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I have debated my recent blog updates. Cur­rently, I am try­ing to bal­ance many blogs and have not updated this blog near enough.

Please check out: http://ktmel.posterous.com/ for updates and cur­rent posts.

This blog has great poten­tial and our Con­nec­tions Team at Engauge may come back to it in the future.

Thank you!

Katie

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Mobile Sharing and Channel Integration via iOS 5

 

This week­end I received my iPhone 4S! This device con­tin­ues to amaze me every­day. I espe­cially love uti­liz­ing the social shar­ing inte­gra­tion on the new oper­at­ing system.

Apple’s iOS 5 oper­at­ing sys­tem is bridg­ing the gap in mobile social shar­ing and chan­nel inte­gra­tion, which I wrote about here.

The iOS 5 social shar­ing inte­gra­tion is now enabling users to seam­lessly share con­tent on mul­ti­ple plat­forms via their mobile devices. These mobile tech­nol­ogy updates are truly mak­ing mobile more and more of an umbrella chan­nel.

Twit­ter  posted about the social integration:

Sim­ply enter your Twit­ter login infor­ma­tion into on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, and you’ll always be con­nected to your Twit­ter account. This means you can tweet directly from Apple apps like Cam­era, Maps, Pho­tos, Safari and YouTube, along with third party apps, such as Chomp,  Flip­board,  Liv­ing­So­cial,  Insta­gram,  Mad­Pad,  Pop­Sugar,  Showyou, Sound­Track­ing and Zynga’s Words with Friends.

 

Mobile Com­merce Daily high­lighted Liv­ing­So­cial’s mobile appli­ca­tion enhanced by the iOS 5 Twit­ter inte­gra­tion. Liv­ing­So­cial con­sumers can use the mobile app to find and share free deals with easy!

With the iOS 5 inte­gra­tion, it’s a lot eas­ier to tweet our offers and deals,” Bren­dan Lewis, direc­tor of cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions at LivingSocial, said. “The Twit­ter but­ton comes up and you can get the word out to followers.

 

The iOS 5 inte­gra­tion is great from brand and con­sumers, but also for devel­op­ers!  Work­ing directly with Twit­ter sig­nif­i­cantly cut down mobile social shar­ing devel­op­ment time.

One of our devel­op­ers, Jared, at Engauge recently com­mented on my Social Shar­ing Mobi­lized post saying:

The issues with sharing…lies par­tially on the devel­op­ers that are imple­ment­ing the shares and par­tially on the social inter­faces in gen­eral (twit­ter, g+). The “sign in” road block is inevitable with any third party inte­gra­tion for obvi­ous rea­sons. If you are already signed in and they know you are that step is skipped.

Well, in response to Jared’s com­ment — iOS 5 has solved the chal­lenge of devel­op­ers imple­ment­ing the sharing capabilities!

The iOS 5 social inte­gra­tion shows that mobile is only becom­ing more and more sig­nif­i­cant in the com­mu­ni­ca­tion eco-system.

What is the mar­ket­ing take­away? When posi­tion­ing and devel­op­ing brands, cam­paigns and pro­mo­tions — make sure you think through all the pos­si­ble ways, times, loca­tions and plat­forms in which indi­vid­u­als will want to con­sume and share con­tent about your brand. 

I look for­ward to see­ing the future of mobile integration!

Note: Apps are also includ­ing other social plat­form inte­gra­tion. The Bible.is app allows users to allow Face­book access to the app for easy shar­ing to Face­book as well as Twitter!

Related arti­cles

• Thanks to iOS 5, Twit­ter Has Tripled Its Daily Sign-Ups (readwriteweb.com)
• How Twit­ter Inte­grates With iOS 5 (mashable.com)
• Dick Cos­tolo: Twit­ter signups via iOS devices have tripled since iOS 5′s launch (thenextweb.com)

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New Platforms Attempt to Integrate

 

Inte­gra­tion and con­tent aggre­ga­tion is huge topic of con­ver­sa­tion through­out mul­ti­ple industries.

Why is every­one talk­ing about integration?

The answer is sim­ple. Inte­gra­tion is nec­es­sary because of the increas­ing com­plex­ity and vol­ume of con­tent. Not only is con­tent increas­ing, but there are also new plat­forms and tools pop­ping up everyday.

I’ve noticed a recent trend of new plat­forms launch­ing with the intent of sim­pli­fy­ing the chaos and cut­ting through the clutter.

Today Mash­able announced the “inverse of the typ­i­cal social net­work” called Cir­cleMe.

