Weber Shandwick Social Studies Blog

The 2011 MIMA (Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association) Summit was the best I’ve been to yet. It featured the hilarious Googler Avinash Kaushik as the morning keynote and the renowned Chris Anderson as the mid-day keynote, but what I want to talk about is a mobile-focused breakout session that was led by Jason Grigsby.

Jason unleashed a deluge of information right away, starting with how disruptive mobile technology has been. You’ve probably seen charts that depict the adoption rates of new technologies like washing machines, radio, TV, computers, microwaves and the like. It used to take decades for a new technology to reach ubiquity, but mobile has done it in just a few short years. Such an amazingly rapid ramp-up have left a lot of companies feeling overwhelmed.

This leads to puzzling or just incomplete mobile strategies. Jason used an example of a certain luxury goods brand: a year or so back this brand had a mobile app for iPhones that was pretty slick. The only problem was, if you went to their main wesbite on a mobile device, there was nothing there. Their website was still built in Flash which meant it was unusable for the vast majority of smartphone users. Even more puzzling, they didn’t have an HTML-based link to the mobile app that would have alleviated the problem. It seems as if one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. This is not a problem unique to the aforementioned luxury brand, it’s a symptom of a rapidly changing mobile landscape that is making even web geeks dizzy with its upheavals.

The problem with a new platform (several if you include Google’s Android Market and Apple’s App Store as distinct platforms) is that it’s a fundamental change, meaning a lot of layers on top of the old platform (desktop computing, in this case) have hooks into and dependencies upon the foundation, which causes problems when you try to shift things to the new platform. There are thousands of little quirks and abstractions that made sense within the mouse-and-keyboard paradigm that no longer make sense on touch-pad interfaces like those on smartphones and iPads. Touch-pads contain limitations, but they also open up new ways of doing things like the three-fingered swipe which has become the new “back” button.

Another side of things is technical and straightforward to implement, but costs precious time. One example is when you search for something in Google on your smartphone and when you click your chosen link you are taken to a mobile version of the site. Great, except that most of them tend to dump you on the homepage of the mobile site and ignore the fact that you were searching for a certain page deep within the site. Now you have to start your search over again. And their search feature might be crappy or nonexistent. The page may not even be mobile-accessible.

This is not a good experience for the mobile visitor and raises the question of whether we should even have mobile sites at all. Newer mobile browsers such as Mobile Safari and Opera Mini do a great job of rendering normal versions of the site as long as there’s no Flash. Jason didn’t offer many clues there, but I think so call M-dot sites will soon be a thing of the past since it’s very possible to build a site that gives a good experience to both desktop and mobile surfers simultaneously (Blackberry is a big exception here). Mobile sites are just extra work and if they aren’t going to be supported properly — with smart search redirection and accessible, non-Flash content — why bother?

Jason did say that research and his own experience (and mine) is that “people will do whatever they need to do on a mobile device, if they can.” Write long emails? Yep. Fill out huge forms? Check. Read long-form content? You bet. Watch whole TV shows and even movies? Of course. So the challenge becomes building the tools that allow mobile users to do just that, without breaking the budget.

The new HTML5 video standard (whether it ends up being Ogg, WebM or the early leader H.264/AVC) will go a long way to help matters. Already many sites are sniffing your browser to offer you the most appropriate format. If your browser supports HTML5 (most recent ones do to some extent) then you will be served up dynamic content in that format instead of Flash. But Flash will be with us for at least another 10 years so this means web developers will be supporting multiple platforms for the foreseeable future. It will take a long time before Windows XP and IE6 is a distant memory like the DOS and Netscape Navigator, but until then those users remain an important part of the web.

On the other end of the spectrum Jason shared  a shocking statistic: 25% of mobile web users have access to the web only through their mobile phone. These users are mostly young and not very affluent. They don’t own desktop computers and don’t have much access at work so their mobile phone has become their gateway to the web. This leads Jason to suggest that web developers should develop for mobile first, and include desktop users as a secondary goal. This sounds great in theory but few shops can afford to stay on the bleeding edge of mobile, especially when it’s changing constantly and the bandwagon you just jumped on empties out to run after the next trend. I think it’s far more prudent to take the middle-path approach I mentioned earlier by making sure the site is accessible for all.

Jason shared some more interesting statistics and tidbits. We all know Blackberry is very strong in the corporate market, right? Amazingly, Blackberry may be even more popular amongst teenagers because of Blackberry Messenger, the messaging app that gets around the ridiculously expensive text messaging fees that carriers insist on charging – probably because they made $100 billion in SMS revenue in 2007 (you can imagine what that number must be today). Apple just got into the game with the new iMessage, which bypasses cell towers whenever possible and sends messages out via wi-fi connections – for free. Even phone-less devices like the iPad and iPod Touch can get into the game with an email address instead of a phone number.

Other signs of changing times: The number one camera manufacturer in the world is…. Nokia. Studies of mobile usage have shown:

• 80% use it during downtime
• 76% while waiting in line
• 62% while watching TV
• 69% for point of sale research

And most disturbingly:

• 39% use the phone on the toilet

And those are just the folks willing to admit it. Remind me never to touch my friends’ phones again. This is exactly the sort of problem we never had to worry about with desktops. Your coworker’s keyboards were gross, but at least they probably washed their hands at some point. When was the last time you washed your phone?

This segues into mobile’s 8 unique abilities. These are 8 attributes that really set mobile platforms apart from the desktop and even laptop paradigm we are used to:

1. Personal – you probably don’t share a phone unless you’re a kid or in a borderline-creepy relationship.
2. Permanently carried –  50% sleep with their phone. Technological co-dependence?
3. Always on – they can be put to sleep but they’re trickier to turn off completely.
4. Built in payment channel — not just iTunes; other countries are way ahead of us on this, Japan especially.
5. Creative impulse — the camera is not as cool, but the best camera is the one that’s with you when you want to take a pic. # 1 camera on Flickr is the iPhone.
6. Accurate measurement — not a household-sharing computer, because it’s a personal device. This opens up new avenues for marketers to build meaningful relationships with fans, along with creepy tracking and monitoring concerns that will keep civil libertarians up at night.
7. Social context — Siri could say “Jason’s stuck in traffic” because your phone knows where you are based on cell-phone tower usage, wi-fi triangulation, and GPS.  Social media took off at the same time as mobile. Jason insists this is not a coincidence.
8. Augmented reality – this is largely unexplored but new apps like Yelp’s augmented reality integration, Monocle or the popular Star Walk, which makes astronomy way easier than it was when I was a kid, are pushing the technology forward.

By the time I hit “Publish” on this article some of this information will probably already be out of date. The mobile space is moving at light-speed, lending credence to talk of a technological singularity. What’s coming next? No one can say for certain, but we can be assured that the future will be here before you know it. While you wait, have you considered washing your phone?