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Key features of iOS7 Developers and Users

Magnus Jern — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:51:36 +0000

Every summer the last 6 years Apple has presented a new major iOS release at WWDC. This year was no exception and from a developer point this was the most exciting in a long time.

So what makes us excited about iOS7 in terms of how our developers and clients can leverage it?

New look and feel

Although highly anticipated and highly controversial the biggest news of iOS7 was the Flatter but not totally Flat design and everything associated with the new design lead by Jonathan Ive. This was the first major redesign of the user interface since the launch of iPhone 7 years ago. The new design will not only mean a major shift for users of the core interface and features on iPhone or iPad but also for many developers that are likely to follow the new paradigms when designing their apps. The lack of changes by Apple to the user interface in the past have resulted in a lot of UI innovation coming from the development community but now we expect that many existing leading apps will upgrade to align with the new look and feel.

UI Dynamics to enable realistic motions

From the beginning one of the biggest differentiators of iOS has been the smooth animations and graphics. With UI Dynamics developers will be able to continue build even better experiences and iOS including proximity and gravity controls as well as a whole new kit for text.

Multitasking

The second biggest news for developers and users is the support for real multitasking. In the past Apple has provided partial workarounds to support multitasking with the excuses being to save battery power, enhance performance and protect the user. But with the latest revamp, developers can actually provide users with a better experience. Apps can load content in the background and users can switch back and forth without the apps being put in freeze mode and this will enable lots of new types of apps and features. It also means that when a user opens an app from the Notification Center, the app can be updated already and doesn’t need to be refreshed. The new multitasking capability has been designed with the ambition of saving battery power through intelligent scheduling and use of Wifi so it will be interesting to see how well this will work.

AirDrop support

Another feature for developers and consumers is Airdrop – a tool already available on Macs that lets users send files wirelessly without the need for a Wi-Fi connection. Developers can use this in apps to e.g. send images, videos, audio and more which can also spur some interesting innovation.

New Frameworks in iOS7

Sprite Kit – allows for hardware accelerated animation systems for 2D or “2.5D” games. Provides graphics rendering and animation, sound playback support and physics simulation.
Game Controller – Allows developers to add hardware controllers to iOS, either by directly connecting the device or through Bluetooth.
Multipeer Connectivity – The peer-to-peer connectivity supporting AirDrop.
JavaScriptCore – Allows for wrapping of standard JavaScript objects into Objective-C (the code used for iOS apps).
Media Accessibility – Allows for closed-caption support in your apps.

Ability to move apps in iTunes

This probably won’t mean much for most people but for big brands and publishers this is a big deal. As companies raced to get their apps to the appstore early on many of them didn’t have their own developer accounts and therefore used the one of an agency or created a temporary one. Now businesses can consolidate their apps by moving an app ID to a different developer/company ID.

Enterprise apps

There are also a bunch of new features in iOS7 that will excite and satisfy the IT departments of businesses and organisations. Here’s a short summary of the key Enterprise news:

Better protection of work and personal data
Management of app licenses
Seamless enrollment in Mobile Device Management
Wireless App Configuration
Enterprise single sign-on support
Default data protection for 3rd party apps

We will provide a more extensive update on this in another blog.

Consumer facing features

Finally, we want to highlight what the hundreds of millions of consumers with iPhones and iPads can expect. Here are some selected features:

New design and Multitasking described above
iTunes Radio – a new streaming service that can recommend and play music for people via personalised radio station set to challenge Spotify and Pandora
New Control Center with quicker access to controls available directly from the Lock Screen
Nightmode in Maps that responds to ambient light when you use it in the dark
FaceTime audio for high quality calls over data networks
Notification sync, so when you dismiss a notification on one device it is dismissed on all of your devices
Phone, FaceTime and Messages blocking to prevent specific people from being able to contact you
Enhanced in-car integration, bringing an Apple designed experience into the car for the first time
Notification center including Today View
Core apps revamped with the new design and features including Photos, Camera, Calendar and Weather
Safari enhancements including full screen browsing, unified search field, unlimited tabs, new scrolling feature, swiping between windows and more
Find My iPhone app lock feature that requires your Apple ID and password before you can turn off Find My Phone, erase data or re-activate a device after it’s been remotely erased
New Siri sound, look and features

In summary, although controversial this may actually has been the most exciting update of iOS since iOS version 2 introduced the Appstore.

Tell us what you think?

Note: iOS7 will work on iPhone4 and above and iPad2 and above.

