A great three-minute segment on CBC featuring wine writer Natalie Maclean, who talks a bit about her approach to making a mobile experience available to the 110,000+ members of her customer community of oenophiles. Three key takeaways:
- Use mobile to provide access to the breadth and depth of information that’s available to customers; plus,
- Simplify the experience to make it easy to navigate; and,
- Always ensure it’s available, not just when customers are in front of their computers
As a wine journalist, it’s interesting to see how Natalie is leveraging the capabilities of mobile to make it even easier for the members of her community to access the information she’s providing, as well as connect with each other.
Disclosure: Our company, Cerado, worked with Natalie to create this iPhone app
I’m afraid that as far as social media goes, it’s been drowned by the early marketing adapters trying to make a buck, which renders it…well, not that valuable and a lot less fun that it could be.
As a business, we plan on cutting down our social media use to almost zero by the end of 2010. It’s not to say that there will be some success stories, but the vast majority of businesses aren’t making it work, and won’t make it work as it exists today.