What’s the buzz at 3GSM? A Women in Mobile Data Association Meet-Up

The Women in Mobile Data Association is having an informal meet-up to chat about the buzz at this year's 3GSM in Barcelona. It’s an informal event where you can have a coffee or a glass of wine and a chat with other women in the industry about what you’ve seen and experienced at 3GSM. It'll also be a chance to escape the testosterone fuelled exhibition and conference and chillout for an hour or two. We don’t have a sponsor this year (unless you’re offering) so it’s a case of buy your own drinks and food.

What: Women in Mobile Data meet-up

Where: Café Viennese, Casa Fuster . The nearest Metro station is Diagonal and it’s just a few stops from Congress, or a short taxi ride.

When: Wednesday 14^th February 2007, 3.30pm to 5.30pm

If you would like to come, please RSVP to Helen Keegan, putting WiMD in the subject field. This is so we can let the venue know roughly how many of us to expect on the day.

Please feel free to forward this invitation on to your female colleagues and friends who work in mobile data and content and associated sectors – we’d love to meet them too.

About the Women in Mobile Data Association

WiMD is a global association which started 3 years ago following a contentious speech by an un-named male executive at 3GSM when it was in Cannes, who claimed there wasn’t a market for mobile content for women. After that, a few of us got together and formed WiMD, led by Lisa Modisette, to champion mobile content, data and services for underserved markets, and to support and engage women working in the mobile data and related industries. The Association is a work in progress. We meet bi-monthly in London and on an ad-hoc basis in Europe and the US and our meetings vary from the simply social to networking lunches, seminar evenings and power breakfasts. It’s currently free to join. Members are from all areas of the industry – network operators, content creators, developers, aggregators, consultants, marketers, media owners, analysts, journalists, entrepreneurs and plenty more besides. And we're very friendly.

The Women in Mobile Data website will be re-launched in the next month or so as there isn’t much on there currently.

For more information, please contact me via email.

It’s Barcelona, it’s 3GSM, and the Swedish Beers Posse are in town 13th February 2007

Yes, it’s that time of year again when the world’s mobile executives land in Barcelona and take over the city for a few days of obsessing about all things mobile (well the bit by Congress anyway). So, of course, the Swedish Beers Crew will be there too and we'd love you to join us at our little Swedish/Belgian/Norwegian/Spanish Beers Mobile Networking do.

So if you fancy a beer (it’ll be Belgian beer on the night as we're in a Belgian bar just to confuse matters) and a chat and a mingle with the nice Swedish Beers folks, then come along and join in. You don’t have to talk about mobile and you don’t even have to drink beer if you don’t want to, but it would be nice if you were friendly and enjoyed mingling with other friendly folk who have a passing interest in things mobile.

And not only that, there’ll be a few FREE beers as well courtesy of our lovely sponsors Colibria and MyStrands. Alex from Colibria will be around to chat to you about any interesting applications you may have to include in his fabulous IM platform and there will be several MyStranders and we will have partyStrands running during the evening.

Where: Belchica, Villarroel 60, 08011 Barcelona. Entrance on Gran Via de Deputacion. Metro L1 Urguell (so very near Congress) for more info on the bar, and here's a map. We'll be in the back bar.

When: Tuesday 13^th February 2007 6.30pm to 8.30pm

What: Swedish Beers Mobile Networking drinks

skål

Helen, Steve, Alex and Rudy



About our lovely sponsors

Colibria, from Norway, provides next-generation messaging and instant messaging platforms, clients and apps for mobile operators worldwide. Specifically, their UK-based apps team works with mobile developers to integrate existing SMS/MMS/WAP products into next-gen IM/IMS systems. They would like to hear from companies or individuals who have innovative services and want to investigate partnering to produce demos/prototypes to present to their existing operator customers. Yes, that means you! For more info, talk to Alex Linde on +44 7966 204 616 or meet him on the night.

MyStrands develops behaviour-based recommendation technologies to help people organise and discover digital media. It works using internet connected devices (PC, mobile etc) to discover both content and people with similar tastes both on and off-line. MyStrands mobile solutions include MyStrands for Symbian, MyStrands for Windows Mobile and of course partyStrands which we'll be sampling on the night. Find out more from Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria on +34 665 5524 18 or meet him on the night.

Lots of exciting events at the Dana Centre

I've just been checking out the Dana Centre's website and seen that there are some great events coming up in the next 2 or 3 months at their space in South Kensington. These include:

If Music Be the Food of Love - a pre-Valentine's dinner next Wednesday and discussion about how why music has such an impact on our emotions

Refashioned, from waste to wear - designers take on the recycling challenge. [I'd love to go to this one but it's on when I'm in Barcelona]

And for you mobilists out there, SexTxt, on 28th February, a live txtalogue where you can ask sexperts any question you like anonymously via text and the question and answer will be screened at the event. This event's also being run online simultaneously.

Cyberstatus tips from Trend Central

I teach mobile marketing to both professionals and students and the more I talk about the digital world we are now inhabiting and the more I observe the impact it's having on our day to day lives (including my own), the more I agree with Trend Central's latest findings around CyberStatus in conjunction with the launch of the Cassandra Report.

They have found that "personal 'cool' is being redefined by technology, and as a result, digital cool is spilling over into the real world and digital footprints are important". Think myspace, youtube, Second Life, Bebo et al and it's not just your profile that's important, it's the number of 'friends' you have, or comments you get or how many video views which all contribute to a very visible popularity meter. It's happening in the business world too, although to a lesser degree, with linkedin profiles, activity on industry forums and contributions to blogs as a writer or commenter.

