Apple does a good job of highlighting apps in their TV ads and we were fortunate to end up in one of them. I wrote this piece to share my behind-the-scenes experience. Hope you find it interesting/useful.
Pretty sure he's talking about the cursor control.
On the note of referring: It would be nice if people could actually link to specific features and/or videos on your site so they could be talked about with references. Also, in different browsers (Opera 12 and Chrome on windows) your videos play and load slowly and don't seem to play all the way to the end.
Edit: Also on my (fairly big) monitor the video is zoomed in so much the top and bottom are cut off, and the text entry field isn't displayed at all. Seriously, you need some guy to test your website on various stuff and yell at you if it's broken, if you make a super-fancy one that eschews all the hard lessons learned in the 90s.
Lastly, props for including a warning that this is iphone exclusive. This may sound sarcastic, but i'm honestly glad when ios developers let everyone else know that they don't need to waste time investigating and/or looking forward to a product.
That was actually the original idea. To use math questions as an alarm style but we opted to go with the Shake to wake option to get people moving in the morning. Plus it's more tactile and goes well with the other alarm styles of slapping the phone to snooze and flipping the phone over to turn off alarms.
I couldn't disagree with this more. It really depends on the product and market!
IF you know people will want your product. OR are going after a mass market with a better X OR need to get up the App Store charts (hit based apps)? THEN aim for a huge hard-launch. A big product launch in this case is pretty much mandatory.
IF you are not sure people will want it OR are searching for product/market fit THEN defer launch.
Always launch! Depending on the product/market sometimes you go big other times you fly low with a soft-launch.
Following this formula might get you a post or two but are those reviews going to get you up the charts? Nope, not at all.
- If your goal is impact and reach...you should be analyzing the traffic of the blogs you're contacting. A lot of those sites probably only have a few hundred readers. A review on Gizmodo & TUAW would probably be 10x more effective than mentions on all of those sites.
- We sometimes tend to forget that the R in PR stands relations. So build those relationships don't just spam.
- Get to know bloggers (do your research) and get them to know you well before you go pitching (add value, send them tips, get to know them on twitter and IRL)
- Intros are also very helpful. Have a friend who got a review on insert blog name? Ask him to make an intro since he's established himself as someone who's made something newsworthy.
PR is kind of like trying to get a job. You could blast out 50+ generic resumes + cover letters and hope someone calls. Or you could do your homework, choose the top 3 companies you really want to join, get intros and do something remarkable to get noticed.
Thanks for the reply! It's true that these reviews might not help immensely to get us up in the charts, but they have worked for us in the past imo. We've had some of our most loyal users coming from those review sites so we're currently happy to stick with that list as our initial list to use.
I agree 110% on building relationships and finding well-known bloggers to write about your post as well as reviews on Gizmodo or TUAW being worth 10x more traffic on the list currently provided. You might've missed the last part where I mention that the list is incomplete though because we usually do end up delivering a better pitch to the mentioned top level tech news sites after a week or two.
From just our experience, we've found that doing a blast of 50+ generic "resumes, cover letters" AND posts by the top companies is a perfect combination. Not to mention, it really doesn't hurt to post to the 50+ sites either way.
Sometimes you have to work your way up, though. Big guys are more likely to cover something a lot of little guys have picked up, than someone who has gotten no press at all. And once you have the big bloggers you have a shot at the editorials on the really big names. Then you can say you were in the big names, and have a shot at real articles and TV...
