Communities Dominate Brands

Joke: Being part of 3G mobile revolution

When I blogged about the big news about 3G investments and Li Ka-Shing's surprising statement on behalf of the Hutchison Whampoa Group (owners of various "Three" branded 3G mobile operators in many advanced countries), I promised to dig up an old joke about 3G and post it here for us.

I went through them and ended up picking this, which is not only mine, but like so much of 3G, is a collaboration. This is the joke we authored to end our book 3G Marketing in 2004, so this is an original joke about mobile phones, by Sara Melkko, Timo Kasper and Tomi T Ahonen/HatRat. Enjoy:

Being Part of the 3G Revolution

You know you have missed the 3G revolution, when: 
-         you are the object of constant peer pressure by your family and friends to update your mobile phone
-         you possess only one (1) telephone
-         that annoying blinking sign of an envelope on your mobile phone screen keeps disturbing you, but you don't dare to ask your grandchildren again how to open the text message
-         you still have to CALL home to check what to buy at the grocer’s – instead of just being connected to the camera in your fridge
-         you find latest news from a newspaper, watch weather forecasts on TV and listen to traffic updates on the radio
-         you still leave voice mail instead of hanging up at the announcement and sending a text message instead
-         friends dismiss you because you don’t have your terminal switched on 24/7
-         you think this list is funny and you want to fax it to your friends.....  (wake up friend, nobody uses a fax any more, except lawyers, but as it is -they are "nobody"...)
-         you think this list is NOT funny and you want to harass your friends by mailing it to them.... except you don't have any stamps
-         you keep having to explain that yes you do have a mobile phone and yes it does function, only that you don't see the need to carry it everywhere

You know you are part of the 3G revolution, when:
-         you have walked into a traffic sign while composing a message or playing a game while walking
-         When you look back the good old times when a terminal was still called a mobile phone and the only thing you could do with it was to telephone
-         your drawers are full of terminals, wires, rechargers, spare batteries, handsfree sets and none are compatible with another
-         whenever you see a vending machine you instinctively point your mobile phone at it
-         you feel like all of society has forgotten you if you have not received  messages from anyone for the last two hours
-         the monthly bill to the provider is higher than the rent for you apartment… and you are more than happy to pay it.
-         you feel completely lost when you forget your mobile phone, and suicidal when your mobile phone gets stolen
-         you develop a tamagochi-like relationship with your terminal and speak of “feeding the baby” when you recharge the battery
-         you are so accustomed to taking snapshots of everybody with your camera phone that you have accidentally taken a picture of your own reflection in a mirror
-         you believe that there is a secret burial ground for old terminals somewhere in Lapland
-         you say to your spouse “honey, they are playing our ringing tone”

The above for entertainment purposes only. Does not reflect the opinions of any of the employers, present or past, nor current customers, colleagues of the authors, nor any companies or public personalities mentioned. Original humour by Sara Melkko, Timo Kasper and Tomi T Ahonen/HatRat 2004. Reprinted by permission from John Wiley & Sons, original appears in book 3G Marketing, 2004.

Who Swiped My Phone? 10 Memories for Memorial Day

I was reminded of the Yellow Pages this past weekend, when some movie had a scene of the actor's home and an open Yellow Pages. And it had me thinking, what all have we lost from the telephone experience, in one lifetime (mine..)

Houses for Phones

I wrote last week about the tiny houses we used to build for telephones to live in (phone booths for payphones) and that Finland became the first country to start to decommission them.

Along the same lines, once there were stand-alone boxes we bought, with two tiny tape cassettes, one of which was a funky endless-loop tape into which you recorded your "outgoing message" (OGM), and then there was another tape which recorded the incoming messages. These machines connected to your phone and took incoming calls if you were not home to answer the phone. They were called answering machines.

The book with the yellow paper

Yes, then the Yellow Pages. Once there was an advertising industry all around these massive books printed in yellow paper. Every company in the city wanted to have their ad inside that book. Restaurants, locksmiths, dentists (and escort services) to assist with any need. The big thick books were distributed free to every home once per year. We really needed them too. For some businesses, the "best placement" of the ad in the Yellow Pages was crucial to business. Ha-ha, now its been ten years since I last opened a Yellow Pages.