Image courtesy: Bejing iphone Repair

3: Planning your mobile marketing budget for 2014

Magnus Jern — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:28:21 +0000

Media consumption is changing rapidly with mobile as the fastest growing channel and the gap is just widening. Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and other top executives keep repeating the mantra of Mobile First now and some agencies even predict that 80% of their revenues will come from mobile within 5 years starting from less than 5% today. Whatever you believe the fact is that the majority of all web traffic will come from mobile devices within 1-2 years.

In most cases your current media partners won’t be able to advise you due to lack of experience or conflicting interests because their business model is still based on TV ads.

So how do you plan your mobile budget for 2014?

The answer depends on your overall objectives for digital marketing and services and the stage of your mobile strategy. First set targets for digital in terms of the share of your budget which will depend on audience (e.g. Coca Cola puts 60% of budget on digital for 14-24 year olds), online sales strategy and more.

Secondly it will depend on the mobile maturity of your organisation: (click on the tab below to see it bigger)

What should be the split between production and ad spend (display and search)?

As a reference the normal split for TV advertising is about 10/90 or 15/85 in favour of ad spend. But TV is a completely different format without interactivity and direct revenue. For web & mobile the percentage should be at least 20/80 but can be considerably higher in favour of production depending on the overall budget. Also budget the cost of an m-commerce or loyalty platform separately.

One of the best methods to come up with a split is to think about it in terms of POEM (Paid Owned Earned Media). If the site, app or content you produce (Owned) is great then publicity, viral and organic traffic (Earned) could mean that your ad spend (Paid) is minimal. Also ensure that there is enough budget for Owned media to start with or you might end up wasting your entire budget. Many mobile sites and apps are so poorly executed that driving traffic to them actually givs a negative customer perception. This nicely brings us to the next point.

How to budget for mobile websites and app development?

To start with a few basic rules:

every organisation or brand that has a website also needs a mobile site
every app needs a mobile website
every piece of content, Facebook page and Facebook app also needs to be mobile optimised
only do apps if there is a clear use case and purpose that will differentiate it from the mobile website

Budget for a mobile version of all web sites and campaign sites you plan to run during the year. See our blog posts about the cost of developing a mobile website or HTML5 site / Mobile Web App.

Budget for mobile apps when relevant, but make sure it’s sufficient to deliver a quality app. If you can’t, then don’t do it at all. If you don’t want to invest everything from the beginning then start with one platform (e.g. iOS) and then extend. See our blogs posts about the Pros and Cons about outsourcing.

How much is spent in a mobile marketing budget and how?

Here’s an example budget for an organisation or brand with an annual marketing budget of 10m USD. We’ve assumed that the organisation is a Mobile adopter based on the definition above:

In this case the organisation spent 30% of their budget on digital whereof 75% on desktop and 25% on mobile or 7.5% of the overall budget on mobile. This is still below the benchmark of over 12% media consumption on mobile but a good indicator of where things are going.

Come back next week for Chapter 4 on setting targets/KPIs and measuring results for mobile.

6 sins of mobile

Magnus Jern — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:29:08 +0000

What does BP, Pampers, Dove, Panasonic, Avon, Johnnie Walker, Xerox, Coca Cola (UK) and Pepsi (UK/Spain) and more than 30% of the other top 100 global brands have in common? They don’t have mobile websites for their main destinations (.com, .co.uk and .es). They’ve also failed on most other accounts of a successful mobile strategy.

Here are the top 6 mobile sins that any brand/business should be ashamed about.

1. No mobile website
This is so obvious that we won’t even elaborate on it. Visit the brands mentioned above and see where you end up. Shameful! In Q4 2012 23.1% of all web traffic came from mobile devices and this is rapidly increasing. What do you think?

2. Mobile strategy = web site optimised for mobile
Accessing the web from a mobile website usually means that the customer is on the move and frequently in a hurry to carry out a task. A successful mobile site or app is designed based on mobile usage behavior and not based on an existing website. Think mobile first!

3. Content and apps not optimised for mobile devices
Pampers has 1.6m fans on Facebook and a high level of engagement but what happens when you click on one of the links from your mobile? A full PC Website embedded in an app. Most Facebook apps and content (videos, images, micro sites, etc) are not optimised for mobile which means that you potentially lose leads and engagement from the approximately 50% of users that access Facebook from mobile devices.

4. Out of date content and services
Unfortunately most brands launch apps, mobile sites, SMS campaigns, etc without thinking beyond the current campaign. Every mobile app, mobile site, Facebook app, etc needs a roadmap for updates, optimisation and fixes based on user feedback and a plan to continue the engagement. You’ve got the customers attention, now keep it!

