Janrain Improves Online Marketing for WordPress, Disqus, and Others

Janrain, the social web management solution, announced today new partnerships with Automattic, the creators of WordPress, Disqus, and Umbel. These organizations can now better leverage the power of social by using the Janrain User Management Platform (JUMP). Janrain provides sites with an easy way to engage their site visitors by allowing them to login or join using virtually any social platform — Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc. Site owners can then use this data to deliver targeted content, for a streamlined and effective marketing approach.

Big News for WordPress.com VIP

Janrain’s integration with WordPress.com VIP is the biggest partnership. Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com VIP, has chosen Janrain as their preferred technology partner for user management. The organizations that run the WordPress VIP CMS include such big-name brands as CNN, New York Times, CBS, Forbes, and others. Instead of cumbersome login processes, these networks can gain more members by allowing them to login via their preferred social media account, specifically market to site visitors, and serve up specific content for a better user experience.

More Partners. More Power.

Disqus, a hugely popular comment system, is another major partner for Janrain. Disqus has been called the “community of communities” for good reason — it transcends social media to comprise a vast discussion platform, rich with features and easy to use. Aided by the power of Janrain, Disqus will enhance their value by collecting user profile information for publisher who want to maximize the use of registered audience development. “Janrain integration is really compelling,” explained Ro Gupta, Disqus’s VP of Development. Compelling indeed, since sites can now socially connect with “the largest population of commenters on the web.”

Janrain’s contribution to the ever-expanding social population is personalizing online consumer experience more than ever before. Automattic, Disqus, and Umbel join more than 30 other partners who are reaping the benefits of better audience engagement. Tore Steen, VP of Business Development for Janrain, said, “JUMP [the user management platform] was designed to easily integrate with other industry leaders to support an entire ecosystem of technology choices and engagement strategies for our clients.”

The Social Solution

According to Janrain, more than 86% of site visitors will give up and leave if confronted with a tedious login process on a site. 77% of users prefer social login. Adding such social login gives companies far more members than they would otherwise have.

It’s apparent how easy the registration process is, when powered by JUMP. Compare the screenshots below with a conventional sign-up process, which often involves seven times as many questions, and takes three times as much time.

Janrain gives people precisely what they want, but it does something more. Janrain’s biggest advantage is to the partners, now including WordPress and Disqus. Partners possess social profile data, customer audience insights, and a huge collection of other information that enables them to better serve their customers. Janrain is more than just ease of use and social integration. It’s a powerful way to improve online marketing.

Check out this video to see how Janrain can totally transform a site.

http://vimeo.com/janrain/overview

About Janrain

The Janrain User Management Platform (JUMP) helps organizations succeed on the social web by providing leading technology to leverage the popularity of social networks and identities for user acquisition, engagement, and enhanced customer intelligence. Our solutions, including social login, social sharing, social profile data collection and storage, access to the social graph, and digital strategy services, improve the effectiveness of online marketing initiatives for leading brands like Fox, Universal Music Group, Whole Foods, Purina, Samsung and Dr Pepper. Founded in 2005, Janrain is based in Portland, Oregon. For more information, please call 1-888-563-3082 or visit www.janrain.com and follow @janrain.

Janrain Improves Online Marketing for WordPress, Disqus, and Others

Mollom Releases New Content Moderation Platform

Acquia, the enterprise guide to Drupal and the developers of Mollom, just announced the release of its new content moderation platform. Mollum is a Content Moderation Platform service that analyzes content quality on a website  and filters out spam or inappropriate messages. Content moderation is a challenging and time-consuming job, but Mollom’s advanced solution makes the task quick and easy.

According to one of the developers, Dries Buytaert (of Drupal fame), “I feel like we’ve secured our place as the leading enterprise-ready content moderation system.” The new rollout is the climax to two years of development, 600 beta testers, and millions of filtered comments.

What’s New in Mollom

Users of Mollom are accustomed to its vast power to control website input (social, comments, forums, etc) with ease and accuracy — accuracy to the tune of 99.98%. The new platform provides the following major benefits:

• Easy to manage teams. The task of moderation is never a one-man show. Now it’s easy for admins to add moderators, analyze their performance, gain at-a-gance view of their overall work, and make sure that they’re keeping up with filtering standards.


