 months and new form factors every 12 months.

With such rapid changes and growth, it is not hard to understand many of the common challenges and concerns companies face. Security, development, deployment and expansion of an existing mobile apps to other handsets, support and maintenance of apps, how to keep abreast of mobile technology, how to measure the success of your apps and how to keep them fresh and current to maintain its appeal to customers, are just the tip of the iceberg.

If we have learnt anything from the explosion of mobile apps, with hundreds of thousands of apps available and billions of downloads in less than 3 years, it is this. Just because you can build a mobile app, doesn’t mean you should. Many companies judge the success of their mobile app by the number of downloads; however, studies have shown that many apps are downloaded but infrequently used.

The formula for successful mobile apps seems simple enough. Make them easy to use and intuitive ( minimal screen taps to access the information you want), make the access to information quick and relevant, make the mobile app a tool that clients, WANT to use, NEED to use and CAN’T do without! Get this right and you are the talk of the town …get this wrong and you could be harming the brand and image of your company.

The question is fast becoming: how do we keep up-to-date with these changes without the need to create a whole new department specialising in mobile apps development?

This is where a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) comes in.

A MEAP takes care of all the “heavy lifting” required for building a mobile app by allowing companies to design the app through a configuration tool. This process eliminates the need for coding or compiling the mobile app. It allows for rapid development and deployment of multiple mobile apps. It delivers pre-built connectors or the tools to quickly build custom connectors to plug into your data sources regardless of whether they are web services or legacy systems.

It delivers reporting tools for measuring the success of your application (not just the number of downloads) and provides security features to ensure that you don’t experience issues like those that recently plagued the banking industries in the United States. Best of all it can reduce the number of resources required to build, manage and maintain your mobile apps, thus reducing your costs.

And if you are thinking “bleeding edge” technology, then think again. Many of the MEAP platforms (Sybase, Antenna, Pyxis Mobile) have been around since early 2000.

Take Pyxis Mobile for example. They have been providing their MEAP platform for over 8 years, with more than 3,000 corporate clients in the United States. They have released both Enterprise and Consumer mobile apps to the market successfully in timeframes many regard as impossible.

If you want to utilise existing in-house web skill sets in HTML5, JavaScript or CSS, you can create native apps across all mobile operating platforms via Nitobi's PhoneGap 1.0 offering.

Providing mobile apps to consumers is a great way to gain brand exposure, but what about your employees? Many enterprise organisations have spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions, on their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software to improve processes and customer service. While many companies have seen improvements in processes through these deployments, access to these systems for mobile employees still physically chains them to their desks.

While companies have been busy building mobile apps for their consumers, many have put the mobilisation of internal systems into the “too hard basket”. Mobile Enterprise apps are no longer a luxury, but a necessity for companies to capitalise on the investments they have already made in their systems and processes.

MEAPs not only allow you to configure and deploy consumer mobile apps, but also business and partner mobile apps. The ability to connect into multiple data sources and access just the right information can improve the efficiencies of your mobile workers exponentially.

The benefits to employees include being able to access client information at their fingertips, plus information on the latest meetings and meeting notes, the last orders from the client, graphs on their spend history (to see if they are buying less from you, which could mean they are increasing their orders from your competitors) access to stock inventory, delivery times, debtors and outstanding invoices, or RSS links to media releases on your clients, so that you can have an intelligent conversation about what is affecting their business.

What about the ability for your employees to “click to map” and see any other clients or prospects to visit in the local area on an easy-to-view map, with instructions on how to get there? Imagine an employee receiving some competitor information, then entering it into your Enterprise mobile app with a notification being broadcast to all other employees, giving your team and business the competitive edge. While all this information is accessed via different data sources (CRM, ERP, Web services, Mapping services etc) it can be displayed on a single screen that can be drilled down into.

If your company is one of the many that are considering or now employing a BYO (bring you own) handset/tablet policy, that’s OK too, for the application that you designed on your MEAP platform can be deployed to the leading smartphones and tablet devices in a single instance.

What does that mean? It means you design your mobile app just once and it can be used on an iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android or Android tablet simultaneously. It doesn’t matter if the mobile app is a consumer, business or partner app, a MEAP platform doesn’t care.

Why do I predict 2011 as a MEAP year? It delivers a solid foundation to any company’s mobile strategy and takes care of many of the hidden “gotcha’s” in developing and deploying mobile apps. Here are 7 reasons.

1. It provides code-free development of mobile apps, allowing your company to concentrate on how the application looks, how it feels, how it flows, how it behaves, how to make it easy and intuitive to navigate and most importantly how to make it successful.

2. It allows you to control the security of all your mobile apps, deliver data integration easily, receive an audit trial and understand the usage patterns of the mobile app, to define what is successful and remove what is not.

3. It delivers the ability to conduct a single build of a mobile app that runs natively on the leading smartphones and tablets (i.e. integrating access to camera, mapping, calendar, contacts, supporting different screen sizes and navigation methods such as touch screen or keyboard).

4. It removes the R&D required by your company to keep abreast of the constant changes in mobile technology by providing constant updates to meet these changes.

5. It delivers total control over the building of the mobile apps with minimal resources required to design, build, integrate, deploy and manage those mobile apps. Alternatively, you can easily outsource the building of the apps but still retain the IP of the app that was built for you.

6. It delivers a competitive edge by allowing you to rapidly develop and deploy new mobile apps in weeks not months, or make changes to improve the look, feel or process of existing mobile apps in hours not weeks.

7. It allows your company to deliver apps for different business to meet their market segments whether internal or external, all from a single platform.

Enterprise companies are not geared, nor do many want to be geared, as mobile app development houses. If your strategy is to deliver a single mobile app to a single device, such as iPhone, then the traditional process of custom developing your mobile app (building the mobile app via programming code) is best suited to that.

However, if mobile apps are part of your company’s ongoing strategy for branding, exposure, increasing sales and revenue or improving employee access to internal systems, then a MEAP approach to delivering mobile apps makes a lot of sense, both commercially and strategically. Sybase recent conducted a survey of 250 Enterprise clients in the USA and UK, where 4 out of 5 clients will be releasing between 5 to 19 mobile apps this year, yet 1 in 2 don’t have a mobility strategy.

If you want a solid foundation to deliver your company’s mobile app strategy with extensive configuration options for building mobile apps, institutive management tools for reporting and analytics on how your mobile apps are being used and, and a low cost of ownership when delivering them, a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform could be your answ