In our recent post, we highlighted our “secret sauce” of the features and feeds in the News tab of our mobile app.

Maybe we’re hungry around here, but this post is focused on ideas to add in some extra flavor to your News tab through the creative use of features.

For starters, we offer five types of features. How you use them is only limited to your imagination:

(1) Links: Direct users to any external website such as benefits or giving pages, class notes, spirit store, event calendar, directory or an important YouTube video.

(2) Feedback forms: Request user-specific feedback such as address updates, RSVPs, or pledges.

(3) Polls: Request and share anonymous feedback such as demographic information, alumni event planning, or app feedback.

(4) Photos: Post a series of photos to promote an event, highlight an achievement, or show campus happenings.

(5) Emails: Give users a simple way to e-mail someone other than the administrator of the app, for services such as resume review, transcript request, or class notes submission.

Be creative! Below are some examples from our wonderful customers:

Poll Feature: Saint Joseph's Demographic Poll

Link Feature: NC State's link to a Students Today Alumni Tomorrow video.

For a creative example of a feedback form, read our post on LaSalle University’s Scavenger Hunt.

Think of features as spices. Sprinkle them into your News feed to keep app users abreast of alumni events and resources, and garner their feedback in return.

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Two blocks from my house is a big open field. My kids like to run in it, neighborhood dogs like to fertilize it – in short, it is generally enjoyed by everyone around us.

The other day, it turned vibrantly purple.  Soon, perfectly rational adults were staging pet photo shoots and roving bands of little girls were gathering weedy bouquets. In short, something good got even better.

Our customers customize the outside and inside cover of our book and give it as a thoughtful gift. Graduates love our content and our buyers love the branding.

So how do you make it even better?

Add 8 pages of custom content to the front of the book. It’s not quite a field of wildflowers, but the 8-page insert is a great way to share a lot of specific information about your institution.

We love to read the creative ways our customers use their insert:

Keeping In Touch: Showcase the ways your alumni or members can stay connected.

Benefits: Share details of your alumni benefits program.

Career Services: Let your alumni or members know about career services you offer.

Our 8-page insert is an inexpensive way to include substantial information about your institution. We can even print color pages (at a slightly higher cost) if your information looks better nestled against something bright, like say a field of purple wildflowers.

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The Colonel has a secret recipe. Coca-Cola locks up their secret formula in a vault. Our app has its own secret sauce: our feeds and features.

Feeds

Feeds contain the stories told via your social media (Facebook, Flicker, YouTube, RSS, etc). The posts appear chronologically (most recent at the top), so if you include a lot of feeds, your app always has something fresh.

Since users want news that is both fresh and relevant to them, they select feeds important to them (e.g. engineering and football). Your alumni return for news they want to read.

Add as many feeds as possible (newspapers, clubs, blogs, and so on). With lots of feeds, you let users select niche interests from an institution they love.

Features

Think of features as “special messages” from your office which you want to get read or responded to.

Features can include address update forms, event RSVPS, links to your website, and videos promoting your next event.

Features appear every third item in your news feed and never disappear (users can’t turn them off and they never “roll down” your feed). When Bobby checks his news, he’ll see your features.

Our buyers add and delete as many features as they’d like, and prioritize them in any order. Update a feature and your app updates immediately.

We think the reason our secret sauce works is its simplicity. Users read news they love in one simple place. Schools get their messages (features) read.

So that’s our secret sauce. We think it’s better than a bucket of chicken and a medium-sized drink.

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Ten years ago, in the unfinished basement of our tiny Connecticut home, Jesse wrote the first edition of our flagship book, “life after school. explained.”

What I remember most about that time are the late nights sitting next to each other in that damp New England basement – Jesse endlessly editing and trying out new jokes, making me laugh out loud while I was trying to write papers. It was our first year of marriage, my first year of graduate school, his first entrepreneurial venture.

The book was born out of a seminar series. In the beginning, schools would advertise free pizza to get their students to a taxes seminar. Jesse quickly learned that if you don’t make HMOs and 401(k)s funny, people will smile, take their pizza and leave.

