It’s about bringing content into the environment you’re already in, not creating an environment conducive to your content.

Introducing the iPad

The iPad has been highly successful since its recent introduction, selling 2 million units within 60 days. The iPad benefits from a growing base of Apple customers, software developers, partners and media relations, and builds on the functionality of Apple’s previous mobile devices, leading to their adage, “You already know how to use it.” It looks and feels like the iPhone with a larger screen. Apple has leveraged our familiarity with their existing products and added some innovative new steps. With a stunning design and an advanced multi-touch user interface, this larger-screen mobile device is hard to resist.

Balancing The Mobile Experience

The reach of mobile computing continues to expand as sleeker, more feature-rich devices enter the market. At the very least, these wireless smart devices serve as glorified PDAs that enable users to carry around their most important information wherever they go. At their best, they enhance and enrich the user’s lifestyle through a careful balance of convenience, transparency, relevance, connectivity, and flexibility.

Convenience

As mobile devices merged into smarter and more powerful devices they also got thinner, smaller and lighter and Apple is truly innovative in this area. But let’s face it, with the requisite learning curve, a new device can be anything but convenient. It has to be connected, configured, customized and protected. Data has to be transferred from the previous device and there’s usually some troubleshooting required, even for Apple’s easy-to-use products. And there’s the initial cost, too. But once those hurdles are cleared, we have a convenient device that simplifies and consolidates our personal effects.

Ease of use is also a must, because consumers will not use a product that’s difficult, unstable or uncomfortable to use, no matter how attractive it is. The device shouldn’t require the user to change their behavior in order to use it; it should adapt and complement the user’s existing lifestyle. It’s about bringing content into the environment you’re already in, not creating an environment conducive to your content.

Transparency

Of course, by transparent we’re not referring to a device that is actually invisible (or perhaps missing because it was left unattended a bit too long in a California pub), but transparent in that a user ‘forgets’ the device for the content it holds. Apple’s iPad and iPhone stay out of the way of the on-screen content. In fact, they are mostly screen—apart from a highly designed bezel and a few understated controls. The 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen dedicates much of the visible area to content, giving users a large frame for exploring and sharing their digital lives on the go.

Relevance

With the hardware and underlying software working in the background, content is the primary focus. What makes the iPad so desirable, like its iPhone and iPod Touch cousins, is the level of personal relevance for the user. There’s prestige in carrying a beautifully designed, cutting edge device, but even after the love affair over having the latest, greatest product fades by a few newer versions, it’s the ability to customize and fill the device with personalized content (photos, videos, music, contacts, files, apps, etc.) that makes it relevant, even essential, to our daily lives.

Connectivity

When you hold the iPad in your hands you’re actually holding the entire dynamic content of the Internet (minus the Flash bits, of course) and the bright, large display creates a rich, immersive experience. It gives users who spend time on social media sites the ability to update their status accordingly. Expect to see “Running on my treadmill with my iPad,” or “Laying on the beach with my iPad,” much like “Sent from my iPhone” email signoffs.

Flexibility

Software-based controls keep the device flexible and simplify the ability to adapt the controls for multilingual use. It allows Apple to dramatically improve the user experience through software-driven OS updates and has the ability to drive additional revenue-generation for content and software developers. As our world changes, the iPad will change and adapt to remain viable longer, making it a great investment.

It Just Fits

The iPad was released in January 2010 to mixed reactions. The biggest question revolved around whether there was a market for a touch-screen device that bridged the gap between Apple’s iPhone and laptops. The iPad’s early sales success can be attributed to the simplicity of use of other Apple products, or it could be that it’s a new kind of user experience that just fits.

In future articles we’ll look at some of the reasons that the iPad is destined to stand out and excel in an industry flooded with smart mobile devices.

“The word website
is becoming a misnomer.”

-Ed Illig, Brainstorm

The Importance of a User-friendly Website

Brainstorm’s Ed Illig spoke on the importance of a user-friendly website at a recent Linking Indiana winter event.

He cited three very different market sector website case studies: Anderson University, a higher education site; Lumina Foundation, a non-profit; and RCA, a commerce site.

Using these examples, he described what user-friendly means in different spaces and where he sees things heading in terms of usability, user engagement, brand, metrics, and more.

You can view the talk on Blip.tv in full here:
The Importance of a User-friendly Website [32:21]

Or in three bite-size, lunch-ready segments here:
(Part 1 of 3) The Importance of a User-friendly Website [12:40]
(Part 2 of 3) The Importance of a User-friendly Website [11:45]
(Part 3 of 3) The Importance of a User-friendly Website [8:47]

We’ve identified five focal points of opportunity for 2010. They’re not an end-all priority list for brands, nor predictions, but rather initiatives, items born of trending behavior and emergent technologies being embraced by consumers.

1. Mobile-based marketing

Smartphones are fast becoming the center of consumer experience for work, home and play (see: Is Your Mobile Presence Brand Immobile?). A device capable of connecting people, places and things via text, voice, social networks, apps, tools, email, video, and images is a powerful medium. And the medium’s delivery mechanism is already in your audience’s hand, on their belt or in their purse. Smartphones are a direct way to connect with your audience and influence their behavior each time they use the device.

2. Location-based marketing

Aligning cultural trends and consumer behavior with location-based kiosks mobile and social apps can elevate your brand from relationship marketing to direct sales. Online and mobile apps such as foursquare combine locale, social game play and entertainment with information and tangible incentives. Geo-based marketing can deliver the closest, most highly-rated businesses, directions to get there and real-time incentives to entice a visit.