• Instant automatic moderation. One of Mollom’s biggest advantages is its ability to scrub spam without a trace. Only the “ham” comes through, making the moderator’s job easy and fast.


• Customization. Mollom now has the power of customization. Users can set up a specific set of parameters for a site, thus creating specific spam or profanity scores. Customizing is as easy as dragging a score bar up or down.


• Multi-site control. Mollom is an enterprise level solution. Customers can manage literally hundreds of sites. For agencies, reputation management consultants, or big brands with tons of web properties, this is a dream come true.

The Mollom Solution

Companies, especially bigger ones, are often the targets of damaging spam. According to some estimate, 90% of the content submitted to websites is spam. Manually filtering such spam would require the full time and attention of dozens of employees — and a boring job it would be.

Mollom makes it easy, and excises thousands of comments a minute. The site’s homepage has a ticker, which at the time of writing, registered over 2.28 billion spam sites caught across more than 61,000 sites. Such large scale filtering allows companies to weed out harmful commentary, and improve their social credibility across the web. “With the Mollom Content Management Platform, organizations can manage social content with the confidence that their brand will be protected with our enterprise-ready content assurance solution,” says Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia.

Mollom is one of the few moderation systems that works really well and does so on a massive scale. The product is becoming more and more important in an era when social is incredibly important, and when moderation is crucial to a brand’s integrity.

About Acquia

Acquia provides enterprises with the freedom to create extraordinary web experiences based on Drupal, the open source platform that integrates content, community and commerce. Offering a variety of SaaS solutions specifically designed for Drupal, Acquia gives global organizations the unparalleled ability to rapidly deploy and manage multichannel content across web and mobile devices. Co-founded by Drupal project’s creator in 2007, Acquia has helped more than 2,500 companies including Twitter Warner Music Group, Humana, Stanford University, Mercedes-Benz and the New York MTA, to grow and scale their digital experiences with confidence. Acquia was recently named the number one software company in the 2012 Inc. 500 and was named one of the 100 most promising companies in America by Forbes Magazine.  For more information visit www.acquia.com or call +1 781 238 8600. Acquia is a registered trademark of Acquia, Inc.

View Mollom’s Press Release

Read about it on Mollum’s blog.

If Mollom is new to you, check out the three and a half minute video intro here:

Mollom Releases New Content Moderation Platform

Introducing Liferay's New Community Ideation Initiative

Liferay, Inc., provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class open source portal, announced today the launch of a new Ideation initiative designed to foster the development of new products and features for the Liferay Portal platform. The initiative is aimed to empower Liferay’s worldwide community of users, customers and partners to better coordinate the technical resources and business requirements needed to develop new features for Liferay’s products and create new apps that can be delivered through Liferay Marketplace, the company’s public apps repository.

Liferay’s new Ideation initiative includes the launch of a dynamic, easy-to-use dashboard of product and feature ideas and a more streamlined ideation process. In the new Ideas Dashboard, community members can quickly see the most popular feature requests, champion app ideas to the community, and get a direct feed of upcoming features for Liferay products. This allows Liferay community members to actively participate in setting the direction of Liferay’s products and to discover new ideas to implement for their own projects.

The dashboard also serves as a springboard for those wanting to develop apps for Liferay Marketplace. Developers can find other community members to participate in defining and developing new apps, which may not be on the company’s road map, and use the Marketplace to make their apps available to the public. Liferay initially launched the Marketplace with over 70 apps and themes developed internally, and is now accepting third-party apps from its partners and community members.

“We are proud to say that Liferay from the outset has enjoyed a close relationship with its talented and dedicated community, and together we have made significant gains in raising the profile of open source software among enterprises,” said James Falkner, Liferay’s Community Manager. “We hope this effort will help us better gather and put into action the innovative ideas of our community while empowering individuals to add their own unique voices to the advancement of the Liferay platform.”

Many key features in today’s Liferay Portal have originated from Liferay’s community, which generates thousands of feature suggestions each year and now number more than 85,000 members. Examples include Faceted Search, which debuted in Liferay Portal 6.1, and features that are now fixtures in the portal platform such as Communities, Virtual Hosts, Translations and Control Panel. With this new initiative, community members have a new way to propose and promote ideas of their own.

