Archive for the ‘Case Study’ Category
Best practices on push notifications
posted by Michael Schneider (Mobile Roadie CEO)Push notifications are one of the most valuable things we offer our customers. Instead of having to send expensive SMS messages to reach people, push notifications are free, relevant (users opt in first by downloading the app, and then by accepting to receive push), and geo targeted down to a mile radius around any address in the world.
Here’s how to make the most of them:
Location, location, location.
You’ve heard “location” a million times as the killer mobile feature, and it is. Don’t just reach your audience when you want to. Reach them where it’s relevant for them. For musicians, this could be during a show. For a conference, perhaps right before the big keynote starts. For a hotel, as a guest enters the building.
We give our customers three ways to send targeted push notifications:
Blasting your entire audience can be useful when you have a general announcement. Using an address/radius is useful when you want to target people around a specific venue. And using our Map feature, you can draw a box around an area – a city block or an entire country.
Don’t be shy.
Customers many times are worried about “bothering” their audience. Don’t be. They downloaded your app for a reason. They want to hear from you, especially offers that give them exclusive content, a discount, or exclusive access. We recommend sending a relevant message at least once a week.
Use our rewards system.
Don’t just message your users – offer them things in exchange for interacting. Using our rewards system, you can message users, challenge them to do something (virtual or real) and get a reward (virtual or real). For example, you could tell fans to post a photo at a show and unlock a free track from the artist. Or, you could instruct hotel patrons to “check in” using Foursquare or Facebook Places and get a coupon for a free coffee. The possibilities are limitless.
Deep link to content.
When sending a push, users will see the message along with “slide to view” to open the app. Don’t waste this call to action – link it to content that’s relevant to the push message. For example, if you’re trying to sell tickets to a show in Los Angeles, deep link the push message to the exact page in the app for the show – this will open the app directly on that page. Fans won’t have to search to find the show, resulting in a higher conversion.
Some don’ts.
Don’t put a link to a website within the push. User’s can’t copy and paste it, and the whole point of a push is to draw them into the app. If you want to link to a website, use our URL system to “target” the push to a link. It will open the link inside the app.
Don’t just reference offline events. It’s great to tell fans to “watch a show on TV” or “vote for an award” but it’s better to pull them into the app to do the action or view a news post on the event. Remember to connect push notifications to content in the app.
In conclusion.
Send relevant, targeted push notifications often and engage with your audience. Smart use of this system results in higher engagement, retention, and virality, not to mention – transactions!
Mobile Roadie / The Beatles LOVE / Cirque du Soleil 5th Anniversary Promotion
posted by Michael Schneider (Mobile Roadie CEO)Like Las Vegas? Love the Beatles? Want to see a free Cirque du Soleil show?
Announcing The Beatles LOVE 5th anniversary promotion, in cooperation with Cirque du Soleil and the Beatles.
Watch the video below. Grab The Beatles LOVE app, powered by Mobile Roadie. Scan the QR code using the app’s built in QR code scanner, and win amazing prizes, including free tickets, merch, and the grand prize: a weekend in Vegas including airfare, hotel, and 2 tickets to LOVE. The contest is open to US residents only.
MIDEM – a case study in event app best practices
posted by Michael Arcand
Have you noticed those strange bar-code looking boxes that are popping up everywhere lately? Those are called QR codes (“Quick Read”), and they represent a world of possibilities for your business.
QR codes have been around a while, but are just now gaining momentum as a mainstream promotional tool with consumer recognition. You’ll notice them on our app gallery pages. With a QR scanning app, any smartphone user can scan the image and be taken directly to the download for the app. We also automatically assign a QR code to every piece of media (music, videos, photos) you upload into your app – and you can hide media, and have it revealed with a QR code, which you can deliver physically or digitally.
MIDEM, one of the oldest music industry events in the world, used this powerful tool along with others in our app to help promote an emerging artist at the event, promote their app, and build a mobile community that augmented the live conference experience.
1. MIDEM started by promoting their app before the conference started. This included a dedicated email to attendees, and including the app in logistic reminder emails, along with tweeting the app link.
