Wisdom.Applied Wednesday: More than just a Popular Picture App

Today’s market is dominated by mobile devices and mobile apps: customers cruise Instagram while shopping for milk and butter; the bored peruse their second-cousin-once-removed’s trip to Florida; athletes plan their big weekend bike trip on Google Maps. Since July 2008, when Apple’s App Store for iOS opened, mobile apps have consumed individuals, companies, brands, and more… including relationships!

Just a few months ago, for example, two college students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison went viral—all thanks to Snapchat. While many use the popular app to send pictures to friends, others have used it to, well, find love!

When “Mystery Girl” posted a video of herself via Snapchat to the campus feed, “Viking’s Fan” eagerly responded back, positing a video of himself in the hopes that she would see it. The two expressed mutual interest in each other on the campus feed and even publically announced plans to meet in-person later that night. Because the two strangers were posting to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Snapchat feed, all 43,000 of their closest UW-peers and other Madison townies were able to follow along to their soon-to-be love story… including myself.

Snapchat users cheered the two along, helping them meet up later that night by posting videos to the feed that prompted their locations. As a result, Mystery Girl and Vikings Fan became famous on campus, with people stopping to take pictures of them anywhere they went. The story caught massive amounts of attention across the world, too: magazines, including Seventeen Magazine, conducted lengthy interviews, celebrities, including Ashley Tisdale, retweeted the viral video, and Steve Harvey himself even took the two on a televised “date.”

Apps, in their broadest sense, make things possible. They not only allow the lonely to find love, but allow the unfamiliar to familiarize themselves in new cities, allow music lovers to always have their tunes on-the-go, enable news-junkies to receive live updates from popular news channels, and more. With technology advancing at a rapid pace, apps have made it easy to gain information and stay connected—all at the touch of your fingertips.

For our customers, we recommend creating an app, if applicable. Doing so can further customer loyalty, increase visibility, enable easy access to important contact information, schedule appointments, receive notifications of all kinds, and most importantly, further engagement with consumers.

Elizabeth is a Junior Executive Intern at SJG. She earned her BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison this past May. Outside the office, she enjoys bike riding, listening to music, and hanging with friends and family.