To contribute ideas to the Liferay community, visit the dashboard at www.liferay.com/community/ideas.

Introducing Liferay's New Community Ideation Initiative

Six Major Trends that Are Changing the Web Industry Right Now

The web world is always changing. Always. For anyone whose livelihood is tied to the web, it’s important to keep an ear to the ground to find out what’s changing and how it might affect you. To save you the trouble of putting your own ear to the ground, we’ve done some listening ourselves. Here’s the rumble on the biggest changes in the web industry. Whatever your role on the web, we suggest you take heed.

1. Responsive Design

As discussed in a previous CMS Critic article, responsive design is huge. Right now, we’re facing a sea change in the web design world bigger than anything since the Web 2.0 revolution nearly ten years ago. Sites without a responsive component are a step behind. Responsive is an integral component of any web strategy. Forsake this major trend at your own peril.

2. The Domination of Mobile

It is cliché to say anything about “the rise of mobile.” It already happened. That’s old news. However, mobile domination is different from the rise of mobile. At the close of last year, CNN cited the presence of five billion mobile users on the planet. That’s a huge percentage of the world’s population toting mobile gadgets. It represents a gigantic demand for mobile information. The mobile monster demands the attention of designers, programmers, developers, writers, marketers, and anyone else whose life is touched by the web. (Which is, uh, everyone.) Mobile is the modus operandi for accessing the web and for doing our jobs. Like it or not, it’s changing how you live your life in 2013.

3. The Demand for Instant

Due in part to our mobile addiction, we want everything now. Maybe that’s why Google Now is a standard fixture on all Android devices. It’s more than just information —  stock tickers in website sidebars or weather widgets in our calendars. It’s more than just blazing connection speeds. No, we want instant activity, instant direction, instant access, and instant everything right now. Whether you’re crafting a site architecture or managing a website, think about the speed issue. How can we get even faster?

4. The Growth of Online Shopping

I’m an online shopping junkie. I even buy food online. (The fifteen-minute drive to Trader Joe’s is just too much. Thanks, Amazon Prime.) The world’s move to online shopping is on an upward swing. We’re watching rising rates of online shoppers flock to the shopping websites across Europe and Asia, and pretty much everywhere in the developed world. More online shoppers means more online stores, bigger online stores, and a heightened demand for the tightened integration of CMS, CXM, and CRM. More money is being spent online. A lot of someones are going to get a lot of money.

5. The Decline of SEO

The domination of SEO is fading. Sure, SEO is going to stick around for a while, but it will no longer have the immense clout that it once had. There are two major reasons for this; both reasons are rooted in search engine algorithms. First, search engines are becoming prescient. They know what words you’re going to type in the search bar before you do. This goes beyond autocomplete. Search engines have the ability to anticipate searches based on your search history, geographical locale, demographic, and other features. Anticipated searches and user-specific results means that SEO is getting weaker by the minute. Search results are at once, far more nuanced and yet less malleable. We can’t force rank shifts as easily as we once could. Second, the algorithms are adept at weeding out junk pages, content farms, spammy sites, and irrelevant information. (I’m looking at you Google Penguin.) Rankings have less value when a search engine acts more like a human than a search bot. And that’s what we’re dealing with now — search algorithms with humanoid complexity. Yes, SEO is declining, yet his is not the decade-old declaration that “SEO is dead!” Nobody’s dead yet. SEO is just changing just like everything else in the web world. SEO is shifting in style and approach, and therefore its influence is waning.

6. The Rise of Personal Influence

Rushing in to fill this void is the rise of personal influence. We all know that Web 2.0 is an intensely personal and interactive web experience. With personal blogs aplenty, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and social media overkill, there is no longer any reason to feel like the web is an impersonal entity. The social trend is coming to maturity. Personal influence is going to matter more and more. For example, a single tweet from one individual can create a massive ripple in the Twitter pool. Likewise, the more prolific and skilled a blogger, the more you’ll see his smiling mug in the search results of Google, thanks to Google+. It’s less likely that a company will command your attention, and far more likely that an individual will carry that company’s flag to the front lines. Personal influence is much more than just hiring managers checking out your Facebook page and LinkedIn profile. The rise of personal influence admits that the Internet is full of people writing information, people selling goods, people selling services, people sharing their lives, people uploading photos, people communicating with other people….people, people, people. Internet equals people. Therefore, it is no wonder that the web will ride on the wave of personal influence.

