Weaving Social Media Threads Together for a Branded Mobile Website

The Next Generation of Mobile Web Design Software, Everywhereigo, Introduces the Mobile Social Hub Solution, Allowing Businesses to Harness Influencers on YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and the Like to Create More Loyal Customers.

Philadelphia, PA, November 9, 2009 — While marketing experts scramble to explain what to do with all of the valuable social media located on sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, a mobile technology company has side-stepped the debate with a simple suggestion.

Gather it under the business’ own brand in a mobile-friendly social hub.

A spate of reports recently emphasized that social networking is likely to become chiefly a mobile activity. For example Facebook revealed that users of the mobile web and mobile application versions of its service grew from 20 million to over 65 million in a little over 6 months. As well, marketers have begun to take seriously the promotional benefit of social media, as Forrester reported in its study “Social Media Playtime is Over,” indicating that 53% of marketers plan to increase social media spending. Businesses are now turning to focus on the question of how to capitalize on the rapidly expanding mobile social networking audience.

In response, mobile application software provider PhindMe Mobile today introduced a solution for businesses to create their own mobile social hub. Available through the PhindMe Mobile product Everywhereigo (www.everywhereigo.com), the solution combines social media (like Flickr pictures, YouTube videos and Twitter posts), and the business’ branded content into a customized mobile application. The application is in turn made available on the web in multiple versions to accommodate consumers on all types of mobile phones, and in a downloadable application for the iPhone and Google Android-powered phones. The company states that, by delivering product and service promotions in a mobile experience within the context of community-based social media, businesses develop stronger bonds with their core customers, in turn shortening the buying cycle with new customers.

“The mobile social hub is really an alternative to a generic mobile web site, creating a focused, multimedia mobile app that fits the mobile user like a glove,” said PhindMe Mobile CEO Chuck Sacco, whose company’s suite of products includes the Everywhereigo “Design for Mobile” on-demand online mobile design software. “Businesses can, and should, include their own “evangelist” staff-driven content channel alongside fan-sourced media to bring the full flavor of the brand and its product or service to prospective customers.”

Nathan Arnone of Southern Tier Brewing Company (STBC, available at http://stbc.mobi), a craft beer brewery with over 50 different brews, said, “Our growth has been primarily through word of mouth. The mobile social hub concept gave us a way to create a focal point for the community and to amplify our fans, who are really influencing others to become customers.” He added, “Fans of our craft brews want to encourage like-minded people, and they inspire new consumers to come on board.” According to STBC, beer lovers routinely tweet and publish videos reviewing the various brews – which are then fed into STBC’s mobile social hub application. The site is a direct destination to experience the community, see what others are saying and learn what’s new. New customers that discover STBC social media elsewhere can follow links back to the STBC mobile social hub to find out more about their product line, sign up for their beer club or visit their brewery or distributors. All roads lead to the Mobile Social Hub.

Previously, a company’s promotional web site would link visitors out to sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter to experience the community surrounding the brand, product or service. The net result was to drive consumers away from the company’s own web site. As well, visitors following a link from a video or a tweet into the company’s desktop-style web site will quickly abandon the site when using mobile phones to interact with social media.

Now, consumers can engage with social media alongside the company’s branded content while visiting the company’s web site on their mobiles. Businesses can relate to their mobile audiences in new ways, for example through real-time social interactions like receiving tagged user generated videos that then display in the company’s app, or automatically responding to an SMS text message with a link to an image gallery.

How Everywhereigo Enables the Mobile Social Hub

Everywhereigo allows for the aggregation and smooth delivery of many types of social networking posts and social media to all types of mobile phones. Take YouTube videos for example. Everywhereigo uses a direct YouTube connection to receive videos, and then creates a convenient video gallery for mobile playback on various devices. Finally, it allows businesses to customize the presentation of the video, creating a branded YouTube channel under the company’s own domain that works as required on various types of mobile phones. A similar process applies to other social media types such as Flickr, Picasa, Twitter and many more.

For more information or to try the Everywhereigo Design for Mobile online software, visit http://www.everywhereigo.com.

A dedicated resource page for the Mobile Social Hub solution is available here: http://everywhereigo.com/social

More in-depth coverage is available in this PDF, including links to research and reports pertaining to the convergence of mobile and social media.

Media Contact: Jon Cooper, Everywhereigo, a product of PhindMe Mobile, 866-562-2398 x706, jon@everywhereigo.com

Everywhereigo is an online software solution for making mobile web sites and mobile web apps. It solves the problem of delivering the most satisfying user experience on every type of mobile phone. Marketers, web designers and developers use Everywhereigo to create online experiences specifically for their mobile audience. The Everywhereigo Design for Mobile online software provides design staff with full artistic control and is built to ease integration with other technology and websites.

Everywhereigo Design for Mobile - Information about creating a Mobile Social Hub

In a nutshell, the mobile social hub is the mobile web experience you create around your business’ product or service that also features user generated media from your customer community. It’s not for everyone, but if you have happy customers – even better, fanatical fans – then this is how to leverage them to help you create new customers.

