Which is a better choice for my brand: Mobile App or a Mobile Website?

Using mobile platforms as a way to grow your business is essential to your marketing strategy.  Yet, many still struggle deciding to build a mobile app or a mobile website.

While both platforms are effective ways of reaching existing and potential customers, considering the pros and cons of mobile apps versus mobile websites will allow you to make the right choice in tailoring the platform to your specific business.

Who are you reaching out to? The first thing to consider is the kind of audience you’d like to reach.  Remember that mobile websites function on any internet ready mobile device while apps only work on the phone for which they were created i.e. iPhone, Droid, etc.  This may seem like a no brainer at first, but if you’re looking for a specific market demographic, iPhone users for instance, you may have better success with an app designed for that kind of user.  A mobile website will have more of a mass market appeal.

Connectivity

Mobile apps don’t always need to be connected to the internet to work.  Mobile websites do.  Consider those who might try to access your brand while traveling, or where wireless service isn’t available.  This happens more often than you think.

Content vs. Functionality

Mobile sites are better for providing content.  Shopping based websites have more success with mobile websites than with apps for the mobile sites’ ability to provide content and information that can be indexed by Google and other search engine.  On the other hand, mobile apps have a more feature-rich functionality and more engaging design layout that makes navigating content easier for the end user.  Mobile websites can be confusing, because you may be asked to click through several links and pages to find information. Where mobile sites provide more and better content, apps have more and better functionality.

Advertising

It’s much easier to drive advertising traffic to a mobile site than driving traffic to the app store, where they have to download the app before they can use it.

Appeal

Mobile apps, especially iPhone apps, are sexier.  This may seem marginal at first.  However, when considering the billions of dollars spent annually to great effect to make products seem young, sexy, fun, and edgy, having that extra zip can give your brand the edge on the competition.  Think about your target demographic and what is important to them.

Accessibility

Mobile websites are more discoverable through site redirects.  Obviously, a customer who accesses your brand on a mobile device with automatically encounter your mobile site, without downloads.  However, in terms of speed and navigation, mobile apps take the cake.

Price is always a concern when deciding which platform is right for your business.  Mobile websites are less expensive than mobile apps, because they usually lack the design and functionality that make mobile apps sexy.  Mobil apps, however, have become much more affordable recently, as app designers can customize templates that still provide the functionality and visual appeal without paying a developer to design from scratch.

Affordable iPhone Apps are a reality.

The demand for mobile applications like iPhone apps is at an all time high, but the cost of developing iPhone apps can be a major deterrent for small to medium sized businesses. It seems that anyone asking about the price of an iphone app these days will likely be quoted an astronomical figure in the tens of thousands, citing the countless hours of development and graphic design work.

Not willing to allow sky-high price tags to squash their dreams of going mobile, these smaller businesses have found a way to get their messages right into their customers hands.  Saavy entrepreneurs look to the various app development templates that they can customize at a fraction of the cost rather than creating one from scratch.

At the most basic level, iPhone apps can range in cost from $0 – the do it yourself model – up to $25,000 – $100,000 for sophisticated interactive apps that require months of coding, design and development.

Developers like 3 CLiCk Media have developed techniques to make custom apps with the sophistication and market appeal that meet customers various needs and requirements. Features such as GEO Location, App monetizing, social networking platforms, push notification functionality and more are easily produced at a fraction of the price.  The development team also handles the nebulous task of submitting to the Apple’s App Store.  Now, smaller businesses can compete with the big boys, starting at $2500 and up depending on the complexity of the app.

Emmett Murphy worked with Las Vegas visual artist Daneille DeBruno at Desert Ice Studios directing video/photo shoot for PGT Entertainment’s new ballroom show. Internationally renowned ballroom team, Igor Dogoter and Natalia Gorshkova provided stunning performances, costuming and choreography. Take a look at some behind the scene photographs of the project.

