Archive for March, 2008
Random thoughts on a Friday night: when young people form groups in school, it’s as important who is in the group as who is kept out of the group.
I wonder if digital device ownership will or already has become a criteria for social interactions: John owns a Nokia and therefore hangs out with this group of people whereas Nancy owns a second-hand Blackberry given by her parents and hangs out with a completely different group of people.
Could this also possibly extend to network providers? Could Blyk become a brand that people associate with a particular mindset and serve as a social glue?
Mobile providers already have brand images that yong people recognise. Vodafone can perhaps be thought of as the “safe and grownup” network, whereas O2 and 3 are the younger-feeling brands. Could these brand “personas” become mirrors for their users not only on a personal level but also affect perception from others. Hard to tell as we don’t tend to wear our network on our sleeve, but the Blyk offering could certainly push things in that direction.
” Didn’t have to pay for tickets: You must be using Blyk ” to take a simple example. “Saw yesterday’s message of the day? Wasn’t that highlarious?” When a network starts to become a social agent, the game isn’t about how many minutes or texts you get for free, but what actual connections you create between users.
March 28th, 2008
In a recent interview Blyk members reported that the ads they enjoyed most were those that featured intriguing graphic effects. If this were taken at face value it would suggest a need for escalating innovation in Blyk advertisers’ campaigns. Not a bad thing in itself, and likely to happen anyway. But maybe not the only route to capturing members’ attention.
Blyk can, to some extent, track what members do when they receive different types of ad, as well as what they say they do. In January Blyk tracked the responses to a campaign of text messages for Connexions, the UK government youth agency, that combines traditional employment bureau with a wide-ranging advice service. The campaign was focused on 16-19 year-olds and featured a series of introductory questions covering bullying, employment and debt.
The average response rate to Connexions’ questions was 36%, and analysis of this response base revealed that 29% reported bullying problems, 29% sought careers or employment advice and 51% needed financial advice. Beyond the simple Y/N responses the campaign had anticipated, many respondents sent more expansive comments. For example
on bullying: Ma sis said she gets bullied all tha time and shes scared of them but she tryes to tell people whts goin on but they neva help her
on employment: No thanks im going into flight attendant training 4 da career of becoming a flight attendant
on debt: YeS i neva have enough.
These responses suggest a connection between the advertiser and members beyond attention-grabbing graphics. The content counts. And although members know this is not a live conversation, they’re offering a genuine exchange here.
It’s just this ‘almost human’ link via text messages that smoking cessation programmes are now exploiting to boost their impact. A trial in New Zealand showed that if people were supported by a sequence of text messages as part of their cessation counselling they were more likely to quit smoking than a control group who did not receive text messages (the trial is now being replicated in the UK to determine whether this effect lasts beyond the six-week follow-up tracked in the New Zealand trial).
Giving up smoking is a lonely process; so is worrying about money, bullying or unemployment. It may be that the private link between individuals and their phones creates a new opportunity for communication and support. One wouldn’t want to be too rose-tinted about this yet. But there was a hint of potential for a two-way connection in the pre-launch trials I ran for Blyk over 2006-7. One participant commented at the end of a post-trial interview ‘I’m going to miss my little friend Blyk.’
Part of the success of the Connexions campaign is likely to be due to its individuality among a range of different messages, and the focus on a specific target audience that Blyk can achieve. The experience would naturally be dulled if the communication was too repetitive or unfocused. And members’ willingness to engage in the future is likely to depend on the feedback and reinforcement they have received before. But if Blyk advertising comprises a balance of message type and content (something that could be hard for Blyk, as a business, to make a decision to control) it may help develop Blyk as a service that not only links members to brands they like, but also opens up communications that members hadn’t previously considered.
March 28th, 2008
Standing in the toy section of a store in the Hong Kong airport, I was fascinated by the wide array of faux laptops made for children. These machines were designed to look like laptops, but their functionality was extremely limited to a learning-based program with the graphical capability of a Tamagotchi. Faux electronics for children have been around for a while, especially in the world of mobile phones. Lately, though, technology has become cheaper and what was once faux is now real. While children’s laptops are still more hype than reality, phones for children are appearing all over the place. These “kiddie” phones are often smaller, simpler, and more brightly colored.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times reported on the tide of concern in Europe over the rise in kiddie phones. On one hand, there are questions about the long-term health effects of mobile phones. On the other, there is a parenting concern about whether young children should have phones at all. One of the experts quoted draws a parallel between the mobile phone and tobacco industries. In other words, are companies acting maliciously by addicting kids to mobile phones at a young age? Luckily, since it’s Europe, the furor is prompting a bunch of research.
In the States, kiddie phones have had a different tenor. Here, the safety concern revolves around access to porn and other “harmful” content as well as the potential for dangerous contact from strangers. (Research is not encouraged.) When kiddie phones are available, their uniqueness is less about look and feel than it is about parent-child specific features. For example, the branded kiddie cell phone service offered by Disney was a glorified parent tracking device for parents. Last fall, Disney cancelled the service, citing challenges breaking through the carrier stranglehold.
