Is your app ready for social media marketing?
By Peter Hanschke 
Every where you turn, there’s an article, blog piece or tweet expressing the importance of using social media to market your product or service. You get the feeling that if you do not embrace social media to market your product or engage with current and future customers, you’re doomed to failure. In principle, I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, but I question whether it’s a “must-do at all costs” kind of scenario. My worry is that businesses — new or established — launch head first into a social media plan without really thinking about whether the timing is right. I suspect in many cases that the timing is too early. In other words, is your product or service ready to handle the potential outcome from the social media cauldron?
To outline what I mean, I’ll use my experience writing and bringing my iPhone app, myFabWines, to market. On August 1, myFabWines was live in the iTunes App Store. Sales to date have been decent, and I have not done any real marketing other than creating a web site and talking to friends and family. During this time, I’ve had some suggestions about what the next version of the app should contain. Many of these requests are actually quite brilliant, others are rather run of the mill. Nonetheless, I realized that in order to satisfy a larger market — i.e. appeal to a wider audience — I need to implement some of these brilliant suggestions.
