It fascinates me how powerful information is and how much we have to consume each day to remain current. In fact, if I didn’t peruse the live feed on Facebook a week or so ago (I saw Brian Solis commenting on Jeremiah Owyang’s app), I would be late with this post and might have missed the next personal branding phenomenon.
One of the trends I’ve noted on Personal Branding Blog is the rise of video and mobile mediums for branding. Well, aside from Hollywood celebrities developing their own iPhone applications, now everyone will have one. There will be a slow adoption at the beginning, but in about six months to a year, we’re going to see a major growth in this area. The reason might you ask? More eyes are being drawn to the mobile platform than ever before and that number is guaranteed to increase because our phones activate our lives.
The facts about applications for personal branding
- 607.5 million people globally accessing social networks by 2013, which is 43% of all mobile internet users (eMarketer)
- 50% of mobile phone users will access the mobile internet at least monthly by 2013 (eMarketer)
- 6 billion songs sold in the iTunes Store as of January 2009, which was 70% of worldwide online digital music sales (Mac Daily News)
- 100,000 third-party applications are available and there were 2 billion downloaded as of October 27, 2009 (Apple)
Do people need iPhone applications?
You don’t need an iPhone application if you don’t have an objective behind it. For instance, I wanted an iPhone application to remain positioned as a forward thinker in this space, to be competitive, to try it out and because I want the content of this blog and my Twitter account to be everywhere possible. It’s the reason why I set up multiple syndication agreements for this blog. I also wanted to emphasize how the same branding strategies that companies use can be leveraged by people all in the same.
Just tell me how to get my own app already!
My iPhone application was developed by MotherApp. They did an excellent job and I would recommend you try them if you have the content, the ambition and a little creativity. As you can see in the below screen shot, you can customize the main screen, the iPhone icon, and then append your blog and Twitter feed.
Here are some of the other highlights that MotherApp offers:
- You can create apps for the iPhone, Android, Windows mobile and more.
- Apps can be created using HTML.
- The apps are turned around in one business day.
- You have complete control of the look and feel of your application.
