Cloud Communications And The Future of Marketing In The Post-PC World

Editor’s note: Dan Kaplan does Product Marketing for Twilio, which is hosting a conference on cloud communications in October. Follow him on Twitter @dankaplan.

If you are a marketer who has spent the last 10 years mastering the art of capturing and converting clients on the desktop web, the rapid rise of smartphones and the iPad might make you nervous.

You’ve built businesses on paid search, written essays about optimizing lead forms and studied the ever-changing subtleties of SEO. Using cookies that follow us around the web, you've turned display advertising into a performance medium. Nevertheless just as you were beginning to wrap your heads around the whole social thing, along come the iPhone, Android and the iPad and with them a whole new reality: the post-PC world.

The post-PC world is radically different from the world in which most marketers honed their skills. Here, horizontal keyword search is losing ground to vertical-specific apps like Yelp and Hipmunk and a stream of recommendations from Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and like as not Path. Along its frontiers, touch- and voice-driven interfaces write most of the laws. This landscape is unfriendly to lead forms. It rejects traditional tactics like SEM and SEO. In the post-PC world, the marketing methods of the last decade will be on their way out the window. Marketers and businesses that can’t adapt will be on their way out the door.

But post-PC consumers are not patient. When we want to engage with your business, we expect you to respond in an instant, on the communications channels we prefer to use. Responding to our emails in a few hours or days just ain't gonna cut it: depending on our demographics, we are either overloaded with email or hardly use email at all.

But we do consume nearly every text message that we receive. When we're in info-gathering, entertainment or transaction mode, we tap on links that seem enticing and follow push notifications into our favorite mobile apps. And if your business offers a frictionless way to contact you, many of us will even call.

Cloud communications democratizes telecom, making it easy for anyone with access to programming chops to create applications that historically required tons of expensive telecom hardware, big contracts with telecom carriers and a slew of esoteric telecom skills. Cloud communications abstracts these challenges away, making things like interactive voice response, automated outbound dialing, two-way SMS, text-to-speech and even mobile VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) as simple to implement as a few lines of code.

In practice, this means embedding SMS tools into your CRM, email software or whatever else you want to use. It means using call tracking to gather metrics on phone calls or sending voice and text messages to notify sales reps about new leads in real-time. It means creating “tap-to-call” capabilities that instantly connect smartphone or iPad users via VoIP to your sales or support agents with a tap on a link in a mobile app or an ad. And for these agents, it means taking calls straight from an iPad - not locked down in some office or call center, however anywhere that wireless internet can go.

Powerful API for phone services to make

Twilio offers developers a powerful API for phone services to make and receive phone calls, and send and receive text messages. Their product allows programmers to more easily integrate various communication methods into their software and programs. Twilio allows developers to use their existing web development skills, existing code, existing servers, existing databases and existing karma to solve these communication problems quickly and reliably. System is based on Asterisk.