What does it take to make a successful iPhone application?

Before answering what does it take to make a successful iPhone application we have to define what makes an application successful. Sapient always asks why are we building something, what are we trying to achieve, and how are we going to measure it; so starting from top down, what are the business objectives, the key performance indicators, and all metrics. iPhone applications usually serve one of two purposes: drive brand or drive revenue.

Objective: Drive brand
Applications that drive brand most likely are free since they have to target a broad reach. Objective is usually increase awareness, brand recall, or word of mouth, and is traditionally measured based on simple downloads, usage, and extended with how many share with friends, stickiness, and engagement levels. A good way to take it one step further is tie in social media monitoring and analyze share and velocity of voice, general sentiment, and overall impact of the application within social conversations.

Now that we understand how to measure it, what will the application do? Nowadays brands cannot push messages to the consumers, they have to provide value and we generally call it brand as an enabler. Applications that drive brand usually fall under one of two categories: be entertaining or be useful. Entertaining applications usually have a wider adoption, more downloads, but less engagement as users open it just a few times before they get bored. Useful applications have a smaller reach but higher engagement; less users will download the application, but they will use it much more than simple entertainment applications. However the key for both types is simplicity.

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Alabama's Local 15 News Live Twitter Billboard

A few days ago I found this shocking blog claiming “Live Twitter News Billboard Leads to Social Media Fail“… go ahead, read it and see if you agree.

First, the fact that they pulled off a digital billboard with live tweets is awesome.

So now ask yourself, what was the cause of this event? live tweets? twitter? social media?

The answer is none of the above. The only reason this happened is due to organizational readiness. There are two factors here:

1. Are they ready to accept that people talk? Does it really matter if something like this shows up? how much is it really going to affect their brand? is it really a failure? what are the thresholds and limits?

2. If it is a concern, why didn’t they implement a simple keyword filtering? Any simple profanity filter would have caught the word ‘rape’.

3. If simple keyword filtering is not enough, they could easily have hired a moderation company. Moderation could have been pretty simple to do … would require a person/company to approve every tweet to go live on the billboard. Depending on the refresh rate and how real-time this billboard gets the data, this task could be really simple. Just refresh it every 10 minutes, select 140 tweets per day, done.

So did Twitter lead to failure? I don’t think so … they agency should have added a few precautions, but even without anything in place, the fact that I’m blogging about this and giving props to their agency for innovating digital out of home advertising is great for a local news station … I think it was well worth it.

I had the pleasure to moderate a panel for Omma mobile in October with a nice talented group of experts:

Panelist |   Jeannette Kocsis, SVP Digital Marketing, Harte-Hanks, Inc.
Panelist |   Ujjal Kohli, CEO, Rhythm  Media
Panelist |    Kyle Outlaw, UX lead, Razorfish
Panelist |    Ken Willner, CEO of Zumobi
Panelist |    Jamie Wells, Director, Global Trade Marketing, Microsoft  Mobile Advertising
Moderator |   Rob Gonda, Director of Digital Strategy & Innovation, Sapient

Topic was Mobile Web Vs. Mobile Applications; it was pretty interesting, Ken and Jamie as more vocal and Ujjal with some nice comments for debates. Jamie plugged Microsoft so much that it almost became a game, and I had to get back at him towards the end; he said he wanted to pick up a fight, crowd always loves that.

Please check it out, it’s long, but hopefully you’ll find it useful and entretaining.

After playing with Chrome developer edition for the Mac for a few weeks, Google released today the official Beta. I tried it on a PC a few months ago and quite honestly, was not impressed at all, and haven’t paid much attention since. Today I decided to run a few tests, and it seems to be 1) pretty fast, and 2) extensible?

1) Open http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/canopy/ and click launch experiment … tried it with Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome 4 beta … Chrome wins by far …. granted, this code was built to showcase Chrome specific advantages and should not reflect Safari generic JavaScript performance, but it’s pretty sweet.

2) Chrome Extensions : https://chrome.google.com/extensions … wow, I had no idea this existed… this is the main reason I like Firefox, all the nice tools …

All n’ all, I still use Safari as my main browser, Firefox to look behind the scenes, dev tools, and now I’ll try Chrome a little more too.

P.S. Posting this entry using Chrome to test wordpress compatibility; thus far, all good.

[update] P.S.2 Extensions does not seem to work for Mac. Hopefully they’ll enable them soon

[update] P.S.3 Enable extensions for Mac through this little hack-around