Customer journey: ways to share and self-promote materials

[brampitoyo]

After a piece of review/writing/video/audio is created, a contributor wants to promote it and share it with the world:

• We’ve thought of using the share button to send a link to the material via email, Facebook post, tweet, etc.
• We’ve thought of allowing materials to be embedded
• What else?

[brampitoyo]

• Indirect sharing: asks other users in the Marketplace to share or upvote. Especially helpful when the work is a collaboration of various members in the community (every collaborator would know when it’s published and ready to share). But it can be used by individuals, too.

[pwalm]

I'm kind of afraid of share buttons on the whole, as they increase page load and are rarely used: http://ia.net/blog/sweep-the-sleaze/ Maybe once the user creates some kind of content, they get a success notification with an option to share. That way it only comes up once, and on a per user basis.

[mhanratty]

Sharing also has a lot of issues for us of Firefox OS (issues with app switching).

Here's another idea: send an email when a user creates a piece of content and have a link they can add to Facebook, Twitter, etc.

[brampitoyo]

Great point!

The only problem is, Marketplace doesn’t have a visible address bar when run as a Firefox OS app. So even when user wants to share, finding the link to share it is impossible.

Email is one good way to do it. GitHub has something interesting, too. They’d display the URL in a textbox and have a button to copy it to the clipboard.

Can we do the same for Firefox OS? Have a button that will copy the URL to the clipboard? That’s the first problem to solve.

The next problem to solve is the URL itself. If I’m a Firefox OS user who gets this shared link, it will open Marketplace in the browser rather than in the app. How can we make it so that the link will launch Marketplace app?

One possible idea is to use a custom URL scheme – read tutorial. User will get a URL that looks like marketplace://openwapp. When selected, the URL will link to https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/openwapp in the Marketplace app (not the browser).

I think this is getting a little too bogged down in detail, but I thought I’d post it here anyway because it’s a limitation we’d have to be aware of.