Read all about the mobile social hub here, and please attend the free Webinar: Mobilizing Social Media.

• Editor Update – We use a third party editor and are excited to roll out their latest updates. With the latest release you’ll notice a slick style and  improvements on many of the editors core features such as improvements to the image editor,  the link manager, the paste from word functionality and also a number of bug fixes around different browsers and HTML translation. We’ve played with the new tools for a couple of weeks and we’re very excited about the update.
• Filters on Customer and Business Tables –  Our user management and our business management tools now have filters.  For user management you can select to display the filters by clicking on “show filter” at the bottom of the user management grid. Partners will also see the ability to sort through businesses through their client selector pages.
• Added Truncation for RSS Feeds – We had some users point out that they like the truncation we put into the YouTube feeds and they wanted to see it on other RSS feeds in case their feeds are long. Consider it done!
• Update to YouTube Feed to Truncate Long URL’s – We added similar logic that we have in the Twitter and RSS feeds to our YouTube system to reduce the size of long URL’s. This will help prevent wrapping issues that may occur with some feeds that come through.
• Lead Source for Custom Forms Identified – As people have began to add more and more forms to their pages we noticed a need to identify where the leads are coming from. The recent update now identify the page from which the lead was generated.
• Bug Fixes for Custom Forms – We’ve fixed a few bugs in the lead forms around the labels and emails. You should now have no issues in all browsers adding users and creating labels for forms.

That’s it for this release. We’re continuing to refine our advertising platform and hope to have that out soon. We’re also working on some more advanced functionality for private pages that we hope to roll out over the next month. Stay tuned!

Having a Youtube feed on your mobile site will allow users to view select videos posted by you or others, incorporating a more visual aspect into your site. Users are able to view these videos without being redirected away from your branded mobile experience.

To create a Youtube feed page, first select “Build Your Site” from the main page, and go to “Everywhere Pages Content.” Click “Create a New Page” and a selection window will pop-up in your browser. Enter the name of your page, then choose “YouTube Feed” as the page type. Once in the edit page, you need to choose what parameter you will use for your feed.

This can be:

• a list of results from a query (keyword)
• a YouTube channel (username)
• a category of videos (category)
• a list of favorites (favorites)
• a playlist of videos (playlist)

You will then enter the information that will be used to create the feed. Some necessary information varies slightly between parameters, however all parameters will require something to generate the feed from (like a keyword or a playlist name). You can also choose a maximum number of results to be shown on the feed, so you don’t end up with an unnecessarily large page. Once you’ve entered the necessary information, click generate feed. After this feed is generated you can preview it below.

There are also some other options once the feed is generated. You can choose whether or not to use the header provided by YouTube for your navigation menu or not. You can also choose to display a custom header on the page, rather than the YouTube header. Other options are whether or not to include the author of the videos’ username, and whether or not that name is a link, as well as displaying or hiding the date the video was posted.

After you are done with these options, click save display options to continue. Finally, go back to your everywhere pages, and select the first checkbox by your page name so it will show up on your mobile site.

That’s all there is to it! Now you have a mobile video page!

• Campaign Archive and Delete – Customers asked for it and we now have it. You can archive campaigns or delete them by visiting the campaign management page and selecting to archive or delete a campaign. Campaigns can also be restored from the archives if you’d like in order to start them back up.
• Ability to select campaigns to go to email or text only – Some users choose both email and text as their preferred communication channel, but clients were looking to only send to one or the other. We’ve now added a way to select whether you want to just send to text users, email users or both in the group message section of the campaigns page.
• Update to Campaign Preview – Character count is now aligned with outgoing message
• Improved character support for RSS feed URL’s and custom form posts – @ and ~ signs are now supported. // are also supported.
• URL Truncation in feeds – A lot of feeds from WordPress, Blogger, Twitter and other RSS sources have long URL’s that cause the width of the mobile site to be wider than expected. We added auto truncation to the URL’s to present this from happening, but the users can still access the link
• Sorting Update – Sorting has been updated to support filtering users by labels and then sorting them by different columns.

Our next adventures are in advertising, updates to our editor and filters for some of our tables. If you have any interest in beta testing our ad integration with Adfonic or AdMob, please let us know.

As always, thanks for your suggestions and feedback and let us know what you think of the latest updates!

Everywhereigo elite programmer Olesya Gelfond ringing the bell to celebrate the initial launch of TicketLeap Mobile

That’s a Baiada Center tradition for resident startups whenever there’s awesome news. The Everywhereigo technology team worked hard to create the mobile user interface for TicketLeap’s self serve event ticketing web site  – see for yourself: just go to www.ticketleap.com on any mobile phone.

What’s so special? A few things we can think of right off the bat.

