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Of course, there are a ton of cool, slick, fun and potentially great applications for businesses. But this list is about a select few that are ready to explode this coming year. In a very good way. They've all been around for a while. They all have a strong customer base and growing communities. And they're all positioned for huge growth, particular among small and medium sized companies. Your company should look at these seriously, if only because so many others are already doing so. Full disclosure: some of these applications are made by companies who are clients of The Marks Group. How can they not be?
Via TechinBiz
Facebook and its Messenger application dominated Nielsen’s list of the top apps of 2015.
The flagship Facebook app and Messenger placed at Nos. 1 and 3, respectively, on Nielsen’s list of top smartphone apps of 2015 by users, creating a sandwich around second-place YouTube.
Messenger also posted the highest year-over-year change in users, at 31 percent, outpacing second-place Apple Music (26 percent)....
The in-app feedback provider recently asked 350 smartphone owners in the US about the “minimum star rating they’d accept in order for them to consider downloading an app.” Roughly 60 percent of respondents said that they “usually or always check ratings before downloading an app.”
According to the survey, only 15 percent would consider apps with a two-star average rating. One more star, and half the respondents would potentially download the app. An impressive 96 percent said they would install four-star apps. This makes logical sense and parallels the way consumers react to product and service ratings in other categories....
Name virtually any task, and there’s probably an app for it.
The Android and Apple online marketplaces are flooded with apps that range from helpful to inane. With all the buzz surrounding successes like “Candy Crush” or “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood” (which is set to make $200 million this year), PR pros can often forget what a life saver technology can be, overlooking many digital tools that can make the work go more smoothly.
Here are five apps that PR professionals should have in their arsenal:...
I’m interested to see if Sulia — a news recommendation platform that offers intelligent filtering by subject — can provide a suitable, more open alternative. But can diversity and precision really work well together?
Concept and LayoutSulia is a strange kind of hybrid. It feels like a social network, albeit one that is based around news; it has users, a kind of following system, and every post is adorned with controls such as Like and Comment. But it is also, quite clearly, a full-blown news aggregator, equipped with Prismatic-style intelligence, that pulls in stories from unaffiliated Twitter feeds, blogs and media outlets...
Gone are the simple days of running a small business; gone is the time when a disgruntled customer's voice had a lifespan of a few days. We live in the future now, where reviews live forever.... ... OwnerListens, a startup that spun out of a hummus shop in Palo Alto, is trying to give customers a more direct alternative to Yelp — and they’ve just raised over a million bucks to do it. Through OwnerListens, customers can send messages directly and anonymously to a business owner, who can then respond immediately via SMS. Feedback doesn’t have to be negative, of course — it can be positive, or even just a suggestion. The logic behind OwnerListens is pretty straight-forward: if you give customers a direct, pain-free line to the owner, they’ll (hopefully) try to get things fixed instead of storming straight to Yelp to punch out a 200-word tirade. And because it’s anonymous and private, customers will — at least theoretically — be honest and upfront....
This is a collection of mobile resources from Mike Reilley and the Poynter Institute's Regina McCombs, Dave Stanton and Damon Kiesow, as well as many others. A list of mobile reporting tools appears at the end of this page. Most apps are tailored to the iPhone but have versions available for many other smart phones, too....
With Google pulling the plug on popular apps like Google Reader and Google Alerts, Jim Berkowitz takes an objective look at several alternative applications that can help with your content curation.... When Google announced that they were discontinuing Google Reader and made Google Alerts disappear I was perturbed to say the least. My initial knee-jerk reaction was to try to find a set of tools that were as similar to the ones I was using as possible. It wasn’t really all that hard. With a little research I was able to come up with Talkwalker Alerts as an alternative to Google Alerts and Feedly as my Google Reader replacement. I was a happy camper and back in my comfort zone. But, you know what? When it comes to digital marketing best practices and the technologies to support them, a comfort zone is not always the best place to be. You miss a lot, you fall behind, you slowly lose your edge. Don’t get me wrong… I still love the value I get from finding new great content sources with “alerts” and then using RSS Feeds to deliver all the new content from my favorite sources to one easy to use platform....
While social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have their own apps, developers have created many others that can provide more specific services while working within those sites. Read on to learn about 7 awesome apps to help your social media marketing efforts. 1. Flipboard – Gathering content from around the Web, Flipboard acts as a social magazine. Users can decide the sources from which content will be collected. It also allows businesses to connect their social media sites to the app, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Google+, so they can be shared easily with others. Content can be found, shared and managed all within the app....
Business is mobile. Here are 19 apps that can help your marketing, and keep track of results, on the go. Content Curation and Publishing Pocket This app allows you to ...
