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 09, 2006

More pizza phones

If you thought I was kidding when I wrote about the narrow-minded inutility of what I have dubbed the Pizza Phone, I was. At least that’s what I thought until I read this, from Danah Boyd at Many 2 Many:

The next step in social technologies is mobile. Duh. Yet, a set of factors have made innovation in this space near impossible. First, carriers want to control everything. They control what goes on a handset, how much you pay for it and who else you can communicate with. Next, you have hella diverse handsets. Even if you can put an application on a phone, there’s no standard. Developers have to make a bazillion different versions of an app. To make matters worse, installing on a phone sucks and most users don’t want to do it. Plus, to make their lives easier, developers often go for Java apps and web apps which are atrociously slow and painful. All around, it’s a terrible experience for innovators, designers and users.

The only question appears to be, would you like a Hawaiian pizza phone or pepperoni? The rest of Boyd’s post gets into an interesting analysis of where Helio went wrong in its thinking about MySpace.

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Quote of the day

I have never had one of these calls asking about the quality of this or that service which did not leave me seething with rage and hatred, and more negative about the service itself than I was before the call.

-Brian Micklethwait

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Social media does not serve up communities on silver platters

Terry Heaton is a media specialist whose background is in television, but who is entirely up to speed with social media and its implications. He writes of the case of YouTube, the user-contributed videos website that very quickly grew to six million daily users, and which now serves more than 35,000 videos per day:

[T]hose numbers have caught the attention of the mainstream, and we’re about to see clone after clone being created. Why? It’s the numbers. It’s like mass media scouts are scanning the horizon and shouting back to the tribe, “There! There’s the audience we’ve been losing.”

Meanwhile, there are reports that youTube is raising as much as $25 million in venture money. Why? It’s the numbers. Is youTube the new Amazon, the new eBay, or the new mySpace? This is a VERY tricky question, because with money comes old school rules, and if there ever was an anti-establishment site, it’s youTube. Remember that this site was built for user-contributed videos. The deep pockets that are drooling over it could give a rat’s ass about such. They want those numbers to present their OWN videos, and that’s a problem. The same users who made youTube “successful” could just as easily turn their allegiance elsewhere.

Terry laments the fact that so many companies are desperate to purchase communities developed by other entities, yet want nothing to do with exploration and experimentation of their own. Our quotation here earlier of Jeff Jarvis’s contention that you can’t own the community; the community owns the community is one that such companies would do well to heed. In a time where individuals online have not only asserted control but wield it with a growing certainty that it is their right (and it is), it is easier than ever to be faced with millions of turned backs. And no receipt can get you your money back on that kind of loss.

Cross-posted from What MySpace Means: Lessons for Every Brand

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

The Engagement Alliance's first event

It’s happening on June 21st here in London, and you are all invited. We’ve got fantastic speakers from - amongst others - Skype, the Guardian, and Hitwise coming along on the day to help people make sense of the MySpace phenomenon and what it means for their businesses. For all the details, check out the official website for What MySpace Means: Lessons for Every Brand.

I’m going to leave this post on top for a couple of days. If you’re not reading this site through RSS, please scroll down for updates. Thanks!