#1, this puppy works on any phone and provides an exceptional user interface on all of them. That’s because the Everywhereigo mobile web application publishing engine does more than simply wrapping a mobile template around desktop-bound web content: it provides the right creative to the right phone, optimizing performance on any device and ensuring both sides of the transaction have a secure, successful and satisfying experience.

#2, great looking design and usability that is consistent with the main web site. Thanks to Olesya, TicketLeap users who visit the site on their mobile will be treated to the same crisp, clean and easy-to-use online experience they get when they’re visiting the desktop-style version of the site.

More to come on this – in the meantime – Congrats Olesya!

Southern Tier Mobile Site on iPhone

It’s Oktoberfest time over at Everywhereigo and we’re excited to be working with one of our favorite breweries, Southern Tier Brewing Company. Southern Tier is known for some amazing beers such as Unearthly, Chokolat, Pumking, Harvest, Hop Sun, and much much more. They are also one of the many quickly growing craft breweries in the Northeast with an ongoing project to triple the size of their brewery and increase their distribution throughout the country. With this comes the need for some additional marketing power, or as Southern Tier’s marketing guru and graphic designer Nathan Arnone puts it, “It’s time for the shelves to talk.”

As part of the project, Southern Tier created shelf stickers with SMS campaign calls-to-action to place around stores and bars. The stickers direct users to more information about the brews by texting in “STBC” or “STBC Unearthly” to 77950. Customers receive text message responses that then bring them to a mobile landing page, which has more information about the beers, but also includes great user generated content such as YouTube customer reviews and Twitter comment posts. Ultimately creating a more compelling story around each of the beers and encouraging others to try them, and to post their own feedback and comments.

Southern Tier Twitter Conversations

Southern Tier is one of the fortunate companies who have a very strong customer loyalty and a great product, so getting content was easy. Searches for Southern Tier on Twitter brought up tons of great reviews on different beers they offer from all over the country. Harvesting this into a mobile twitter page was as easy as selecting the beers we wanted to query for the season and stringing all of the tweets together using the Everywhereigo Twitter function. Pulling in YouTube videos was easy as well. There are many beer advocates popping up on the web, so a general search for Southern Tier Beer brings a good selection of reviews. In order to organize these, Southern Tier has a YouTube Channel at http://www.youtube.com/southerntierbeer where they can tag their favorite reviews and then they’re automatically added to their YouTube feed in the Everywhereigo system.

Outside of the social media aspects of the site, we also added a few more elements for Southern Tier drinkers to keep in touch including an email and text alert list you can sign up for via your mobile phone, a list of distributors to get ahold of the brews, and the thing that I’ve needed multiple times when trying to find the brewery, directions and a phone number to the brewery and their famous brewery bar “The Empty Pint.”

I highly encourage you to grab a Gemini Imperial Blended Ale (my favorite!) and take a tour of the site and if you are ever near Lakewood, NY go visit the brewery!

Adding Bango Analytics

First Register at Bango by doing the following:
1. First register at www.Bango.com
2. After you login, go to Manage page and click on Get page tracking code
3. Copy your page tracking code

After you’ve registered you can add this to your account by doing the following:
1. Log in to your Everywhereigo site
2. Go to http://everywhereigo.com/BusinessAdmin/ManageDomain.aspx
3. In the bottom right corner you will see the analytics section. Choose Bango as the provider.
4. Insert the copied tracking code into Unique ID field and you are collecting analytics!

Note: It will take 24 hours to begin seeing hits to your site.

Adding AdMob Analytics

First Register at AdMob by doing the following:
1. First register at www.AdMob.com
2. After you login click on Analytics tab
3. On the Analytics Home you’ll see your website’s name. Click on Edit
4. Copy Analytics ID

After you’ve registered you can add this to your account by doing the following:
1. Log in to your Everywhereigo site
2. Go to http://everywhereigo.com/BusinessAdmin/ManageDomain.aspx
3. In the bottom right corner you will see the analytics section. Choose AdMob as the provider.
4. Insert the copied tracking code into Unique ID field and you are collecting analytics!

Note: It will take 24 hours to begin seeing hits to your site.

Adding Motally Analytics

First Register at AdMob by doing the following:
1. First register at www.motally.com
2. After you login, go to My Account page and click on Settings next to your website’s name
3. On the Details Page you will see Invocation Code displayed in different programming languages. Click on ASP.NET (C#), scroll down the code to the line which looks like:
motallyParams.Add(“s”,”ab1ab1ab”);
Copy ab1ab1ab parameter (it will be different in your case)
4. Now you can add new record to Mobile Analytics table: choose Motally as the provider and insert copied tracking code into Unique ID field

After you’ve registered you can add this to your account by doing the following:
1. Log in to your Everywhereigo site
2. Go to http://everywhereigo.com/BusinessAdmin/ManageDomain.aspx
3. In the bottom right corner you will see the analytics section. Choose Motally as the provider.
4. Insert the copied tracking code into Unique ID field and you are collecting analytics!

Note: It will take 24 hours to begin seeing hits to your site.