And once there was a ring-ring sound to phones, real ringing. This is difficult to explain to younger readers. I don't mean music on your phone, or the "Nokia tune" It was not music, it was really ringing. Ring-ring-ring. And it was loud too. And annoying. You could not change the sound but usually at least you could set the ringer to be less loud.

How do you explain rotary dialing

And yeah, going back a couple of decades, the phones had dialing which was based on a rotary dial. This is really difficult to explain if you've never experienced one, but imagine a DVD disk but which has 10 holes in it, numbererd 0 to 9. Then to select a number, you had to stick your finger in the appropriate hole, and twist the dial (roll the disk). How DO you explain a rotary dial without showing a picture? Anyone in their 30s or 40s (or older) will obviously know exactly what this was like. You could do the rotary-dialling with your finger in the air, and if you did that gesture, others of our age would understand, yeah, an old-fashioned telephone, sure. But show that gesture to a teenager today and they are totally clueless, what is that weird pointing, are you drawing the letter C with your finger, or perhaps the Question mark?

 

Fax. Thats another weird one. We would type up a letter on something called a typewriter, then feed the paper into a machine, and it would do some weird beeps and then half a minute later, hundred miles away another such device would reprint that typed page. The person at the other end would read it, and then go to a typewriter, write a response and maybe an hour later you saw the reply appear on your fax machine, as the paper would be printed at your end. We considered this remarkably fast

Oh, then there were really important long-distance communciations, which we did by telegram. You couldn't send a telegram from your home or office, you had to go the phone company, write your telegram onto paper, give the paper to the company, and pay, and they would then send the telegram for you far away, like to another country. But the cool thing was, that at the other end, when the telegram arrived, someone would actually hand-deliver the printed version of your message to the address where it was intended. Telegrams were used for remote congratulations of weddings, or death announcements and that sort of things.

And back in my youth there wasn't something like international direct dial for the phone, for most international calls you might want to make. If you wanted to call another country, you had to book a call to that country. The call would be organized by the telephone company, and you would be able to make the call several hours later or perhaps the next day. When that call was finally arranged, you could actually hear the telephone switchboard operators from one country to the next connect the call, speaking their various languages and accents, until you heard that your connection had been put through. The calls would sound very distant too.

When Humans Answered

While with arranging calls, how about calling a company. There was a time when if you called a company, a human person would answer. A person called a switchboard operator. "You have reached Pan American Airlines, how can I help you". Not a machine with a recorded voice, sending you to an interactive voice response system. Real human people actually answered the phone. That was not always as good as it may sound now, because some of those switchboard operator personnel were very bored with their jobs, poorly paid, and could be quite rude, and deliberately disconnect your calls etc. But it was a time when a company seemed more human, when you called them, and it was a real person who answered and then connected your call, not a mechanized recording like today.

The Book with Everyone

But the one which is perhaps the most cute, is of course the white pages listing. An annual book of the who's who of any city. Every adult person would be listed there, in Alphabetical order, together with their home address and their phone number. When I was young, it was a significant achievement of growing up, becoming an adult, was to get your first own listing in the phone book.

But that of course led to the snobs who didn't want to be listed (and soon enough, I joined that group too) and then the desire to not be listed in the phone book. To have an "unlisted number" like rock stars and movie actors. Yeah, clearly that was proof that you were as important or famous as the rock stars and TV celebrities, if you too had an unlisted number. This was such a premium service that the phone company would charge phone subscribers a premium cost, not to be listed in the phone book.

My oh my have times changed in just four decades...  Still, I prefer it this way today..

My Master and Me: Confessions of a Mobile Phone

I am a mobile phone. I'm not a luxurious iPhone or a fast-reacting Blackberry or certainly not one of those awesome Nokia N-series devices. I'm just a normal mid-range cameraphone, what is called a featurephone. But my owner loves me.

