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How do you create a mobile strategy?
Mobile technologies are driving personal brand interactions with customers, and providing compelling opportunities for relationship development with prospects.
Mobile is the 4th screen.
It’s always on and always with consumers in a very personal way. Beyond movies, television and the desktop web experience, the ubiquitous nature of Mobile all over the globe presents a huge opportunity to reach out to customers in a new and more personally relevant way. It is a technology that leapfrogs others, creating new opportunities where there were none before. For many people on the planet this not only constitutes their first telephone experience, but also their first personal computing experience. In the past year alone, the total number of smartphone subscribers increased 72% quarter-over-quarter, growing from 15 million subscribers in Q2 2008 to 26 million in Q2 2009.* This growth will far outstrip the number of web enabled computers.
The future of personal computing is in mobile.
With the advent of the iPad and other tablet systems, there is now a rush to develop distributed experiences that can make the same use of a vibrant, monetized ecosystem. Social networks now work to build connections manually, but mobile devices will soon automatically feed location and contact data to build a form of automatic relevance, ranking connections and providing a fascinating data channel to marketers.
These opportunities present the next horizon in marketing.
Today’s online customers want to take their experiences with them. It is not about creating a website that degrades to a mobile browser, but building a unique set of mobile principles that support this personal intimacy, and the unique use-cases that come with a personal device. Brands that can grasp this difference, and can develop meaningful relationships with individuals will excel in this new mobile age.
Remember when you got started on Facebook? There was that phase a few months into it where every high-school friend was suddenly back on your radar, whether or not there as any reason to have remembered them in the first place. Waves of old and new faces would wash up on the shore of your in-box. Some of us indiscriminately accepted all. Some others took more time to approve or maybe ignore some of the more hinky ones.
Social Networks right now are merely dumps of nearly infinite connections, powered by XML and RSS. If the robot even thinks there’s a connection, it is programmed to go ahead and make it, hoping that you, the human, will sort it out later. This works for the most part, but it also creates a flat landscape where there is no intelligence save your own driving how those connections work. Making and breaking connections is a manual process, sometimes leading to potentially awkward un-friending – a scenario that was hard to imagine 5 years ago outside of Junior High.
What about relevance? Do you think your Mother in Law really wants to hear your latest Tweet about long-form depreciation from that conference? Do your work friends want to see pics of your 5-year-old’s birthday cake? Some might, but handling that kind of relevance is a manual task, using lists, accounts or other means to fight the heavy hand of “connectedness” so prevalent today. Its all so meta that it makes your head hurt.
Think about this present state as a plane in space, flat, with connections among people on the surface being only poorly managed manually, if at all.
Now, the next phase is coming, and part of me loves it- and part doesn’t.
Relevance:
What if Facebook and all social networks had the ability to know how relevant various connections are to you, and why? What if Flickr knew to prioritize photos from members of your family as you browse? What about that super important job lead you met last week? Don’t you want to see EVERY tweet that guy posts? Right now it might not know your mother’s connection to you, or that you want to avoid that one dude from the fraternity- ‘cause of that thing.. You know… That one.
At the most recent Social Fresh Portland conference, I had my eyes opened to this new dimension to the social space. Relevance is in the air, as various speakers express their take on how this new data will change everything. What’s coming is real relevance, driven by real data. It’s becoming possible to track and log connections, and then make data-driven judgments about relevance. High-school friends that you only “friend” once will drop to the edges, and tweets from constant companions, co-workers and family members will drift to the center of your attention-span. This will be done in part through the data-gathering ability of near-field RFID devices to help us make, and log connections. This means the flat plane of Facebook will become peaky, with hills and valleys of relevance.
The most vibrant speaker, Peter Shankman (@skydiver) spoke for over an hour nearly extemporaneously on the coming 24-36 months in this space. He also handed out a few Poken Wikipedia as trinkets. These look like goofy USB drives, but they contain this near-field technology. Just a tap tow pokens together and we share contact data. If we do this more than a few times, the system can really begin to learn and gather real data about how we connect as individuals. Yes Poken are a bit crude, and they look silly, but they mark a new step in making a relevant social space out of a mass of otherwise undifferentiated XML connections. Future developments of this concept might have cel phones making these connections automatically. In retail, supermarkets will be able to log our entry, and as we walk out with a bag of goods, send us the bill to be settled via PayPal. (Of course, they’ll know everything you bought, and that you lingered by the ice cream for longer than average…) We won’t have to tweet about it anymore.
