There's an app for that--how mobile apps have changed our lives

 

Any small inconvenience (or what some call a first world problem) in life can now be minimized by an app. And people download a lot of them. According to appsolutegenius.com, Apple’s App store is about to hit 25 billion downloads.
 
One such app has helped the happiest place on earth, Disneyland, become an even more joyous place. Instead of guessing at which line is the shortest throughout the day, you can now download an app that can help you chart out your day for maximum ride-riding and minimal line-waiting.
 
Feel like your alarm always goes off in the middle of your deepest sleep? You're in luck! There is an app that will chart your sleep cycles and wake you during your lightest one that is closest to your wake-up time.
 
And paying too much for items has become a thing of the past. There are apps that allow you to scan barcodes and compare prices. Apps even allow you to find the cheapest gas price any area that you happen to be. 

Apps are changing the way we use our mobile devices. They are also influencing everything from mobile design to marketing.

The website mappdom.com has a list of the most interesting facts about apps. Here are the ones that I found most intriguing:

• ·         Half of smartphone owners have scanned QR codes and 18 percent of them made a purchase after scanning.

• ·         By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

• ·         16 % of smartphone users report that they’ve made a purchase as a result of a marketing message they received on their phone.

• ·         In Q3 2011, teens increased their mobile data consumption by 256% over the prior year.

I think mobile devices are quite literally becoming an extension of the human being. This is partially due to the convenience of apps. Why buy a GPS when you can just use a map app on your phone? Why clip coupons if you can just scan QR codes?

My favorite viral videos

Ah viral videos. How many hours have I wasted on you? According to HubSpot Americans spend an average of 3.5 hours per week watching viral videos.

In all of my viral video watching though, there have been a few that have really stood out from the rest. Today I think I will share my top 5.

5: Charlie the Unicorn:

Don’t act like you haven’t see it. And don’t like you didn’t like it. Charlie was the first viral video that I ever watched on YouTube. Although it was posted five years ago, I still go watch Charlie lose a kidney on his trip to candy mountain every once and awhile and laugh.

Favorite quote: “Shun the non-believer. Shuuuu—n.”

4: Bed Intruder Song with Antoine Dodson

I honestly have no idea how many times I watched this video of a song created from a news report. Words cannot describe its genius.

Favorite quote: “So you can run and tell that, run and tell that, run and tell that homeboy, home home homeboy.”

3: Kid President

I had to put an inspirational video in the post. And this is by far the best inspirational video I have ever seen. Kid President thinks we all need a pep talk. And I think he is right.

Favorite quote: “Not cool Robert Frost!”

2: OK Go: Here It Goes Again

Such a cool video. I have this on my workout playlist just so I can imagine everyone going crazy on the treadmills in the Field House at Utah State.

The treadmill choreography is so original and unique. It was destined to be a hit.

1: Lazy Sunday

Andy Samberg is hilarious. Stick him in an Saturday Night Live short rapping about cupcakes and the Chroni(what!)cles of Narnia with Chris Parnell and a viral video is born. And even better, they followed it up with Lazy Sunday 2. Which is also crazy-hilarious.

Favorite quote:
Chris Parnell: Reach in my pocket, pull out some dough.
Andy Samberg: Girl actin’ like she never seen a ten befo’.
Chris Parnell: It’s all about the Hamiltons, baby!

So what makes a good viral video? According to InnovaTonic there are 5 characteristics required for a viral video: humor, creativity, simplicity, emotional and engaging. I can see a lot of these characteristics in my top five favorite videos.

Search Engine Optomization

 

The first time I heard about search engine optimization was from my dad. I was a junior in high school and he had started a business and was trying to give it a strong online presence. I haven’t given SEO much thought since then. But if I plan to have anything to do with social media in my career, it looks like SEO will be something I will need to know how to use. 

So what is SEO?

SEO helps businesses show up early in search results. Wikipedia defines SEO as “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results.”

Why does SEO matter?

Many business owners have realized the benefits of SEO. This is not surprising considering the following statistics from the Search Engine Journal:

-75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.

-Search and e-mail are the top two internet activities.

-Inbound leads cost 61% lower than outbound leads. An example of an inbound lead might be from search engine optimization. An outbound lead might be from a cold call.

-A study by Outbrain shows that search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300%

-SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate.

