SMW In Your Hands- Our New Mobile Site

You may (or may not) have noticed that we’ve been changing things up at Social Media Week- building out new products, enhancing old ones. From the one-click registration system to our new mobile apps and down to our new mobile website, we want to improve the overall experience of SMW. And that means making SMW more convenient- so, yes, we did say mobile. Now, when you visit our site on your smartphone, you get delivered a crisp, clean and mobile-friendly version of our site- including registration. You can register for events, learn more about our city organizers and what’s going on in each of them, and- for your tweeters out there- experience the site when you click through a link on your phone.

So, pick up your phone, check it out, and let us know what you think! We’ll be building upon it for SMW12 September, making it even better. In the meantime, meet the team that helped make it happen: Todd Shingler of Mobile Perspectives and Rob Leishman of New Media Innovation.

How did Mobile Perspectives and New Media Innovation both get involved with SMW12?
Mobile Perspectives had previously met with the coordinators of SMW Chicago about putting a mobile web solution together for the Chicago 2011 event and they introduced us to the Global SMW team at CrowdCentric. New Media Innovation is a strategic technology partner of Mobile Perspectives. We leverage NMI’s Intelligent Multimedia Publishing Suite (IMPS) when delivering mobile website solutions and engage their delivery team as needed during project implementations. For Social Media Week, Mobile Perspectives worked closely with CrowdCentric while designing the mobile user interface and implementing the service flows to ensure a consistent- and mobile optimized– experience for SMW attendees. New Media Innovation handled the majority of the back-end integration work so that attendees can login, register for events and subsequently manage their SMW schedule.

 
Mobile Perspectives and New Media Innovations are both solid companies built around building and designing mobile solutions. What sets you both apart and what was great about working together on this partnership?
We believe our collective breadth of experience in delivering successful mobile projects across a diverse range of industries for companies such as Wal-mart.com, Wells Fargo, AT&T Wireless, Cox Communications, and Qantas Airlines, as well as our experiences working with smaller local businesses sets us apart. The founders of Mobile Perspectives and New Media Innovation have worked together in a variety of capacities over the past decade and our teams and skill-sets are highly complementary.
 

Todd, Mobile Perspectives also have the Mobile Campaign Edge offering cross-channel promotional services. Can you tell us more about this?
Mobile Campaign Edge (MCE) was created in response to having a number of our consulting clients ask if we could simply execute the strategies we developed for them. MCE itself is a customized solution and set of best practices that extends an organization’s web, social media and traditional marketing to the mobile channel. The resulting cross-channel integration (web, mobile, social, print, TV, radio) provides a constant communication platform needed to reach and interact effectively with their target audience. Beyond mobile web, we incorporate text messaging, QR Codes & Microsoft Tags, mobile video and other complementary mobile technologies as appropriate. Our primary focus is on enabling effective, targeted engagement of our client’s consumers while they are on-the-go.
 

What trends are you seeing in the mobile space?
The primary trend we are seeing is the creative leveraging of social media and geo-positioning to enable mobile-enhanced experiences that are simultaneously more personal, intuitive, effective and satisfying than previously possible. Retailers are starting to leverage geo-enhanced mobile advertising within applications, like Pandora, to entice consumers into nearby stores and then offering mobile concierge services through branded mobile applications. Restaurants and other businesses are enabling– and encouraging- loyal patrons to ‘share’ their experiences and purchases with friends and followers by linking directly to social media via optimized mobile websites. When there is a sufficient value exchange, consumers are willing to share their location and act as brand agents within their social media circles.
 

Rob, you create mobile solution for enterprises looking to interact with their customers via Mobile. With the complexity of different backend systems within these organizations, how does New Media Innovation tie this together for a successful customer implementation?
New Media Innovation has been developing and fine tuning our Mobility suite of products for the past 5 years. We have developed a highly configurable and flexible product suite that allows us to provide a mobile offering to suit any customer. Example solutions may be

• An out of the box Mobile website
• A Multi-Channel (Mobile and Web) based site
• A Native Client (currently iOS or Android)
• Or a combination of all of the above.

We work with our clients to define their requirements and help guide them on the appropriate technology for their situation. Whether it be extending their existing web-based systems to mobile via our New Media Framework or using our Mobile/Web CMS (the IMPS Product used for SMW) to host and manage the customer branded multi-channel digital content on their behalf.
 

As the rate of accessing sites via mobile is steadily increasing, do you think this will slow down or will brands that opt out miss the boat?
Brands that opt out will definitely miss the boat. Retailers are already starting to change their business models and revisit their supplier relationships to avoid simply becoming ‘showrooms’ for Amazon. Likewise, the hospitality industry is fighting to take back ownership of customer relationships they’ve inadvertently ceded to OpenTable and GrubHub. The advances in smartphone capabilities provides brands with a new opportunity to get (literally) into their consumer’s pocket.
 

This year’s theme for Social Media Week is Empowering Change Through Collaboration. How are you seeing this played out locally and globally?
The growth of social media, web communication tools and complementary mobile apps makes it possible to quickly assemble and manage virtual teams across companies and geographies. Take the SMW mobile website for example. Mobile Perspectives is based in Chicago, Crowdcentric in New York, New Media Innovation in Melbourne, Australia, the Nokia maps team is based in Finland, and Techliminal, who we worked with on the back-end integration, is based in San Francisco. Almost all
of our communication has been via email or Skype and our geographic spread actually allowed us to progress the mobile website virtually around the clock.
 

Finally, what was your favorite part of working with SMW this year?
Everyone we’ve worked with at SMW has been incredibly enthusiastic and collaborative. We’ve also enjoyed gaining insights into the hot social media topics around the world through our exposure to the various local city event blogs and schedules.