Go for MVP – Most Valuable Panel.

Don’t just present your knowledge in the same boring way. Make it interactive for the audience. Be memorable. Take a stand. Own your opinion. People respect that. The most valuable and entertaining session I attended was ‘UX Smackdown – Usability Testing Techniques in the Ring”.

Fix the format.

The UX Smackdown panel used a debate style for their session – much better than the highly disorganized panel I’d been to a few nights prior (where one of the panelists had a ‘Yep, what he said’ answer to almost every comment made by his fellow panelist’). Some panelists can tend to get lazy, relying on the moderator to ask the right questions. Clearly, there was preparation involved in the UX panel. The Smackdown moderator had downloaded a bell noise onto his iPhone, signaling the start of each round, and as we entered the session we were given noisemakers to vote for the winner of each battle.

Noisemaker!

Take a stand.

People respect people who have opinions. The debate/opposing viewpoints format that UX Smackdown had could be very effective for presentation styles where there are two or more presenters. This allows each presenter to really own the opinion and bring some passion to it. Whether your side wins or loses, it’s a win-win.

Hashtags.

One thing I noticed was helpful was adding the official hashtag for the session to the bottom of each slide. This allowed users to follow the conversation on Twitter as well as listening. Don’t tell me that’s rude because let’s face it – we have a habit of looking at our devices while we are listening and learning. We are dual or triple device users while watching tv, so why should a conference session be any different? Having the hashtag at the bottom of each slide made it easy to remember when you wanted to tweet something insightful to add to the discussion. It also made it easy to follow along with the imaginary drinking games that sprung up during each session. ‘Take a shot every time he says ‘beautiful’! (regarding Ben Silbermann, co-founder of Pinterest).

@prTini

Deck out your decks.

Use of simple, striking, visual slides vs text was popular. We’ve all complained about boring, dry, text-heavy PowerPoint decks. At SXSW, I’ve seen this trend emerging of large, vivid imagery on a stark background, with one, maybe two words. The images will often repeat, suggesting a single idea at a time (a fox, a large pair of dice, a Rubix cube) and then reinforcing it later. Other slides represented real people in various situations to bring home ideas. Specific examples and videos were also key to grabbing attention, with one presenter using a clip from 30 Rock, another playing a screen recording of trying to ‘break’ Google text (when you enter way too many characters, instead of showing the remaining characters, Google displays, “Really?”). What wasn’t cool was the guy who tried to make us all cry by playing Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ during his presentation. That song is scientifically engineered to evoke an emotional response, and crying is probably not the one you want your attendees to do.

Be flexible.

In addition to the attendees needing to be flexible when lining up their schedules because sessions may be full, the presenters showed a high degree of flexibility and courage under fire. In one case, Jason Hreha said Lion reverted his slides, so the deck he was showing wasn’t the deck he created. So he had to work with what he had in front of him, losing the joke he was going to open with. It turned out to be a great presentation on applying psychology to web design, because clearly Jason knows his stuff.

In another situation, @prTini had planned on giving a talk about PR and Marketing, something something gobbledygook (boring!), and ended up speaking to us about her trip to the earthquake-devastated island of Haiti. She announced that she decided the night before to make the switch, and had been changing her slides a half an hour before the talk. She spoke with us about how more than any manual labor she could have contributed to the Haitians plight, the people there had just asked that she share their story using her voice in social media, and that our #firstworldproblems pale in comparison. Needless to say, the topic was riveting.

Her bright pink skirt didn’t hurt either. Which leads me to my last point:

Be memorable.