Take a minute and consider this new space. With the more complex, machine derived data… Will it be a good thing that the virtual social world we inhabit be like the inner space of our mind? It will get that way as it watches us connect long enough.
When was the last time:
• you were truly engaged, interested, and even fascinated by a discussion?
• you left a meeting energized and actually thrilled about an exchange of ideas?
• you learned something new, about the world or yourself?
• you actually listened to someone else, and thought about what was being shared before taking any action?
I would venture to guess that its been a very long time… if perhaps never for many of us.
How often to we cringe to see two talking heads spouting their own agendas at each other while their actual dialog is nonexistent? How much time have we wasted in “meetings” and “Webinars” when we don’t even hear what is being said? We often sit there with our laptops open, paying only half-attention as a voice drones on somewhere in the nether regions of our consciousness. Is that time well-spent?
Enter “Notes on Dialogue” by Stringfellow Barr, former President of Saint John’s College, which is best known for its unusual curriculum, the Great Books Program, based on discussion of works from the Western philosophic, scientific and literary canon. Students at the college are responsible for their own education. Tutors are there only to guide, cajole and redirect as necessary. There are no “lectures” but the main process of learning takes place in a seminar format, that relies on discussion as outlined below.
“Notes on Dialogue” is a short treatise that lays out the groundwork for Seminar behavior at the college, and is a shining example of true education at its best. It provides profound support for the group, the individual, and the collective consciousness that can be developed through mutual respect and consideration. I submit here that the guidelines presented within this document are well worth considering in professional settings in addition to this academic environment. The true sharing of ideas and of valuable collaboration are dependent on how close we can get to this ideal.
I strongly suggest you read the entire document, but to whet your appetite, here are a few digested guidelines from the document.
• Brevity stimulates dialectic – the effort to be too complete is often self-defeating.
• The imaginative and the unexpected are frequent ingredients of Socrates’ style, and Irony can go farther in making a point than long-winded explanations.
• Interrupting a speaker is forbidden, but a quick question can help redirect conversation
• The will of “self insistence” gives way to the will to learn over time.
• In dialectic, “participational democracy” consists in everyone listening intently; it does not consist in “equal time”. (for speaking)
• It does not matter who’s mouth gets used by the dialectical process, provided all are listening intently.
• The name of the game is not instructing one’s fellows, or even persuading them, but thinking with them and trusting the argument to lead to understanding.
• When free minds seek together for greater understanding, they tend to move, as the mind of Socrates so characteristically moved – with playfulness and a sense of the comic.
• The truly relevant jest is never out of order so long as we can pursue our dialogue with high seriousness and with relevant playfulness.
This is a reprint of a blog post I put up at work:
Everyone is talking Social Media, but what about companies with a more traditional profile? What are the true ramifications of web 2.0 technologies and modes of thinking to “traditional” clients? What are the avenues for innovation? What opportunities exist using the social web, and web 2.0 technologies this year?
TNG built a presentation that outlines some of the major themes that come up as part of a Web 2.0 discussion, which became a discussion of opportunity.
Section 1: Modes of Social Interaction Over Time
The Village:
In the early stages of culture, the village market was the focus of trade and social interaction. The market was an open system, guided by culture, and constrained geographically. Face to face interaction required a high degree of accountability, and the quality of a product was directly associated with a producer. There was a high degree of market visibility, as everything could be seen across the market space. A new caravan entering with news or products would have an effect on price and on the social activity within the space.
The Messenger:
As technology for travel increased (navigation, ship building etc.) the market for information and trade becomes less geographically constrained. Its possible to interact with people that one doesn’t know, through the messenger. Infrastructure for doing this trade becomes held by fewer parties, and the kind of market awareness in the Village becomes impossible, as geography strains the boundaries of communication. There is a high degree of trust necessary, as one might wait a year to get information or value back from certain locations.
The Producer:
The Industrial age brought a new form of information sharing, as the ability to broadcast messages and value became industrialized. The infrastructure to broadcast is concentrated in the hands of a few, and information and value travels one way, from the producer, to a mass of consumers. Brand became abstracted from value to help consumers distinguish among competing ideas and products. The producers have little contact with consumers: (Henry Ford didn’t personally know most of the people who bought his cars, nor did Hearst know who read his papers)
The Aggregator:
The Internet begins to influence mass communication, and ideas and information begin to be aggregated. 24 hour network news, portal websites all begin to repeat ideas instead of generate original ones. The infrastructure to aggregate is still held by a few, but with greatly increased sharing and commenting by consumers, these media outlets begin to respond to, and cater to user-generated opinions. Economics drive production overseas, and aggregators like WalMart bring vast power to the marketplace, influencing product development and price points.