I start in the morning with the alarm. My owner is slow to wake up and will hit the snooze button, usually twice. So we get three contacts before he is even really "awake". He touches me 3 times while still mostly in a sleep state. He must love me.

But once he is focused enough to recognize its time to get up, the next thing he'll always do, is to see if there are messages and calls. And during the night there often are. So the day will then start by looking at the phone calls log and the inbound messages. That gives him 1 more contact with me.

My master is not a big caller, places only 3 calls per day, and not long calls at that, usually. It is not unusual for a call to ring at the other end not to go through, so on average once per day, one of the three calls won't get through, and my master will call again later. So the 3 completed calls produce four calling attempts. That is four times he touches me.

As there are calls that he places, there also are calls that arrive. There are 3 calls that he takes, but in addition to that, there is on average one call he sees coming, that he doesn't take. Sometimes this is due to circumstances, being in a situation that a call can't be taken. At other times its a deliberate choice, not to take a call because he doesn't want to talk to that given person at that time, or perhaps, doesn't recognize the calling number and won't take the unfamilar call. So my master will handle me 4 more times on inbound calls.

When he is on the phone, there is the occasional call that gets disconnected either by accident, the network at either end is congested or one of the people moves out of radio coverage etc., and sometimes the call is interrupted by either party briefly to do something else, and is resumed momentarily. That causes on average one resume call attempt per day, continuing the call that was already ongoing. In all, my master will fondle me 9 times per day on the phone calls he is on.

But I am connected even when he is not. There will be typically one other call that arrives to the phone, that he didn't see or hear, and the call is waiting on the phone. He'll notice it later in the day. But that means there are voicemail calls as well. And for voicemail, I get to deliver an SMS text message to him, that there is a call. When he notices that, he'll then decide, whether to call the voicemail now or later. And calling the voicemail he'll then listen to messages - there may be more than one - and react to them. But lets say this is one activity, one message arrived, it is handled in one action, and any resulting outbound call was already counted for in the above.

But my master is more into SMS text messaging than voice calls. He sends on average 8 messages per day, which is about twice the worldwide average, my fellow mobile phones tell me. Some are envious of me that I have such a heavily SMS addicted user, but I know also many phone friends who have owners who send 20 or 50 messages per day, so my master is not at the extreme level. But as he sends out 8 messages per day, it gives us a lot of interaction and I like that; I like to feel his fingers on me.

Of his messages, to create 8 messages he sends, two on average are interrupted for any reason. So he starts a message, is interrupted for example by what is on TV, or when he has to pay at the grocery store, or wherever he happens to be when authoring the message, then he just interrupts the message, and returns to it a little bit later. So it takes 10 actions to create 8 messages to send. But he also will occasionally start a message that he didn't send, so there is on average one message per day, that he started, but didn't send. So to send messages, my master will handle me 11 times.

I of course then return messages to him from his friends and contacts. And at his level of usage, as he sends out 8 messages, he also receives on average 8 messages per day. But after he sends some of them, he might expect an urgent reply, and his counterpart isn't yet able to respond. So in addition to reading the 8 messages that arrived, my master will on a typical day two times look at the phone soon after sending a message, whether an answer has arrived already. I would hope he'd just trust me to beep when the messages arrive, I have never failed him, but he is neurotic about these things sometimes, so yes, he will look at my screen two more times per day just to see if the expected message had arrived.

There is that issue also of re-reading a message. At least once every day, he will feel the need to dig up an older message, to see what some given detail was, etc. So on the inbound messages, he touches me 11 times every day.

My master is not big into MMS picture messaging and doen't use email on the phone. Some of my friends have masters who use those features a lot. But my master is into his music and his pictures.

On the music, he'll use the music player on average three times per day. Always when he leaves the home and on his journey back home, but also one further time on average, during the day. That involves several interactions. Each music session requires both the starting of music, and turning the music player off. So each of the three sessions requires at least two interactions.

But he will also walk from quiet places like his home to loud locations like the sidewalks of the city street So he will adjust the volume on his music at least three times per day. He will use the music player on random shuffle mode, but there will be songs that he doesn't feel like listening to, at a given moment, so he'll also shuffle the music typically once per session to skip a song. So his music habit gives us interplay 12 times per day.