5. Lack of marketing support
Launching a great app or mobile web site without an integrated marketing campaign. Yes, 1 in a 1000 apps and mobile sites go viral and doesn’t require any marketing support but the other 999 do. Consider SEO, Social, Embedded content/feeds, CRM, cross-channel marketing, etc.

6. It only works on a few devices
Most mobile sites work well on the iPhone and maybe on the latest Samsung Galaxy device but test it out on other devices and there will be issues. Most brands and agencies simply cheat and don’t do any quality controls at all. This potentially means that millions of users will get error messages, crashes, badly formatted content and more damaging your brand and reducing conversion rates. Don’t forget to test your mobile solution across the devices that the target audience will be using. Test on OS, specific devices, screen sizes, etc.

To learn more about what you should do rather than what not to do keep reading our blog over the next weeks as we begun to post one great tip to succeed in mobile every week.

“think Apps not Ads” is this right?

Anne-Sophie Pelissier — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 09:23:44 +0000

Sunil Gupta, head of Marketing at Harvard Business School, has published a great article that argues that brands need to think about apps before they spend money on mobile advertising. He also notes that most mobile ads are still poorly executed which often includes linking to full website pages rather than a mobile site.

“When I click on the app for the online magazine Slate, for instance, I see a banner—smaller than my pinkie—for something called Bingo Rush, with little stars and the word “free.” What is Bingo Rush? I have no idea. At the bottom of the Huffington Post app is a tiny rectangle that says “Scratch and win with Adidas.” What can I win? I’m not sure; the ad can barely accommodate five words…”

and continues:

“The best way for marketers to communicate through mobile will be with apps. Apps will trump traditional ads in part because consumers don’t perceive them as advertising—they value them for their functionality and thus don’t find them intrusive. For marketers, apps will also be attractive because they’re actually more cost-efficient than traditional ads, and they sometimes create entirely new revenue streams.”

Read the full article here:

http://hbr.org/2013/03/for-mobile-devices-think-apps-not-ads/

We agree that mobile apps can be one of the most engaging channels for brands to communicate with customers and usually more efficient than traditional ads. However, advertising is also needed to make consumers aware of the brands mobile proposition including apps. To succeed every app needs a mobile website and most apps need to be promoted whether it’s through social, display ads, search, above the line marketing or some other marketing method. Successful apps are based on a combination of Paid, Owned and Earned media.

In conclusion, yes mobile apps are great, but don’t forget that people need to know that your mobile app exists!

image courtesy: Inneractive

2: 5 best social practices for mobile apps

Anne-Sophie Pelissier — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:56:48 +0000

Social must be a value add and not just be a tick in the box. With Facebook’s latest Social Graph SDK and similar enablers from Google and Twitter social can be a true value add to a service. Some great examples of this are

Nike+ Running – See how you stack up against your friends
Opentable – Lets users share the menu, invite friends and more
Starbucks – My friends’ drinks

Here are 5 key tips for you to succeed with social in mobile apps:

1.Understand mobile sharing behavior

Identify the natural social and sharing behavior of the content on a mobile device (showing it to a friend, talking about it on Facebook, taking a photo of something fun or beautiful etc). Identify the key use cases for sharing and go through the user journey in detail before you start developing.

2.Social integration

Implement social and sharing as an embedded part of the service and NOT as tag-on “Share via Facebook” or “What your friends on Facebook are doing”. Go back the understanding of user behavior and use this as a blueprint. As an example instead of sharing a link to a movie from a cinema service, the user can ask their friends to vote for which movie they want to go and see.

3.Transparency & Privacy

Be transparent about how the content will be shared, what an invitation looks like for a friend, data privacy, etc. No one wants to be seen as spamming their friends. Also, if you require registration or social sign-in for your service then be clear what the benefits are for the user and offer options.

4.20/80 creators/consumers

Most users are content consumers and not creators. Less than 10% are usually creators of user generated content. Ensure that consumers can also engage with minimum effort. Examples of this is voting, polls, likes and ratings.

5.Ongoing conversation

As long as you have content of value, e.g. latest results from NHL, results from a poll, a relevant news update, etc you can have an ongoing conversation with the user. Make sure you have a great content roadmap from the start with frequent updates and a high relevancy.

These are just some basic tips to help you get started. To step it up another notch we recommend doing a complete use case analysis on the sharing scenarios, interaction with friends and the value add of social for your application.

image courtesy: Justin Mezzel

1: Writing a mobile brief

Magnus Jern — Wed, 29 May 2013 08:57:43 +0000

Every mobile strategy, campaign, branded service or platform should start with the creation of a brief no matter how high level. If you’re an app developer or agency and didn’t get one from the client then create one yourself and check it with the client. It can be anywhere from 10 min to a couple of days work and it will always pay off in the end.