The Integrated Marketplace:
We reach a point in the present where the influence of the web has arguably outstripped mass media. Traditional media outlets are searching for viable business models, as consumers and producers become one in the same. Blogs, Twitter, self-publishing of books and media all compete for attention. We trade online, sending each other value via PayPal, and Etsy.com has made producers of us all.
We have come full circle, as the model is identical to the Village, except for the geographical constraints.
Aberration?
Looking at this model, it becomes possible to pose the questions:
- Was the industrial age of communication an aberration?
- Did the advent of technology for distribution, making newspapers and broadcast the norm, distort the communication landscape for a period of time?
- Are we back to a new “normal”?
- What does the future hold for companies who are in the business of manufacturing and distribution of ideas and objects?
Section 2: Opportunities in Web 2.0
Opportunities abound within the web 2.0 environment for those who are willing to study and extract the basic principles that Web 2.0 supports. The second section of the presentation is an investigation into these concepts, and some case studies, looking into how groups have leveraged these principles to drive business value and monetization.
Web 2.0 is the nickname for a collection of technologies and thought processes that support these major aspects of interaction:
- The web as a platform for
- delivery of business functionality
- development
- internal workflow and logistics
- monetization
- User-participation
- Community
- Syndication
- Collaboration
- Sharing/Mashups
- Flexibility: Anytime/Anywhere
- Interoperability
- Portability
- Rich Media Applications
We round out the presentation with some high-level studies of notable business models within the industry:
Case Studies:
- Amazon vs Netflix – evolving business categories and infrastructure as a profit model
- The iPhone – a rich ecosystem for user experience and monetization
- YouTube vs Hulu – we’re still doing it wrong: the broadcast model
- Google AdWords, iTunes and AppStore – revolutionary on-demand delivery platforms for commerce
–Tom Bennett @tom_bennett is a 20 year Digital Marketing Veteran working as a Digital Strategist at The New Group, a Portland OR based Digital Marketing Agency. More on Tom
Social Media: Is the time spent doing it for the benefit of your company, or for yourself? This is on everyone’s mind, from the recent Social Media Club PDX meeting, to this Ad Age article by David Armano.
The furious reaction on both sides indicates that it is a sore topic for some. The conflict between self and company indicates that our economy is undergoing a change. The “industrial” society and the social contract indicates that when punched in on the clock, we are part of a company. We are supposed to function as a gear in the overall system. Though a glacial shift is happening, as the industrial age is giving way to the social age. It indicates that we as people have input, and function individually, and as part of organizations. There is much more of this to come, as we consider new ways of organizing that aren’t necessarily part of a company, but as ad-hoc groups of individuals.
I had a talk with Kelly Feller last night about this, and how Intel chooses to handle it. She takes the view that person and company is integrated, and she accepts people as individuals warts and all. Social media is about relationships, and we have relationships with people. The other end of it is that we do have to think about what we share, as there is such a thing as oversharing. But for me that is the same for all social interactions.
We don’t just blurt out everything we think. -or should we?
I was having a very interesting conversation with my friend JeanAnn- one of those where we both had more things to say than could come out in normal conversation… like fast ping-pong, watching those Chinese guys go crazy, hardly even using the table at all.
We were talking about advertising and marketing. Who isn’t nowadays? Even my neighbor Dan wants to stand in my driveway and talk about advertising and marketing, as if we’re all trying to guess the outcome of March Madness.
Today is different than before, but how? What WAS advertising? Traditional, not exactly… Tactical… kinda… Offline, yes, but the new religion still can be offline too… We kept going back and forth with it, until I held up two drink coasters… Slapping one down on the table top: THIS one is the New advertising, and THIS one is… is… FRANK – slap. It all came to a halt, as soon as we had a name.
What do we see when we look at Frank? Frank is P.T. Barnum, Darin Stevens, The Subservient Chicken, and Don Draper. It’s all top-down, “You Shall Love This because we said so” mentality- it has a prescriptive feel to it. “We’ll tell you what to think… ” Every cog and gear needs to function for the greater system to work. It’s Fritz Laing’s Metropolis. Consumers have a role, but it is to CONSUME, in the downward flow of ideas.