2. During the event, MIDEM held a contest for their top users in their app (users automatically get points in our apps for coming back to the app, interacting, sharing, and buying in the app). They gave away a free pass to the 2012 event each day, culminating with a free Guitar Hero on the last day.
3. Push notifications were extensively used throughout the three day event, including to notify attendees of last minute changes, giving them the contest rules, and thanking them for coming.
4. A QR code was published in the MIDEM newspaper, offering a free track to those that got their app and scanned the QR code (go ahead and try it – it works with the above image!). This simple and powerful feature helped break an emerging artist, and set MIDEM apart as being on the cutting edge.
The app was a success – resulting in 50% more downloads than attendees – and spreading the MIDEM message worldwide to many potential attendees for next year.
You can download the MIDEM conference app here to see it in action: http://road.ie/midem
Former Olympians Build Swimming App
posted by Michael Arcand
Go Swim is a joint venture between Glenn Mills and Barbara Hummel. Glenn was a member of the 1980 Olympic Swim Team and is a Masters world record holder. Barbara is a veteran of two Olympic Trials and is currently a coach and world Masters Top-Ten Swimmer. Between them they have over 50 years of high-level competition and coaching experience, and are both learn-to-swim instructors. I had the privilege of chatting with Glenn on the phone recently to talk about his business and Mobile Roadie app.
Why did you build the app?
Coaches, swimmers … everyone uses technique material, but it’s always away from the pool. We want to get people the information that they can use when and where they actually use it. We wanted to test the waters, so to speak, to see if a mobile app is a viable way of doing this.
Are you using it the way you envisioned?
We try to take advantage of the Mobile Roadie app as much as possible. We serve our own videos, upgraded with Mobile Roadie’s help. We needed more bandwidth than YouTube was able to offer, so they helped us with that. We use the Fan Wall as well as Pictures, which are updated each week. We also have our Twitter feed and RSS news from popular swimming websites. The app reflects our website in a good way. There is tons of content on the app, and we’ve got tons of content on the website as well. Our business model is to give away some information, but also drive more people back to the website for DVD sales.
What have you discovered or been surprised by the most?
The Fan Wall is probably the thing that surprised me the most. We get a lot of kids on the app – more than on the website. Kids are used to this format more because of things like Twitter and texting. So the demographics, I would say, are that the app is used by a lot of younger people. Moderation is easy with Mobile Roadie, because it’s all done online. And as these kids grow and become more serious swimmers, we’re there for them. We want to think long-term with our brand and develop our market going forward.
How has your experience been working with the Mobile Roadie platform?
It’s very stable. For someone like myself and our business, we don’t have a ton of time to chase around the tech side of things. We are content creators for a niche market. So, having something that’s been so relatively easy to put together has been important. In creating all this content, we need to be able to focus on creating the content. The stability has been tremendous for us. The upgrades and features, like Ustream, to have something like that just show up – I don’t think we’d be able to develop something like that on our own. It keeps us on the cutting edge, and helps us stay ahead of the competition. I’ve also been surprised by how responsive the support staff is, all the way up to the top of the company. Makes a small business like ours feel important.
You can download the Go Swim app here: http://road.ie/go-swim
Spotlight: Conversational Marketing (CM) Summit App
posted by Michael Arcand
We’re pleased to announce that Mobile Roadie is powering the official CM Summit app. CM Summit: Marketing in Realtime is a two day conference produced by Federated Media and targeted at executives in the digital marketing and publishing arenas. The conference is taking place next week, June 7-8, 2010 during NY’s Internet Week. However, one of the goals of the team using a mobile app is to keep the community engaged throughout the year. We hear this often from our customers who are involved in annual events of various types, whether they are conferences such as this, or music festivals. All want to keep people engaged throughout the year so they are not “out of sight, out of mind.”
