Mobile World Congress 2018: What did we discover? Join me on 21 March 2018.

We've now had a little time to recover from Mobile World Congress and digest what we saw and what we talked about. It's a big show with 108,000 visitors from all over the world and it covers every single aspect of mobile technology. It's impossible to take it all in, even if you were there every day and walked up and down every hall twice. And if you weren't there, what did you miss?

I hope my panel session next Wednesday 21 March in London will help fill in the gaps and make some sense of it all. I'll be chairing the session and will be joined by Paul Stringer, who heads up the mobile team at Equal Experts, Priya Prakash who is founder of D4SC and is also one of the UK Government's DIT Technology Specialists and Rafe Blandford, who is DigitasLBi's mobile guru. I also happen to know that there will be some MWC18 attendees in the audience who also know their stuff and I'm hoping will also contribute to the discussion.

Tickets are free and tapas and drinks are courtesy of the lovely Equal Experts. RSVP is required. You can do that by registering for a ticket below or by clicking here to reach the Eventbrite page.

So whether you were at Mobile World Congress or not, I do hope you can join us on Wednesday.

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Doors open at 6pm for a 6.30pm start.

We'll be at Equal Experts' offices on Brock Street. Full details on eventbrite. Nearest tube is either Warren Street or Euston Square.

Internet Week EU–Mobile Best Practice Panel

It was a busy week last week – it was Internet Week in London and there were a ton of mobile events as part of that. I moderated two sessions, participated in a round table, went to a dinner and attended two mobile conferences. Even by my standards, that’s quite a lot. There were some recurring themes though…

• Mobile is still being placed in a silo and not prioritised despite proven results. I heard tell of a bank wanting a mobile presence but not willing to put any budget behind it. Another tale of a large retailer whose mobile commerce offering is highly successful but has been ignored in all the above the line marketing for their Christmas push.
• Ad agencies are one of the barriers – inability to make margin or add value in a mobile proposition; lack of technical knowledge or expertise; blinded by the iPhone; unwillingness to change their way of working to incorporate mobile thinking to be at the heart of the strategy rather than an add-on
• Mobile marketing budgets are still relatively small as compared with above the line or even social media budgets (despite ~50% of social media being consumed on a mobile device)
• Clients lacking technical knowledge and lacking in consumer insight means that mobile initiatives are tactical rather than strategic.
• Arguably, mobile commerce is core business to many organisations now (in the same way as having a bricks and mortar store or an ecommerce offering), but is not treated as thus
• We’re still talking about statistics to prove that customers have gone mobile. Surely we know this already and we should be moving on to talking about what we do, how we do it and what we learned in the process?
• There is an obsession with direct ROI in mobile initiatives and a fast one – a few months, maybe a year. Yet in publishing, a new print magazine would not be expected to break even for three years. The mobile experience is more complex than just looking at the number of hits or click throughs and we should be applying research methods from other marketing and commerce disciplines rather than transplanting online advertising models.
• Accessibility is barely on the radar at all. It seems to be perfectly acceptable to alienate a large proportion of your customers because they don’t have your preferred device, so what chance do people with impairments or disabilities have when it comes to the big guys making their mobile sites and services more accessible?! Oh, and there are at least 54m disabled people in the US and over 6m of them here in the UK.

Much of this, and more, was discussed in my Internet Week panel session last Thursday at The Hospital. My fellow panellists were James Pimentel-Pinto from full-service mobile agency, AgencyMobile, Shawn Thomson from Largetail, consultant Andrea Bauer and Andy Smith, formerly of Admob (Google) and now with mobile couponing specialist Eagle Eye. There were also some interesting questions and comments from the audience. So if you have 40 minutes or so to spare, you may want to take a look or have a listen. Comments and questions welcome.

Everything you need to know about being a presenter or panellist

Well, almost everything you need to know at least. Here are some links to interesting blog posts and articles about being a presenter or panellist which some of you folks out there might find useful, regardless of whether you work in tech or fashion – these tips are all relevant for you.

How to write a successful speaking proposal

http://blog.web2expo.com/2008/04/how-to-write-a-successful-speaking-proposal/

Jeremiah Oywang – how to moderate a panel – a comprehensive guide (this is a *must read*)

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/01/30/how-to-successfully-moderate-a-conference-panel-a-comprehensive-guide/

Benjamin Ellis gives us tips on working more quickly…

http://redcatco.com/blog/productivity/why-dont-you-see-what-you-can-do-in-an-hour/

and how to write a speech in 5 minutes…

http://redcatco.com/blog/communication/how-to-write-a-speech-in-5-minutes/

and finally, a presentation checklist

http://redcatco.com/blog/communication/preparing-to-present-a-check-list-for-presenting-at-a-conference-or-large-event/

Technorati Tags: conference,speaking,speaker,events,panel moderation,writing a speech,presentation

What are you doing on 13th June?

If you're in London Town, you could do worse than head over to LSO St Lukes for the NMK Forum 07. Curated by Mike Butcher, it promises to be a day of discussion and debate around the new wave of innovation in the digital media industry. Leading industry figures (ahem, that includes me and pals Justin, Sam, Jemima and Alfie as well as luminaries such as Jason Calcanis of Weblogs fame and author and citizen media specialist Dan Gillmor) will talk about the future digital landscape online, offline and mobile (I'm on a panel entitled 'Communities, Commerce and Marketing' in the afternoon). There'll be a good turnout on the day if previous events are anything to go by so the knowledge and networking should be great, greatly enhanced by the unstuffy 'cabaret' layout thus enabling a proper conversation.

To book your, very reasonably priced ticket, go to http://www.nmk.co.uk/event/2007/06/13/NMK-Forum07. Tickets are £345 and there's a reduced rate for students, not for profit organisations, employees of micro-companies and freelancers of £245. Money well spent I reckon.

And if you can't wait that long to hear me in action, then you'll have to follow me to Denmark where I'm speaking at "Knock Knock The Future of Music" Conference in Aarhus from Innovation Lab on 31st May (It's being held in English not Danish). You can download the PDF flyer here. If you're interested in music and the impact of digital media and innovation in that sector, then it's probably worth a trip. Not least because there's also a music festival on that weekend as part of the conference and exhibition programme. A mini, Danish SXSW maybe?

If you're going to be there and fancy meeting up, let me know. I'll be at the networking dinner on the Thursday evening and am planning to hang around for the weekend too to check out some of the music, all being well.

I want my MTV

I'm really excited to be on a very prestigious panel at next week's Music Tank event, 'I want my MTV'. The keynote speaker is James Scroggs who is VP Marketing MTV UK and Ireland and he's going to be talking about the fact taht the old world of music TV is a shadow of its former self and its role in the music marketing world is up for debate with newcomers like Joost, YouTube, MySpace et al.

The chair is Keith Harris (no not Orville's master AFAIK) and fellow panellists are Assia Grazioli-Venier who heads up Ministry of Sound TV and Malcolm Gerrie who is Chief Exec of WhizzKid Entertainment, and who created the legendary 80s music show, The Tube.

It costs £20 to £30 to attend and is on at Bertorelli's Restaurant and Bar on Frith Street from 6.30pm.

So if you're not going to Mash-Up or didn't get your ticket in time for Chinwag Live's PR Unspun, then why not join us?