Give the listeners something to do when they leave. Allow them to apply your experience to their lives. Make me want to find out about Haiti, go to a baseball game and understand the nuances and intricacies of an at-bat, determine whether my co-workers are ‘hedgehogs’ or ‘foxes’, tell the story of my life based on the music I’ve listened to over the years… or design amazing, beautiful (take a shot!), highly user-friendly mobile websites.

~~~

Anne Munkwitz is a Project Manager at Roll Mobile. She is a gadget geek, fitness fanatic and Twitter addict. Suggestions for a BLOG@ROLL topic or inquiries about how YOU can be mobile can be sent to anne@whyroll.com or on Twitter via @RollMobile.

If you’ve heard of Pinterest, it’s probably been in the form of people raving over being hopelessly addicted to ‘pinning’, with you wondering ‘what is Pinterest and why should I care?’. The premise of the site is that any product or image you see on the web can be ‘pinned’ to your pinboard on Pinterest, via a bookmarklet you drop into your bookmarks in your browser. You can also browse pinboards by category, friends or keyword search. The result is an endless supply of eye candy, accessible from your desktop, mobile device, or with an iPhone app.

The site is growing wildly, in a way some compare to what Facebook did in 2006, with 3.24 million unique visitors per month. I do see a lot of potential for Pinterest to grow like Twitter did a few years ago, with people slow to get on board but eventually shaping what it can be used for.

Women vs. Men

From what I’ve learned since being hopelessly addicted to it, it seems women are more into ‘pinning’ than men. 50-74% of Pinterest’s user base is female. One comment that piqued my interest while asking around about the site for this very post came from Facebook, where my friend John had posed the question “Why should I use Pinterest? I already know what I like.”

This generated a discussion: “To admire beauty, express creativity, and pine after expensive things you may never own. In short: eye candy. It’s basically an inspiration board where you can ‘collect’ images of products, clothes, home decor, etc.”

John expressed that his Amazon wish list already does that.

“Ah yes, but with Amazon you can’t pin an entire room or a craft idea or photography you find stunning.”

He, being a guy, said he’s not sure why he’d want to do that. So, whoever said men are more visual creatures than women may have been wrong about that! The majority of the boards I’ve seen are fashion, home decor, recipe, or bridal themed — things many men might shy away from. But there is so much more to it than that, and I’ve slowly been seeing more men join the Pinterest party.

Why We Pin

So, for the women reading who are still with me… what makes Pinterest appeal to us so much?

Lust
Well, for one thing, it’s envy… lusting after something we can’t have, which we always love to do. It’s the boots we can’t afford, the garden we don’t have time to tend to, the dress we don’t have an occasion to wear, and the wedding to the man who hasn’t asked yet. It is a place to collect fantasies.

Organizing
It’s a way to organize and keep track of things we don’t want to forget. This makes it especially appealing for gift ideas (presuming the people you are gifting don’t follow your boards) and brides-to-be. Virtually any product you like on the web can be pinned to your own board, for you to reference and click through to purchase later.

Discovery
Are we wasting time, pining over things we can’t have? Is Pinterest feeding into a never ending fantasy that we can’t have? For me, Pinterest has inspired me to experiment with fashion more, to find out what kind of engagement ring I really might like to wear for the rest of my life, and see a pattern of colors that make me happy. Of course, there are also pins of hairstyles I’ll never be able to pull off, or workout moves represented by a woman with a perfect body that I’ll never get. It may sound silly, but I’ve discovered a bit more about who I am (and who I’m not) as I peruse these gorgeous homes and hairstyles.

