Category archive: Mobile

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Campaign against cruelty to customers: TextAmerica

Alan Moore and I like to promote the successes of companies as we move into the Connected Age. But in a radical transition as we are now, moving from the Networked Age to the Connected Age, there will be players who make mistakes. Some make fatal mistakes. Now TextAmerica seems to be on a collision course with disaster. The iceberg watchman of the Titanic has an alarming announcement…

"Campaign against cruelty to customers: TextAmerica" continued...

Thursday, May 25, 2006

One year of Communities Dominate Brands

Alan Moore and Tomi Ahonen, both founding members of the Engagement Alliance’s advisory board, are today celebrating the one year anniversary of their blog, Communities Dominate Brands. It was originally established as the online counterpart to their critically acclaimed book of the same name, but - as Tomi explains - has come to mean so much more to them.

A year ago we thought that we should try to get one or two postings per week to make sure this site remains active. We didn’t know how important this site would become to us, professionally and personally, as a vehicle for expressing our passion to a changing media, technology, and to economic and social worlds.

Congratulations, guys, on a significant milestone for an information-rich, expertise blog. Next time we meet up, the shandies are on me! 

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Mobile marketing: The emergency you may be ignoring

A new study by Harris Interactive and Enpocket, about UK young adult behaviour with mobile phones reveals some alarming changes in behaviour that should wake up brand managers. The study was reported in the Digital Bulletin of the Brand Republic.

The study reveals that 60% of UK young adults between ages of 18-34 have consumed content on their mobile phones in the past 3 months - but much more significantly for anyone working in advertising, branding and marketing communications: 57% of British young adults have interacted with a brand using SMS text messaging on their phones....

For this age group - and MUCH MORE SO their younger sisters and brothers - the mobile phone is their absolute number one device. They are addicted to it, the mobile phone is a projection of their own persona and the lifeline to all of their friends (at all times), as we describe in our chapter on Generation-C for Community in our book. So forget the Playstation Portables, the iPods and laptops. TV? Its so last century!  You HAVE to talk to young people on the device that is their preference, the mobile phone.

But what is their favourite application on that phone? It is not voice. Voice is for us old geezers. Young people clearly prefer SMS text messaging. Even when they are kicked off the broadband internet connection at home, logging off their instant messengers, the kids take their mobile phones to bed and spend the next hour or two sending still more messages. Like the famous Belgian study of 2500 teenagers revealed, 20% of kids are awoken REGULARLY from sleep by their friends texting them at night.

So now we find out that in the UK in the under 34 year age group, over half are already familiar with interacting with brands using their favourite tool, the mobile phone and its absolute top favourite service: SMS. I bet the numbers would be dramatically higher if this latest survey was of the age group of 13-18 year olds.

So SOMEONE is already talking with your ideal target customers, using the preferred tool and method. Why are YOU not doing it? How much longer can you wait?

Like Alan and I have written in our book and we’ve blogged about so many times already - more people can be reached by SMS than by e-mail or instant messaging. More have mobile phones than have personal computers or TVs. More people have mobile phones than have credit cards or loyalty cards. It is the seventh mass media, and as much different from the web, as the internet was different from TV, or how much TV was different from magazines. How much longer can you dare to wait before you start to engage with your customers using the most personal of all mass media, the only always-on mass media, the always-carried mass media and the only mass media with a built-in payment mechanism?

Oh yeah, and the mobile phone can of course replicate all the attributes of the previous six mass media, including text, pictures, voice, moving images, and interactivity. Yes, the mobile phone can do everything each of the previous six mass media can do - but the mobile phone adds four critical elements that NONE of the previous six mass media can do today.

Isn’t it about time? When will you write your mobile marketing strategy? When will you start to engage your customers with SMS? Oh, and should you feel you’d like a bit of guidance, Alan and I will love to come and help you along. 

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Digital TV broadcasts to mobile arrive in Europe

Nine months after the first digital TV broadcasts to mobile phones started in Korea, now Three/Hutchison, the 3G mobile operator in Italy, has started the full broadcasts on the DVB-H technology. The story was reported by our friends at the3GPortal on Friday.

Initially Three/Hutchison do not offer the full channel selection, and have only 500 of the new handsets (which include the “set-top box” digital tuner built into the 3G mobile phone) to get the first customers viewing. But Hutchison promises to have all major Italian broadcast channels on by June, and aim to sign up a million 3G TV viewers by end of this year.

For those who are now remarkably confused (didn’t we have TV viewing on our 3G phones already?), this is a new technology and new type of viewing. Previously on mobile phones you could either watch video clips (download a clip, then watch it) or select a “streaming service” - which would at times cut out and be fuzzy etc. But now following the concept from Korea, the Italian mobile operator has launched handsets which have full 3G telecoms and data capacity - AND a separate digital tuner. The TV signals will be broadcast over the airwaves. This allows a much better - and more cost-effective TV viewing experience on the mobile phone (or other viewing device, such as the flat panel viewer on a backseat of an automobile etc). Of course it means that anyone offering this type of service also needs to own a TV broadcasting license, as Three/Hutchison does in Italy.

Again another variant on the “Y of Convergence” that Alan Moore and I talk about in our book, of how telecoms, the internet and media are merging.

Friday, April 28, 2006

How to refuse profitable business, part X: Truly bad telecoms marketing

I wrote a column in the 3GPortal about an extremely bad marketing example from the UK, with one of my mobile phone accounts with one of the UK mobile operators. I didn’t mention the operator, that would be unfair, as these kinds of mistakes are commonplace all throughout the mobile operator community. But the story is illustrative of how bad telecoms marketing is still today in 2006 in even such a modern and competitive market as the UK.

Without getting to the specifics of the telecoms profits, customer care info, etc details that are in the column (which is written obviously for telecoms professionals), let me keep it on a more general level here to summarize the story.

"How to refuse profitable business, part X: Truly bad telecoms marketing" continued...