The book has had its high moments: when a 22-year-old Marist College grad was elected mayor of his town and credited his early success to our book in his inaugural speech. And we didn’t even know the guy.

Photo from an article in the Hartford Courant, 12/6/05

And, of course, there have been low moments: like when the warehouse storing books caught fire. We learned that books are made of wood.

Over the years, we’ve loved watching our creative process spark the creativity in our customer schools – from amazing cover designs to cover photo shoots.

With over half a million copies sold, the book is very much still a living document. Over the years we’ve improved the customization options, revised pop culture references (Britney Spears out, Kim Kardashian in) and kept up with technology (Facebook didn’t exist, so neither did Facebook etiquette).

Most recently, we added chapters on Unemployment, Renters Insurance, and Travel Insurance. The book content is the foundation of our newest product – a mobile app called Crib Sheet.

A decade later, Jesse is still at his desk making edits to the book and I’ve joined him. We’ve traded in a damp New England basement for a humid Orlando office, and been joined by a local staff and a team working around the world to improve our products.

We hope you will give the updated book a read, and welcome your feedback.

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Mobile 101: This post is part of our educational series on mobile technology. If you are new to the smart phone/app arena, this series is a good place to start.

An apple pie without the cheese
is like a hug without a squeeze.

So, a mobile website without an app
is like a road not on the map.

In other words, your mobile website will get more use when combined with our native app, Crib Sheet.

Schools with great mobile websites often contact us because their sites are not getting enough traffic. Some problems:

– Discovery of mobile websites is difficult. Mobile websites are not listed in app stores. Native apps are.

– Return visits are clunky. To return to a mobile website, users have to remember and type in a URL address, or go through a messy process to bookmark it on their mobile browser. Native apps, on the other hand, are easily accessed via app icons that live on your phone.

Crib Sheet can serve as the missing link between your alumni and your mobile website with something we call “features.”

Features appear every third item in our news feed and can direct users back to any mobile website (or any website).

Link to a mobile website for online giving, class notes, alumni benefits, or your directory:

Since users enjoy returning to Crib Sheet to get updates on their alma mater’s football team, alumni events, or whatever, they’ll always see your features interspersed in their feed.

If your alumni are visiting your website from a mobile device, you need a mobile website. If you want more traffic, consider our app as a useful and complimentary “portal” to keep them coming back time and time again.

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Using social media posts to reach your alumni is a bit like shouting from a crowd in a moving train – your post is one among many and disappears quickly.

Take Facebook as an example: When viewed on an iPhone, an average user gets an initial view of 20 posts from their 130 friends. If your alumnus checks Facebook a few hours after your post, your train may already be in Topeka (or something).

To complicate matters, Facebook (by default) only shows posts from those friends or pages which it feels are most important to a user (“Top News”). To see ALL posts, a user has to change to the “Most Recent” feed.

So, how do you make yourself heard amid all the noise? Give your alumni our app, which provides a DEDICATED news feed for your institution. After you select which feeds to broadcast, your alumni and members read only YOUR news.

And users like the simplicity. Your app is an uncluttered place with fresh content from across your institution.

MSU's News Tab: Alumni News, Sports and More

Don’t get lost in the crowd – make the most of your social media with our app.

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Most attacks launched on a network can lead to crashing.

Deep space communication

Deep space communications is a network that allows users to communicate with remote locations. It works based on quantum mechanics, so it is not something you can replicate in our world.

The internet of things

For those of you who do not know what the internet of things is, I would like to elaborate on it. Internet of Things is an interface that every device connects with, allowing them to communicate with each other. Today, internet of things consists of many things such as:

Sensors (active and passive)

Software

Data storage

Vehicles (cars, airplanes, drones)

And so on

These devices are connected and share information. For example, car communicates with other cars and any objects attached to car. We are in the same boat with IT devices.