Happiness
Pinning the things we love is a way to ‘have’ them. After all, most of the fun in having something is the anticipation BEFORE actually having it. In that way, Pinterest satisfies the basic need more than actually having it. Studies show our happiness level is highest right before our pending purchase or our upcoming vacation. The act of simply anticipating happiness can give you more bang for your buck. So, pine away!

How Brands Can Use Pinterest

“Paint a picture of what life will be like for your customer after they have your product.” –Great advice from our friend Noah.

Pinterest allows us to paint a whole world of fantasy. But, if you are a business, how can you use it to paint a world for your customers? Like any social media platform, you can leverage your business by using it as a way to interact with them. Pinterest allows a highly visual way to do this.

I absolutely recommend using Pinterest as a brand. If your product has any kind of visual appeal (housewares, appliances, jewelry, shoes, furniture, gifts, toys, books, photography, etc) you may want to start some pinboards of your own. For example, a jewelry retailer might want their designer to pin all the products that have inspired him or her to design jewelry a certain way. Or an artist may want to pin all the images that inspire them, as well as their own favorite products that they’re selling on Etsy. Use your imagination!

Additionally, if you have  dedicated product pages for apparel, crafts, gifts, etc, you may want to consider adding a ‘Pin It’ button for websites (shown above) alongside your ‘like’ and Google+ buttons. This is a simple way for users to pin items from your catalogue that appeal to them. For those looking to explore and grab images from around the web, add the Pin It link on the Pinterest Goodies page to start pinning.

Do’s and Don’t's

Do:

• Ask for an invite. It takes a while to get one when you request the typical way through the website – but if a friend invites you, you’re in immediately.
• Follow lots of people. Follow your friends and follow strangers. Think ‘Twitter’ not ‘Facebook’.
• Explore. Check the everything tab. Follow through on pins you love and find who was the original pinner. What they like, you may like.
• Use captions (they will auto-fill when a user is repinning, but each user can edit the text – they don’t stick with the repin). Use hashtags, yes hashtags work!
• Use search. Recently, I have been in the mood for ruffles, chevron, and pencil skirts, and when I search these terms I find a treasure trove of ideas.
• Pin from the web. Don’t just re-pin, go on a discovery spree. Remember, with the ‘Pin it’ bookmarklet, you can pin anything you find!

Don’t:

• Don’t auto-share to Twitter or Facebook, because that’s just obnoxious.
• Don’t use Pinterest as your personal sales floor. People can see through that on Pinterest just like they can when you’re spammy on Twitter or Facebook.
• Don’t forget to credit the source if possible. Linking back to a product page or providing a dollar amount of a product is a good idea (and when the dollar sign and a number is added to a pin description, it appears in the corner as a cute little price tag!).

What are your thoughts on Pinterest? Have you found it as addicting as I have? I’m curious if any men out there have found themselves pinning as much as women have. I think men could grow the brand in their own way, it will just take a while. Share your thoughts in the comments!