These trends are not just changing the web industry; they’re changing the world. Although this article doesn’t chase down the various ramifications of these changes, you’ll probably want to do some thinking about how to respond in your own unique situation. Change is happening. We must learn to accept it, embrace it, and thrive.

Six Major Trends that Are Changing the Web Industry Right Now

Teach Coursework with Wordpress - Review of Sensei Plugin by WooThemes

If you’ve ever taken an online course, you’ve experienced the fine work of developers and programmers who have worked very hard. CMSs for education are notoriously difficult to manage. WooThemes and their new plugin, Sensei, set out to change that. Their new tool, “the learning management plugin for WordPress, was released in January.

Introduction

Sensei is exclusively a WordPress plugin. Since WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS, this is a great choice. Sensei is easy to use, even for someone who is not familiar with using a CMS. Anyone familiar with WordPress will find the plugin very easy to use.

Sensei a Japanese martial arts term, meaning “teacher” or “person born before another.” The term applies to this plugin.

Features

Sensei is not what you would call a “really powerful” plugin. In other words, you’re not going to make Coursera. The features it does provide, however, are sufficient. Here’s what you can do:

1. Create an unlimited courses


2. Create lessons within courses


3. Set course and lesson prerequisites


4. Create quizzes with required pass percentage


5. Set custom lesson length requirements


6. Embed videos of any kind to the lessons


7. User registration for students taking the course


8. Complete course analytics and student information


9. Learner access to dashboard to track progress


10. Custom theming options

The plugin interface looks and feels like many other plugin. Creating lessons and courses is easy using the familiar WordPress post creation.

Getting Started with Sensei

(Note:  I tested the plugin using a privately hosted WordPress 3.5.1 site using the Standard Theme.)

The first step to Sensei is, quite obviously, installing it. I navigated to my WordPress site’s plugin page, selected the 253 KB zip file, and clicked “install now.” Within ten seconds, the plugin was successfully installed.

After selecting “activate plugin,” I was redirected to my plugin page, where I was provided with a welcome message.

It was time to do some schooling.

Using Sensei

The plugin provides me with an icon in the sidebar with and five menu items. We’ll go through each one of these.

Here’s the screen I was looking at when I clicked on the Sensei icon.

The plugin page looks just like the main page for creating new posts. Instead of categories like “author” or “tags,” the Sensei plugin featured the titles  ”course” and “prerequisite lesson.”

Add New Lesson

My first step was to add a new lesson.

This was familiar territory, since it mimicked the features and layout of typical post creation.

Unlike typical posts however, adding a new lesson displayed the following additional features below the main field:

I went ahead and wrote a mock lesson and published it. In doing so, it was necessary to create a new course and assign this particular lesson to that course. If this action is not completed, the course will not be available for viewing or taking from the main page.

When I visited my blog home page to take the course, the first thing I noticed was the addition of two category tags in my header menu:  ”Courses” and “My Courses.”

Clicking “My Courses” brings me to the main page for courses that I published.

Let’s take the class.

 

What follows is a simple display of the lesson that I created. I clicked on the blue button to “start taking this class.”

What follows is the lesson display, along with a progress bar.

It was unclear to me how to set the lesson to completed. The “In Progress” notification appeared on the lesson whenever I looked at the lesson.

“Create New Lesson” is where the real work of course development happens. You are provided with a full editor, plenty of options, and access to all the familiar plugins that you have installed. The nice thing about creating lessons is that there is no learning curve for typing or creating a new lesson.

All Courses

Next, I chose to view “All Courses.”

The interface is familiar for those who are used to using WordPress. I created this course when I was in the process of writing up my lesson. The Course Creation was provided as one of the options underneath the lesson creation field. Editing a course takes me to page that looks just like a post or lesson creation.

Analysis

The analysis page provides a course instructor’s perspective on all the necessary metrics for courses, grades, and learners. Here are the features you’ll see when you click “Analysis.”

