May 13 2008
“It’s Only a Platform If You Jump”
I spend a great deal of my day on the phone with our clients, talking to them about their needs and how they’d like their brand to be perceived on social platforms such as Facebook. I’d estimate that roughly 4 out of 5 clients I speak with come to Aux with a very skeptical perception of this burgeoning service industry after having less than stellar experiences with the development “shops” they’d previously chosen to work with.
It seems as though everyone’s a social media expert these days, and Facebook application developers are a dime a dozen. Our friend Craig Biddle uttered the brilliant words, “It’s only a platform if you jump,” and we couldn’t have said it better ourselves. With every brand out there vying for the attention, and profile real estate, of Facebook users, simply building an application isn’t enough. Applications themselves must not only be technologically sound and aesthetically pleasing, they must also contribute value to the overall Facebook experience in order to attract a single install. Now, scale that. On platforms such as Facebook, the old adage, “build it and they will come” won’t suffice. Brands must have solid strategies for reaching their target markets and convincing them that there is real and significant benefit from incorporating the application into their user experience.
So, what does this say about Jesse Farmer’s blog post that application development is slowing atop the Facebook platform? To us, this is great news! We’re pretty sure that the sheep-throwing market has been cornered, so hopefully this lessened activity will be the catalyst for developers to think before launching applications just for the purpose of including “Facebook application development” on their resumes. Brands who have learned how to properly leverage social media to engage with their customers are going to shift their marketing spend from traditional outlets to the social media space. According to Advertising Age, “88% of marketers who use social media plan to spend more on it this year, and 31% of those said they will spend ’significantly more’.”
As a full-service agency and development shop specialized in helping brands leverage social platforms to deliver value and drive engagement, Aux is uniquely positioned to advise our customers on the best ways to derive value from these technologies, whether this means strictly a technology solution/application, a full-scale marketing strategy or, most commonly, a hybrid of the two. Aux strives to provide superior solutions for our clients, applications that do more than exist on the platform. Our clients’ applications serve as calls to action, drive traffic to pre-determined channels, and provide a vehicle to make brands interactive and accessible to every user. We spend significant time determining best practices from the thousands of applications that have been launched on the platform, and innovate upon the model of how to engage with customers online based upon this research.
Caroline McCarthy at CNET writes that “all gold rushes must come to an end.” But to us, this isn’t a gold rush, this is the cream rising to the top.