~~~

Anne Munkwitz is a Project Manager at Roll Mobile. She is a gadget geek, fitness fanatic and Twitter addict. Suggestions for a BLOG@ROLL topic or inquiries about how YOU can be mobile can be sent to anne@whyroll.com or on Twitter via @RollMobile.

A: A wealth of knowledge, in the form of a free e-book published by Clear Verve Marketing in Elm Grove. You can download the free book here: http://www.100ways2012.com

The goal was to tap into the brilliance of Milwaukee-area minds, and have them share what they’ve learned over the years in their professional niche. Each shares their ideas and experience in list form with a few paragraphs to sum up how you can put them to use in your own field. It’s definitely a quick and valuable read to those growing a business or career anywhere, not just Milwaukee.

Our own Sara Santiago contributed her five business ideas to the book. She explains how your firm can best use a mobile web experience and social media, as well as how these tools can help make the most of your ‘white space time’. My favorite tip is her ‘guy for that’ theory in which she describes how social media is no different than a small town where you learn to know and trust those you do business with.

Give the book a try – I’m sure you’ll recognize several of the contributing authors and find the information helpful.

~~~

Anne Munkwitz is a Project Manager at Roll Mobile. She is a gadget geek, fitness fanatic and Twitter addict. Suggestions for a BLOG@ROLL topic or inquiries about how YOU can be mobile can be sent to anne@whyroll.com or on Twitter via @RollMobile.

* * * * *

The mission: to create a clean, simple, easy to navigate site that reflects the Telling the Truth ministry, while including a call to action on each page to guide listeners and donors straight to where they want to be. On each page, as is standard for us, we’ve added a link to the full version of site.

The design: From the beginning, the client had established design standards and colors for consistency, which helped us mirror their brand in the mobile design. The result was a remarkably beautiful mobile website.

Broadcast: The focus of the project was the daily broadcast – an ability to stream the daily half-hour broadcast in a click or two, while also showcasing their current gift offer that comes with donations. Additionally, there needed to be a way to donate online via mobile device, sign up for daily devotional emails, and get a high level introduction to the faces of the Telling the Truth ministry.

About the Briscoes: For those who are new to the ministry, About Us was also made mobile – this is high level background about each of the Briscoes, served up in a simple, clean page with an expandable ‘accordion’ option. This negates any potential crowding on the page until the user chooses to expand the section they’d like to read more of.

Daily Broadcast: The podcast presented us with a few challenges. Using HTML5 for audio playback is the new preferred standard, but support is still inconsistent among even the newest phones. Our solution was to use HTML5, but if it’s not supported, fall back to a direct link to the audio file. Between both methods, nearly all phones are able to play the podcast. While we took care of the complexities of cross-browser compatibility, the user only sees a single button: “Listen Now”.

The result: The site accomplished Telling The Truth’s mission, in a bright and beautiful mobile display. The client is pleased with Roll’s mobile solution, as it allows people to bookmark the podcast page and return daily to listen straight from their devices – perhaps at the gym or in their car – without going through the added step of adding it to a podcasting feed and using a separate mp3 player to listen. In the future, as devices become more standardized, there may be a more clean way to accomplish listening to past or future episodes of the podcast, which we’ll explore in future phase improvements.

* * * * *

Telling The Truth can now be viewed at tellingthetruth.org/mobile or via a mobile redirect when visiting tellingthetruth.org with your mobile device.

OR, to jump right to it, scan the QR code –>

I beamed as my boss, Sara, confirmed that the reason she called me into her office wasn’t to fire me, as that little voice in our heads sometimes worry, but it was to give me a little pat on the back for a job well done — something she makes sure to do for every member of this team.

Hard work doesn’t go unnoticed here at Roll. Not only did Sara let me know how she felt, but she also told me that one of the members of my team came to her to say they felt I handled a situation well, and that I’m a good coach. She went on to tell me that I set the tone for the team to remain positive when we really could have had a crappy attitude about some challenging work and demanding deadlines. I smiled and said thank you, hoping that in those two small words I could convey how thrilled I was at her positive energy, and that HER attitude and energy is what trickled down to help me handle that very situation.

During the challenging project we discussed that day, Sara wasn’t always available to step in, nor did I want her to. She advised me a few times when I presented her with solutions I was considering, but for the most part told me ‘“I trust you”. Never once did she check up on me or step in to undermine my direction. She had my back. She let me ‘roll’ with the punches (pun thrown in for Bruce’s benefit). She allowed me to learn from it. Having that freedom to make decisions and see things through to completion, will undoubtedly make me a better project manager going forward. The stress gave me confidence, the team gave me strength, and the challenge of the project inspired me.

As a project manager and the face to our clients, I want them to know that I’m on their side. I’ll be their cheerleader and their advocate and the champion of the project as it goes through our internal process. I can tell the client with confidence that we’ll bring them an amazing finished product, because I trust my team to bring it, whether the going is good or there are stormy seas ahead.

I’m supported by wonderfully gifted people who are amazing at what they do, and who bring to light new discussions and techniques that make our clients literally say ‘Wow’. When it comes time to share our work with clients, I am EXCITED to show them what we’ve done. I can’t wait for them to see how much thought and care we’ve put into their project, and for them to be excited about their customer’s reaction to their new launch. I’m lucky to be the face they see when that’s the case, because everyone loves to be the bearer of good news, right?

But what about when I’m the bearer of no-so-good news? It’s reassuring to know that in a tricky situation, under stressful deadlines and demanding expectations, I’m backed up by a boss and a team that will shine and come through in the end.

This post isn’t to brag that I’m good at my job. It’s about how I learned what talents I bring to my role. That to my team and to my clients, I’m a cheerleader, a coach, a champion, an advocate, and a leader. And it’s about how the talents each member of our team brings to the table are just as crucial to our success as the things that I’m good at. As part of this team, knowing that the specific characteristics that make you, YOU, are valued, and when we can use them to rise to the occasion and make a client say “Wow”, well…

THAT’S what this post, and the team at Roll, is all about.