With the CM Summit app, users will be able to access conference information such as speakers, sponsors, and agendas. It will also help conference attendees to keep track of everything going on during the event, as well as in the industry itself. It includes information on attendees who participate in the interactive portion of the app, as well as Twitter streams, news, and even pictures and videos from the conference. Even if you can’t attend the conference, using an app like this could be the next best thing to being there. The app is available for free on both the iPhone and Android mobile platforms, with a basic version also available on the web to BlackBerry Opera users.
Download it here: http://road.ie/CM-Summit
Case Study: Twilight in Forks App
posted by Michael Arcand
After the wild success of the Twilight series of books and first movie to hit the big screen, the small town of Forks, Washington, was plunged into the spotlight as a major tourist phenomenon. People just couldn’t get enough of the town that was the setting for the Twilight phenomenon. Now, anyone can get a glimpse behind the scenes at the city of Forks, thanks to a recently released documentary, “Twilight in Forks.” And when the filmmakers decided to build their mobile app they chose Mobile Roadie.
I recently had the privilege to speak with the film’s producer, York Baur, and the director, Jason Brown for the scoop on what how the app is working for them and where they plan on taking it going forward.
Why did you decide to build a mobile app?
York: It’s an interesting scenario for us. It was done as an independent film and then we did a licensing deal with Summit for distribution. Of course, there was, and continues to be, a huge slipstream effect around our movie as a part of the overall Twilight saga, which as you know is wildly popular. So, that’s very helpful but at the same time you can’t rely on that alone. You have to create your own buzz as the filmmakers. That’s really what led us to the decision to try an iPhone app alongside of the some of the other social media things we were doing as well as traditional PR. So it really was part of an overall viral promotional campaign that led us down the road. We’re happy to say that it has been one of the more successful aspects of that campaign.
It has been very successful. Can you share with us some of the success that you’ve had?
York: We’ve had 38,000 downloads at the moment. And that’s without any promotion around the app specifically. The MTV article is really the first formal promotion around it. The rest was us tweeting and facebooking about it and it was carried virally.
Why did you choose to go with Mobile Roadie versus other options when deciding to build an app?
Jason: The traditional path of a customized solution, in my view, has a couple of drawbacks. It takes a while and it’s usually expensive. On top of that, there’s typically a lot of revisions. So when we came across the Mobile Roadie platform, both from the phone interface side along with the back end content management side, it just seemed like it was tailored to do all of the things we were going to design into our own app, and a few that we thought would be nice but didn’t want to [spend] our time figuring that out. They had already did that for us. [It gave us] the level of customization for our title, on top of a pretty rich set of attributes that were friendly, easy to use and easy to update. We’re using the iPhone app almost [to distribute] deleted scenes or additional content that you would traditionally find on the DVD. We’re actually going to do all of that through the web and specifically through the iPhone.
York: I’m a data junkie. I have a background and a career in marketing, in particular online marketing. You can feel good about things but they are difficult to manage and correlate and to know where you should place your next investment of time and energy. So the back-end and the ability to see data in real time was a crucial element of our decision as well.
Are you seeing a lot of interaction with the fans using the app, are they engaged?
York: Yes, and that’s really exciting to see, quite frankly. Globally, what’s interesting about it too, if you look at the distribution of the app, it’s not just a U.S. app. Our film, of course, is not just a U.S. film. So the interactions are interesting to watch because they really span a wide range of demographics and geography. We were surprised at the level of interaction, not only on the posts on the fan wall, which has been fun to watch, but also specifically on things like the photos. You wouldn’t think that people would take the time to comment on a photo on a device like the iPhone, which is principally a content consumption, not a content creation device. It’s not the world’s easiest thing to type on. And yet a ton of people have commented, multiple times and multiple people have commented on each individual picture. That’s been great for us to see, not only because we’re hitting the mark, but it gives us real time feedback of what fans are drawn to. As filmmakers, that’s worth its weight in gold because it helps shape what you do next and how we go about it.
Jason: One of the things York’s talking about that is crucial to how we shape all of that content is the feedback. That’s one of the greatest things about the iPhone. You know people took the time to download the app, sign up to be on our list and comment on a photo. They’re engaged, right? So, when we put something out we get feedback right away and we can tell what they like. In essence, it gives us almost an instantaneous way, to have a little sandbox, to interact with the fans. You can do that on the web and on Facebook and on your own website, but they have to decide to keep going back. But the great thing about the iPhone and mobile applications in general is that they have it with them.