Cir­cleMe aims to help indi­vid­u­als col­lect their likes across a broad range of cat­e­gories in one place. I loved the con­cept of the plat­form after read­ing the Mash­able post. I had hopes of Cir­cleMe inte­grat­ing and pos­si­bly sim­ply­ing my dig­i­tal presence.

Below are my thoughts after sign­ing up and play­ing around with the platform:

• Cir­cleMe is very visu­ally stimulating.
• The “inte­gra­tion” aspect requires a lot of user effort, but Cir­cleMe wants users to have this control.
• Cir­cleMe wants to users to “dig­i­tal ren­der of your likes in a classy, cus­tomiz­able profile.”
• I love the look and feel; how­ever, I am sure if I will have long-term engage­ment with the plat­form. We’ll see!
• My co-worker, Drew Hawkins, and I dis­cussed the plat­form as a “data mine” for mar­keters. The “like” data would give us bet­ter insight into con­sumers’ true and valu­able “likes.”
• Cir­cleMe beta cur­rently only imports “likes” from Face­book, Foursquare and Net­flix. I am sure they have plans of adding addi­tional plat­forms in the future. Drew men­tioned that they might want to inte­grate a few plat­form cor­rectly before adding the masses of many dif­fer­ent platforms.
• I am curi­ous to see if peo­ple will jump on this plat­form in attempts to orga­nize the rest of their dig­i­tal lives.

If indi­vid­u­als do begin­ning to par­tic­pate on Cir­cleMe… how will brands and­mar­keters lever­age this content aggregator?

Inte­gra­tion and con­tent col­lec­tion is becom­ing more and more rel­e­vant as con­sumers are over­whelmed by var­i­ous platforms/channels. There is not a sin­gle plat­form that brands and mar­keters can nar­row their focus on because con­sumers are con­strained to spe­cific platform.

 

The les­son: Con­sumers are look­ing for ways to con­nect the dots and sim­ply their lives.

The ques­tion: How will your brand and/or prod­uct help sim­ply lives and con­nect the dots?

 

I’ve included screen­shots of my Cir­cleMe expe­ri­ence below. Feel free to check it out your­self. I would love to know your thoughts!

 

 

 

 

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Tumbling into the Marketing Mix

 

Tum­blr, a social blog­ging plat­form, launched in 2007. My first blog post on Tum­blr was Novem­ber 25, 2009. I began using the blog­ging plat­form sim­ply to learn and grad­u­ally built a theme around my per­sonal blog; how­ever, I only knew a few other friends using the plat­form at the time.

Three years later, my per­sonal blog theme has changed, but the more impor­tant fact is that the plat­form has grown by leaps and bounds. eMar­keter and The Nielsen Com­pany have recently pub­lished reports stat­ing that Tum­blr expe­ri­enced 183% growth in just one year (May 2010 — May 2011). Accord­ing to Mash­able, Tum­blr is now a more estab­lished blog­ging site than Word­Press in num­ber of blogs hosted (29 mil­lion blogs as of Sep­tem­ber 2011).

I recently gath­ered together Engauge’s Dig­i­tal Inno­va­tion Group to dis­cuss and brain­storm the growth and use of Tum­blr for indi­vid­u­als as well as brands. We have been div­ing deep into the world of Tum­blr and even cre­ated a pri­vate Tum­blr blog to house all of our research.

Tum­blr is chang­ing the way peo­ple blog by adding social shara­bil­ity within an easy-to-use web and mobile interface. The social fea­tures of Tum­blr make blog­gers more aware of their audi­ence. Blog­gers have been able to track URL vis­its on many other blog­ging plat­form; how­ever, Tum­blr specif­i­cally noti­fies users when other users fol­low, reblog, like or com­ment on their posts.

Tum­blr is not only mak­ing a huge impact on the blog world, but the plat­form is also an impor­tant piece of the over­all mar­ket­ing mix.

I was thrilled to see promi­nent web sources such as Read­WriteWeb and Mash­able recently imple­ment a Tum­blr share but­ton on their articles.

 

Social shar­ing inte­gra­tion is an impor­tant ele­ment in the over­all mar­ket­ing mix because it allows indi­vid­u­als to eas­ily share con­tent to the platform(s) of their choice. I know that I am more likely to share con­tent if it means I sim­ply click a few buttons.

Try it out on with this blog. I updated the social shar­ing with a Tum­blr but­ton (see the top and bot­tom of this post).

 

So how is Tum­blr chang­ing the mar­ket­ing mix?

Tum­blr is another plat­form to take into con­sid­er­a­tion when mar­ket­ing a brand or build­ing a campaign.