~~~

Anne Munkwitz is a Project Manager at Roll Mobile. She is a fitness fanatic and Twitter addict. Suggestions for a BLOG@ROLL topic or inquiries about how YOU can be mobile can be sent to anne@whyroll.com or on Twitter via @RollMobile.

I read the same email that everyone else got from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. And like that, before a single coffee bean had been brewed, I awoke. I threw my metaphorical parka on, because I knew there was going to be a hell of a storm on its way. The price hike was one thing; look at the backlash that caused on social media networks everywhere. But you’d swear they would have learned form that … right?

Twitter. Facebook. Tumblr. Even the prehistoric internet – CBs.

Everyone, everywhere griped about the price hike earlier this year. And who isn’t? In this economy, nobody wants to see another luxury cost them more, despite delivering the same. Often times, though, people will gripe and then get over it.

But rather than being all bark and no bite, people acted on it by leaving Netflix in large numbers. You could see it starting on the social networks as retweets and reblogs filled about people’s outrage at this.

Social networks have allowed us all to be these storm trackers. Watching a flurry of comments here and there, only to combine, grow, and turn into a PR blizzard bad enough to impact the productivity of even the biggest companies.

This Netflix hullaballoo has been a fascinating case study, watching it all unfold over social media.

What seemed like it must have been damage control due to the negativity surrounding their price hike, their latest email only fanned the flames, causing even more outrage. First prices went up, then another studio decided not to allow their content to be distributed through them starting early next year, and now they’re going to divide the company and further ignore the customers’ user-experience by making them manage their viewing habits – and payments – across multiple websites?

More cost. Less content. Extra work. Really?! Are you sure about this, Netflix? Just save face while you can. Backpedal. You can play it off as a Candid Camera goof if you really wanted to, in honor of the series now streaming on your network. Something. Anything.

Every move has people scratching their heads. Did Tommy Boy take over the company from Daddy CEO?

It shows just how quickly the giants can crumble these days. Just earlier this year, people were using Netflix’s slaying of the Blockbuster beast as a case study of how a once-unstoppable company could go under. The quicker the data transfers from person to person, the faster bad decisions can reach and poison a company’s central nervous system. No company is immune to this. Not Blockbuster. Not Netflix. Not MySpace. Not Facebook.

After two days [at the time of publishing] of blogs and social media still hammering away at Netflix, they’ve yet to attempt to dig out of this latest storm. Are they waiting to ride the storm out? Is it smart to avoid the elements right now and to wait for the winds to die down? Or will they be abandoned and forgotten about before they’re able to emerge from it?

We’ll be monitoring this ongoing storm and keep you posted.

Bruce is the Director of Client Services at Roll Mobile.

He is a lover of good music, bad puns and ugly sweater vests. Want to learn more about adding mobile components to complement your existing marketing strategies? Or have a BLOG@ROLL topic you’d like us to explore?

Contact bruce@whyroll.com or on Twitter via @RollMobile.

Likes, hearts, +1, thumbs up. Shares. We look to accumulate those en masse, and if people throw a word or two our way, then hey, that’s a nice little bonus.

Feedback has gone away from the personal, and impersonal is more and more acceptable. Which seems ironic, considering social media (a) has “social” right in its name and (b) everyone from individuals to international brands are using it to supposedly connect with others.