What are your favorite overall features of the app?
York: I would start on the user end of it first. Certainly the CMS and the data are great for us, but if you look at it from a fan point of view, there are a couple of things that are kick ass for the fans. Number one, the fact that it plays music at all, but particularly that it streams music when you open it. We’ve received a lot of very positive feedback about that and, of course, you can favorite a song based on that. The second thing, which you guys just added here recently, is the offline photo capability, because the photos have been a much bigger deal than we would have anticipated, given that we’re a video offering, not a photo offering. The offline photo thing is crucial, because waiting for that stuff can be like watching the grass grow. So, once you’ve gone through that once, the fact that you can now pull it up and show your buddy or look at something that’s special to you again in real time without having to hassle with that, that’s a huge aspect of it.
What are your plans going forward with the app? Do you guys make use the push notifications?
York: You know, that’s something we’re going to roll out here in the next week or so. So we haven’t even done that yet, and we still see this great adoption and participation.
Jason: Well sure, a couple of things. You asked earlier why we picked Mobile Roadie. It’s because we don’t want to write software, we want to give the fans what they want. Mobile Roadie did a great job of allowing us to do that. In fact, I put the whole thing together in one day, no training. I never even had to contact support.
York: I had the same experience. After Jason set the app up originally and worked through the approval process and so on, I went up there and added some additional stills. And again, no training, no muss, no fuss. And that is something we’ll continue to do. It’s very interesting to see the great petri dish for testing content. If you look, for example, in the photos, you’ll notice I didn’t group them in any order. Well, what’s really interesting, if you’ll look at the responses, is the number and enthusiasm. If you look at the last picture up there, you see that’s Bella’s truck, the real Bella’s truck, from Twilight. That got some of the largest number and most enthusiastic comments, even though it’s the last picture up there. So clearly people are drawn to certain things, and that gives us as content producers the ability to test what is the most germane to the fan base, and that’s worth its weight in gold.
What would you tell somebody if they are looking to do a mobile app? Is it worth it?
York: Totally. There are going to be 65 million smartphones sold in the U.S. alone this year. So if you’re not thinking about this as a way to get the word out about you and your content, your band, your film – whatever it might be – then you’re missing the boat. It’s certainly not the only mechanism, but it’s becoming a huge mechanism, so you have to pay attention to it. Then, to echo the points Jason made earlier, Mobile Roadie is easy, good and affordable. And that’s a pretty hard combination to find out there, particularly because, like us, I doubt people want to be in the business of writing software.
That wraps up our case study for this week. We certainly wish the Twilight in Forks app continued success and can’t wait to see where Jason and York take their app from here.
Scoble Dishes on His New Mobile Roadie Apps
posted by
We’re pretty excited to announce that Robert Scoble has joined the Mobile Roadie app family. I caught up with him just before his trip to Israel to find out more about why he decided to upgrade his existing app with one built on and powered by the Mobile Roadie platform. Robert joins a growing number of online influencers experimenting with apps to give their audience a more holistic view into what they’re up to, and another direct way to connect. He’d taken note that we were investing in the early adopters in the tech industry in a way that others weren’t by supporting several well-respected tech people and conferences.
“[Mobile Roadie] has an idea of events and community which the other’s don’t,” he told me. And then he shared a few comments about the breadth of capabilities of our CMS and vision as a company versus alternatives who are just offering “a template with lame content.”
Oh stop. We’re blushing. OK, keep going. We don’t mind.
“I never used my app. With Mobile Roadie it’s the completeness that I like. My content behavior is spreading out. I used to be a blogger but now i do a lot of content across many platforms like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, that collectively make up what my brand is. With my app, I can see Twitter faves, people who write to me on Twitter, show videos, blog content..It gives a more complete picture of what I do.”