-For Google, a study from Slingshot SEO shows 18% of organic clicks go to the #1 position, 10% of organic clicks go to the #2 position, and 7% of organic clicks go to the #3 position.

-79% of search engine users say they always/frequently click on the natural search results. In contrast, 80% of search engine users say they occasionally/rarely/never click on the sponsored search results.

Great. Now how does SEO work? 

Jonathan Strickland describes two philosophical strategies to SEO: black hat and white hat.

White hat strategies focus on finding keywords that people search that lead them to certain sites. It focuses on giving leads to the spiders or crawlers that are sent out to scan web pages for content.

Black hat strategies are looked down on by some in the SEO community. This strategy involves cramming keywords onto webpages to skew search results. This can be done using invisible text or text that is the same color as the web page background.

Management: Analytics and URL Shorteners

Do you like my little orchestrator guy? I was looking for someone managing social media and I thought this fit the bill...kind of.

Some individuals and organizations invest a lot of time and strategy into their social media. For those that are using social media to make money, it is vital to manage content well. Management is all about working smarter, not harder with social media. 

I think that analytics can be particularly helpful for social media users, especially bloggers. If bloggers don’t know how many people are visiting their blog, who their visitors are or where their visitors are coming from, it is impossible to evaluate effectiveness. Mack Collier (http://www.mackcollier.com/beginner-blog-analytics/), an expert blogger, wrote about the types of things he tracks with the analytical software. Collier uses Google Analytics and SiteMeter to help manage his blog. The statistics Collier says are most important to him are: 

• Traffic (how many people are visiting his blog)
• Search Traffic (what people are looking for when they come to his blog) 

• Referral Traffic (what sites are sending people to his blog) 

• Page views for top posts (what posts are the most popular) 

• Search Keywords (what keywords people use to find his blog) 

Those who use social media should also maximize their space. I never feel like I have enough room to say what I want to on Twitter. I often spend time re-working my post so that I can convey the message I want to. In order to save space, URL shorteners are very useful. Not to mention, shortened URLs look a lot better than full ones. And I’m not the only fan of URL shorteners. Ben Parr (http://mashable.com/2009/04/05/url-shorteners/) wrote an article on Mashable about why URL shorteners rock. His top five reasons are: 

• They make links more manageable 

• They can track and compile click data (This relates back to analytics. Knowledge is power and the more you know about your audience, the better!) 

• They can be transformed into social media services 

• They can provide users with useful features 

• They promote sharing (If you want your social media to take off, you need your viewers to share your stuff!) 

These all seem like pretty good benefits to any social media user. 

 Analytic and URL shortening sites are just two tools that can help manage social media. I have never used analytics because I am not currently using any social media professionally. But I have used URL shorteners and I love them. They help stretch those 140 Twitter characters just a little bit further.

Organizational Uses of Social Media: Social Media in Politics

This is a topic near and dear to my heart because I was able to get an inside look at political social media through a congressional internship in Washington, D.C. Because of their roles as  pivotal figures, politicians have to be extremely careful about what goes on their platforms.  According to the United States House of Representatives Social Media Wiki, 96% of members of congress use Facebook and 85% use Twitter. The congressman I worked for sometimes Tweeted his thoughts from inside hearings and meetings! This doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for filtering of ideas and messages for anything that could be offensive.

This lack of a filter can be, and has been, a public relations nightmare for some politicians. Remember New York Rep. Anthony Weiner? His political career was ruined after he sent some inappropriate photos to women via Twitter.

Politicians and constituents have more access to each other than they ever have before. And although that can create problems for politicians, it can also be an excellent tool for them.

During the presidential elections this past year people broke Twitter records during the first presidential debate, were encouraged to vote by their peers through many social media platforms, and mentioned the elections 71.7 million on Facebook.

These interactions create an extra level of work for political support staff. While I was in D.C., I helped respond to literally hundreds of emails sent to my congressman each week — we received at least ten times as many emails as we did physical letters. Petitions were conducted via email. Our office’s media manager was literally doing the job of two people because in addition to the traditional work of press releases and media engagements, he was also required to regularly post to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as well as monitor what others were posting to the congressman’s profiles.

I think that social media overall does more good for politics than harm. Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing to be able to see what our elected officials think and do when they aren’t being filtered. And if more people get involved in the happenings of their country because they can do so through their mobile device, that’s great!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.