And he uses the Bluetooth headset, so we put that on and off several times per day. Each time he puts the Bluetooth headset on, he needs to connect it to me, and when he's done using it, he needs to disconnect the headset. So this gives him another 6 interactions with me during the day.

Now, my master is not particularly neurotic about time, but does use the clock feature, of course. I don't know of any of my friends whose masters don't use the clock of the phone at least part of the time. My master will only find the need to glance at me for time during the day, not counting the wake-up alarm, 6 times per day. But he does look at me that many times, and often this means he pulls me out of his pocket, or grabs me on the table to see the time better, and often he has to activate the screen from sleep mode to see the time. But whether he touches me, or only looks at me, it is 6 more interactions we have every day when he checks the time from my display.

He does use the reminder alarm during the day, typically once per day. That adds one more contact when he sets the reminder, and the other when I beep and he turns the reminder off. This gives us 2 more contacts.

Then there is of course the profile. My master uses three profiles, the normal mode, the silent mode, and the loud mode for when he's outside. But he shuffles between silent mode and normal mode many times per day, as my master goes to many meetings and needs me to be quiet at those times. He will make 10 changes to the profile setting on a typical day.

I mentioned my master is into the camera feature too. He'll typically take one picture that he keeps, per day. But that means he typically takes two pictures, and discards one that he was not happy with. He can be quite funny about that, sometimes taking many pictures to get just the one he wants. I am not very fast in capturing those pictures for him, so often he is a bit frustrated that the picture he thought he took, and the image I was able to capture, are somewhat different. But then he does have the ability to take another snapshot, which invariably he will do.

So on average he takes two pictures per day, and keeps one. But he also likes to show his pictures to his friends, so he'll often search me for a picture and show his friends by sharing me with them, momentarily. That is always a strange sensation. He is so possessive of me, that it is unusual for him to share me, and when he does, it is for very brief moments only, to show pictures.

And this is quite funny about my master, he often will prepare for an upcoming meeting, by looking for a given picture while on the way to the meeting, so its ready to show his friend. And when he shows pictures to friends, sometimes they will want the picture too, so he'll bluetooth the picture over. And the friends will then often have a picture that my master wants, and he'll take delivery of that picture by bluetooth. So on a typical day, he'll interact with me 5 times per day relating to pictures.

I have the calendar for him too. He isn't using that much, but he'll look at it twice per day to see what is coming up, and make one change to the upcoming appointments per day. So he interacts with me 3 times with the calendar.

I have a web browser and he could access the internet (or what we call technically, WAP, its not really the internet but he's not a geek and can't tell the difference anyway) but he doesn't like the slow speeds and high costs and prefers to use his laptop for web surfing. I have friends whose owners use Google on their phones many times per day, but my master is not like that.

He does love the 2D Barcode reader, and smiles broadly when he gets to use that. But in my country we don't have many of those in use yet, so he doesn't use it daily. I hear from my Japanese phone friends, that in Japan this feature is used many times per day. I also heard from my phone friends from South Korea that their owners will use the phones to make payments. Wow, I've never been used that way. But my owner is perhaps a bit old-fashioned and he doesn't even use a credit card much. He likes cash. But that could give me much more interaction.

And I don't have the fancy mapping and GPS systems to give him those kinds of services. But I do have a few games, and he'll quite often play a game when he is waiting for something. He'll play the games two times per day. When he plays, its constant contact, and I love it. That doesn't last long, however, his car racing game that he likes will only run about 5 minutes to complete the circuit. He does, often find that a game is interrupted, such as when his train arrives at the station. He'll pause the game, step off the train, complete the game, and then get on with his day. He's that way with his gaming. Once he's started a race, he has to finish it too. So he gets typically 3 contact with me related to his games.

