Monica Yoo

technology. science. marketing.

My Favorite Apps

There are a handful of iPhone apps I use on a regular basis that enhance my life. Here’s my list (in no particular order):

  • Spotify is a music streaming service with on-demand access to millions of songs.  It’s a music discovery, internet radio, and  a way to share music with your friends all in one application. My favorite music app of all time.
  • Shazam is a music identification service. Hear a catchy new tune at a restaurant, on the radio or anywhere else, but have no idea what it’s called or who it’s by? Open up this smart app and it’ll tell you in seconds.
  • Amazon is an online retailer for just about anything you can pretty much buy on the internet. I’m sure you already knew that. I find the Amazon app indispensable for my natural tendency to compare prices for something I’m eyeing. That’s right, I’m a showroomer. It’s also great for impulse purchases. =)
  • Feedly is a news feed aggregator I adopted once I learned that Google Reader was no longer going to exist. It was a sad day, but I’ve grown to like Feedly. It’s fun, colorful and easy to use.
  • Kindle app is great. It syncs across all your devices where you left off in the book you were reading – Kindle, iPhone, iPad, etc. A big win for me since I tend to use a different device every time I seem to squeeze in a reading session.
  • Pocket is an app that let’s you collect articles and blog posts to read at a later time. It comes particularly handy when you stumble across something, but don’t have time at that moment to read it. I usually catch up on my Pocket articles when I’m at the airport or during some situation where I’m waiting on something.

 

Too Much Noise

I am an information junkie that reads just about anything I get my hands on – books, articles, blogs, advertisements, magazines, billboards, tweets and my most recent addition, food and ingredient labels. This may sound like a lot to absorb, but all of these things combined don’t even come close to how overwhelmed I feel when I wake up each morning and check my email inbox. I scroll through pages and pages of attention-grabbing subject lines like:

  • “Don’t miss this exclusive sale!”
  • “You’re going to LOVE this!”
  • “We miss you <3”
  • “Limited time only…”
  • “Ring in the new year with X, Y and Z!”

When I see the flood of these unread emails, a brief panic goes through me and I immediately skim the subject lines and do a single group delete. Done. Immediate relief. If I’m looking for something in particular, I may peek at a couple of emails, but those usually get zapped too.

I know what you’re thinking, “You could just unsubscribe from those emails.” You’re right, I could. However, I’m not going to just in case there comes a time I will want those emails. 99% of the time I’ll probably delete them all, but for that measly 1% I’m going to endure the daily pain.

It’s stressful being a consumer.

Then I got to thinking, marketers need to know their audience better.

Seth Godin writes,

You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They’re not anonymous and they’re not masses. You can only market to people who are willing participants.

So true. No one, especially nowadays, appreciates feeling like they’re being mass marketed to, and I get it – the idea of businesses knowing your buying patterns and interests is creepy. However,  whether we want to admit it or not, there is some level of expectation that businesses should have an inkling of what we want. It’s almost offensive to receive “recommendations” or “suggestions” from websites and businesses when they are way off and totally wrong. Right?

Take Netflix recommendations for example. When I first signed up as a member, over 6 years ago, I’d flip through a ton of random hodge podge selection of movies. Fast forward to today, and I love what gets recommended to me. Perhaps too much.

Data. Data. Data. It’s out there. And as marketers, we just need to be better about slicing, dicing and making sense of it all.

 

It Happened.

I had an interesting conversation with my brother the other day. Not sure how it came up, but we got onto the topic of what apps and websites the new generation of internet users (tweens and teens) are using today. I learned that there is a whole slew of apps out there that are primarily used by these youngins that I was completely unaware of. Not only that, how they use popular apps like Facebook and Instagram are totally different from how, say, my generation of users use them.

Mind. Blown.

This whole notion makes me shutter, as I didn’t think I’d get “old” and not know about these things. Ok, ok, I’m being a wee bit dramatic. I knew this would happen eventually, but not this soon. *chuckles* It was just an interesting moment of realization, which I oddly savored.

After getting over the initial shock factor, it made a whole lot of sense. New apps and websites pop-up every day (perhaps dozens or more at a time) and with the internet so easily accessible to kids nowadays, it is a very natural and inevitable reality that the social adoption to them would evolve just as quickly.

On a different note, Happy New Year! =)

Ch, Ch, Check-In

Wow. Fascinating. (Click on the chart to see a larger version of it)

I have to admit that the results of what apps the Early Adopters use greatly surprise me. I never would have guessed that 90% of social location app users would use Facebook Places to check-in versus 22% for Foursquare. For years now, the only form of “checking-in” I’ve heard has been through Foursquare (since 2009 actually, which was when Foursquare was founded), until recently when Facebook launched their own form of it. Here’s an interesting read about Foursquare vs. Facebook Places, if you’re interested. And this one too.

Also, with 17% of Early Adopters choosing to participate in location based apps, and 12% for Mass Consumers, it would have been interesting to see how having SCVNGR would have changed the results.

SxSWi – Always A Good Time

Geek Fest

I was pretty psyched when I found out I was going to SxSW this year and so I told a few of my friends about it. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Guess what? I’m going to SxSW!
Friend: Awesome! What bands are you going to see?
Me: Er…no bands. I’m going to the Interactive Festival.
Friend: Interactive? Oh, that’s cool.
Me: Yeah! I hear the founder of SCVNGR is going to speaking! COOL, RIGHT?
Friend: *crickets*

It’s instances like these that remind me that I’m a geek…and I’m ok with that. I went to SxSW Interactive in 2008 and 2009, took a break last year, so I was ready to jump back in the scene.

One of my favorite things about going to SxSW Interactive is the conversations you have there. You can throw out technical terms freely and people won’t think you’re crazy. You can talk about new internet memes and a) they totally know what you’re talking about, b) think you’re awesome and c) they won’t think you’re from a different planet. And you know what else? You can get super excited about a cool app that you just discovered for your phone you can’t live without and people will share your enthusiasm! Nothing makes me happier than going somewhere where you’re in the minority if you don’t have at least 3 electronics strapped to your body. Oh, joy!

Matthew Inman

There were several panels that I sat in on, some better than others, but my two favorite were by Seth Priebatsch, founder of SCVNGR, and Matthew Inman, the man behind The Oatmeal. They each talk about two very different things – Priebatsch’s covered social gaming and human motivation and Inman’s mostly about viral marketing, but they were fascinating nonetheless. If you’re curious at all to know what they talked about, listen to Seth Priebatsch’s and Matthew Inman’s podcasts.

 

Also, two cool photos from SxSW.

Random guy, me, Matt Cutts and Tara

I went to the most amazing tradeshow booth ever – Chevrolet’s 3-D Photo Station. It was set up to promote I believe their new Cobalt and it was fantastic. Definitely my favorite stop.

As always, I learned a whole lot, met great people and had my fair share of good old fashioned nerd fun.

See ya next year South By!

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