3. Brand design

Design continues to differentiate, now more so than ever. In a world deluged with cookie cutter applications and off-the-shelf adornments, consistent, appropriate and user-centric brand design compels and communicates amid the cacophony of visual noise.

4. Branded Edutainment

YouTube had more than 120 million viewers and 10 billion video views in August 2009 according to a September 2009 ComScore report. With the proliferation of on-hand, video-ready, mobile devices and a broad array of storage and sharing sites like Hulu and YouTube, online video is becoming ubiquitous.

Video is a powerful and potentially amplifying medium for your messaging when produced, integrated and distributed properly. But, it must be engaging, relevant, interactive, easily-consumed, readily-shareable, educational and/or entertaining for full effect.

5. Strategic Integration

There are many ways to reach and influence your audience—perhaps too many. Just because you have more options to extend your media mix doesn’t mean it needs to be less strategic. In fact, to penetrate the noise and stand out, strategy is more important than ever.

Facebook has hundreds of millions of subscribers. So what? Citing large numbers isn’t a strategy. And developing stand-alone initiatives without an integrated and targeted plan risks losing your message in a sea of irrelevant noise. Be it a person wearing a sandwich board on the sidewalk or an online video, your marketing efforts must be strategically integrated, well-planned, consistently branded, distinctively designed and metric-driven.

This year, don’t obsess over New Year predictions or resolutions. Assess, and act.

Related Reads:

Is Your Mobile Presence Brand Immobile? [.think]
Coca-Cola’s 100-Flavor Interactive Freestyle Soda Fountain
Shazam To ‘Tag’ Dockers’ Super Bowl Ad
Foursquare’s Marketing Potential

Share your experience.

Share everything. Make it easy.

A positive experience with your brand lingers with those who encounter it. It can become part of their life experience, and people enjoy sharing life experiences.

Therefore, it’s important to provide opportunities and simple ways for people to embrace and share your brand content.

Here are 10 ways to distribute your content and extend your brand:

1. Multi-Channel Distribution
   Use multi-channel distribution mediums like Posterous.com. Posterous allows you to assemble your content in, and send it via email. Simply send an email to Posterous with your formatted content attached. PDFs, text, images, even video are immediately forwarded to multiple social sites of your choice. Once distributed, users or fans can easily share your branded content with others.
2. Widgets
   Use widgets like Share This, Add to Any, or Add This to enable single-click sharing on other web sites and social media pages.
3. Micro-blog
   Create an account and build a following of constituents, friends, like-minded individuals, clients and prospects on a micro-blogging site such as Tumblr, or Twitter. Post short messages with information or links to your content and users can re-blog posts of interest. You can also feed your micro-blog to your web site, Facebook page or other online destinations for real-time updates.
4. iPhone apps
   Aggregate your content from multiple sources into a custom-branded iPhone app where fans and affinity groups can follow the content from your blog, web site, and social communities, all on one portable device.
5. Downloads
   Give your content away in the form of portable ebooks, white papers, digital audio and video downloads. Spread the word.
6. Flash drive
   Hand a prospect or influential person your content on a portable device like a branded flash drive. Encourage them to share its content with others. They’ll remember you and your company when they use the drive for their own storage and file transport needs.
7. Incentivize others to share
   Create a contest or sweepstakes to pull people to your content, then encourage and incentivize them to share it with others.
8. Think about the copyright
   Use Creative Commons to manage the proper usage of your shared content on sites like Flickr; it protects you, the author, and facilitates liberal sharing of your content.
9. Share the responsibility for content creation
   Extend the reach of your content to different audiences and demographics by collaborating from the outset to make your content, “our content.” When people share in the process of content creation they become invested and far more apt to share the experience and results with people they know.
10. Branded Watermarks
    Tastefully embed a logo or other watermark in the corner of your photos and encourage users to make them their own in device backgrounds or other digital applications.

Have an idea about making your media and messaging movable?
Share it with us.

Image: jonathanvlarocca

Gnaw Bone
(chew on that)

Our latest list of inane musings from the Brainstorm office white board:

Top 20 Vacation Hot Spots in Indiana

1. Chicago – It’s ours, it’s ours I tell you!
2. Columbus – Top-rated U.S. city on NatGeo Travelers list of Historic Places (#11 worldwide)
3. Notre Dame (Yes, The Notre Dame)
4. Brown County (Nashville) – It’s really green
5. Santa Claus (No, not him)
6. Madison – The place, not the donut girl
7. Um, Indianapolis – By and large, clean, safe, historical, sports-oriented, prospering…
8. Wauwausee (once you see it you’ll whine until you see it again)
9. Bloomington – sporting a campus ranked among the most beautiful in the U.S.
10. Turkey Run, Shades Park Combo
11. The Dunes – Sandy, but good
12. Bean Blossom – Boogie
13. Hoosier National Forest – You can see it for the trees
14. The oddly named Holiday World and Splashin’ Safari
15. Rose Hulman (Take that M.I.T.)
16. Lake Max (Like a Great Lake, but smaller)
17. Pete Dye – designed golf courses @ Purdue
18. Spencer County – Home of Abe Lincoln’s boyhood abode
19. French Lick (No, really)
20. Peru – Circus City
21. Gnaw Bone (Chew on that)

See the entire board

Image: Garden Beth