Maybe it’s because it’s easier to fit quantity of likes and hearts into a spreadsheet at the end of the month than it is to quantify and bar graph the actual thoughts within comments.

Or maybe it’s simply because the last decade has seen a tsunami of bloggers deluge us with content. At the start of the new millennium, we had a more compact number of personal and corporate bloggers compared to the current climate. During those days, we could spend more time commenting and starting paragraphs of conversations with the fewer blogs we followed. Now, we follow hundreds of blogs, RSS feeds, and Twitter accounts, leaving less time to read and more time to skim and +1ike posts.

Social media commenting has adapted the equivalent of the Jeep wave.

Rather than stopping and catching up, you keep driving and if you see another Jeep owner, you give a head-nod or a two-finger wave of acknowledgement. Don’t have time to stop and write a paragraph about why you agree with the author? Like or heart their blog post. Maybe you go the extra mile and click the Retweet button.

We’ve had to shift our goals and expectations to weight these one-click-approval methods accordingly and not put all of our success eggs into the commenting basket.

You don’t have to Like or +1 this new trend of “commenting,” but you do have to account for it when judging the success or failure of your social endeavors.

Bruce is the Director of Client Services at Roll Mobile.

He is a lover of good music, bad puns and ugly sweater vests. Want to learn more about adding mobile components to complement your existing marketing strategies? Or have a BLOG@ROLL topic you’d like us to explore?

Contact bruce@whyroll.com or on Twitter via @RollMobile.

They’d fly a fork-full of food around our faces like an airplane, making sputtering noises with their lips as the foodplane caught turbulence and bounced around. Until finally, air traffic control told them the runway was clear to fly that plane of green beans into our little kid mouths. Suddenly, we didn’t mind being force-fed our greens quite as much, as long as it was done in a playful manner.

Now that we’re adults, it’s no different.

We’re more accepting of branding and marketing of messages, as long as it’s presented in a kitschy manner. Mobile gaming is perfect for this. Oh, you want to get people to tell all of their friends about your restaurant, on your behalf? Okay, here’s this bright shiny [fake] badge they can unlock by doing so! And if you do so enough, I’ll even make you [honorary] mayor!

Becoming a mayor is the new punch-card reward for loyalty.

Then there are newsletters. It’s getting tougher and tougher for companies to get people to opt-in to their email newsletters; our inboxes are already busting at the seams. Visitors see this on a site, and often wonder if they need to opt in to another one. So instead, we dress them up in QR Codes so they don’t get mistaken for the rest of the slop out there. Scanning and discovery becomes a game, and before we know it, we’re happily requesting a helping of newsletter stew.

Now to decide if I want to use a train whistle or a sports car noise to get people to give this blog post a chance.

Bruce is the Director of Client Services at Roll Mobile.

He is a lover of good music, bad puns and ugly sweater vests. Want to learn more about adding mobile components to complement your existing marketing strategies? Or have a BLOG@ROLL topic you’d like us to explore?

Contact bruce@whyroll.com or on Twitter via @RollMobile.

State Fair engaged Roll Mobile to create a mobile experience for visitors of the State Fair Park and State Fair website. The site functions as way for users to get on-the-spot access to information during and surrounding the Wisconsin summer highlight — The Wisconsin State Fair!

This year the fair runs from August 4th through the 14th, so users will be directed to Fair site during and just before those dates. During the rest of the year, the site provides information for the fairpark grounds, for both visitors and exhibitors.

For the Wisconsin State Fair site, we incorporated the State Fair’s colors and signature barn-door look and texture. The bright red colors convey that sense of good ole’ Wisconsin fair-going. We chose to place focus on today’s events when you land on the home page, and also highlight deals during and before the fair, as well as what’s new for fairgoers this year. Sheep-shearing demo? World’s Largest Cream Puff? Guinness World Record Attempt at the largest cheese sculpture? It’s all here.