All of this makes me wonder… What is the appropriate age for children to first get phones? What should be the purpose of those phones? What regulation is necessary? What are the responsibilities of parents?
March 25th, 2008
Blyk have just carried out one of their regular Insight discussion groups with members and, not for the first time, participants said they felt time-pressured in their lives and wanted short cuts to information. The Blyk generation (16-24s) gets a pretty negative press but many are packing in studying, jobs, living independently for the first time and, quite reasonably, want some social life too. Maybe it’s not surprising then that they feel too busy, running between tasks, to notice advertising along the way: in an early piece of Blyk research one participant mentioned that she never got to see bands she liked because she was too busy to pay attention to posters and other advertising.
But it may not just be a question of being too busy. In dealing with the range of advertising impinging upon them, consumers make systematic decisions about what to pay attention to and what to ignore, when they can give attention and when not, and whether the risks of giving attention outweigh the benefits. Research (in 2005) by CBS, on the attention London commuters give to advertising in different media, highlighted some of the decisions that people make:
- they welcome and pay attention to advertising on transport (which fills in down-time and gives a focus for their attention on crowded buses and trains), but dislike billboard posters
- many like cinema advertising (they’re relaxed, it’s part of the show) but dislike TV commercials (which get in the way of focused viewing)
- internet advertising fares poorly compared to other media and is far more likely to be avoided (like TV advertising, it interrupts users’ focus but, additionally, users are wary of the outcomes of clicking through to advertisers’ sites).
There is complexity, though. What people attend to may not be what they act on. TV advertising may be disliked, but it is seen as more up-to-date than other media; it’s also more memorable and more likely to be acted on.
The CBS research pre-dates Blyk but it’s interesting to consider how mobile advertising might rate compared to other media. The positive news for Blyk is that the research found that 16-24s are more likely to see advertising as useful, compared to other age groups. Mobile advertising has the advantage of potential for personalisation so it can be focused on 16-24s’ interests. As we know, teens use their mobile phones to fill in down-time, to keep in touch with friends, and (occasionally) to browse the web; it’s something to do, a focus of attention. So mobile advertising shares some of the benefits of transport advertising in its availability in those in-between times. Beyond that, mobile ads have the same benefit of being up-to-date that TV advertising brings. So they should not only get attention, but also prompt action.
SMS and MMS seems to fit the bill for Blyk’s target group, with the potential both to reach them and prompt action. But mobile advertising is still challenged by users’ reluctance to click through to the web to browse content. Any general mistrust of advertiser web sites is amplified by concern about costs (everyone seems to know someone who has racked up astronomical browsing bills) and, often, a poor user experience of the sites themselves. 16-24s often don’t have up-to-date handsets (despite the stereotype of their obsession with gadgets) so any browsing they do may lack the exuberance of users with the latest technology. So while the Blyk model of sponsored links to click through from SMS and MMS seems to work, the expectation of more general browsing may not.
A white paper by Mobile Economy calls on Blyk (and any other ad-funded mobile network) to start innovating tariffs for mobile browsing in order to provide more useful services than currently. But at the moment 16-24s seem to be sending a strong, conservative signal about how much browsing they want to do. A survey by AppTrigger reports that in January 2008 people, generally, were using their phones in a similar way to in 2003. On the up-side for the industry, 62% of 16-24s have downloaded music or games. But it’s quite a step from downloading a game to phone browsing.
Blyk’s Insight group want Blyk to ‘make my life easier’. So would free browsing stack up in attracting members compared, say, to simply providing more free talk time? It could bring useful information to them, at times they are open to accessing it. But, it may hit precisely the ‘Opportunity or Attention Compression’ Alex describes in her post. Without the momentum of users’ experience and trust, offering it would be something of a leap of faith.
Link to AppTrigger data from Usability News
March 23rd, 2008
In media and advertsing, especially looking at what we like to call “young people”, the question is always: are they listening? and if not why not?
I was leading workshops with groups of Blyk users last fall trying to find out what they thought of the service but also how they would imgine it developing. Future-casting some would call it.
One thing that became obvious very quickly is that these young people above the age of 20 already relied on and trusted services they had been interacting with for a few years. They were already uncomfortable with the idea of change. We often think that young people are by nature care-free, adventurous, open-minded and an opportunistic about any new opportunity, but maybe that’s a way of glorifying those wonder years.
In the toy industry, they call that age compression, which in their case means the age at which children are willing to play with toys and not screen-based games. The first time a young person has to enter into contact with a service they are likely to be married to for a few years is clearly a key one for Blyk but also for most services like banking, video rentals, gyms, etc. How could we think about this in terms of services like Blyk’s? Attention compression? Opportunity compression? Something to think about for Easter…
Photo from a Matthias Ries project.
March 21st, 2008
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