Tampa Paper Thinks iPhones A Form Of “Social Media”?

I hate news papers, almost with a passion. But I subscribe to the Tampa Bay Business Journal. I think the Business Journal is a great resource to the business community and also is a really interesting source of information.

But check this out… look at the front of the paper, and then look at their “STAY IN TOUCH” area to the top right.

The Tampa Bay Business Journal is smart by listing social media methods on how you can get information from them. They got the usual suspects… Twitter, Facebook, RSS, E-mail… but they also included the social media network iPhone. Wait… the iPhone is a social media network? That’s right, it’s not. The iPhone is a device, a platform… like Macintosh OSX or Windows 7. The reason why they put “iPhone” on there is because they have a mobile version that’s more or less designed for iPhones.

So do I think the Tampa Bay Business Journal should change this, or that this is an incorrect way to display “media forms”, such as Twitter, Facebook, ect? Na… I actually think this is a good idea. It’s actually surprising. It shows a slow change in the way we view devices and connectivity.

Since when do we see a particulate device listed in a way like this? We’re starting to get more and more used to moving out of our “PC” and more into different forms of how we get our information. I think of the Amazon Kindle as another example. Book publishers, retailers, etc are starting to list the “Kindle” as a method for how you can get a book. “Available in paperback, hardback, and Kindle”. That’s stupid, right? The “Kindle” is just a device and it accepts a certain eBook format… why not just say “eBook” and let that be known you most likely support the Kindle format? Or how about just say “eBook Readers”? Because… for one, they may not support all eBook reader devices, and frankly… they don’t care. They only care about the Amazon Kindle because that’s the device almost everyone uses if they have an eBook reader device. There’s ways to read eBooks on competing eBook reader devices, ways to read eBooks on your PC, laptop or netbook, apps so that you can read eBooks on your smartphones, including iPhones. But combine all those sources, and they don’t compare to the numbers using the Kindle to read eBooks. So they care about letting people know, first and foremost, that their book is available on the Kindle.

This is the effect popular, industry-shifting devices such as the iPhone and the Kindle are having. It’s really funny to see a particular device mentioned in the way iPhone or Kindles are… but this is the change that’s happening with our technical society.

One piece of recommendation to any businesses thinking about displaying something like this with their media, product, etc… listing one particularly popular platform or device may possibly alienate people who don’t use the device (iPhone vs. Android for example). My recommendation instead of listing “iPhone” would be to list something like “Mobile devices such as iPhones” or “eBook readers such as Kindle”, etc. That way, you don’t promise to support all devices, but also give hope to people to check out your product on their devices. In the Tampa Bay Business Journal’s case, instead of “iPhone” with a picture of an iPhone, I would have it say “Mobile” with a picture of an iPhone. iPhone users, their main target, would clearly know iPhones are supported, but it’s also not alienating to Android, Black Berry or Palm owners (whether or not they even have a mobile version for them).

Peace, JbB