Mobile Social Networking: Now Is The Time for Innovation

“Mobile is both the most personal device and location-based device..its also the only 24/7 session,” stated Evan Tana, Director of Product Management and Marketing at Loopt. And so very true! I had just Twittered from one such mobile device a few minutes before to notify my followers of my presence in the session—how very appropriate, eh?

As the last session of the day, the last remaining stalwarts filed in to hear about this still very emerging platform, and disappointed we were not! With a solid panel consisting of some of the most active doers and thought leaders in the space, the session remained relevant and to the point (and kudos to moderator Mickey Alam Khan, EIC of MobileMarketer.com for keeping the audience engaged with frequent breaks throughout for Q&A). Ok so lets get down to the good stuff:

MODERATOR:
Mickey Alam Khan, Editor-in-Chief, Mobile Marketer magazine

PANELISTS:
Evan Tana, Director of Product Management and Marketing, Loopt
Mike Howard, VP of Sales, Kiwibox.com
Polly Lieberman, VP, Advertising Sales, buzzd
Andrew Osmak, Senior VP, Business Development, Lavalife
Jordan Greene, Principal, Mobile Media, Mella Media

Take-away 1: Mobile networking is here, its growing, and its the future

“Its important to understand mobile social networking is here because of consumer demand,” noted Mike Howard of Kiwibox.com,  “The most important thing to realize is that its not a killer app, its not going to kill wireline and SMS platforms, but its an opportunity for integration and it is needed to provide value to users, this is an important concept for both publishers and marketers.” With an audience of 255 million mobile users and 50 billion text messages exchanged each month, its clear that mobile has become a central part of our communications habits, and more importantly the mobile is not just for talking anymore. “Whats happening on the mobile web is mirroring what went on with online social networking adoption. We provide a sandbox for people to come and meet and develop whatever relationships they want, where they want,” said Adnrew Osmak, Senior VP of Business Development for LavaLife. LavaLife has developed several mobile communities in addition to their wireline community and the success of the mobile communities has nearly rivaled that of the online community. “We started Web communities a few years ago because that is where our customers were, we now have mobile communities because that is where our customers are…we go where they go,” he added.

Take-away 2: Design for the platform

There were several questions from the audience around how to implement mobile. Do you simply make a smaller version of your wireline? Do you start from scratch? Can you have a mobile community if you don’t have a Web community? And our panelists didn’t disappoint with their sage advice: Design for the mobile platform. “Our pure mobile communities do far better than the shrunken version of LavaLife.com…I really believe in paying respect to the medium. Design for the medium of mobile,” offered Osmak. The overwhelming recommendation was to be thoughtful in your design, develop strategy and build from there—don’t just shrink your wireline.

Take-away 3: Still some kinks in advertising standards, but innovation is king right now
While there are some standards around text message length, banner sizes, and mobile apps, the challenges for advertisers is designing campaigns that can deploy across multiple device types and interfaces. However, Tana offered a note of optimism saying, “If there were hard and fast standards now, you wouldn’t see as much innovation.” True, but audience members wanted to know how to plan for optimal campaigns in such a fragmented space. Polly Lieberman, VP of Advertising Sales at Buzzd remarked, “While there are challenges, there are services that provide a point of integration for advertisers with mobile campaigns. Its also a lot about experimentation right now.”

Take-away 4: Mobile isn’t a stand alone…integrate it with the rest of the marketing mix
Mobile is the ultimate “user experience”, its so personal, so immediate…but just like people are not locked to a single touch point, mobile too should be integrated with the rest of your marketing mix. “What I’m seeing in mobile is a shift—look at what happened with the internet and user adoption and the emergence of marketing there, a similar thing is happening with mobile. I think we will see the same trends that happened with the internet map over to mobile,” explained Lieberman. Jordan Greene, Principal of Mobile Media at Mella Media offered a glimpse into one such integrated campaign his company executed for the launch of a horror flick: “We created a mobile experience that involved a mobile site, downloadable ring tones and a wireline site. After sign up users would receive a ringtone, and we noticed that ringtone delivery would correlate to spikes in traffic to the wireline, much more so than when print ads were deployed.”

Moderator Mickey Alam Khan closed the session with his prediction for the future of mobile: “I think we will see that every corporation will have their own corporate mobile site in the next 5-7 years. Mobile doesn’t stand alone…integrate it…there are so many ways to think of mobile, not just as a mobile end but within the whole marketing mix. Now is the time for innovation.”

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