As promised, I am blogging the Mobile Conference. I should note before I start that last year a colleague attended and his posts are here and here. And I apologize for the typos in advance.
There look to be 75 to 100 of us in the room but people keep streaming in. The room is jammed. First speaker is Paul Berney representing the Mobile Marketing Association. He plans to set a context from the perspective of a major industry association focused on mobile. He sees 2009 as a turnaround year for mobile, or at least mobile marketing. The big reason is the dramatic increase in mobile Internet which increases the richness of what can be delivered and the interactivity of that content. And so we have seen big acquisitions by people like Google and Apple. It hasn’t taken long before he has gotten to the big selling point for mobile: “Acting at the point of impulse.” But he is quick to describe mobile as not a replacement for traditional channels but “a connector” among channels. I see a billboard for a movie and I use my mobile to see where it’s playing. I see a product I am interested in and I scan the bar code which sends me to the product’s site. So traditional channels increasingly have a call to action which is a mobile intention.
He sees social networking as the key drivers of mobile Internet. In the UK, FaceBook is the single biggest destination for mobile Internet users. We are growing a generation that is used to this sort of instantaneous interaction which in turn raises the bar for how brands need to deliver their services and interact with their customers. Now he has transitioned to the use of apps to promote products. There are lots of examples, many of them embedding advertising in games. And there are lots of things you can now buy via your mobile device and for some things you can only buy with your mobile. Example: parking in central London! But here is the caution: Lufthansa is trying to move to all check-ins via mobile devices. In 2009 just 11 percent of check-ins were by mobile. A cool device with lots of cool stuff, but some real challenges for serious research. (My words, not his.)
Next up is Mick Couper who is going to talk about applying the lessons of visual design of Web surveys to mobile. (I should note in the interest of full disclosure that Mick is both a colleague on a number of research projects and an old friend.) He has started by downplaying expectations—slow down. Right off he wants us to see it as one more tool in the kit, not an overall replacement technology. So, two questions:
- What’s in it for researchers? What can we do with it that we can’t do with other methods?
- What in it or respondents? Why would they want to provide information over the mobile channel?
He points out that we now know that visual presentation of survey questions influence responses. This has been demonstrated over and over again on Web survey experiments. The same is no doubt true of mobile devices which seem to have major constraints. There is the small screen but also the lack of standardization in the interface, unlike Web. Pictures of various smartphones drive home the point in terms of screen size. Now he is showing a number of questions that work on the Web but are a mess when you look at them on an iPhone. Of course, they were not designed for iPhone which is an essential thing we need to learn how to do and do well.
Now he is running through a bunch of findings from the Web visual design work he has done to how just how visual presentation impacts response. It’s compelling. He has suggested another title for his talk: “Little Things Matter.” We know this very clearly from the Web design literature and we face it all over again with mobile. Good design in Web surveys has been largely based in Web standards. But there are no standards for mobile and so the challenge is substantial. They are starting to evolve but a good deal more research is clearly needed.
Now I confess that I moved from observer to participant and asked this question: how do we deal with the hype about mobile when penetration rates even in countries like the UK and US hover around 30 percent or lower? Mick Couper talked about the social research implication. Paul Berney passed.
Next up is a panel about how mobile can fit with other modes of research. It’s very interactive and hard to break out themes. Now that it’s winding down I think you can arrange the panel members along a continuum arranged based on enthusiasm for mobile:
- Mark Fuchs from the University of Kassel is trying to evaluate mobile from a traditional survey perspective of TSE. He is worried about the things Mick has talked about as well as mode effects more generally when we talk about combining models from different modes.
- Mario Callegaro from Google is sort of in the same camp, but more cautious. He is arguing that it’s very important to monitor where online survey data are coming from—a PC or smartphone. He is sensitive to the mode effect problem. He also sees the potential for interviewers using smartphones as a data enriching device.
- Scott Dodgson from Skopos is sort of fighting the last war and very concerned about the online panel problem of engagement where he sees smartphones as one of many remedies. He also makes the cogent argument for “in the moment” with examples like evaluating advertising during cricket matches.
- Liz Nelson from Fly is reprising all of the arguments we heard originally for online. Let’s get on with it. Response rates are high. Longer open ends and better. This is the future. We need to stop resisting new methods. She has anecdotal evidence of where it worked. The argument is empirical, not theoretical. Her energy is contagious but I feel like I’m in a time machine.
In the end I think this panel represents the same debate we have seen for the last decade about online. No clear consensus. By design or not, the panel members show a pretty good distribution of where the key segments of the industry are on the issue.