The main problem is that currently this technology has reached a new level, whereby you can expect to add at least 30 more devices into the Internet of things by 2018. This means that anyone with access to the internet has access to all sorts of data and intelligence. Check out this IP exchange services here that allow interconnection for businesses voice and data needs!

However, even if you were to connect all the Internet of Things to your computer, your computer would still be unable to keep up with all the data it would receive. This is because your computer is made to manage your network resources, which it would not be able to do in a situation where all devices share the same network, and that’s why they need protection for this, from systems as Fortinet, since there are issues like malware that affect your systems.

What if, however, we had the ability to connect our phone to the internet and this allowed it to receive all the information and data it would receive on its own? What if we did this through a quantum network? Then this would be a quantum internet, also known as the internet of quantum information, where everything would be able to communicate in real time, which could make the Internet of things a truly quantum-based internet.

There are several companies working towards this end; these include Google, Quantum Artificial Intelligence Labs, and JETstack. We can see how quantum computers might affect some of the applications mentioned above. For instance, this technology could help in facial recognition, where computers could detect if an individual is in front of a CCTV camera or is using a phone. It could also aid in AI, where computers could share information about objects without the need for programming.

But what about security?

The main concern here is that a quantum computer could be used for hacking purposes, as explained in detail in our section “Securing Your Data.”

I did some research and discovered that there have been some tests that compare quantum computers and classical computers. These tests showed that quantum computers could achieve similar speeds as a classical computer, however they were able to analyze data much faster.

This post is part of a series for our customers on easy ways to promote your app.

Searching for ways to promote your app? La Salle University recently used a wonderfully creative “scavenger hunt” to help promote their “crib sheet” app.

The goal

Get La Salle young alumni to download and explore the app.

The idea

Offer a drawing to win an iPad 2 to La Salle 2011 grads. To enter, they needed to download the app and fill out a “scavenger hunt” form (on questions about our life skills topic content) prior to graduation.

How they did it

La Salle promoted the scavenger hunt with e-mail blasts, flyers around campus and advertising at Senior events. Students were instructed to download the app and look for the “Scavenger Hunt” feedback form in their news feed.

Via the Dashboard, they added this Feature:

When users tapped on this Feature, they are taken to the feedback form they created for the scavenger hunt:

This form asked users to read through various topics to find answers (and hopefully learn a bit on credit, home buying, and more along the way).

Result

La Salle had over 50 feedback form responses, but more importantly their downloads grew to roughly the size of their graduating class.

Takeaway

Use events like graduation and homecoming to rally your alumni/members around a creative incentive to get and use your app.

If you don’t have the funds for a large prize, consider using smaller gift cards for local restaurants or tickets to an upcoming campus event.

Keep your feedback form to 3-5 questions, so the incentive matches the work required.

And most of all, like La Salle, keep those creative juices flowing on how to get the word out about your app!

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Mobile 101: This post is part of our educational series on mobile technology. If you are new to the smart phone/app arena, this series is a good place to start.

Last week I received this email:

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but I responded. Victor called me the next day.

He explained to me how his daughters “made him” get a smartphone. He figured out how to download apps and got excited when he found our “crib sheet” app from his alma mater.

Victor hadn’t been in contact with his school since he graduated in 1970, but reconnected with his frat house earlier that morning via the app. I call this “discovery”.

If you follow our blog, you’ve read my lovely wife’s series on best practices for promoting our app. When you promote, you get downloads from connections that already exist.

But what about the “Victors” of the world? When your app is in app stores, alumni find you. That’s powerful stuff.

How Discovery Happens

How do people get apps? In most cases, they search an app store:

Each type of phone has their own app store, but they work in much the same way. Search for a term and download an app.

When I first got my iPhone, the first thing I did was go into the App Store and search for “Duke,” because I’m a Dukie.

Based on feedback and statistics, “discovery” happens. Alumni are reconnecting by searching an app store for their alma mater.

In short, your alumni are out there looking for you.

And, as the case of “Victor” proves, they are not always the ones you’d expect.

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