These are my 15 learnings of how to best promote an iphone app after being No. 1 in the German "references" category with the hiogi iphone app for three weeks now:
Promote immediately on launch date to reach top50 among new apps and possibly get featured by Apple (awareness on start is essential)
Reviews are key. Convince everybody to leave a review!
Release a lite version for free some weeks after the premium one
Play with the categories and specific new app versions
Send out a press release and contact Mac magazine publisher
Include "now in app store" button on your site
Activate push notifications for special services to bring users back to your app
Read the reviews and criticism carefully and improve the app
You need to try to reach at least 200-500 downloads a day for Top50 or even Top25 and try to stay there by firing off some more marketing! Visibility of Top25 is very high.
Include viral features like "recommend the app via twitter, facebook, email to your friends"...
List the app in various app portals
Include backlinks to the website of your app on apple's itunes pages
Change the text of your app according to user feedback, news, special topics and to communicate: Try different text versions.
Please share your learnings by leaving a comment. Thanks
Yesterday evening during the keynote of Eric Smith and his colleagues I was speachless, when they demonstrated that it will become so easy in the future to translate anything (e.g. a menue in a foreign language) using google goggles text recognition plus google translate on mobile phones. Also... imagine this: In the future you might talk to someone in China, who only speaks Mandarin and you only speak English, however google speach recognition and google translate directly translates your communication in real-time. Amazing thought. Voice-based search was also really impressive. One reporter started the questioning session with "google rocks" - I must agree!
In contrast to microsoft Adobe AIR and Flash 10.1 really got me excited here on the mobile world congress. I cannot wait until we can convert our Adobe Air clients for mobile devices like Android, e.g. All of these technologies are currently being beta tested by Adobe and a selected group of developers. The Adobe booth showcases some really cool apps, games and other stuff that runs on Adobe Air and Flash. Apparently the binary for the Adobe Air runtime environment on mobiles is expected to be around 4-5 MB...
Today I checked out the main new functionalities of the new windows phone 7 operating systems here on the Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona. The software uses a hub system to connect to various social media, plus a nav bar on the buttom that pops up with different options. Also it supports Office, Sharepoint and of course XBox features for gaming or BING search. But see yourself, if it creates any WOW-effects on your side... I was not so impressed and Microsoft still does not seem to have the innovative power to create something new and a really astonishing usability as Apple delivers time after time....
Personally I really wonder what the CRM future of companies working with and for the facebook generation will look like. We will definitely see big changes in the industry and salesforce for twitter or salesforce answers give us a little bit of a flavour what to expect and how companies will build a wider knowledge base and new communication channels based on social media on the web. However this demo flash video of faceforge as a plug in for salesforce really got me thinking...
I concider myself to be a part of the facebook generation: I am 34 years old, I work in the internet industry, I use Facebook to stay in touch with my friends, XING to manage my business contacts mainly in Germany and LinkedIn to manage my international business contacts. Both Facebook and XING are running most of the time in my browser, when I am online, which is approximately 11 hours from Monday to Friday and maybe 2-3 hours on weekend days. I check LinkedIn twice a week for new contacts, messages or news. I also use twitter, but only to stay informed about industry news. Therefore I only follow mobile or web experts or companies that build innovative software. I also tweed about 5-10 times a week about new stuff I learned, my business, my thoughts on industry trends, gadgets and tech stuff. I also use the mobile versions of all of the sites named above, when I am travelling.
Looking at this brief social media profile of myself, which is more or less shared by most of the people I know here in Berlin and that I work with, I started thinking in which social media channels I would accept corporate CRM communication. Here are the results:
XING - OK, since business related, but I would carefully look which personal data to share.
Facebook - NO!, since strictyl private.
Twitter - YES!, since business and knowledge oriented.
LinkedIn - OK, since business related, but I would carefully look which personal data to share.
Conclusion:
As an end consumer it would be ok for me to connect with a manufacturer of a product I use via Twitter in order to communicate with a support agent of that company to get help. Maybe it would also be ok, if that company would contact me later via twitter to sell me an upgrade, ad-on or other products/services. However I would not use all of the other social media sites for customer services - not yet.
As a business men the situation is different, since I do sales activities myself on XING or LinkedIn. Therefore I would accept sales or service activities from other companies that want to do business with me aswell. However I never accept any linkedIn-request or XING-contact-requests of people that I haven`t met before... private messages on these platforms are fine, but I will not share contact details so easily!
And now the most important finding in analyzing myself: I do not want ANY marketing, sales or service activities on Facebook whatsoever, since I want to use Facebook as my private friends network! And if I become a fan of a company or product, this is only because I identify myself with it and I want to share this information with my friends.