He does use me a lot so my battery runs down quite a bit every day. But he's a good master and he recharges me every day too, when he gets back home. So it gives us three contacs. Why three? He wants me back so much, that after he's plugged me in, he'll almost as a rule, come in too early to see if the charge is full, and find it is not, and then return later to unplug me when I'm again fully charged. But that gives us 3 more contacts.

Then it comes to the end of the evening, and its time to go to bed. He'll often send messages from bed, but they were counted in the above. But his last action with me is when he sets the alarm for tomorrow. So that gives me one more contact during the day.

My master will fondle me 86 times during a typical day. I feel so much love. He will literally touch me once ever 11 minutes of every waking hour of the day. I am a happy mobile phone. I only worry, that its been over a year since he got me, he is probably going to get a new phone soon and then he'll probably toss me into that drawer of old phones and chargers, and forget all about me. Its a short love affair that I can have with my master. There will be a new phone in his life soon.

(the end)

The mobile phone is the most widely spread technology on the planet. There are 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions meaning more than two times more phones than TV sets and more than 3 times more phones than personal computers. The mobile phone is the first thing we see when we wake up, and its the last thing we look at before we fall asleep. Our lives are changing much more dramatically due to the phone, than due to the laptop or desktop PC, or the iPod or Playstation Portable.

If you'd like to understand mobile as an industry and the role of the mobile phone in our lives, I have authored a short 2 page summary of the industry that I am happy to send to you for free. It is what I call a "Thought Piece" on the size of the mobile telecoms industry. Send me an email to tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com to receive the Thought Piece on Mobile in 2009

For those who are professionally interested in this industry, I have also released an annual Almanac of 171 pages as an eBook with all the major numbers and statistics for the industry. It costs only 9.99 Euros and there are sample pages of it at this link [Tomi Ahonen Almanac 2009: Mobile Industry Review, ordering and infromation page]

 

 

Two hands, two phones, two screens, twice the interactivity

I'm continuously bumping into the phenomenon of people using two phones at the same time. I think this is one of those not-well understood aspects of mobile as a mass media channel, that compared with the PC based internet (as we call it, the 6th mass media channel) is very well optimized for stationary large-screen two-handed operation. To consume the PC based internet, we have a large keyboard and a mouse to help us navigate the big screen. And the screen is able to capture most of our attention and viewing space.

Mobile (the 7th mass media channel) is very different. On mobile we have a small screen and we tend to be walking or moving when we use it, and we often have other things we also do, so we often multi-task while we use mobile. But now, as half of European phone owners have two phones, and worldwide over 30% of all mobile phone subscribers have two or more subscirptions (often meaning two phones - think iPhone owner who also has a Blackberry) - we see the phenomenon of two phones used simultaneously.

This was not expected. But think about how often this happens. We listen to the music on one phone, receive an SMS on the other phone, and happily respond to the SMS while still wearing the earphones and not pausing the music. We were consuming two services on two separate phones simutaneously. I often in my workshops talk of being able to consume two telecoms services simultaneously, for example while talking to one person, our other phone rings. We see who is calling, decide not to take that call - and the call is diverted to voice mail. What happened? We were on one voice call, while the other voice call was directed to voice mail. No problem at all, for anyone to consume two telecoms services simultaneously.

In our book Communities Dominate Brands, Alan and I introduce Generation C for Community Generation. We talk about Gen C being able to multitask. Since the book, we found that a UK survey by Carphone Warehouse in 2006 that revealed that 48% of British youth admit to sending text messages while talking to someone else. This can be a real person, talking to mom and dad, while holding a phone in the pocket and sending a text message to the best friend. That is multitasking yes, but not using two phones and services. The more amazing part, is to see youth absolutely conveniently carry on one phone conversation on one (mobile) phone while simultaneously carrying on an SMS text message conversation on the other phone. Now we do have two uses of two phones and two mobile services simultaneously.

There are many more examples. Using the mobile internet on one phone and sending text messages on the other. Talking with one person on the phone while voting on American Idol on the other, etc. The point is, that the phone is optimized for one-handed operation. This is actually a very old idea, first suggested by Matti Makkonen (the retired Finnish mobile pioneer who was an executive at Telecom Finland (now TeliaSonera), Nokia and Finnet Group, who recently won the Economist innovation award for inventing SMS text messaging). Matti suggested this over 20 years ago, and I remember he mentioned it to us, when I worked at Nokia and seeked Matti's guidance for my Consulting Department, and he gave lessons to us about what makes mobile distinct from existing channels and tools.

