3 Ideas for Your Web Presence from Pokémon Go

Pokémon Go is a new app from Nintendo that is taking the U.S. by storm. In just a few days, Pokémon Go has almost as many active users as Twitter. Our friends are talking about it. The news is covering it. It even dominated the first few minutes of our morning meeting. So the PINT team thought we’d share some interesting ideas the game can inspire for developing a web presence.

1. Talk to People

Pokémon Go encourages users to get out of their houses and look for virtual Pokémon in the real world. A funny thing happened when people got off their couches. They started talking to other people!

This encourages us to recommend ways to talk with users in more of our projects. Our friends at ZingChart have seen their engagement rise since trying on-site web chat.

There are a few options for this, such as:

• Olark
• Zopim/Zendesk
• Intercom

2. Crowds are Powerful

In Pokémon Go, there is a concept of gyms. In real life, gyms are public spaces, like parks. Here, you can meet up with your friends and benefit from your associations.

In the web world, we can use this concept as well. We have to leverage our friends when building an audience for a new product. And the companies we help when developing their web presence must do the same.

• We can use our associations and memberships for link building.
• We can ask friends and colleagues to share and provide feedback on content.
• We can entice our visitors to leave customer reviews and other useful crowd-based content.
• We can collaborate with more experienced users (like the PINT, Inc. team)😉

3. Use Your Camera

The camera is an essential part of Pokémon Go. In the game, you must use your cell phone camera as you walk around in order to spot the Pokémon in the real world. So too should we make the camera an essential part of our online presence.

We’ve known for a while that social posts with images get more “engagement.” This comes in the form of likes, comments, and shares. But there are also some other ways to use our own cameras and get users to snap photos to increase engagement.

• Bauble Bar and West Elm have capitalized on photos their users tag and upload.  They’ve leveraged this content  to help sell their products and grow their social followings. They’ve made it easy for users to upload their own photos on product pages, or tag them via Instagram so visitors can see the items “in the real world.”
  
  This increases the company hashtags on social. Plus, it gives loyal customers a fun shout out for using the products.

• Media outlets, celebrities, and Chewbacca Mom have all found big followings from live video on Facebook. Why not give your followers the live scoop on something? – A fun “unboxing” of new product

• The exciting reveal of a new project

• Some other exclusive glimpse
  We tried it just for fun here at PINT, too.
  

• One website application for users on their phones is to auto-fill eCommerce forms. If you find users are dropping out of your funnel when it comes to the checkout process, this option might be of interest. This new browser feature allows developers let users to snap a photo of their credit card to be entered into a checkout form. This camera feature would replace entering it manually.

Pokémon Go Ideas: Week 1

These are just a few initial ideas we’ve had since the game launched. Have other ideas come to mind for you? Share them with us in the comments. We’d love to know what others might think.