Interactive Marketing & New Media – How Can It Help My Business?  Murphy speaks at educational seminar for National Pawnbrokers Association Pawn Expo

How can emerging forms of interactive marketing like iPhone® Apps, social media, text messaging, email marketing and website optimization help your bottom line? In this educational seminar Emmett Murphy of 3 Click Media will discuss successful examples of how medium sized businesses have harnessed the power of current day marketing tools. We will also cover managing and utilizing your most powerful marketing tool: your contact database.

DOWNLOAD THE KEYNOTE PRESENTATION PDF HERE!

By JAMES Q. LYNCH Globe Gazette Des Moines Bureau | Posted: Thursday, July 8, 2010

Are laws written before there were fax machines adequate to regulate campaigns that increasingly rely on the Internet and social media such as Twitter and Facebook?

Maybe, says Charlie Smithson, executive director of Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board. Maybe it’s too soon to know.

“To be honest, campaign laws are still trying to catch up with social media,” he says.

He’s monitoring attempts to regulate campaign use of social media — such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information.

Despite the growing popularity of social media, there are no specific federal rules. A few states have begun to regulate new media. Smithson is in no hurry to join them.

“I’m more interested in court cases that will invariably come down than writing new rules, Smithson says. “I’d rather watch and react than get out front and get sued.”

That makes sense to Steve Grubbs and Jeff Link, who are in the business of advising candidates.

Grubbs, a former Republican state legislator and president of Victory Enterprises in Davenport, believes social media is so transparent “it becomes self-regulating.”

Grubbs and Link share a practical argument against regulation.

“There’s a real danger if people are trying to regulate things they don’t understand,” says Link of Link Strategies in Des Moines, who advises Democratic office-seekers.

The key is to maintain transparency, they say, so people know who is paying for campaign communication whether it arrives on TV, in the newspaper, mailbox, inbox or the mobile phone.

“If e-mailing is your new direct mail or your new door-to-door campaign, we may need more regulation,” Smithson says. “Is it fair to make you put ‘paid for by’ on every piece of direct mail, but not on these new media communications?”

In Iowa, campaign websites, including Facebook pages, must include the “paid for by” disclaimer just like billboards and campaign ads. That’s not practical for Twitter, which limits messages to 140 characters, Smithson says.

There is a fear of fake Twitter and Facebook accounts being used to post damaging or embarrassing message as if they were coming from a candidate.
“Rumors travel at hyper-speed on the Internet,” Link says. However, they can be knocked down in cyberspace more quickly than through traditional media.
“If someone puts up a TV ad attacking a candidate, within moments the candidate can get the truth on Facebook or Twitter and supporters can begin redistributing that to others,” Grubbs says. “In the past, we would put out a press release.”

New media makes it possible to respond to last-minute attack ads or brochures, too, Smithson says.

State regulations do not apply to independent bloggers. Bloggers who work for a campaign and blogs maintained by campaigns are subject to the “paid for by” rules.

Smithson thinks Iowa has the basics in place to deal with social media in campaigns, but expects it to be an issue for some time.

“We’re trying to balance free speech versus people’s right to know who’s influencing the outcome of elections,” Smithson says. “Let’s see how new media impact other mediums to see if they maintain their relevance before we look at where we are,” he said.

READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE>

A common discussion among our web hosting clients is how to make their websites attractive and informative for customers, but also user-friendly on the back-end for updates.  Here are a couple of ideas for achieving both objectives.

Website design is an important part of branding, but to be successful, sites need to be optimized for search. Flash is one of the options for building a unique, animated site, but consider these seven factors before making that commitment.  For instance, Flash prevents access to web spiders, meaning the site won’t be easily crawled and indexed by search engines.

Choosing a content management system (CMS) for your site can also be a challenge.  Finding the right fit depends on several factors like the number of pages, frequency of updates and the type of interaction you want to have with the user.  The good news is, there are a number of free and low cost CMS options available for every skill level – whether you plan to build and maintain the site yourself or outsource to a developer and only make occasional tweaks in-house.