The iPhone/iPad AppGuides simplifies the cluttered App Store to help you pick only the best apps to download. [Really helpful for Apple device users ~ Jeff]
Via Ana Cristina Pratas
Robin Good: If you are an iPhone user here is a uniquely useful article from the Wall Street Journal, providing lots of tips, resources and advice on how to snap up great pics with your iPhone camera. This mini-guide lists some very useful apps, tools and techniques that can be put immediately to good use. Very useful. Resourceful. 8/10 Full guide: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303816504577305702578426084.html ;
Via Robin Good
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In the mobile-first 21st century, apps have become one of the most important elements of any product or brand. But as the users of millions of crappy apps can attest, designing a good one is tricky. So what separates a great app from shovelware?
After receiving hundreds of submissions for this year's 2016 Innovation by Design Awards, our jury selected the apps that landed on that magic formula. Check out this year's 33 finalists, and two winners, below."...
Via John Evans
Newer messaging apps like these are getting popular, and millennials and marketers are taking note.
When it comes to messaging, Snapchat and Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Messenger are the go-to apps of millennials and marketers alike. But increasingly, a new crop of messaging apps is growing in popularity. Players like WeChat, Line, Kik and Viber are beginning to quietly capture the attention of brand marketers via sponsored stickers and chat bots reaching millions of millennials and teens.
"Messaging today is what Facebook was in about 2006," said Evan Wray, co-founder and vp of Swyft Media, which builds messaging-based campaigns for advertisers like L'Oréal and Coors Light. "The tricky part is that every single app is different and [also] a new environment for brands. They're each trying to differentiate themselves slightly." Here, is what marketers need to know about four hot messaging apps in the coming year....
Here are ten of the best apps to use to do precisely that, and give you the edge when making that all important presentation at work. We suggest trying them and seeing which ones work best for you.
Via Baiba Svenca
Happy February! Many bloggers are in the midst of school, work, and/or NYFW prep. If you’re in Seattle like me, you are probably gearing up to cheer on our Seahawks in the Super Bowl parade today!
Now that we’re back in the grind, how are your resolutions coming along? One that I’m continuing to work on is being more efficient with my time on the computer – so I can spend that time enjoying life away from the digital world. On the never-ending quest to be more organized and productive, here are a few tools I use regularly that help me get the job done efficiently, whether that’s note-taking, reading all the articles I find, and clearing out the digital clutter...
We’ve all endured “death by PowerPoint.” It’s a painful experience for the audience and probably not all that fun for the presenter either. To help my students deliver effective presentations—free of those deadly bullet points—I have my go-to applications.
Via Baiba Svenca, Rui Guimarães Lima, massimo facchinetti
With Google ringing the death knell for its RSS Reader application, the July 1 curtain call has kicked a number of companies into action as they vie for the market left by Google Reader’s closure. Digg has already thrown its hat into the ring, as it plans to build an RSS app with the best of Google Reader’s features. And Feedly is benefiting too.
Earlier this week, another RSS service opened in public beta called Ping.it, offering an interesting feature called ‘Probes’ which lets users create very specific feeds based on keywords and popularity. Ping.it and probes Ping.it launched initially in private beta back in December, before Google revealed it was pulling the plug on Reader. At its most basic level, Ping.it is an RSS reader. But it’s the new Probes feature that’s particularly interesting.
For example, if you only want to receive feeds on “YouTube videos on Reddit with more than 1,000 Likes”, you can create a Probe that taps both YouTube and Reddit to present this information directly in your feed. Without creating a Ping.it account, all you can really do is subscribe to probes created by other users....
Everybody knows Evernote and Dropbox. Here's a sneak peek at the next wave of productivity apps that top entrepreneurs like Tim Ferriss Seth Godin use... I asked my favorite entrepreneurs their absolute favorite, yet very little-known tools, they use to achieve everyday tasks. After lots of correspondences and digging deep into these entrepreneurs' toolkits, here are their unedited answers....
Mobile Apps for Networking: Here are 26 apps to help you network, stay connected with your social communities and conduct business while on the go.
There's a hot new app taking college campuses by storm. It's called Whisper. Whisper is an iOS app that lets you anonymously share secrets in the form of digital postcard. You don't have to interact with other people on the platform, but Whisper does enable you to leave hearts on posts you like, respond to a post with a Whisper of your own, and send messages....
Very cool tools: 10 Great Apps for #PR Professionals Thinking on your feet is essential for any PR pro. For example, consider the NFL Super Bowl XLVII ads. When Oreo leveraged a current event the second it happened, it resulted in a free to low cost campaign that earned nearly 15,000 re-tweets and more than 20,000 Facebook likes. The catch is, in order to be on top of these current events, sometimes you need to be plugged in. This quick line of communication and organization depends largely on people moving quickly with technology. Below you’ll find ten mobile apps that will help you become a PR champion on the go....
Let’s face it, who doesn’t want to be more organised? With so many things happening at once, it can be difficult to keep track of everything that’s going on. Thankfully, many developers know this and there are numerous apps out there designed to make organisation better, improve your workflow and do everything else in-between. We’ve picked out 50 of the best apps that will certainly help you improve your productivity, no matter where you are.... [You'll find some must-use apps on this excellent list - JD]
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Checkout these eight useful business apps.