To help you here’s a high level structure of the content to be included in a brief. Some of it is essential for every brief whereas other things are optional.

1. Background

1.1 Initiators/needs/incentives

Provide information about the needs you have identified for this project

1.2 The brand

Questions related to brand personality.

* Purpose What is the purpose of what you sell?

* Uniqueness

* Why does your current customer base buy from you?

* Does your product or service offer a solution to a problem that people have?

* Does it make their lives better in some way? What are its benefits?

* Visual language Provide brand guidelines and/or other visuals for us to understand your visual language.

1.3 Competitors and adjacent industries

What have competitors and adjacent have done well, bad and what opportunities can be identified based on that.

* Strengths What have they done well on mobile?

* Weaknesses What are they missing?

* Opportunities to differentiate What do you see we can do to make you stand out from the crowd?

1.4 Inspiration

What concepts, services and designs inspire the customer?

* Related Concepts & services the customer likes What concepts and services inspire you?

* Visual design the customer likes

* What visual designs have you seen that you really like?

1.5 Objectives

What does the customer want to achieve with its mobile efforts?

* Short term – What do you want to achieve with mobile in short term?

* Mid term – What do you want to achieve with mobile in mid term?

* Long term – What do you want to achieve with mobile in long term?

Note: Sometimes the KPIs could be part of the brief. E.g. achieve 5% increase in sales within 3 months in London stores based on 10% increase in footfall during the period.

2. Target Group/Audience

2.1 Reach and Localisation

What’s the reach of your product? Are you going to be selling regionally, just in your own country or worldwide?

2.2 Demographics

What age groups do you reach? What’s your average customer’s level of income? Are they single? Married? In a relationship?

* Sex

* Age

* Level of income

* Marital status

2.3 Psychographics

Are your customers mostly middle class or wealthy? Do they live in the city centre, suburbs, the country or an urban loft?

* Values

* Attitudes

* Interests

* Lifestyles

2.4 Insights from customer or yourselves

Additional insights on consumer behaviour applicable to the target group

* Social Insights on mobile social behaviour

* Viral Insights on mobile viral behaviour, i.e. what’s likely to drive viral effect within the target group.

* Purchase Insights on m-commerce and purchasing behaviour within the target group.

3. Technical infrastructure

Like it or not but often the technical infrastructure of a company or legacy of a service or campaign can decide what’s possible to do. Therefore it’s important to understand the prerequisites.

* What systems are available today that can be used to support the project

* Client-server API formats (Preferred formats are REST-JSON, REST-XML, etc) * Available APIs – What APIs are in place ready for integration?

* API Documentation – Are the APIs mature and well documented?

* Preferred solution Is there a preferred technical platform, e.g. LAMP, Cloud hosting with GAE, AWS, WordPress CMS, etc?

* Technical support – Can the client support technical integration? In some cases the assumption is no technical integration is possible. Everything has to be built from scratch.

There you go! Start writing your brief.

We want your feedback. Did we miss anything that is really important in the brief template? Tell us so we can add.

Next weeks blog in the 10 week mobile strategy series will be: 5 best social practices for mobile apps

Image courtesy:http://pinterest.com/pin/497999671264911566/

The mobile strategy handbook 10 series: Introduction

Magnus Jern — Wed, 29 May 2013 08:43:34 +0000

What if there was a handbook to make your mobile strategy a success?

During the past year we’ve done more than 100 workshops with brands and partners,spoken at 20 events and conferences,contributed to a book about mobile apps,published white papers,shared our trends and conference insights and educated 1000s off students about mobile app development.

Over the next 10 weeks we will share our top tips in a special series of blogs on consumer facing mobile services that will make almost any organisations successful in mobile.

The blog will cover the following topics:

Writing a mobile brief
5 best social practices for mobile apps
Planning your mobile marketing budget for 2014
User centric mobile design
Choosing mobile technology
Testing for mobile
Setting and measuring KPIs for mobile
Acquiring users to mobile services (apps and sites)
Top tools for mobile development
…and finally a topic of your choice

As always, we look forward to hearing your comments and feedback.

