If you have 15 minutes to spare it’s worth watching Clay Shirky’s talk at Web2Expo last month (or read it here).
Shirky’s thesis is that web 2.0 works, and engages people in interactions, because it provides an outlet for the ‘cognitive surplus’ that is untapped by conventional media (‘we produce, you consume’). According to Shirkey people seek an outlet beyond passively consuming what media pipes to them. His thesis is that media should embrace production, consumption and sharing; and that people want to take part in all three. And that rather than dismissing blogging, Twittering, YouTubing etc. as just being a fad, what we’re seeing at the moment is just a beginning; something people will grow into rather than grow out of. (Given the context for this talk, of course Shirkey is upbeat!)
I don’t buy Shirky’s thesis in total. For a long time, traditional passive media (such as print media, TV and radio) have presented some compelling experiences, which have been shared within families, with friends and colleagues. Mass media events (such as the latest Apprentice series, currently playing out on British TV) still create a shared national experience (even if it’s one of incredulity). (To be fair, Shirky says he’s not forecasting the end of passive entertainment.)
But I agree that new media create opportunities for people to go beyond traditional consumption, to produce and share, and that these opportunities are taken up in a wide range of contexts, not necessarily nerdy or techie: consider the number of book groups and craft circles using web tools to produce, consume and share.
There is something in Shirky’s thesis for Blyk, and it links to Carlo’s post on the non-distinction between advertising and content. For some of Blyk members, the mobile phone is still simply a utility and Blyk’s messages are the price to pay for free calls and texts. For others, however, Blyk is another part of the media mix they experience and there is potential for ‘cognitive surplus’ to come into play as much here as with the web. When content engages members they respond to the opportunity to go beyond passive consumption, to share and (as response to the competitions Blyk has run suggests) to produce. Just as Shirky claims for Web 2.0, this is likely to be just the beginning. It is up to Blyk to draw on members’ cognitive surplus in the opportunities for interaction it presents.
A talk by Bill Moggridge at last year’s Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign conference included some telling video footage, of a researcher in Tokyo setting up and using an account on her phone to buy a soft drink from a vending machine. Thirty five minutes and many instructions later, the drink is in her hand. Bill used this example to illustrate the challenge of designing web-based services for small, multi-purpose devices, such as the mobile phone. He suggested that exemplary design solutions, such as the iPod, evolve over several years: iTunes software for downloading music to computers was proved before the iPod device itself was launched, and it was a couple of years more before iTunes store was added, first on the Mac and then later extended to Windows.
Bill Moggridge’s talk pre-dated iPhone’s launch. But there was a similar theme in Bill Buxton’s keynote speech to CHI (the annual human-computer interaction bash) this year (the speech is summarised by Nate Bolt here). He described innovation as having a long nose: products and services that succeed usually have antecedents going back several years (in Buxton’s view, at least 20). As an example he linked the iPhone to Apple’s Newton hand-held computer, released 15 years ago; and to an IBM/Bell South smart phone collaboration, also in 1993.
Comparing the iPhone and the Newton, from Bill Buxton’s CHI 2008 speech
The iPhone’s success has sparked predictions that this is the way mobile interactivity will now go. Certainly other manufacturers will release similar devices soon (Nokia, according to rumour, in the first quarter of 2009). It should never be so difficult again to buy a fizzy drink via your phone.
But is full-blown smart telephony appropriate for everyone? Alex’s post last week on Generation Tags brought a response from Dave Ambrose that while many 16-24s are fully engaged in the internet, there are many others who find the internet boring and of no value. I’ve picked this up in research, too. And it’s also reported in research on mobile browsing carried out by Acacia Avenue for Buongiorno which finds two distinct groups of 18-32 year-olds: ‘Embracers’ and ‘Pragmatists.’ Leaving aside any reticence one might have about dividing the world neatly into two, there seems to be something here that mobile phone companies, caught up in the heat of the mobile internet, ought to be listening to.
Conventional high-end phones (such as Motorola’s Razr family) have fared poorly in the climate created by the iPhone. But there is a whole class of users in the 18-24 age group (and beyond) for whom neither is particularly relevant. And it’s not just a question of cost. There’s an opportunity for design and marketing that is not about flaunting technology; an opportunity for products and services that don’t scream ‘everything a user could do’ but say ‘just the things the user wants to do.’ The same technology may lie behind these phones as behind the latest, most glamorous, web-enabled device. But the user simply shouldn’t have to care.
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.
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.
This week the Washington Post celebrated the watershed of 3.3 billion mobile phones active on a planet of 6.6 billion people. In retrospect it seems unremarkable (a no-brainer, as Mo Ibrahim puts it) that mobile phones have penetrated the developing world as rapidly as they have, possibly outstripping the impact of computers (mobile networks are now being used to support computer-based internet access in areas where there is no conventional computer link to the net).
Over the past four or five years Nokia has been carrying out research to understand consumers’ needs in these important emerging markets. Some of this research (carried out in shanty towns in Mumbai, Rio and Accra) was reported by Younghee Jung at the 2008 Lift conference. Recognising the limits of observational research in communities with which the researchers lack familiarity and where language is a barrier, Nokia augmented standard observational techniques with competitions for local people to express what they wanted their phones to do for them. It’s good to see innovative research approaches and this particular idea seems to have generated a rich response from community members.
Most of the research participants’ ideas had a strong practical orientation. The request for genuinely rugged phones that survive local conditions over a number of years struck a chord with me: I have heard similar from people working in manual trades in the UK (they also want a volume level that makes callers’ voices audible against the background noise of a building site).
Another idea that came out of the competition was a single phone that could hold up to four SIM cards, allowing the user to get the best out of a range of tariffs without swapping SIMs manually or carrying multiple phones. How sensible is that. It would be welcomed in the UK, too, particularly by 16-24s, many of whom juggle SIMs and handsets in order to get the most out of their mobile phone spend. A Google search reveals there is at least one phone (apparently aimed at business users) that can accept two SIMS, plus an N95 clone that can take three SIMs, and some third party hacks to bring two SIMs into one phone.
Handset manufacturers and operators haven’t exactly jumped at this opportunity so far. Operators are hardly likely to want to share customers with their competitors. They gain from people’s inefficient use of their tariffs (not using their full allowance or running over allowances and paying for additional use at a premium). This inefficiency might be reduced by easy swapping between SIMs and tariffs. And multi-SIM handsets would disrupt the prevailing model in the mobile industry: give the phone, sell the tariff (in his Wired article, ‘Freeconomics’, Chris Anderson has tracked this type of cross-subsidy back to Gillette’s tactic of giving away free razors to create a market for disposable blades).
I wonder whether Nokia are responding to the multiple SIM idea. No doubt they are constantly reviewing the relationship between phone handset and operator, and how their technology might develop to meet changes ahead. Disruptive companies like Blyk, where any unlocked, MMS-capable handset can be used to receive the service, are already signalling the possibility of change in the traditional relationship (advertising sponsors phone use, rather than phone use sponsoring the cost of the handset).
I’ve focused on this particular research snippet because it shows how users can come up with design ideas that have the potential for disruption. It’s common for people to claim that user research never generates any ideas that haven’t been thought of by industry already. In this case, the research hasn’t come up with anything that’s brand, spanking new, but it has shown an idea in a context where it has real meaning and where there is, surely, potential for development. The milestone of 3.3 billion phones has been achieved with restrictive handset/operator conventions (played out to an extreme in the launch of iPhone with just a single operator in each country). It will be interesting to see whether the traditional relationships will continue to hold into the future.
