Mobile Conference is done!

Now for the afternoon session. Tim Macer is chairing another panel. He has set the bar pretty high in the last panel so it will be interesting to see if he can clear it again. His panel is Richard Windle (again); Nick Lane from Mobile Squared; Linda Neville from Coke (again); and Tanja Pferdekamper from Globalpark (again). Their topic is getting MR to take mobile more seriously. This is why I came.

People are mostly talking about specialized functionality that mobile phones have and the cool things you can do with them. But it’s still niche stuff. Now Linda is giving us the voice of the client and need for confidence. What is the respondent experience? Are the data reliable? How does mobile fit with the other stuff the client is doing to understand the same problem? Is it filling a gap? What does it add? And just the fact that it’s new and different can be a plus with some clients. It’s shiny and so 21^st century! Nick now is reminding us that it’s still tough to do things with mobile Internet because it still has penetration issues. SMS is another matter; everybody uses it, at least in the UK. Texting is widely practiced but it’s very difficult for data collection. So maybe it’s a waiting game until costs go down and Internet penetration goes up significantly. He further argues that we need to learn to do short surveys of maybe 2-3 minutes if that is going to work for us.

Tim is now showing us data from a survey he does every year of MR firms worldwide. Key findings:

• Two percent of revenues are coming from mobile and 47 percent of that is via Web.
• Most respondents in his survey (just north of 50 percent) see it as not useable outside of certain niches but 10 percent see it as viable “as any other method.”
• The range of benefits cited by his respondents starts at convenience for respondent and then falls off to “moment of truth” raising response rates, reaching certain kinds of people difficult to reach by other methods.

Now it’s open to the audience for questions and ideas. You can feel the brain cells all over the room straining to come up with some major insights, working really hard on the issue, but in my humble opinion it’s all niches and not very exciting niches. A bunch of anecdotes and some maybe this and maybe that.

Unfortunately, a crisis back in the office pulled me from the conference and so I missed two presentations—one by Emmanuel Maxi from evolaris and the other by Ingvar Tjostheim from the Norwegian Computer Center. Based on jumping in and out both looked to be good reports on research projects using mobile with lots of interesting data. I’m sorry that I missed them.

At least I am back in my seat to hear from Tom de Ruyck from Insites who is going to talk about using Twitter for MR. (And here I should note that I follow Tom on Twitter.) He has started by giving us stats to clearly show that Twitter is “small” and “niche.” He’s not making claims about representivity, in fact, jus the opposite, giving examples of how you can design and do research with Twitter. The specific project he is discussing is their Ultimate Twitter Study which you can get lots of detail about on the Insites Web site. Mostly it’s a tutorial about Twitter and the people who use it and he is doing a nice job of orienting us to the ins and outs of the Twitterverse and its inhabitants. It doesn’t have much to do with mobile, but it’s interesting nonetheless. They key is learning to harvest what’s there and turn it into insights for our clients. Not an especially new story but nicely done.

Sabine Stork is up next to talk about brand emotions, presumably monitored via some mobile devices. Unfortunately, I have to take an important call and am missing it.

Now we are hearing from Nicola Doring from Ilmenau University of Technology who is going to talk about the psychological aspects of interviewing by mobile phone. Right off she makes the point that we probably can make more use of the “audio channel” than other forms of interviewing. She sees three factors that go into the psychological aspects of the interaction: the medium, the individual, and the situation. These all interact to create a certain psychology in a mobile exchange. We need to realize that for a lot of people it’s not just a phone. It can be scary and one more example of information overload. For other people, it’s their best friend, a multipurpose device, a toy, and constant companion. What it is used for and who or what its being communicated are also key to how people react to it.

This would seem to me to not being just applicable to mobile. People also have different attitudes and anxieties about regular, landline phones. Granted, the emotions may be more complex with mobile because of all of that functionality but this line of inquiry might be generally of interest for people who do telephone research. I don’t know how much it’s been looked at in the telephone survey literature, although I’m not hearing all that much in this talk that helps me to understand how the survey data might be impacted.

Of course, we all believe that the setting in which a phone interview is conducted is key, even though research presented earlier at the conference did not find as much variation between landline and mobile phone situations as we tend to expect. Perhaps that’s because people in awkward situations either do not take the call or decline to be interviewed.

The final presentation is Malte Friedrich-Freksa from YOC. He’s going to talk about the implications of application use for mobile research design. He starts by pointing out that application download on a broad scale is a new and different behavior largely brought on initially by the iPhone. This is fundamentally different from surfing the Web with a mobile device and may have implications for how we recruit people to do surveys on their mobile devices. He has run through all of the ways in which people get recruited to surveys and then complete them. They all involve a push of an invitation and then various ways to actually complete the survey. Then I confess, I lost the thread, but I think one key takeaway is that response rates were better for mobile surveys than taking people to the Web for an online survey. But I confess, I’m not sure. Maybe I’ve become a little dense after two days of listening to over 20 presentations.

Finally, I recognize that these posts have a rambling character to them. After this all sinks in I will post a brief summary of what seem to me to be the main takeaways from what has been an interesting couple of days.