Image courtesy: http://charlotte.olx.com/handbook-for-boys-boy-scouts-of-america-1937-norman-rockwell-cover-iid-49540642

Mobile highlights from Google I/O 2013

Magnus Jern — Thu, 23 May 2013 09:30:26 +0000

With all the stuff going on at Google I/O (Google’s equivalent to Apple WWDC) it’s difficult to see the trees in the forest. Therefore we’ve made an attempt to digest the mobile related announcements from Google from last week:

Activations and apps
Google announced that more than 48 billion apps have been installed from the Google Play store, thanks to 900 million activations of Android devices.

New APIs
Google Announces Three New Geo APIs for Android: Fuse Location Provider, Geofencing, Active Recognition:

Fused location provider utilizes all of the communication sensors in the phone (wifi, gps, and cell), while using 1% of the battery that previous APIs used. It speeds up the process and makes the location accuracy higher.
Geofences, pre-drawn boundaries, that when crossed by the app user, trigger events on the device. Developers can have up to 100 geofences active at a time.
Active recognition refers to a device’s ability to determine how one is moving: walking, riding, driving, etc. The API uses the accelerator combined with artificial intelligence.

Mobile marketing spend far behind

Anne-Sophie Pelissier — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:58:31 +0000

One of the most quoted charts in 2012 (including this blog) was KPCBs slide showing time spent on different media vs total ad spend in the US. The chart highlighted a 20 Bn USD gap and opportunity for brands, ad networks and publishers in mobile marketing and web based on 2011 data.

To bring the debate back to life we decided to update the graph based on 2012 numbers from eMarketing and IAB. To start with it showed pretty much the same results as for 2011 with less time spent on print and more time spent on mobile as expected.

The surprise however was that despite recent focus mobile and growth in mobile revenue for the top online brands (Facebook, eBay, Google, Amazon, etc) the gap continues to widen. According to our estimate the missed opportunity during 2012 grew to 23 Bn USD and at the current rate this will be over 25 Bn USD in 2013.

To be fair, there is not necessarily a direct correlation between time spent and media spend. As with any other investment media spend should be based on ROI (media effectiveness of each channel). There are arguments that e.g. eCommerce conversation rates are lower on mobile than web (made up approximately 16% of total online traffic but only 5% of transactions in 2012). This does not take into account that mobile might be driving physical retail sales to a larger extent and that the sales process may start on a mobile device but end on a desktop device.

According to multiple studies such as MMA the ROI for ads is actually higher for mobile than on web. There are some valid arguments for lower spend however such as game play on mobile as this is not included in the comparable figures for web and TV.

When will mobile catch up? We think it’s starting to happen in 2013. Looking at Facebook and Google’s latest reports, mobile revenue is currently accelerating rapidly.

What do you think? Comment, like and share!

Top 5 reasons why your mobile app will fail

Magnus Jern — Mon, 13 May 2013 07:00:14 +0000

During my 6 years as CEO of Golden Gekko we have delivered over 1000 apps so I have a pretty good idea what apps will succeed and which ones will fail. Although it’s not always in our best interest to tell people when the concept for an app concept sucks we always openly share our opinion with our partners and customers. We want successful long term customers and not one-off projects that fail.

So why do so many mobile apps fail?

1. Lack of customer demand
In many cases there is simply no demand for the app or service in the first place. The easiest way to find out is to see if your app will fulfill a need in peoples life’s before you get started. Sometimes this can be answered through market research but other times it’s simply based on a gut feeling.

2. No one knows it exists
The most common reason that apps fail is due to lack of awareness. With over 700.000 apps on the appstores customers won’t find your app unless you tell them about it. And yes, there are amazing apps that no one knows about.

3. Missing engagement / interaction
Once you’ve managed to get customers to download your app you need to keep them engaged. For some apps this might come naturally but for most it does require a bit of thinking and work. How often do you expect people to use it? Why would they come more often?

4. Bad execution
Many great app ideas are simply badly executed. Difficult to use, badly designed, too much functionality, bad performance, lots of bugs (crashes frequently), forced registration of personal data, etc are just a few examples of bad execution. To make it worse these issues are usually never fixed even if the feedback from customers is clear. Bad execution will result in low ratings and no one wants to download an app with low ratings.

5. Lack of differentiation
With so many apps to compete with your app need to stand out and be different. If you’re a vodka brand there is little purpose in creating yet another cocktail app like all others or if you make exclusive lighters then your chance of success is small if your app is a copycat of Zippo. The advantages vs a mobile website is also an important consideration. Why will the app be better for customers than a mobile website? If there are no advantages then maybe there is a better alternative.

You want to find out if your app will succeed or fail? Contact us and we will tell you at no cost.

Tired of failing? Starting from next week and continuing for the next 10 weeks we will give you one tip every week on how to succeed with your app strategy.