A common delivery method for malware is shortened url’s.  Twitter recently announced a built-in URL shortener to make links uniform and recognizable.  Starting this summer, shortened links will conform to a “t.co” format.  That and other accompanying changes are already garnering praise. (Preview: shortened URLs will no longer count towards the 140 character limit.)

Facebook has received unwelcome attention lately for some of its privacy policies and security issues.  Unless you’ve made manual changes, updates to the site have made more of your information public.  Backlash resulted in further changes fixing that, but you should still take a look at your privacy controls to be sure you’re not sharing more than you think.

There is even a cottage industry popping up to help users keep their information secure.  All this has some people giving up their citizenship in Facebook nation.  But, with 400 million users, chances are that walking away may mean leaving behind a major network. A less drastic option is “quitting without actually quitting.”

The creators of malware and viruses get more clever every day.  Outsmart them by being informed about the different methods of attack.

Once you’re in the know, make sure your computer is armed to identify nefarious programs:
•    If you don’t have it already, antivirus and antispyware software should be your first priority.
•    For existing software, check to make sure the latest updates are installed. Means of infiltration are constantly changing; the software won’t protect you properly if it isn’t updated.
There are a number of free and paid options to choose from if you’re considering new software.  Here are some things to look for when deciding which is right for you:
•    If you’re a frequent user of instant messaging, email or other P2P applications, confirm those are covered.
•    Note whether users or reviewers comment about the rate of false positives.  Thinking you have a problem when you really don’t can be an annoying time waster.
•    Check to see if the software has a high rate of early detection — this will help keep you ahead of the game.
•    Be aware of size and resource use.  Some applications can take up a lot of space and slow your computer while scanning, which wouldn’t be a great incentive for keeping it updated and running.

Taming Twitter’s Streams With Automated Web Sites

By PAUL BOUTIN  – New York Times
Published: February 10, 2010

Unlike Facebook, whose builders strive to make it an ever more organized social network, Twitter seems to thrive on being a jumble. It is an egalitarian sort of mess: Twitter does not sort its users into categories, does not tag some as celebrities, does not map out who does lunch with whom in the real world. You and Shaquille O’Neal are Twitter equals, only he has an extra 2.8 million followers.

But that loose nature also makes it hard to find out who is there to follow. Twitter has no searchable directory of users as Facebook does.

There is no map of the Twitter landscape to guide newcomers, although the company does maintain lists of suggested users by topic.

There is also a Web site, Listorious listorious.com where volunteers publish personally chosen lists of posters to follow based on specific themes. But it is hit or miss. The Best of Photography list is a sharp collection of 29 eye-catching feeds, but Tech News People is a pile of 499 journalists for you to sort through.

So, how do you figure out who to follow? Start with a sweeping generalization: Twitter users can be grouped into different categories. For each, there is an automated site somewhere that lets you follow the genre without having to find and follow dozens, or even hundreds, of individual Twitter streams.

CELEBRITY POSTS Twitter seems to be an irresistible draw for the superfamous like Oprah Winfrey. A typical post: “Just saw Avatar. Wowee Kazowee!! Interviewing James Cameron tomorrow and Lady Gaga. Can’t sleep. So excited.”

Ms. Winfrey seems to honestly enjoy the chance to connect with her fans without a producer or a script. Same for the actor Ben Stiller, who has been posting links to Haiti disaster relief for weeks.

You can find celebrity accounts by searching Google for, say, “Twitter Ben Stiller.” Or, even better, you can let the machines do the work: The automated site CelebrityTweet.com tracks a few hundred verified accounts of celebrities, and posts anything on Twitter by them on CelebrityTweet’s home page. That sounds overwhelming, but it turns out to be one new Tweet every one to three minutes, most of them only a few words.

Rainn Wilson, of the NBC comedy “The Office,” recently posted, “Classical music makes me want to cut my ears off and eat them like raw ear jerky.”

Twitter has done surprisingly well at keeping out fakes who pretend to be celebrities by individually vetting accounts, discouraging ghost writers and adding a verified account seal.

So, yes, you can trust that is really Demi Moore typing.

