B1BLOG

Recent arti­cles, news and com­men­tary got me think­ing about how the whole land­scape of social media is shift­ing and that mobile is key to how peo­ple will use and inter­act with social media which will affect every­one oper­at­ing in this space, includ­ing Facebook.

See­ing this chart from Chetan Sharma Con­sult­ing makes me think that the world has gone slightly mad if there are more mobile devices out there than peo­ple who have access to fresh water.

It seems only yes­ter­day that I wrote my last post on QR Codes, but just checked and it was last Novem­ber and my god has a lot hap­pened! Maybe, just maybe, they’re catch­ing on.

Despite encour­ag­ing signs in 2010, there were many who just believed that QR Codes, or mobile bar codes, were purely an interim tech­nol­ogy wait­ing for the newer, funkier tech­nolo­gies such as NFC and aug­mented real­ity to get their act together and take over. But, as is the way, this hasn’t hap­pened yet. Sure, things have pro­gressed, but they still do not yet offer com­pelling rea­sons for mobile manufacturers/networks to make the invest­ment to uni­ver­sally include them. This is due to, amongst other things, some inter­op­er­abil­ity issues between Wik­i­tude and Layar tech­nol­ogy, the debate over user inter­faces and the pros and cons of real-time ver­sus cached data.

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We held another suc­cess­ful Hud­dle over at the Ban­ner offices yes­ter­day. The sub­ject was all things mobile. And, over the course of the next few blog posts, I’ll be tak­ing you through some of the insights from the var­i­ous speak­ers who gen­er­ously gave their time to make the after­noon such a suc­cess:

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• Simon Sil­vester – EVP Head of Plan­ning, Y&R EMEA
• Christina Carstensen – Direc­tor of Mobile Strat­egy, IDG
• Matt Findel-Hawkins – Sales Direc­tor, Nikkei BP Europe
• Mark Challi­nor – Direc­tor of Mobile, Tele­graph Media Group

With the B2B mar­ket­ing crowd get­ting increas­ingly excited about All Things Mobile, we’ve been ask­ing our­selves what we should be doing about our online con­tent, to make it acces­si­ble through mul­ti­ple devices, par­tic­u­larly our blog.

I thought it was high time we took action, so I had a look at our ana­lyt­ics to find out exactly which types of mobile devices were used to access our site, what per­cent­age of our over­all traf­fic they rep­re­sented, and what the growth rates were.

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We’re con­stantly look­ing for ways to improve our vis­i­tors’ expe­ri­ence and have recently made a few small tweaks to the B1 Blog which we hope you’ll like.

First, we’ve added a ‘related posts’ sec­tion to the bot­tom of every post (using YARPP). It’s incred­i­bly easy to install and use and depend­ing on the weight­ings you choose, can tighten or widen the net as necessary.

Sec­ondly, we’ve added a ‘Tweet’ and ‘Like’ but­ton to the top of each post as we felt that the but­tons on the left-hand side­bar were per­haps not promi­nent enough. What do you think?

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For those lucky enough to escape the grey monot­ony of Lon­don last week (I was not so lucky) and escape to Barcelona for the Mobile World Con­gress, they were in for a rare treat. In recent years the world’s largest mobile event has descended into a rather dreary almost bor­ing litany of the same ol’ same ol’. This year appears to have been any­thing but…

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I con­fess. Mine is one of the ani­mated voices debat­ing the future of Apple in the mobile phone indus­try. But I’m the heretic deny­ing that we’re wit­ness­ing the birth of the Mobile Mes­siah. I have much love for Apple (even if sit typ­ing this on a Sony Vaio). They have a knack of dis­rupt­ing mar­kets through intel­li­gent and beau­ti­ful design. And the desir­abil­ity of their brand is sec­ond to none. So they should be well placed to thrive in the mobile phone busi­ness. Right?

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Few top­ics have inspired as much ani­mated con­ver­sa­tion within the agency recently as the launch of the iPhone. There are even rumours – which I can nei­ther con­firm nor deny – that two senior Ban­ner exec­u­tives have staked a rea­son­ably hefty sum of money on whether or not Apple will still be in the mobile phone busi­ness in three years’ time.

Atti­tudes so far seem to fall into three main camps:

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• Apple has a new shiny prod­uct and I want one. It’s a mobile phone? It doesn’t mat­ter, I want one anyway.

Tak­ing the long-term per­spec­tive, which is worse:

1. The news that North Korea has test-detonated a nuclear bomb, or

2. The real­i­sa­tion that, in the near future, peo­ple every­where will be watch­ing TV clips on their mobiles and annoy­ing the hell out of other peo­ple who are try­ing to get on with their lives?

If, like me, you think the answer is 2, then the news com­ing out of this week’s Las Vegas Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show (CES) won’t make you feel much bet­ter. The show appears obsessed with TV. Last year, yet again, it was HDTV; this year, it’s the many dif­fer­ent ways to get TV onto your mobile, not to men­tion IP-enabled TV sets.

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OK, so WAP was a dog. Despite the hype and promises of the inter­net on your mobile, the real­ity was so far behind to make most users (all 3 of them) give up in despair. But that was OK because 3G came along to solve all that. Make video calls. Watch TV clips. And get the inter­net on your mobile (again – no really).

The take up of 3G ser­vices has been slow to say the least. As Kim Ki-ho, Samsung’s senior VP told del­e­gates to the Sam­sung 4G forum,

“3G was a fail­ure. The mar­ket did not respond, and it is already becom­ing an old-fashioned tech­nol­ogy.”

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