HOW TO: Build a Mobile App

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:29 — 49.9MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS

Want to launch a custom mobile app to build excitement before and accelerate connections at your next event? Nervous about having to develop it from scratch?  

If you’ve already read my blog post on HOW TO: Social Media Market B2B Events — which gives a punch list of things you can do to promote real world B2B events in online social spheres — this podcast is a deep-dive on designing and deploying mobile apps for use at live events.  

In this podcast, new biz dev guy Pankaj Prasad (@therealpankaj) from DoubleDutch, which has built mobile apps for TED, Cisco Events and HP Events, shares best practices for creating branded mobile apps for live events. DoubleDutch has skinnable geolocation apps for mobile devices that bring the functionality of Facebook, Twitter and FourSquare in a closed community, to the mobile device.

The Double Dutch mobile app (pictured left) includes a portfolio of micro apps that can be branded and combined on the mobile desktop.  

It can be used to provide event attendees with the ability to social network with other event attendees in an exclusive environment without spamming or alienating their Facebook friends or Twitter followers.

Mobile apps give event organizers a way to port their paper schedule or conference program to a mobile device so that attendees can search it by time of day, proximity, keyword or track and automatically add sessions to their iCal or Google Calendar.

The activity feed in the Double Dutch mobile app can segmented to meet the needs of a particular event, so people can network around different topics, and this is important because the company believes that people are more responsive to focused feeds than broad ones, which is why they typically check email, Facebook and Twitter in that order from their mobile devices.  

The better an activity stream can give you social information from people from your community that are around you at that time, the more useful it is, which is why they built feed segmentation into their app.

The Double Dutch app provides event organizers will a web dashboard that they can use to publish and edit the information in the app on the fly.

Cisco uses DoubleDutch to power their Cisco Events app, which iPhone users can download and play with.

Photo by Neil Soni on Unsplash