POLITICIANS’ POSTS “Everyone should follow the people who represent them,” the political pundit Ana Marie Cox said in an interview. Twitter, Ms. Cox says, is a more efficient way than the mass media or a Web site for public servants to let constituents know what they are working on or where they stand. Assuming you know who your elected officials are, the Google search trick will find their accounts.

But prepare to be disappointed.

Unlike Hollywood stars, most politicians let their interns do their posting for them. President Obama’s account — @barackobama — during the 2008 election campaign was written by staff members of the Democratic National Committee, according to a White House spokesman. The committee’s Organizing for America project now manages the account.

Even comic-turned-Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, does not write his own messages. As a result, politics on Twitter can be informative, but not necessarily inspiring. The site Politics Tweet follows more than 200 American politicians, just as CelebrityTweet tracks movie stars. But the posted messages consist largely of dull check-ins from events, and links to non-Twitter content on politicians’ Web sites.

For a while last year, it seemed things might turn around when Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, typed some angry Twitter messages aimed at Mr. Obama, the former junior senator from Illinois. His best-known status update: “When you are a ‘hammer’ u think evrything is NAIL I’m no NAIL.”

Alas, Mr. Grassley seems to have learned to control his Twitter temper. A recent message: “45 people at town meet in Traer. Obviously small turnout bc it started 7am.”

PHOTO AND VIDEO POSTERS Twitter does not allow users to upload photos directly. Instead, there’s a cottage industry of sites with cutesy names like TwitPic, TweetPhoto and Twitgoo meant specifically to tie photos and videos into Twitter. Just go to PingWire, which scans Twitter for links to those sites and more. PingWire creates a live feed that displays a slow, scrolling wall of thumbnail-size versions of photos being posted to Twitter at the moment, and it is hypnotic to watch.

To save a photo, right-click it with your mouse and open the link in a new window.

TECH-SAVVY POSTERS The Internet has its own shadow culture, a tech-savvy nation separated from mainstream culture with sites like Slashdot and Boing Boing carrying CNN-like clout online.

Twitter posts, though, have been dominated by mainstream Americans almost from the start. Top items on Twitter’s Trending Topics list recently were discussions labeled “#donttalktome” and “#uselessfacts.”

If you are nostalgic for more tech-oriented posts, try Tweetmeme and Retweet.com, two automated sites that track the news stories, images and videos their users are posting about the most. Top stories tend to be less about the Haiti earthquake and more about Internet Explorer.

LUNCH OUT Brad Holcman, a Los Angeles resident, says Twitter changed the way many Angelenos eat.

“In L.A., you can’t always drive to lunch, so lunch has to come to you,” he says, referring to the food trucks that drive from one office location to another. Traffic jams can keep the trucks from sticking to a regular schedule. Twitter has emerged as the means used by food truck operators to alert their fans as they roll from spot to spot.

The practice has spread to other cities. A truck that makes crème brûlée in San Francisco has nearly 10,000 followers.

Mr. Holcman took the obvious next step: He set up an account, @FoodTruckLA, that reposts the messages from dozens of Los Angeles trucks as a single stream. That gives hungry patrons a single up-to-the-minute feed of which rolling restaurant will be where, and when.

During a phone call outside Marked5, a Japanese hamburger truck, Mr. Holcman said that having the schedules appear in his Twitter feeds was the best way to get his attention. “Sometimes,” he said between bites, “you need to be reminded to eat.”

3 CliCk Media announces new website incorporating a new company branding, recent project gallery and a New Media Mashup blog with insightful information about the ever changing landscape of new media. “3 CLiCk Media’s new website and iPhone App will be a go to source for up to date information” says New Media Strategist, Emmett Murphy.

The New Media Mashup will broadcast breaking news and unique content about Social Media, emerging marketing, public relations and online technologies. “The strategy is the the key. Everyone has access to the technology, but what you do with it is the real secret.”

3 CLiCk Media is a new media design firm that combines cutting-edge Internet technology with tried and true new media strategies to build movements that make an impact. Our services are used by over 120 companies worldwide.