Mobile Meeting success!

Congratulations to Mobile Monday Mid-Atlantic for a great event on Monday, May 17!

The event was reminiscent of the excitement generated during the dot.com era and a testament to why in only three years Mobile Monday Mid-Atlantic (www.momo-ma.com) has become one of the area’s premier networking organizations. The organization partnered with two prominent local marketing organizations, the Philadelphia Interactive Marketing Association (PhIMA) and Philadelphia American Marketing Association (PAMA) to bring together 400 innovators and seasoned marketing professionals.

The presentations started with the area’s A-list entrepreneur, Josh Kopelman. Kopelman, of half.com fame, analyzed the market and broke down the business space into three categories:

• The “monitorization” model downloads for cash.
• The customer retention/acquisition model, companies who are using mobile media as a piece of their overall customer communications.
• The companies who are looking to use mobile to add enterprise value.

For Kopelman’s investment firm it is the third category they are interested in developing.

He talked about a future where the mobile commuter would put their wireless mobile device next to a workstation and compute in the clouds instead of working on a laptop or desktop computer. These are the ideas his investment firm wants to build upon.

The panel moderator, Jeannette Kocsis, has deep experience in cutting edge direct marketing and started out with some statistics to keep everything in perspective. The mobile marketing world is small, but rapidly growing and changing. Right now 1 in 5 U.S. cell phone users have Smart Phones, but that is projected to be 1 in 3 by the end of next year. The panel gave some great examples of successful mobile marketing campaigns, and discussed the challenge of fragmentation in the mobile arena.

Aps are a hot topic, but mostly dismissed by the panel as a “throwback” to a time when we needed separate software for anything you wanted to do on your desktop. The fragmentation in mobile devices, operating systems, and platforms makes application development extremely challenging.

Then there is the revenue potential for an ap, while 20% of U.S. cell phone market is “smart” right now, only approximately 20% of those smart phone users download aps. So while this technology offers great potential and strong growth, the media struggles for a common platform before it can really become common place. Of course there are targeted segments where it makes a lot of sense to build mobile into your marketing plan, but the masses are not there yet.

The greatest potential for this media is its personalized nature. The panels spent a great deal of time discussing the personalized aspects of the industry and the absolute necessity for permission-based campaigns. Mobile devices have the ability to remind you that it is your spouse’s birthday, prepare you to leave five minutes early, and suggest a store to stop in close to where your car is parked. The reminder is physically nudging you on your hip; which is why this could be an unacceptable intrusion if you did not give express permission.

The panel discussed the legal requirement for expressed consent to receive SMS text messages and the hefty fines for non-compliance. The success stories that were shared indicated a change in mindset, as is echoed in so many social media discussions. Marketing communications is changing from a one way broadcast to a discussion. The more personal our media channels become the more these communications become dialog rather than advertisements.

There is great potential for this media to change the way consumers communicate and relate to their brands, the potential grows as smart phone usage grows and the technology platform becomes more standardized. I am excited as we continue to find ways to fit appropriate use of this technology into our customers’ communication plans.