Good Morning!
We were roused from the long weekend this morning by the sound of a steady drumbeat, "mobile, mobile, mobile". It's time to get off the sidelines and start planning for how you are going to reach your audience on their smartphones. For those of you with midyear fiscal calendars, you've got about 4 months to convince your Board it is time to get on board. We're also taking a look at gamification, and where it is today. Is gamification like flying cars, a cool idea but an impractical technology? Or are we going to see some real innovation in the space now that mobile is such a big player?
2013 is Mobile
Over the last six months we’ve watched a dramatic increase in the inquiries for mobile friendly sites. We think the rapid adoption of mobile tech is far outpacing those inquiries, but that is to be expected. A few weeks ago we wrote a great post about what you should keep in mind when thinking about responsive design. This morning The New York Times highlights some data from a new report from comScore about the future of mobile. This article and report give you a good deal of the ammunition you need to get your leadership on board with making some serious headway into the mobile space this year.
Game Layer
Way back in 2010 Seth Priebatsch did this amazing talk on adding a game layer to everything in this world. For most of remainder of 2010 and throughout 2011 you couldn’t go to any tech conference without hearing about gamification. Zynga was the golden child, convincing the booming 40+Women social media demographic that gaming was ok. The problem is that gamification, for advocacy especially, never really matured. Today, CopyBlogger takes a look at some bais principles for gamifying your blog. While it doesn’t provide anything new to the conversation, it certainly offers a starting point to think about gamification. The New York Times looks at a real world example of actual advocacy game with a big studio development timeline of 3 years. I’m still not sure we’ve cracked the nut of gamification, but with smartphone reach breaking the 50% mark it might be time to rethink what the game layer might look like (hint: passive location based awards).