This page provides a survey of numbers only. It is not possible to submit queries or display the data in any other way. Unfortunately, there is no way to manually change student grades.

Settings

The settings page is a complete way to design courses, lessons, and general settings. There are plenty of options for each. Here is a look:

General Settings

Course Settings

Lesson Settings

Editing the Sensei settings is a great way to customize the individual lessons and create a virtual school with specific images, appearance, and features.

After becoming familiar with the Sensei interface and features, I figured it was time to give it a go with additional features.

Adding a Quiz

Let’s go ahead and create a quiz to test this feature.

After clicking “create a quiz,” I’m prompted to stipulate a pass percentage.

To proceed in creating questions, it is necessary to save the draft lesson. After this, quiz creation can commence.

The only questions that you can create are multiple choice questions. The help article states that there will be “the ability in the future to include multiple types of questions such as assessment, essays, etc.”

 

After you create the quiz question, it appears in the “Lesson Quiz” area, with the option to add additional questions. 

After saving the question, you can go on to create additional questions. I created a total of four, then went to view my lesson.

When I clicked “take quiz” on the lesson page, I was redirected to a new page, still displaying my familiar blog template, and displaying a post with the title of the lesson and “quiz.”

At the time I tested, my quiz did not display. I presume this was due to a conflict with my theme’s CSS. WooThemes is available for any WordPress installation, but is designed to be fully compatible with Twenty Eleven and Twenty Twelve.

Using Video Courses

Sensei is primed and ready for video instruction. Each lesson provides the opportunity to add a video embed code. Doing so is as easy as using WordPress’s oEmbed function and all its supported codes.

Changing the Plugin Appearance

For those who desire to customize the sensei template within their theme, there is a Sensei Theming guide for doing so.

Charging for Courses

Although I did not test this feature, Sensei also integrates with WooCommerce, allowing you to charge for courses. The process, apparently, is as simple as creating your course and then linking it to a product on the commerce plugin.

The Future of Sensei

This plugin is a work in progress, and Sensei makes this clear. There are good things in the offing. Thankfully, they provide a way to vote on future features in the Sensei forums. At the time of writing, there are dozens of suggestions for improvements.

Cost

A single license costs $99. For a five-site license, the cost is $149. For $299, you are allowed to use the plugin on an unlimited number of sites.

Conclusion

While Sensei is not a large and full-featured educational CMS, it does provide an easy-to-use plugin for those conducting small scale educational courses on a website. It’s the perfect solution for selling educational services from a blog, or providing employee or subscriber training. It is not, however, designed for large-scale usage by educational institutions.

If you’re looking for an easy way to add courses to your blog or website, Sensei is for you. Like anything from WooThemes, it’s fun and virtually bug-free. Plus, it’s got a bright future.

Visit the WooThemes Sensei plugin page.

Teach Coursework with Wordpress - Review of Sensei Plugin by WooThemes

MobStac Review - Manage Mobile Websites and Apps Across All Mobile and Tablet Devices

Click to visit MobStac

At present MobStac are the “only product in the world to offer mobile websites, tablet websites and native apps for every device“. When I received the MobStac information pack in an email I noticed, below the company contact info, the tagline “Mobile is the new Web“. According to their research there is an estimated 788 million mobile users predicted by 2015. In this infographic by New Relic called Why The Future is Mobile they state that there are more Android phones being activated each day than babies being born. So making sure your web presence is mobile compatible is going to be crucial in the days to come; if it isn’t so already.

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MobStac has done all the hard work so you don’t have to try to comply with thousands of devices on top of the mobile learning curve. They provide a SaaS mobile cloud that lets you easily manage your content from whatever device is at hand. It supports HTML 5, complies with Google’s SEO guidelines and can integrate with all your content management systems and feeds; making you “mobile in minutes“.

Working With MobStac

MobStac is fairly easy to work with, but there are some occasions where it’s not necessarily obvious how things work. You can navigate quickly around the dashboard; everything is broken down into manageable chunks that, for the most part, comfortably lead you through the process.

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You are given a sub-domain on MobStac that you can visit in a browser on your computer or a mobile device (if you open it in a mobile browser you may get prompted to download the app). The look of the mobile site will stay pretty consistent between devices and I was able to test it on a XP Laptop, iMac, iPad, iPhone and an Android S3. They provide built in analytics that shows you not only the number of site views, but also what devices were used to view your mobile site.

