Posts Tagged ‘mobile’

Communities – Mobile Is The Future, Are You Ready?

Friday, September 30, 2011 @ 10:09 AM
Phil Wride

As has become a regular theme on the blog, this post provides my thoughts following a really engaging and insightful #DigitalSurrey event where Jon Bishop (@jonin60seconds), Head of Social Media at Paypal UK, gave a presentation about mobile and how Paypal see the future. I’ve already highlighted mobile in a number of other blog posts here but this one takes a slightly different stance and focuses on commerce.

Jon spat out some really interesting figures last night, like the $3.3 Bn being spent on mobile advertising, the number of devices people tend to carry around with them or how a mobile operator in Africa is actually the largest bank on the continent. As a Community Manager increasing levels of interaction via mobile (as long as your community is usable on a mobile device) will be something to look at but the commerce side is definitely something to be aware of.

If your users can now comment in your community AND purchase products from your business while they are “on the move” what impact will this have? Will your community evolve to be a sales channel in itself? Let users converse, read reviews and then click straight through on their mobile and enter the purchase flow? If this is the case, what impact does it have on user support? Will Customer Support need to ditch the phones and emails and man the community site in order to respond to issues?

Lots of questions are raised by this and with both mobile usage and ad spend set to increase chances are it’s going to become an area of increasing value / concern for Community Managers. Is it time to create mobile only communities and develop a whole new strategy of how to deal with time poor consumers who want to flit between interaction and purchase at a moments notice?

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In Being Social Remember To Be Accessible

Monday, January 10, 2011 @ 10:01 AM
Phil Wride

With a reported 40% of all tweets originating from mobile devices and the likes of iPhone and iPad being two of the top social brands last year it’s an important thing to consider when creating your Social Media and Community strategy. What state is your corporate / brand site in and is there a mobile version (or compatibility for mobile devices)?  If you have a community forum or content site and are looking to drive engagement and interaction is this also in a format that is mobile device friendly? If not perhaps this is something worth looking at for this year.

Having a presence across Social Media channels like facebook and twitter is great but if you then try and direct those users to somewhere else with the use of links, photos or videos you are asking for trouble if they can’t easily access that content. Chances are you will only get two shots at trying to get people through the gate and onto your site / community. If your links fail on the first try I might as a consumer put it down to server error, two failures on different days or the thing that loads for me looks completely awful then I certainly won’t be trying a third time.

Chances are 2011 will see an even greater increase in mobile usage for social media usage and if all your properties date back to the 1940’s then you are going to miss out.

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Philip Wride – Social Media Marketer and Community Manager