This raises many challenges for the 21st Century marketer as, according to the Cassandra Report, they'll need to :

• Address their brand's own cyber status as young people (and not so young) turn to the web for first impressions
• Create engaging and informative websites (nothing new there really)
• Monitor the web for your brand's presence (so you'll need to lurk and inhabit forums and social media spaces)
• Stay up to date with the latest technologies (you don't need to know the finer details, but you do need to know what they do from a customer perspective)
• Expect an influx of services and experts like social networking profile designers (we're already seeing that happen in myspace), avatar stylists (think corporate presence in Second Life from the likes of Reuters, PA Consulting, Adidas, Radio 1), blog ghostwriters (well, I know a few of those already - if you'd like an intro, let me know) and online gaming coaches to help consumers up their digital cool

We're already seeing blog and social media service providers emerge like Perfect Path.. and this isn't just around the technology (which is not that hard to do unless you're planning something massive), it's how you actually use it and leverage it (I hate that word but can't think of another right now). And mobile being a communications technology, is all part and parcel of this digital social media revolution we're experiencing right here right now

Carnival Catch Up

Check out this week's and last week's carnival of the mobilists. Last week, Xen Mendolsohn did a great job of her Carnival and this week it's down to Rod McLaren at Mobbu. They're both worth a read. Enjoy.

To bluespam or not to bluespam, that is the question

I've just been catching up on my blog reading and quite a few of my regular reads are commenting about bluespam, or bluecasting if you're being posh.

First off, the Square Group is sending out free video clips from Avenue Q to passers by who happen to have their bluetooth switched on on their phone. The claim impressive results (well if you're in Direct Marketing or Sales Promotion they are). 9,595 active Bluetooth devices were detected and sent messages. Of these, 703 people accepted the offer of the video download – an average of 87 people each day. Seems good on the face of it. I applaud Square Group and Avenue Q for giving it a try. But how targeted was this audience if it was targeting passers-by? [of course, if it was aimed at fans of the show who were inside the theatre, then I could better understand it.]

Ewan shares his feelings about why bluetooth isn't designed for marketing or file sharing and is an, at best, clumsy user experience. Whilst David, from Mobile Marketing Magazine, wonders if these results are acceptable. David continues,

"Put another way, the campaign achieved a (positive) response rate of just over 7%. That, of course, is a response rate that any direct marketer would kill for, But that’s the point. Mobile marketing is not direct mail. It’s more personal than that, and brands that ignore this fact do so at their peril. And while Bluecasting may be legal, to my mind, if 93% of the people you offer a free download to decline the offer, that’s not really a success."

I actually doubt if 93% of people were annoyed at getting the bluetooth message. Some would have been mildly irritated, some would have ignored it completely, some would have left it to sort out later not realising that it was location specific and related to a bluetooth broadcasting system in the theatre, and for some, they may well have clicked on the system and it just didn't work (as in my Casino Royale experience), in which case the logs are likely to be inaccurate. And of course, there would be some people who would be annoyed and consider it as spam and completely evil. We just don't know what the breakdown is.

Putting the legalities aside which I discussed last week in relation to Virgin/Qwikker, I think this begs a larger question of marketing and advertising more generally which Carlo over at Mobhappy also hints at.

It's harder and harder to generate interest in products and services via *any* marketing methods - new or old or mobile or whatever. It's a law of diminishing returns and the youth of today don't understand the economics behind it all - i.e. that advertising has funded the majority of our entertainment for the last 50 years. So what do you do? Of course, there are clearly some wonderful success stories out there, but they are few and far between. If it was *that* easy, then we'd all be rich, but we're not - even when we have fabulous products and services to promote. It's not an easy equation to work out, even when you have the goods to start with.

I also understand why Avenue Q would use something like bluecasting - there's no messaging cost to the network operator. This makes it hugely attractive financially. And it is marginally less intrusive than a text message as your mobile number is kept private. And for any marketing campaign, 7% is a good response rate. And after all, we live in a commercial world and if the maths adds up, then the maths adds up.

But you know what, bluecasting will be an interim technology at best. At some point in the near distant future, we will be always on on our mobiles with wap access, flat rate data charges, pre-installed QR code readers and phones that just work. In that scenario, we won't need bluetooth to file share, we'll just do it over the air, like we do from our PCs. We'll take a picture of a QRcode, it will link us to the wapsite and we'll download away to our heart's content and maybe even share with a friend via the 'send to a friend's phone' link.

So traditional marketers, take heart, we'll still need magazines and posters and audio and video communication in our digital nirvana, it's just we'll be more seamlessly connected so you need to understand how this digital jigsaw fits together rather than looking at channels in isolation. So you could do worse than check out the mobile marketing course next month from e-consultancy.

Maybe I'm dreaming of a future that's 20 years away but hey, a girl can dream. I do know that in the future, we'll also have a lot less tolerance for any kind of push messaging as it will be considered spam and unwanted and will have a negative effect on the brand. And we'll be even better at ignoring it all, which we're already pretty good at as the Avenue Q campaign demonstrates - 93% of the potential audience ignored it.

Right now, we're in a transition phase. The laws are still being worked out. The technology is still flaky some of the time and we're still in a trial and error stage. But try and err you must in order to learn. We're still not quite sure how this mobile game will pan out. But in this 21st Century age of blogging, file sharing, instant access, always on digital overload, there are no easy answers. You will never be able to please all of the people all of the time, but you'd better do your best because if they're unhappy, they're going to tell all their mates pretty quickly with all these new-fangled communications methods flying around.

Ignore new technology at your peril. It really is changing our lives.