What does it take to make a successful iPhone application?

**What does it take to make a successful iPhone application? **

Before answering what does it take to make a successful iPhone application we have to define what makes an application successful. Sapient always asks why are we building something, what are we trying to achieve, and how are we going to measure it; so starting from top down, what are the business objectives, the key performance indicators, and all metrics. iPhone applications usually serve one of two purposes: drive brand or drive revenue.

**Objective: Drive brand **Applications that drive brand most likely are free since they have to target a broad reach. Objective is usually increase awareness, brand recall, or word of mouth, and is traditionally measured based on simple downloads, usage, and extended with how many share with friends, stickiness, and engagement levels. A good way to take it one step further is tie in social media monitoring and analyze share and velocity of voice, general sentiment, and overall impact of the application within social conversations.

Now that we understand how to measure it, what will the application do? Nowadays brands cannot push messages to the consumers, they have to provide value and we generally call it brand as an enabler. Applications that drive brand usually fall under one of two categories: be entertaining or be useful. Entertaining applications usually have a wider adoption, more downloads, but less engagement as users open it just a few times before they get bored. Useful applications have a smaller reach but higher engagement; less users will download the application, but they will use it much more than simple entertainment applications. However the key for both types is simplicity.

Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Part 1 / 2 of free social media monitoring and measuring tools list: list of tools to be used in techniques described on Part 2 / 2 - Free Social Media Monitoring Techniques – interactive marketing blog special.

Free Social Network

• Facebook Insights - free social network Insights Tool

Brand Overviews

• HowSociable? - A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics
• Addict-o-matic - A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence
• socialmention - A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a ‘social rank’ score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate.

Blog Search Tools

• TECHNORATI Search - Technorati’s new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only.
• TECHNORATI Advanced - Technorati’s advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags.
• Google Blog Search - Google’s index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria. Very good for searching between specific dates.
• IceRocket - Blog search tool that also graph-ifies!
• BlogPulse - Search for blog posts by keyword. Developed by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Free Social Media Monitoring Techniques

Part 2 / 2 of free social media monitoring and measurement: techniques to be used with tools on this page or any tool on Part 1 / 2 - Free Social Media Monitoring Tools – interactive marketing blog special.

We’ve previously posted why social media analysis tools are important , and ever since I’ve been trying a bunch on them and our shortlist includes Visible Technologies, Techrigy SM2, Converseon, and Collective Intellect on the high end, and trackur and BrandsEye on the mid/low end ..  I will post a nice comparisson later this week.

However, those are very expensive tools for personal use and small businesses, so what I usually do as a free easy to use solution is set up a bunch of free services and aggregate them using Google Reader.