Optimized for one-handed operation. It means we can rather easily learn to use two phones in two hands. This gives the mobile a powerful advantage over other digital mass media, whether the PC or Playstation or Digital TV - we tend to only consume one of those at a time. But we can rather easily consume two distinct mobile phone based services - on two separate phones - from two competing networks even - simultaneously. Or, we can consume mobile services while we are supposedly paying attention to the other older media such as our broadband internet (sixth mass media) or TV (fifth mass media) or a video game (ie recordings, the second mass media channel).

This changes the comparison to "apples and oranges". There are single-use mass media, like all legacy mass media (print, recordings, cinema, radio, TV and internet); and now the newest innovation, there is multi-use mass media, of which mobile is the first (and no doubt, will not be the last mass media channel).

So yeah, mobile is very different from the legacy mass media channels. And the joke that I have on the back of my current hardcover book, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media, where I say "...On the other hand, you have your other cellphone." (and the cover illustrations too have me holding one phone in the front cover, while hiding my second phone behind my back, on the back cover) - this is increasingly becoming a reality, not only a joke. Yes, more and more young consumers are fully prepared to consume two separate mobile services on two phones, simultaneously.

When your past comes back to haunt you.. Tom Hume blogs about second subscriptions

Tom Hume of Future Platforms is another of our friends and has been a long term fellow traveller on this path to the future of technology, telecoms, mobile and communities. Tom wrote a blog a few days ago about second subscriptions, and had a funny line in it:

About 5 years ago I saw a talk from Tomi Ahonen where he discussed multiple SIM ownership in Finland and mentioned the number of devices he carried with him personally. "Yeah yeah" I thought, filing him mentally under "crazy Finn" and getting back to business. But he was, of course, completely right and it's happened, hasn't it?

Tom then goes on to explain how he already has now joined this group and carries around him several SIM cards in his phone, the wireless modem to his laptop, etc.

First, thanks Tom, I really do appreciate it, that you blogged about it so honestly, that yes, once you thought an idea of mine was typical "Silly Tomi" kind of thinking, and that now you've noticed it has come true.

I wish all my forecasts would have turned out that way (like anyone making predictions, I've got my fair share of them massively wrong, such as recently the one about MMS picture messaging for example, I often am asked to explain what went wrong with that forecast, ha-ha).

But on the really big picture things - that mobile phone subscriptions would exceed human populations (in over 50 countries already); that SMS text messaging is addictive; that yes, we will carry multiple subscriptions (and often multiple phones), I'm quite happy with my record, more right than wrong, and for any forecaster, that is about the best you can hope for. And thank you Tom for putting it so nicely, that even the "Crazy Finn" thinking might turn out right in the end, ha-ha..

I took a quick look through my second book, M-Profits (as it was one I wrote by myself, I'd have nobody to share the blame with for any wrong forecasts) and thought I should really make a review of the major predictions and forecasts, and report on how the forecast turned out. This could be a fun - and perhaps also painful (ha-ha) blog.. ..Stay tuned.

The Age of Unreason in the Age of Networks

I came across this today A book and idea which requires some reflection

anti-rational government is not the product of a Machiavellian plot by “Washington” but is the inevitable result of “an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge” that has left many ordinary citizens and their elected representatives without the intellectual tools needed for sound public decision-making. The real question is not why politicians have lied to the public but why the public was so receptive and so passive when it heard the lies. At this crucial political juncture, The Age of American Unreason challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what our descent into intellectual laziness and our flight from reason have cost us as individuals and as a nation.

Its a bold statement -

The author Susan Jacoby appeared on Comedy Central -

Matthew C. Nisbet writing at Framing Science observes....