Maybe google wave will become another appropriate CRM channel like Twitter is for me personally already today:
Yesterday night I was preparing a presentation at a big Telekom event next week in Berlin, where I will talk about what will follow Web 2.0. I really cannot hear that term anymore, but I started to think back about the digital moments in my life that really moved me...
Here they are:
1996: 1st Web-access Boy, was I excited when I got my first internet connection to the technical university of Hamburg-Harburg to work. I could not believe that I was accually browsing on FREE newspaper pages like Bild.de or spiegel.de that I normally had to pay for as paper issues.
1997: 1st SMS sent I loved my old Nokia 7110 and felt like Neo in the Matrix!!!
2004: 1st DSL-Flatrate Awesome - no more monthly check of the high bills, but a fixed tariff. I loved it.
2005: 1st mobile WAP access I must admit that I first was disappointed about the mobile offerings and still am sometimes...
2008: Got an ipod touch Wow - what a usability. There is one life before the ipod touch / iphone and one after that....
2009: 1st free mobile VoIP-Call using Skype and a free WiFi access A little revolution, bypassing the big telcos which needed so so long to make use of the expensive UMTS licences...
2009: 1st mobile QR / SMS airline check-in Great to see more and more people just walk by the Lufthansa check-in ladies and hold their mobile device over one of the scanning points. New here, but a normal thing in south korea for years.
2009: I became an apple user - partially Bought my first macbook on eBay and starting to love it more and more. My holiday movie which I cut with imovie 9.0 is incredible! Mac rocks.
I hope I will be able to conserve these precious moments and my feelings in the moment they happened for a long time, which is why I am writing them down here. Probably my grandchildren will just yawn about it. :-)
Check out this website, which offers some really unique peaces of digital art. Digitalbloom runs an interesting approach with pre-selected artistics that match strict quality criteria. You can download and use the digital art for your screens, displays, events, etc... Hey - not only Bill Gates should be able to afford to change the digital decoration in his house with good digital paintings or other art ... ;-)
"G" - I have not blogged in such a long time. hiogi is keeping me extremely busy and we are looking at such exciting times ahead of us... anyway... over the last months I visited several conferences, I had quite a few podium discussions and I just found all my notes in my notebook bag. Time to share some of the stuff i learned or picked up:
a) 2011 the revenue split of mobile advertising will be as follows (according to Strategy Analysts July 2008):
55% Display
27% Search
9% SMS / MMS
7% Others
2% TV / Video
Nothing really new and as expected, but definetely interesting for all those mobile start-ups currently calculating their break-even. ;-)
b) Carwash notifications of tz-München (6573 participants via SMS - Alert: Which station has the special today...), Marathon Ticker of the Hamburger Abendblatts (4000 participants- Alert: Who is running where?), picture quiz ofAachen Münchner Zeitung (What are you seeing in this picture?) were the winners of the MINDS-Awards in Hamburg this year and quite interesting SMS sevices for newspaper readers.
c) iPhone showed it, Android is doing it and also the new web 'n' walk will have an open platform for third party applications (named widgets :-) across various operating systems. Another great chance for developers in my opinion. Fast movers can win big time.
d) Today I learned from the really clever guys of www.vioso.com that some projectors are already as small as a box of matches... Oh yes, I cannot wait until I put my beamer into my jeans pocket, upload a ppt to my mobile and off I go to a customer presentation. Yeeehahh. Also check out their projection software that enables you to project on any surface, in any angle, in any size... cool stuff. I will try it during my next presentations for sure...
e) iPhone for me? I had sleepless nights about that questions. I am extremely satisfied with my ipod touch. It has been working perfectly as a gadget for me over the last couple of months. However as a phone, I will probably soon swith from my Sony Ericsson K800i to a Nokia E71 or something similar. I simply want a device in my pocket that easily connects to my car, is easy to type on, works as a modem with my Lenovo Thinkpad, takes good pictures... all the other fun stuff I will keep doing on my beloved ipod touch. Peace.
f) to be continued. It's late and i just remembered some other stuff that i need to finish up today. c u
Besides the thoughts about the mobile future that i presented myself at the iPhone Developer Conference in Munich today...
... 1. CPM will drop even faster due to the financial crisis and a wider offering of mobile advertising space. 2. WIFI routers should be opened up worldwide to enable country-wide open WIFIs for everyone and to pinch the telcos. 3. Apple will decentralize the iTunes Store over the next years and new directories for the longtail of iPhone apps will open up eventually. 4. Local Based Services will dominate the mobile space besides gaming in 2009. 5. Mobile devices will be the central computing device for anything (business presentations, private email access, entertainment...) 6. Instant messaging will be the supplement for email and SMS in the near future (3-5 years).
