Local public sector social media expert, Mike Kujawski, wrote a great post a few weeks ago called Why you need to focus on mobile right now.
In the post Mike describe, among other things, how he used his iPhone and its apps to solve a number of recent business problems. One of his central points was that, contrary to popular belief, the iPhone is a business phone just like the Blackberry and people should start viewing it that way. If people start doing what Mike suggests it will be another step toward solidifying the unique selling point of the iPhone and smart phones like it: their comprehensiveness. By that, I mean their ability to do everything we need, replace many of our current devices – and become devices we hadn’t imagined we could have.
Some recent examples from my own life:
- Today my son and I had some time to kill between games at his hockey tournament in the suburbs. Like most suburbs, we were near lots of stores so I took out my iPhone and checked out the built in Notes app. I use it to make location-based to do lists (i.e @grocery store, @hardware store). Since it’s always with me, when ever I pass one of the locations I pull it out and check the lists and pick up whatever I have noted. I did this and knocked a bunch of things off the list;
- One of things on the list was getting some money from a Royal Bank machine to pay a hockey debt for the team. I used the RBC Finder app (that Mike mentioned in his post) to find the nearest RBC banking machine;
- When I was getting my kids skates sharpened one night this week his little brother kept himself occupied by working his addition and subtraction with the Kids Math app;
- I used Maps to find my way to the arena where the tournament was happening;
- I took pictures of the boys and effortlessly emailed them to their mom and grandma;
- I used TweetDeck to receive and respond to a request to record a social media event I’ll be attending this week;
- I downloaded Gary Vaynerchuk’s audiobook “Crush It!” from the iTunes store; and
- I listened to podcasts on my morning run.
The real magic of the iPhone, however, is not in the individual apps – but how seamlessly many of them work together, especially to share things. I can easily email photos, videos, tweets or contacts at the touch of a thumb and then return to what I was doing. I can take a phone call while listening to a podcast and pick up the podcast where I left off when I finish my call.
All of this functionality makes the iPhone an all-in-one device that, as it gets cheaper, will fuel the growth that saw the number of Canadian wireless customers with smartphones increase from 25 to 32 per cent from October 2008 to October 2009 (JD Power and Associates 2009 Canadian Wireless Customer Satisfaction Study).
Is mobile is appropriate for your business and, if so, what’s your strategy?
Posted in Mobile, iPhone |