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One of the things I really like about MobStac is that it provides user accessibility through three buttons on the bottom of each page. There are two buttons to increase or decrease the size of the text and there is a button for alternative contrast, used when reading at night. It also remembers the settings you last used, so when you return to it you don’t have to set it up all over again.

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You can also change the look of your mobile site with themes. If you click on your MobStac page that lists all you mobile sites (if you are in a dashboard click ‘Your MobStac’ in the top left to return to it). Towards the bottom of the screen there is a row called ‘Mobile site’ or ‘Touch site’ (iPad), clicking the ‘Preview’ button next to ‘Mobile’ will open up the theme for editing. You can alter the colours of the various font classes used, or enter your own CSS stylesheet. MobStac provides you with a wireframe as part of the preview so you can see what it will look like on a mobile device.

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The one thing you should note is that MobStac appears to strip out all photographs from your posts, presumably to reduce loading times and bandwidth costs. On mobiles it looks fine, you can see the text and share the post if you wish, but I personally find on the iPad (Touch site) the preview looks a bit empty with lots of whitespace, almost as if the photos haven’t loaded yet. It also doesn’t appear to follow the same theme that is used elsewhere. There are no theme settings under the Touch site preview page, so it could be this part of the system is still a work-in-progress.

click to enlarge image

I only really had a couple of issues through out: I created a section based on an existing tag we used in the CMS Critic blog, however I didn’t see the section show up anywhere in the mobile site, so I was left a little confused about how it works. I looked into their support forum and a search for ‘Section/s’ returned no results, even though if I scrolled down the main support page I was able to find a relevant post on sections. This explained that you have to tag a post with the section name for it to show up on your mobile site under that section. Since this was a tag that was already in use in our blog feed it’s possible there is a bug here or the indented use needs some clarification.

I also noticed that when I clicked on the twitter feed link (@cmscritic) on the main page of the mobile site I got a “link appears to be broken” error in my browser. I realised after some trial and error that you had to click the ‘+’ symbol next to the feed in the dashboard for it to work, as it gave the impression it was set-up correctly without doing this. Therefore I think a few extra prompts, tips or guides might help when you are new to MobStac. Most of it was simple enough to get started, but a little clarity in certain contexts might help to light the way.

Create Your Own Mobile Domain

I’m sure many of you have seen the trend of adding a sub-domain with the single letter ‘m’ to reduce the length of the URL for ease of use on mobile devices. MobStac allows you to do this too if you own a domain. It will connect your sub-domain to your MobStac site, which allows you to use your domain address instead (e.g. m.cmscritic.com instead of cmscritic.mobstac.com). The instructions below gives you the main details in order to set this up as well as details for WordPress integration.

click to enlarge image

All you have to do next is save and your done, the API Key will be different to ours so we didn’t show it (besides security reasons). They also give you the code for a badge you can add to your blog, as well as some basic instructions on how to use some of the common features of MobStac.

Conclusion

click to enlarge image

As you can see from the image above MobStac can integrate a whole host of things into your site. The settings section gives you a lot of options so you can include and configure all kinds of content just the way you like it. The information pack had a long list of features as well as comparisons between MobStac and other providers, and it is clear they are definitely ahead of the curve.

The ‘Starter’ plan is free with certain limitations like traffic. When your website has grown enough to warrant upgrading, the price I think is fairly reasonable when you consider everything it can do. The professional and premium plans can be paid monthly, as shown in the image above, or you can pay annually to get a two month discount (the plans are on a ‘per website’ basis).

By opening your doors to the mobile market you can increase your readership, improve your conversion rates, making it more likely MobStac will pay for itself. Since you can test MobStac out for free though the question really should be why haven’t you gone mobile yet?

MobStac Review - Manage Mobile Websites and Apps Across All Mobile and Tablet Devices

Should You Build an App?

Apps are the new black. Everyone wants their own. From Mom & Pop shops to blue chip corporations, companies are scrambling to get their brand, product, or service in the app store. If you don’t have an app, you might feel kind of lonely. Many developers, who spend their days managing a CMS or developing sites may consider the app market as the new gold country. Is this where you should be digging for gold? Is is time to pack up and move to mobile country?