Jacoby's appearance on Colbert does prompt the serious question: to what degree do shows such as the Daily Show and The Colbert Report contribute to the age of unreason, with younger viewers displacing traditional news consumption with regular viewing of late night satirical comedy? In other words, can young audiences have their satire and their knowledge too?

Is this true? I don't know.

But when trust in traditional media is very low - where do you go to get your information? As I understand it blogging went vertical in the US after 911 - when people hungry for information went online. Take the whole issue of VNR's for example

According to the trade-group Public Relations Society of America, a VNR is the video equivalent of a press release and presents a client's case in an attractive, informative format. The VNR placement agency seeks to garner media attention for the client's products, services, brands or other marketing goals. The VNR affords local TV stations free broadcast quality materials for use in reports offered by such stations.

Trust Wiki

Its why OhMyNews in Korea a Citizen Journalism news platform is so powerful - and the underlying point is trust - trust between you and me and trust in the media

So we are in a process of migration

Founded on the premise that "every citizen is a reporter," OhmyNews is accredited for having a tremendous impact on the news production, distribution and consumption habits of citizens across the world. By promoting an inclusive online forum for news reporting, OhmyNews encourages online global collaboration and features over 40,000 contributing journalists worldwide, generating over one million hits daily. OhmyNews president Oh Yeon Ho reflected on the importance of online social movements, “Being acknowledged by institutions such as Infosys and Wharton confirms the arrival of citizen journalism as a catalyst to create an egalitarian media.

An egalitarian media.

Forum Oxford Conference Review: Even better than last year

So the second annual Forum Oxford conference is done and dusted. We reported here a year ago about the first confernce, that many long-term experts in the industry had raved about it as having been the best event they had ever attended, including several CEO level execs. We had a very high bar to reach this time. What was so pleasing to me, was when several of the people who attended both events, said this time it was even better.

THE CONFERENCE

The big draw to the event was, again, the speakers. Ajit Jaokar, Peter Holland and I had worked very hard, on a volunteer basis, and managed again to find exceptional speakers from companies that are either major players (like Nokia, Vodafone, Google) or newcomers trailblazing the industry (Blyk, Xtract, Itsmy) or doing radical innovations (Fjord, Mi-Pay, MTV) hot in the news, or companies making business with the industry's hottest names (MyNuMo with iPhone, Polkomtel with Google). There were services topics, customer topics, technology topics, business topics, marketing topics and strategy topics - even some mind-boggling disruptive concepts.

So many of our audience commented to me that the speaker lineup was incredibly balanced and covering a wide range, with topical matter. Again we knew it would have an UK bias to the speakers and audience, but we had speakers from the USA, Germany, Finland, Poland, Brazil and Hong Kong. The audience included members not only from Europe but also from North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia.

And beyond the companies involved in shaping this industry, and the breaking stories happening for it; there were the speakers themselves. We had four authors (Alan Moore, Christian Lindholm, Ajit Jaokar, and myself) who have authored or co-authored a combined 9 books for the industry. We had a fantastic opening keynote by Mark Selby of Nokia. And then inspiring, passionate, deeply knowledgable - and incredibly insightful - speakers such as Jonathan MacDonald of Blyk, Luciana Pavan of MTV, Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis and Simon Cavil of Mi-Pay.

We had a remarkable audience. Two thirds were registered members of Forum Oxford, but a third of the total conference were active members at Forum Oxford who contribute to it. So a very large part of the audience were already accustomed to commenting to thoughts posed by other members of the communify. This fostered a most lively and insighful discussion at each of the Q&A sessions after the speakers. As a change from last time, we had doubled the Q&A time after each speaker, and yet we had lots more questions than we had time to take. The discussion was far more beneficial than the presentations, and featured several passionate exchanges of opinions between fellow Forum Oxford members, starting right from the second presentation, by Jonathan MacDonald of Blyk, with fellow Forox member and author Mark Curtis, the CEO of Flirtomatic, on whether their customer target group - both companies serve the youth and young adults in the UK - do or do not use the mobile internet. A most fascinating exchange of two highly respected experts giving diametrically opposing viewpoints while working in companies that have grown dramatically in the same market niche. Beautiful. This is what a conference is at its finest.