Is it that simple? A one-way flow of ideas is so 2006, man.
The fact that we struggle with it points to what a large shift it is. Is it possible to comprehend when your glacier is moving? What goes through the mind of a penguin when the ground shakes?
It seems that Frank’s got some news coming. If only we could get clients to let go of that old fashioned mentality. What’s it going to take?
I have started taking orders for the Porsche VAS. Check it out here
It’s such a relief to me that we have a President-Elect who actually can articulate thoughts in English, and is willing to share information with us directly, speaking to us as humans. I am not sure I agree with everything he says, (bailouts) but at least he is acting like a leader. What a difference from the last 8 years.
Watch the Obama video here
We start actual performances Friday November 7, 2008. We have had all the stagings, rehearsals, and dress-rehearsals we’re going to get, so its go-time on Friday.
 I am the second on the right... see me?  This was the concept sketch for the Keller The Keller Auditorium in Portland was a very old theater, built around the turn of the century, and word has it that it was subject to a massive renovation in the mid 60s. This was more than the theater, but involved the surrounding streets as well. Market street got a level change, and the theater itself was pushed backwards across much of Second Avenue. If you observe the neighborhood outside, you can see it is part of a complex of buildings that were built at similar times, and there is a very large fountain complex as well across the street. The entire neighborhood to the South has that “urban renewal” feel to it, with planned park walks, 60′s era high-rise apartment blocks etc. Its actually a bit of a lonely place. (60′s vintage urban renewal always seems to create alienating spaces – parks that no one likes, with too much over-designed concrete etc… but that’s another story) Local word has it that whole ethnic neighborhoods in that area fell to the bulldozer and city planners back then.
All of this shows in the fabric of the Keller. The audience spaces are showing a little threadbare, and the lobby is a mess, with not enough room for people during intermission, and always a line at either of the two bathrooms…Now I know what women are always complaining about at ball games…
Backstage, the concrete and brick walls of the hidden staircases and back rooms tell a story of many re-fittings. There are concrete castings from the original building that show the wood grain of the original fir forms. There are sections of random bricks, cinder blocks an steel re-enforcing rods, all stitching the place together like a very old pair of jeans. Every surface is the same color of off-white. The staircases are narrow and utilitarian, and wind up 5 stories, each level having a specific role for our production. Its’ all neat and orderly, but with a confining comfort.
A couple of months ago, my wife put a challenge in front of me: She gets emails about acting opportunities around town, and the Portland Opera was looking for Supernumeraries (Supers) for their upcoming production of Fidelio.
“What’s a Super again?” Apparently Supers are the moving human scenery in the background, that make up the crowd scenes, or are somehow used to enhance the show. We had been to several seasons of operas, so I had often wondered who all those people were… as in Norma, or Turandot… what fun it seemed to wear the great costumes and gesture and march about.
How bad could that be? So we signed up, and anticipated the coming rehearsals (which was to me a grueling schedule of weekday and weekend evenings coming up. (They even scheduled rehearsal on Halloween for god’s sake…
A minute for the plot first… Fidelio is Beethoven’s only opera, which takes place in a Spanish prison. Essentially Florestan is held prisoner, and he has become “inconvenient” for the Prison master Pizarro, and he must be killed. Florestan has a loving wife, Leonora, who takes on the role of a boy, “Fidelio” (Don’t they always in these things?) to get a job at the prison, to be close to Florestan, and of course to change the course of history. This allows the usual mixups (The daughter of Rocco (second in command) falls in love with Fidelio, etc. Jailarity ensues.. and all ends well eventually…
First hitch. It turns out that the male role that they slated me for was a prisoner. Cool I thought… bunch of guys singing.. I can do that… AND, well, I need to be prepared to strip to my boxers on stage and be in chains as I enter the prison… so I guess all of PDX will get to see me as I appear at the doctor’s office..
So with my inner-exhibitionist anticipation, we started rehearsals.
I have so much to say about this experience, I am going to try to break it up into concepts, and write what I can about each. It so far has been an extraordinary experience, and I can’t wait to share. I will take pictures as I can, but I suspect it will be difficult as we are busy back stage, and there is a lot of structure to what we can and can’t do. I will keep you posted.
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