iPad: The Greatest Gift You’ll Ever Give a Client
Let me start by saying that I really don’t plan on getting an iPad for home. We own every other class of Apple product and it doesn’t do enough anything to justify the cost.
Having said that, as a digital agency and brand strategist, I believe that anyone who wants to keep a client forever should take a big page from Apple and leverage this incredible delivery network to revolutionize B2B communications.
iPad as a corporate holiday “gift”
In a lot of large brands, you can’t give people holiday gifts. Fair enough. But if you’re giving them a business tool to make your working relationship more efficient (and that tool happens to be able to sync to your home movies and iPod and you can take it home with you and impress the heck out of your kids), it’s not a gift.
A few months back, Kevin Hoffman and his Happy Cog crüe presented at PhillyCHI about how important it was to spend social time with client contacts because it helps the inevitable difficult conversations through the course of the relationship. He couldn’t be more right. Providing the people you work with iPads means creating a social object in your relationship. At just under $1000 a pop, it’s incredible ROI.
Getting your client to focus
Corporate America is so rife with broken communication infrastructure it hurts everywhere. Most people articulate that as being too busy. What makes that busyness is working off a single monitor and a blackberry and the way Outlook or Notes forces us to look at email. These inefficiencies are very tiny, but together can cripple the effectiveness of an organization, let alone a client relationship.
Having a single extra device (monitor) that is only showing the information about that work is a powerful efficiency tool you simply can not underestimate. It makes your relationship tangible as an Apple product.
The relationship app
People are always focused on apps that can go viral and reach large percentages of a big, affluent audience. But what about apps that are only designed for a small group of really important people that perform the same tasks over and over again?
Right now, communicating with clients and getting them to review and approve anything is a patchworky slough of a mess. How many man-hours are devoted to uSendIt and FTP servers and password-protected videos and missed milestones? In more than a few cases, clients just don’t have the right tool to effectively view and/or evaluate a large swath of the assets in a campaign when they need to.
Creating an iPad app solves many, if not all of these problems, and then improves on them by giving clients a portable way to see what they need to, wherever they are, and in the manner in which it’s intended. Even if it’s just an app that lets clients quickly see video in HD with the correct audio, you’ll make that cost back in the first month.
All the places an iPad can help – one API at a time
The great thing about developing on the Apple structure is that they’ve already tackled the hardest parts and boiled them down into programming plugins (do not try this at home). Version control? Done. APIs for video, contacts, email, calendars, push notifications? Done. Suport for Office documents? Done.
The entire structure is ready. You already have many of the pieces from a technical and content perspective. You just need to put it together and design the interaction around them (ha, just). Of course it will take time and money, but the developer kit for the iPad is already released. You are at the stage where starting now gives you plenty of time to develop and test on iPhones or iPod touches and then ship a tool your client will never know how they got along without.
The gift that keeps on giving, until it doesn’t
No one says “I hate this job because the email client and distributed interfaces stink.” But what if you gave them a device with an application that made their lives easier and their work better? An app that can be disabled remotely for security (or late payment)? Or a cool, useful device that they can only bring into work if they’re working with you. It would be the B2B version of Nike+.
Go ahead. Mock it up in keynote, lay down the money, get an iPad and show this off as a prototype at your next new business pitch, and say that every key stakeholder would get one if they signed a retainer. What would it say about you before you even started your actual pitch?
What do you think? Continue the conversation in the comments below or on Twitter @mleis.
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