The mobile site highlights fairgoers’ two most popular areas to visit: food and entertainment, with an additional food-on-a-stick and cream puff area – of course! Each section that you click on leads you to a listing of all the times and dates that particular feature is appearing during the fair, so you can start planning your next trip before you finish your current one.

One feature we’re sure will get a lot of use is the Google maps overlay onto the State Fair Park map. This allows you to view buildings relative to the map for a multi-dimensional view of the fair park. Additionally, when clicking through from a food or entertainment listing, a pin will mark the map to show you exactly where you want to be.

Are you attending the Wisconsin State Fair this year? Who and what will you see?

How many times have we said this?

To learn from previous mistakes and do things differently this time … what’s an opportunity like that worth, anyway? Does the thought of a Golden Hall Pass sound too good to be true?

For many, Google+ is that Golden Hall Pass back to Social Media High.

My buddy Mike posted something on Google+ joking about people being able to fix the mistakes they made on Facebook. And you know what? There really is something to that.

Social Media has always been one of those “Quick! Everybody into the pool!” mediums where advocates rush in and try to add as many people to follow or friend. Sometimes people just want to amass as many numbers as possible, like a status symbol, while other times, you just have to play the numbers game in the beginning so you can become acclimated to a service’s possibilities or limitations.

But then you reach that point where you’re a veteran user, and you realize you need to thin the herd in order to effectively manage it. Unfortunately, unfollowing or unfriending can cause a trickle-down effect of negativity for any of a number of reasons, whether it’s personally or even financially, if you’re one who uses these for business.

Then there are the businesses using social. Businesses have not only taken to creating Facebook pages over the last five years, but many are actually promoting these pages rather than their own webpage in their advertising. Have we not learned anything from MySpace? Or even the rise and fall of the unsinkable Molly Brown Blockbuster Video? Yet even knowing this, many businesses still won’t diversify their social portfolio.

Despite slipping on the social media banana peel a few times already (*cough*Wave*cough*), Google seems to have caught its footing this go-round with Google+. In less than a month, the service already (unofficially) has around 10 million users, which would make it the fastest-growing social network, ever.

Because of how circles are set up, we don’t have to worry quite so much about who we add, since you can section off your friends, family, and co-workers, etc. For non-business accounts, we learned from the first-go round that awkwardness can occur when your family sees something meant only for a select group of friends. This time around, the golden hall pass lets us determine who we’re sharing every bit of information with. Rumored updates this upcoming week (at the time of this publishing) include easier ways to filter which circles you view on default and to post to, among others.

Or what about integrating third party feeds from apps and sites into our social network? Do we really need to bring in all of our tweets, music blips, check-ins and more into our network and clutter the room?

Businesses, do you have Twitter? Does your Twitter account consist mostly of auto-posts every time you add something to your Blog or to your Facebook account? Is this same Twitter feed live-updating on your website, too? It is? So people on your website are seeing tweets with the links to the blog post you’re already reading? Then why would they want to follow you across all of your social networks if they’re just getting copies of copies of copies? Sounds like a digital dog chasing its own tail, if you ask me.

Virtual farms. Oversharing. Polling. Obligatory “Happy Birthday!” posts.

It took years for social media to turn into this. But we’re getting another crack at it! Do these still have the same place in our social circle, or will we instead close them out and hang with a different crowd? It’s completely up to us how we use Google+ going forward. This time around, we not only have a copy of the exam, but the answers are in our backpacks – and the teacher is cool with us using it!

Some will continue to just fill in “C” for every answer, hoping it will average out and be happy with a barely-passing grade. Others will communicate with their teachers and classmates this time around, to determine what the best answers are.

Bruce is the Director of Client Services at Roll Mobile.

He is a lover of good music, bad puns and ugly sweater vests. Want to learn more about adding mobile components to complement your existing marketing strategies? Or have a BLOG@ROLL topic you’d like us to explore?

Contact bruce@whyroll.com or on Twitter via @RollMobile.