Apple Store Unavailable while iPhone 5 is Announced

First images released - live blog of event located here.

Responsys Interact 2012

Last year, I wrote a blog post recapping my attendance of the Responsys Interact 2011 user conference.  This year, I'm lucky enough to find myself working for Responsys as a Customer Success Manager.  As such, I attended the event again this year - in San Francisco.

Acquisition vs. Relationships
Of the many great themes presented this year - one stood out violently to me: Are you an "Acquisition First" or "Relationship First" company? As marketers, this will be the question of our time I think. Companies that get this right will find themselves left standing.  These will be companies that reinvent customer experience and loyalty.

Acquisition First Companies:

• Obsessed with the first purchase (ever say or hear "...yeah, but we just need revenue.")
• You market the price/product (race to the bottom)
• You have to sell your product (this is a hungry beast)
• Use digital to drive traffic ("how many clicks did we get?")

Relationship First Companies:

• Obsessed with third/fourth purchase (building loyalty)
• You market the experience (how do your customers feel about their purchase?)
• Your customers sell it for you (your best sales reps don't actually work for you)
• Use digital to tie everything together (create one experience, digital and offline - together)

Tough questions that likely require transformational efforts to move from acquisition- to relationship-first. 

charity: water (donate)
Last year, Blake Mycoskie from TOMS Shoes showed up and gave an amazingly inspirational speech about his charity and his one-for-one model.  This year, Scott Harrison from charity: water matched Blake's enthusiasm for doing good. His charity works to provide clean water to communities in Africa.

After an extremely emotional presentation, I was inspired to donate my upcoming 31st birthday to charity: water. Please consider donating to this great cause and sharing this charity with your friends and family.



Earth, Wind, and Fire
Just like last year, this year's event entertainment was amazing. Six-time Grammy Award winning legends Earth, Wind, and Fire performed an amazing show open only to conference attendees. Here's a video I shot front row for the song Shining Star.

You can get a full recap on the event on the Responsys New School Marketing blog.

Twitter vs. LinkedIn: Connecting Desktop & Mobile Usage

Trying to get your users to adopt your mobile app and take you with them when they're not in front of the computer? As Twitter's usage is increasing exponentially they are trying to get as many users on their mobile platforms.

• From Mar 2010 to Feb 2011, Twitter has seen a 280% increase in the number of average tweets per day.
• From Jan 2010 to Jan 2011, Twitter's mobile users have increase 182% - to 26 million.
• On average, there are 460,000 new accounts created on Twitter every day.

They have been running this screen upon logout on their website:

This screen shows all of the mobile platforms that they support and lets you select your device to download the app. If you selected Android, this is screen you see:

Each screen offers a few easy ways to connect the user from desktop to the mobile device.  A spot for you to input your email address so they can send you a link to download from your mobile device.  But, I think my favorite feature of this page is the usage of the QR Code. This is probably the one application of a QR Code 'on-the-screen' that makes sense to me. The users scan the QR Code right from the desktop and they're taken right to the download option on their device.

LinkedIn has a very similar strategy, but they don't use the QR Code and they insert an extra screen which creates an extra step for users. 

I love the copy on this first screen though: "Going Places? Take LinkedIn with you."  It's clever and works on two levels.

On the second page, they then show you the devices...with continued reference to the "going places" line.

The download page is rather simple and connects directly to the android store and offers instructions for manual downloading of the app.  

Both strategies are clean and simple - but I prefer Twitter's fewer screens and usage of QR Codes.