Currently viewing the category:
"Published News"
Mia Pearson – April 14, 2011
We sometimes forget how powerful the emotional connection to brands can be.
A great example is a company with a product designed to keep people safe, which is something everyone can relate in its most simple form.
On the surface, Guardly is a location-based mobile application. It allows users to alert, connect, and then collaborate with family, friends and authorities with one tap. In case of an emergency, users and first responders can communicate through voice, SMS, e-mail, and web conferencing. But the emotional connection, and the ultimate selling point, has nothing to do with the technology or the innovation, but the benefit to a potential loved one.
Add the viral loop. Viral loop companies such as Guardly spread their message in a number of unique ways. The first is organic and occurs when a Guardly user, without much prompting, shares the app with friends and family. Guardly even helps by pre-writing a suggested message for each delivery channel.
Viral loops have been around since the early days of Tupperware and its infamous home parties that my mother loved to attend. Perhaps the earliest example of viral loops in the tech space was during the 1996 launch of Windows Live Hotmail. The company’s webmail service had explosive growth on the back of one simple message at the bottom of every e-mail sent: “P.S. I love you get your free e-mail at Hotmail.”
Hotmail’s approach is often described as an invitation or referral loop. Guardly uses a similar tact by encouraging users to create networks of trusted friends and family that are contacted during an emergency. In addition to receiving an e-mail confirming their willingness to be an emergency contact, Guardly invites you to become a user of the service and so the viral loop grows.
Like most great apps, Guardly is initially available for iPhone but it will soon be coming to BlackBerry, Android and Windows smart phones. As companies like this one expand across multiple platforms, the power of viral marketing explodes. The test will be their ability to keep their messages simple and relevant to their many audiences.
At the end of the day, as small-business owners, we can never underestimate the power of word-of-mouth marketing. Keep the message simple and highly emotional. I have always made a strong differentiation between branding and reputation. Branding is what you say about yourself, and reputation is what others say about you.
The most powerful message to prospects will always come from your customer base. In the social media and mobile world we live in, viral marketing should move from a tactic to an important strategy for your business.
Read this on The Globe and Mail.
Related Posts:
Darrel Etherington – April 7, 2011
A new app launching today provides a single-tap, multi-target alert system for your iPhone or iPod touch. Guardly automatically alerts contacts of your choosing if you feel you’re in danger or have reason to quickly and easily alert a group of people to your location and current situation.
With the free version, you’ll be limited to just creating groups and assigning contacts to them. These could include friends in your immediate geographical area, for instance, or maybe a special selection of friends and relatives who know your medical history and allergies.
You can send alerts (phone, email and SMS text) to these groups of contacts with one click from within the app, but in order to get the full Guardly experience you have to pay up for either a monthly ($9.99) or a yearly subscription ($99.99), which you can do through in-app purchase. Remember that Apple sees 30 percent of that revenue, but Guardly seems more than willing to pay in order to use iOS as a platform for distributing its subscription-based, software-as-a-service offering, something I anticipated as a possible trend following Apple’s introductions of in-app subscriptions.
Subscribing also adds the ability to call 911 with a single tap of the app’s icon from the homescreen (after a brief countdown in case of accidental presses). Auto-alerts can also be set to send to any other emergency contact of your choosing, too. Other premium features include in-app conference calling with your group of responders, the ability share map views and instant messages with your contacts in real time, real-time location tracking and the ability to share photos you take with your device with your emergency contacts.
Guardly is also smart about how and when it calls emergency numbers. It will detect any network failures and automatically call once a signal is reestablished, and it detects your current country using location services and automatically dials the correct emergency number based on that info. The app also offers a loud siren that can be activated in case of emergency.
This is an incredibly sophisticated app that makes amazing use of the iPhone’s built-in capabilities to provide as comprehensive a personal safety solution as you can find in an app. It even sets up your Guardly app’s outgoing caller ID to be that of your iPhone, making it much easier for emergency services and contacts to track you down should you fail to actually get through.
Guardly doesn’t offer much in the free version of its app, but it provides such a polished, thorough experience from beginning to end in terms of app functionality that I won’t be surprised to see people eager to sign up for paid Guardly subscriptions. A SaaS model will also help ensure that the app has a consistent, sustainable revenue stream, which should go a long way towards ensuring the lights don’t go out at a company that many may come to depend on as a personal security resource.
I’m reminded of the emergency call buttons posted at lamposts around campus at colleges and universities when I think of Guardly, only the app model works better because it’s available everywhere and seldom leaves your person. I’m actually surprised more smartphones don’t offer more of this sort of thing as a built-in option, but I expect to see more similar solutions pop up from all sources now that Guardly is making waves.
Related Posts:
CBC Toronto’s Muhammad Lila reports on the launch of Guardly, a mobile personal safety service, with Lead Engineer, Mark Pavlidis, and gets reaction from the streets of Toronto.
Related Posts:
Download Guardly
