Mobile Research Conference 2010 – Final Thoughts

Reflecting back over the last couple of days I'm finding four takeaways. But first, I think we need to do a better job of distinguishing between what one presenter called "the audio channel" versus other forms of mobile data collection, mostly by Web. It seems that when most people say "mobile" they mean the latter, but we could benefit by cleaning up our terminology a bit. In this post, I take mobile to mean everything other than interviewer administered surveys.

1. I came believing that mobile is still a niche method and nothing I heard changed my mind on that score. It was especially telling, I thought, that a panel designed to talk about ways to get researchers to take mobile more seriously didn't come up with much, even under Tim Macer's expert leadership. Tim showed us results from his annual industry survey that put the percent of data collection being done by mobile at two percent. IMHO that's not going to grow significantly any time soon. It's just too limited as an interviewing platform and the penetration of Web-enabled mobile is on a par with Internet in the US 15 years ago.
2. It may be a niche but it's a very cool niche. There are just some really neat things being done and those are things that fit well with the ethnographic research that has been so popular the last several years. I see lots of application there but this in itself is something of a niche.
3. Mobile is still more about the technology than it is about research. It's still very much in the evangelical stage. Nonetheless, there will be agencies who will sell it aggressively and clients who will be dazzled by it, just not very many of them. One hopes that we learned something in the over hyping of online but that probably is a false hope.
4. The mobile marketing industry is seeing mobile less as a marketing medium per se and more as a connector between advertising media—offline and online. Maybe we need to take note of that and think about whether there is a similar approach for our industry. Unfortunately, I'm not smart enough to figure that one out.

All that said, it's pretty clear that while we may not be leveraging all of the cool features of today's mobile devices on a broad scale anytime soon we surely will be making a lot more use of the core functionality. The best part of mobile is still the telephone part.

All that said, kudos to Globalpark for putting this together.