The App Question

Before you rush into the app frenzy, stop and think. Do you need an app? Should you build one? What is the ROI from building an app?

Apps cost money to create. Plus, they have a subtle impact upon your brand. They can either erode your brand integrity or they can build a stronger brand presence and more loyal customer base. An app can frustrate users, or it can be a huge crowd pleaser. An app can either drive conversions or it can slow conversions. Before you decide to build an app, you need to have an overall mobile strategy.

The Mobile Imperative

You probably already know that mobile is huge. You might even be reading this article on a mobile device. Every company with an online presence — which is basically every company by now — needs to have a mobile strategy. That mobile strategy is going to look different for every  single company.

Here’s the thing to remember about a mobile strategy. As Google’s Mobile Playbook explains, having a mobile strategy does not mean having an app. You can have a robust presence on mobile without investing the time and resources into creating an app. Using a website with responsive design, for example, is often a more cost-effective and reasonable solution for many companies.

What is an app for?

What’s the whole purpose behind an app? There are two broad potential purposes:

1.  Entertainment:  E.g., Pandora, Angry Birds, Kindle, Words With Friends, Instagram, Zombie Apocalypse

Game apps are great. As I write, I have two Words with Friends games going on. (I’m losing both games.) Are you a mobile game maker? Is your company name Zynga? If so, then entertainment apps are perfect for you. If, on the other hand, your company is not in the mobile gaming industry, this is probably not a great option. Some companies, however, have chosen such a strategy.

F’or example, Capri Sun created an iPad game. I downloaded it for my toddler daughter to play. The game consisted of trying to score points by throwing a beach ball into a goal defended by a dolphin. You can also make the dolphin do tricks. It was cute. My daughter played it a few times.

I don’t think we’ve drunk Capri Sun since downloading the app three years ago.

2.  Utility or Information:  Docs to Go, Evernote, CNN, Dropbox, Flashlight, Maps, Weather

If you see someone busy on their mobile device, chances are, they’re playing a game or surfing Facebook. If they aren’t, they might actually be working, catching up on the news. or emailing a colleague. Useful tools comprise a vast number of apps. Many companies who create traditional software tools have also created useful mobile versions of their software. For example, Evernote users may use the robust desktop version, an equally powerful online version, or a scaled down Evernote for their Android or iPad mini. Most companies, however, are not in position to profit from a new utility app.

An App that Promotes Your Brand

One website with an obviously older article discusses apps for “promotional purposes.” The article seems to indicate that promotional apps are a great idea. It can “enhance your status and stand out of other competitors [sic].”

Are brand promoting apps a good idea? It all depends.

Obviously, the Capri Sun app, mentioned above, is promoting its brand. It’s probably not trying to become another Zynga. What about Coca-Cola? They have an app, several actually. One of their apps allows you to play games. Another Coca-Cola app allows users to view the history of the Coca-Cola product and brand. Starbucks has created an app that allows users to make purchases, earn stars, create custom drinks, and even get free music. It’s like a loyalty card, only it’s an interactive app.

Perhaps the overarching reason why a company would create an app — be it an app for utility or entertainment — is to promote their brand. Is this a good idea for your company? Are people going to download an app you made in order to play with a dolphin or read about your brand’s history? Do you have an international chain of coffee shops where people can use your app to make purchases? Maybe, but probably not.

Making a Decision

Though the siren call of apps is strong, the numbers tell a different story:*

• 73% of mobile users would rather use a mobile website to do shopping, rather than an app. 


• 60% of mobile users prefer entertainment via their browser rather than an app.

(Stats taken from http://mashable.com/2012/06/06/mobile-site-mobile-app-infographic/)

There are plenty of good reasons to build an app. App users are generally more engaged with your brand. Besides, apps provide a greater level of interactivity and functionality. As the mobile browsing experience matures, however, there is less and less driving motivation to build an app.

You’re out to make an impact, not waste money on a dud. Before you move forward with your awesome app idea, stop and think for a moment. Apps have had their heyday.  Your answer to the app question may be instead to focus your development on responsive design and mobile customization rather than app building.

 

Should You Build an App?