Should your brand jump on Tum­blr just because “every­one else is doing it?”

Not nec­es­sar­ily. Plat­forms and tools, such as Tum­blr, are not the core of mar­ket­ing. The core of mar­ket­ing is con­sumers — focus­ing on indi­vid­u­als and how to best com­mu­ni­ca­tion with them. Mar­keters need to research their tar­get audience(s) and goals before jump on any plat­form includ­ing Tumblr.

It is very impor­tant to back away from the fancy tools and focus on strat­egy. You can use all the fancy tools in the world, but you will not get any­where with­out thought­ful strategy.

Below are a few recent exam­ples of brands using Tumblr:

• Tar­get high­lighted by Busi­ness 2 Community 
• Oscar de la Renta high­lighted by Mash­able
• 60 Brands Using Tum­blr by Social Fresh

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Social Sharing Mobilized

 

This week­end I attended a Social Media Inte­gra­tion con­fer­ence #SMIATL. The speak­ers cov­ered top­ics from cross-channel ana­lyt­ics to blog­ging to search + social. I love attend­ing con­fer­ences because they breed learn­ing and pro­vide insight and per­spec­tive from bril­liant individuals.

The con­fer­ence was great; how­ever, there was a large com­po­nent miss­ing from the social media inte­gra­tion. The miss­ing com­po­nent was MOBILE. Some of the ses­sions men­tioned mobile, but it was glossed over at best.

I dis­cussed my inter­est in mobile and social shar­ing inte­gra­tion with Mack Col­lier dur­ing an after­noon lunch. Mack is a great well-known social media strate­gist, con­sult, speaker and founder of #Blogchat, the largest Twit­ter Chat on the inter­net, where thou­sands of peo­ple meet each Sun­day night on Twit­ter to dis­cuss a dif­fer­ent blog­ging topic.

I was specif­i­cally inter­ested in find­ing out how Mack thought his blog read­ers would share posts as more and more read­ers access blogs on their mobile phones.

Mobile is being called the “glue” of the mar­ket­ing mix and mar­keters are focus­ing on opti­miz­ing email, web­sites and social pages for mobile devices.

Where does social shar­ing come into the mobile mix?

I am a huge user of social shar­ing but­tons on web­sites and blogs on my browser. I want the same sim­ple shar­ing capa­bil­i­ties on my phone!

Two weeks ago, I posted an update on the Google +1 but­ton arriv­ing on the mobile web.

I went to the Mash­able arti­cle on my iPhone to expe­ri­ence the mobile social sharing.

Below is a view of my expe­ri­ence with the mobile Google +1 but­ton.

It was great to be able to sim­ply tap the but­ton on my iPhone; how­ever, I was road blocked when I had to sign into my Google account to share. Also, I was not able to use +snip­pets and did not see inline anno­ta­tions.

 

 

The Mash­able arti­cle also gave me the option of tweet­ing to social the arti­cle while on my iPhone.

Below is a view of my expe­ri­ence with the mobile Tweet button.

 

 

 

The mobile Tweet but­ton on my iPhone proved to have even more steps than Google +1.

1. I had to select which Twit­ter appli­ca­tion I preferred.
2. Log into Twitter.
3. The final auto-tweet didn’t even make sense!

 

Note: Dif­fer­ent web­sites and blogs are imple­ment­ing social shar­ing in var­i­ous ways. The two expe­ri­ences I high­lighted above were spe­cific to Mash­able; how­ever, other web­sites are imple­ment­ing mobile social shar­ing differently.

Another exam­ple of mobile social shar­ing is this blog post.

This blog post is on Word­Press, which has an easy option for mobile opti­miza­tion includ­ing social shar­ing links. When read­ers view this blog post on a mobile device, it should look like the screen­shots below. Notice that the social shar­ing but­tons are much dif­fer­ent than the Mash­able article’s social shar­ing options.

 

 

 

If I did not opti­mize this blog for mobile then it would look like the screen­shot below.

Notice that the “mobile theme” is turned off. Word­Press allows read­ers to decided if they pre­fer to view the mobile ver­sion of the blog or the reg­u­lar web version.

Com­pa­nies, brands and indi­vid­u­als must always take the view point of  their audience(s) in order to pro­vide the best experience.

Soci­ety is becom­ing more and more mobile; there­fore, being consumer/audience focused includes think­ing about how your con­tent will be con­sumed via mobile.

Don’t for­get: Test­ing and refine­ment are also very impor­tant in this quickly chang­ing space.

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