... other participants in the podium discussions said very interesting things about how they see future developments and I would like to summarize them for you:
a) Gaming on mobile devices will be a mega trend. b) Social and networking apps will grow and show new ways on connecting with friends locally. c) Mr. Franz (organizer of the conference) himself suggested an iPhone-based conferencing solutions without any microphones, etc. but instead with every speaker using his/her iPhone in order to connect with the HIFI system. d) NFC and ticketing plus 2D-Codes will show several new used cases in e-Commerce. e) Sensors (skin temperature, pulse, heart beat) will create completely new apps that can be used by sport-enthusiasts as well as ill people on their iPhones or iPod Touches or other smart mobile devices.
Also Mr. Neidhöfer, who is the CEO of netbiscuits pointed out the importance of the iPhone and the iPod Touch in different international markets, where the statistics of netbiscuits sites accessed through these two devices clearly showed an uplift quickly after the moment the two devices were launched in the market (Top10 in each country shortly after launch) . netbiscuits delivers web content in an optimized way for clients and detects the end user device and can therefore exactly measure which device is used more often to surf on various sites.
- 1. und 2. Tag (09.-10.12.2008):IPHO8EXSP - 1. Tag (Business Day, 09.12.2008):IPHO8EXSP1 - 2. Tag (Developer Day, 10.12.2008):IPHO8EXSP2 Sparen Sie bis zu € 550, indem Sie sich jetzt schnell anmelden und Ihren Code einlösen.
Studenten können ab € 99,- pro Tag teilnehmen. Um diesen Preis in Anspruch zu nehmen, müssen Sie sich über ein gesondertes Anmeldeformular registrieren. Dieses finden Sie unter www.iphonedevcon.de/downloads/iPhone_Akkreditierung.pdf oder im Anhang.
The hiogi knowledge community gives away a new iPod touch every week to the person who invites the most hiogis. It is really simple. Send your personal hiogi-Link to your friends or use the special contact list imports on the webteam sites:
Podium: Thorsten Lubinski - Alazar Björn Behrendt - Hiogi Christof Fromm - E-Plus Markus Otte - MTV Håkon Wium Lie - Opera (CTO) Christophe Maire – Nokia
Sitting next to the CTO of opera - i am eager to see what the discussion will be like. All in all it was fun to be there and I learned that ePlus is doing something for mobile start-ups (more later, when I tried it), Opera Mini has a new data center in California, only the Top20 apps in the itunes store really make money and my wish for next year was, if i were god: "Force all the people in Germany to open up their private WiFi routers so that we would have free wifi everywhere!"
Ok, I need to write about hiogi again, since this blog is also my personal diary and in 20 years from now I want to read what got me so excited when I was younger... And THIS really gets me excited!!!
This week we launched the world's first Q&A solution "hiogi for Skype". Users can aks free questions directly in a chat window and do not need to install anything. Anybody can register for free in order to become a hiogi and start asking questions. Especially, if you are looking for advice, insider tips, opinions "hiogi for Skype" will help you. It even works on the mobile phone, if you istall the new mobile beta version of Skype. The skype teams have tested it and like it.
Here is a step by step introduction of how to register and activate "hiogi for Skype" in less than 5 mininutes:
A) INTERNATIONAL (English):
Register for free and become a real hiogi or log in.
Wait until the hiogimessenger contacts you and add hiogi to your contact list. Make sure your skype client is running, contacting your client may take up to a minute.
Skype your individual activation code via skype to hiogi.
Get a list of all Skype functions by typing HELP into your hiogi skype chat window.
Warte bis der hiogimessenger dich kontaktiert und füge hiogi zu deiner Kontaktliste hinzu. Vergewissere dich, dass Skype läuft und dein Status auf 'Online' steht. Es kann bis zu 1 Minute dauern, bevor der hiogimessenger dich kontaktiert, habe bitte etwas Geduld.
Skype dem hiogimessenger deinen Aktivierungscode, den du auf der Seite siehst.
Tippe HELP um alle Funktionen des hiogimessengers anzuzeigen.
Yesterday I got the seat 10B on an Airbus 319. This seat has one big advantage: You do not even have to think about your leg position or any moves during the flight. ;-) You simply sit, sit, sit and wait for the landing...
Yesterday on RTL late news a black man was interviewed on the streets of Harlem and he said: "Now I can go home and tell my little boy: Hey, we live in a great country. Even you can dream and work hard to become president one day!"
Another chubby lady said that she went running in the mornings for the first time in years.
Young men were shouting: Yes, we can. Yes, we can.
I think there is nothing more valuable than a positive spirit in a people with more than 200 million inhabitants. It should move something in the right directions, as long as everybody "starts with the man in the mirror" and does not solely expect miracles from one man! :-)
