Our difficulty of building branded applications on social networks for clients
muscle milk
Thu, 17 Jan ‘08
There's a lot of blog posts out there that talks about apps on social networks. I've been involved in a few agent-client related facebook applications and I've started to see a patterns amongst them. So here's a few issues where I see, from a developers point of view, room for possible improvements.
Design
Most clients want to use their house type face, their own colours and preferably all the functionality we're used to deliver in your average microsite.
"Is it possible to make that blue facebook stuff in the top go away?"
Now, this is only things that makes the application look and feel bad, we can live with that, after all it's been proven many times before that a website doesn't need pretty design to be successful. But please remember, we're building an application, not a billboard or TV ad.
Integration
It's very hard to build a useful application for a client that merely sees the app as a 'presence' and a link of to their main website. And isn't willing to offer their full services through the application.
"Can that link there go to our products page?"
Make your application extend your current services, not beeing a limited version of them.
Maintenance
Since these social network platforms are constantly evolving, then so should your app. Putting your brand on facebook seems to be the new microsite, the clients project managers are the same and the money comes from the same budget. Only microsites are something that can be planned, executed and forgotten about, social network applications can not.
The fact is, if you turn your back on it, your application will sooner or later stop working in the sense it was intended. These platforms change, functionality is added daily, features that your app relies on is removed, and your app will start breaking the platforms terms of service. Your apps discussion board is going to be full of disappointed users, bad-naming your brand. Creating an application is a commitment, would you for example still use Mac OSX if Apple stopped updating it?