And of the conference, what level of competence and thought-leadership. A full 25% of the audience were CEOs or Managing Directors by job title. We had several authors and many leading mobile bloggers again at the event.

Again like last year, the fact that we got so many such high calibre experts into the same place at the same, resulted also in the breaks being a beehive of activity, with intense conversations and introductions and business being exchanged. Again as a response to last time, we lengthened the breaks and still, the crowd was so involved in the discussions, we had trouble herding them back to continue the event at each break. To illustrate how intense the dialogue was, more than half of the total conference stayed on to the drinks reception after the event - bearing in mind that this was a Friday evening, and most Brits at the event would need to go home often at considerable commute. Two hours later, when the bar closed, we still had more than a dozen continuing the vivid discussions and only then they broke up into smaller groups heading for dinner.

SPEAKERS AND SOME HIGHLIGHTS

I cannot hope to do justice to the full event by fairly commenting on the speakers, as I was co-chairing the event and thus could not always give full attention to the speakers (we booked Q&A questions in order, already while the speakers were presenting, so I monitored our audience continuously). I apologize for all the wonderful insights that I now forget to mention. But a few that I have to mention include:

Nokia, Mark Selby's views on the future of our industry, and the role of the mobile phone in it, were the perfect start for the day. Predictably Mark echoed the themes familiar to our readers at this blog, that mobile is emerging as a media channel. What I also thought was quite revealing, is that top execs at Nokia HQ monitor the discussions at Forum Oxford (no surprise in iteself, but very revealing that Mark would say it also in public). Mark pointed out that in the future brands cannot control the discussions with customers - as an example he said that husbands don't own their wives, and nobody wants to be controlled by someone else.

Blyk's Jonathan MacDonald was one of the most anticipated speakers and he actually went quite a bit beyond just his topic of user-generated ads - I loved hearing that yes, the number one complaint by

Death by Tray

Not our usual fayre @ CDB, but since its coming up to Christmas I think we can lighten up a little. SO check out one of the funniest people on the planet. Eddie Izzard - A big thank you to Jonathan MacDonald for sharing this with me. May the Force be with you JM :-)

or this one

Stephen Fry (yes that SF from TV) reviews iPhone and its would-be killers

Its so much fun to discover a new blogger worth reading. Today I stumbled upon Stephen Fry's blog. Yes, this is the UK comedian better perhaps known for his past UK TV shows such as Jeeves & Wooster and A Bit of Fry & Laurie; currently he hosts the brilliant UK comedy quiz show QI. That Stephen Fry.

So it took me quite by surprise to find he's a total gadget freak. He writes in his brilliant comic style (and seems to blog even longer postings than I do ha-ha) and for example explains his how deeply gadget-addicted he is in stating of his relationship with smartphones - "My motto is: I have never seen a smartphone I haven't bought."

And the theme of his recent blog? The iPhone killers (as in devices hoping to become iPhone killers). Stephen is an iPhone fan, and his long blog entitled Devices and Desires on the stephenfry.com blog is both a review of the iPhone, and a review (or in some cases brief dismissive commentary) of several of the early would-be iPhone killers. This is a blog totally worth reading, for his writing style alone. And yes, if Fry was using a Nokia 9000 Communicator back in 1996 - he is a MASSIVE geek indeed. Very happy to find this, somehow from his TV appearances I had thought he somehow hated technology...

This is engagement marketing: Trevor the Intern with Mentos

Our friend Jose Menendez from ichameleon Group wrote to tell about the campaign Mentos ran (it has since ended) about Trevor the Intern. A rather cool idea, Trevor (a real intern) would be available in short periods of 15 minutes at a time slot, 8 hours per day, to take viewer requests to do errands. Like call up your boss to ask for a raise for you, or making wedding proposals, etc.

This is engagement with a brand, not only interactivity, but getting the audience to co-create the value. Great experiment Mentos, here's hoping you'll hire another "Trevor" the Intern for more. To see what they did, check out this website  http://us.mentos.com/