When I asked him why he wanted an app in the first place he said, “I want to see what it can do. I have a personal brand and don’t need an app to survive but I already use my mobile phone so much to interact with celebrities and bloggers and people who write content I care…everything is changing due to mobile and Twitter and Facebook and I wanted to explore what that meant and how my audience would react to it. When you have a committed audience that wants to interact they are going to consumer more of this type of content in this format.”
So how’s it going, you wonder? Well, Robert called it an “awesome app” and said he’s hearing a lot of praise from people who’ve tried it. We’re thrilled.
Being the curious company we are we pried a bit into how he was envisioning using the app. Robert said he isn’t entirely sure yet and wants to see what happens and how his audience consumes and engages with the content. He knows videos will be something to watch since “it’s easier to find videos on that app than on YouTube… I can see why my video views are already doing well.” He’s also looking forward to playing around with the Fan Wall, where anyone with the app can post comments, and virally push them to Facebook and Twitter.
Given Robert’s highly social nature and his very active audience, we’ve no doubt he will turn the use of his app into an example for the rest of the industry to follow.
Case Study: Big Ears Festival App
posted by Michael Arcand
Our next case study is about the Big Ears app, for the festival which took place earlier this year. As we noted in an earlier blog post, we’re constantly expanding our market to include not just individual artists, but also conferences and events as well. I had a chance to catch up via telephone on Friday with Jeff Cuellar, Director of Marketing and Business Development at AC Entertainment, the company which is also behind the Bonnaroo festival. Here’s what he had to say about the music industry getting into the mobile app arena, why it’s important, why he chose Mobile Roadie for his app CMS and the results.
First I had to find out more about the Big Ears Festival – what it’s all about. Jeff explained to me that the festival was meant to be more of a niche mini-festival designed to take place in smaller cities, like Knoxville, Tennessee, as an example. The objective is to provide an indoor / outdoor venue, while providing a world-class experience that you might not otherwise get in the small town environment. The key to the success of such a venture, according to Jeff, is collaboration with the artists.
I asked about music festivals in general and what element mobile apps bring to such events. Jeff felt, like many other professionals in the music industry, that mobile apps initially provided an event guide, simply giving users up to date line-up and schedules, along with other event info. However, as technology has gotten better, he notes that more options have come along for users to share their experience with each other, which has really transformed the mobile app experience.
Asked what excites him most, as a marketing professional, about the Big Ears app, he pointed to the ability to push information directly through mobile devices to the consumer. His point was that people are buying smart phones in record numbers, penetration the market in unprecedented ways. And these people are begging to be communicated with on this new medium. Mobile apps are less invasive than other forms of electronic marketing, because they allow the user to engage with the company when they want to, rather than the other way around.
During the festival Big Ears used push notification to alert users when and where things were taking place, live. In addition, they included an audio mini event guide on the app, giving users an overview of the selected event. Going forward AC Entertainment and the Big Ears festival want to make their app more of an extension of their website, providing additional year-round content to their users.
So why pick Mobile Roadie? This is always one of my favorite questions to ask, because it really helps bring out our best points from our client’s perspective, which is the one that really counts. Jeff said that going into their second year, their budgets were tight. They looked around and really couldn’t afford to go with a customized app running into the $10s of thousands. After having a conversation with CEO Michael Schneider, they decided to give it a go. One of the main selling points for AC Entertainment was the ability for them to customize the app themselves using the CMS. Additionally he was impressed with the time frame, as the app was put together within a few short weeks before the festival. Given such a short notice, they promoted the app at the festival check-in point as well as online, with a response that was very encouraging.
As a final comment, I asked Jeff what he would say to anyone else who might be considering a mobile app. Here’s what he had to say:
“If you’re not doing an app right now, you’re behind. It’s like being on dialup Internet. If you’re not pushing it, you’re missing the boat. Mobile Roadie offers an inexpensive way to get in the game and provide a very strong application because Mobile Roadie is constantly updating their back-end. You don’t have to worry about coming up with a new app every year, you can take advantage of their product and let them stay on top of the changes.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves! Thanks for the interview, Jeff, and we wish you and Big Ears continued success with your mobile apps.
Recent Comments