In this new age, with many of us still putting off redoing our old website with its multiple dead links, IE incompatibilities & latest blog postings dated 2007, the thought of extending our business to mobile and even facebook platforms is incomprehensible. The full range, what we term the 360° (website, mobile application and facebook presence) is certainly not for everyone, but for some this trifecta can be the impetus for revolution to your marketing arsenal, and we believe it doesn’t have to complicated.
Website
If your current site is static we encourage you to consider a solution that allows you to update it yourself without the headaches. I’ve found that joomla, drupal and other platforms out there just don’t have the intuition and ease of Wordpress. We exclusively develop publishing/content driven sites on this platform because its the best out there.
In some cases Wordpress doesn’t meet the specificity of your needs. For such custom oriented situations, we call upon the power or Ruby on Rails to build a custom whatever-you-can-imagine.
Mobile
Aside from iPhone applications, which certainly offer a fantastic platform for marketing products and services or pushing an application that is a product in and of itself, other smart phones are also a fantastic platform to extend to. Android and Blackberry have excellent native application support and a smart-phone optimized website (or web application) can be accessed by any phone equipped with a proper browser.
Primarily a presence on facebook itself cannot be underestimated. It has significantly more active users then any single phone platform and the application potential is virtually limitless. Games, utilities entertainment/social oriented apps – if you can imagine it, it can probably be an app on facebook.
Marketing for your own existing service or product is also highly effective. In some cases an app with an angle can help, but there is also the use of fan pages with pay per click campaigns extended from them. A giveaway, perhaps, can be promoted through facebook giving you thousands of impressions at a relatively low cost in advertising budget.
Extending facebook to your own website can even further increase your functionality and the API is free to use. Your entire login system, for example, can be powered through facebook allowing users with facebook accounts to create accounts on your site with a couple mouse clicks! Users love not having to fill out a bunch of data you can get from their facebook already.
Conclusion
In closing, there are millions of possibilities and we don’t think you need to be scared about it. The web and media has become really intuitive and now is a great time to get a head start. Also, its not too late to fix up that old site of yours and get to blogging. ;-)
