Can Microsoft Develop a Successful Mobile OS?

Last week Microsoft announced that it was ready to launch Windows Phone 7 - just in time for the 2010 holidays. And by the classic Microsoft playbook, Windows Phone 7's (re)emergence into the marketplace was going to be accompanied by serious moolah - a lot of it to the tune of at least $1,000,000,000 on the launch, half of it on marketing alone.

Will Windows Phone 7 achieve the success Microsoft is looking for? I have my doubts. Microsoft dominates the desktop computer operating system market. It has done so for decades. And it is precisely this dominance in the desktop OS market that leads me to have my doubts.

Back in the '90s when PDA's still existed, I really enjoyed using my Palm V for all my appointments, contacts and note-taking. Thanks to PalmOS, the performance was really zippy, start up was quick, and battery life was good. I then tested the Compaq iPAQ which used Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system. My experience: slow boot up time, slower performance and shorter battery life. It was as if Microsoft was attempting to cram an entire desktop computer operating system into a tiny little PDA. Sure, the iPAQ could do a heckuva lot more than the Palm V could. But therein is the crux of the problem: a bloated one-size-fits-all OS (who the heck really used Excel on a PDA) versus an OS built for exactly the use case of the device.

Now I've never used a mobile device running Windows Mobile, so I can't personnaly comment on how this OS works compared to RIM, iPhone, Android, and PalmOS. But according to Millennial Media's MobileMix July 2010 report, Windows Mobile OS has a 4% marketshare of U.S. smartphones (a complete freefall compared with a 19.7% market share in October 2009).

So it would appear that Microsoft still struggles with producing a meaningful operating system for portable devices.

My point is that I'm not yet convinced that Microsoft's engineers are capable of producing a competitive operating system within a constrained form factor. Since the very beginning, Windows was all about including more and more features resulting in a resource-hungry, feature-bloated operating system.


I'm old enough to recall good ol' MS DOS which used to fit nicely on a single floppy disk. But with each "upgrade" to Microsoft Windows came the need to have it running on beefier and beefier hardware. More processor power, more RAM, more disk space, and more power. Windows 7's system requirements now include 1 to 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of hard disk space - that's 16,000,000,000 bytes, or 13,000 of the old 5.25HD floppy disks which if laid end-to-end would equal a line over one mile long!

Earlier this summer, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying that mobile devices are just like PCs in a different form factor. There are different ways of interpreting this statement. My interpretation is that Ballmer feels that mobile devices are just like desktop PCs but shrunken down to pocket size. I don't get any indication that there is any understanding in the halls of Redmond that mobile operating systems are fundamentally different than desktop operating systems.

In my opinion, for Windows Mobile 7 to be successful, there are three required elements:

1. The OS kernel must be completely re-architected from the ground up for mobile devices, AND


2. The chief architects of Mobile 7 must be completely new blood; not a single one of them should have ever worked on the Windows desktop operating system, AND


3. The team must allowed to innovate - free from the internal politics, turf wars, and meddling hands of old-school executives (Mssrs. Gates and Ballmer included).
   

Only if Windows Mobile 7 can be cultivated in this Microsoft corporate contaminant-free environment will it be a success.

Can it be done? One word: Xbox. The Xbox team has been allowed to function semi-autonomously and the results are evident. According to Bloomberg, Xbox became the #1 U.S. game console last March.

Microsoft has proven they can do it...and can they do it again?

Your thoughts? Can they do it? Leave me your comments.

ShopAlerts and Shopkick - Two Different Approaches to LBS

We've all heard the business plans for Starbucks rewards being broadcast to your mobile device just as you pass by. Apparently that's just something that sounds nice but doesn't translate to reality. If it did, then certainly Starbucks would have already done it by now.

It's refreshing to see new ideas emerging that represent the next step in monetizing Location-Based Services (LBS). Startups like Placecast and Shopkick exemplify two different approaches to the same opportunity.

Placecast got some press last spring with the announcement of their ShopAlerts program. In a nut shell, consumers who enroll in this program receive text messages from their favorite brand whenever they are physically near a retail outlet, or other location of interest.



The ShopAlerts technology uses "geo-fences" that are boundaries of a certain radius as defined by the marketer. Any consumer who has opt-ed in to this program receives a text message as soon as they cross this virtual boundary. The idea is to take advantage of people's likelihood to respond to a call to action requiring in-store participation through things like special offer alerts or other types of notifications.

The nice thing about ShopAlerts is that it will only send a maximum of 3 messages within a given week from a retailer. And, of course, to comply with SMS marketing regulations, consumers can opt-out at any time simply by texting "STOP" back to a short code.

Shopkick takes a different approach. Instead of using cell towers to triangulate the consumer with text-messaging as the vehicle of communication, Shopkick relies on in-store broadcast devices and a mobile device app.

When you walk in to a Shopkick-enabled store and your app is running, your mobile device will pick up a high frequency signal from the device and record your presence in the store. Once it's recorded, you get awarded points, or "kickbucks", which are redeemable for in-store discounts or even cross-brand promotions (e.g. Facebook Credits).



The approach that ShopKick is taking is that there is a distinct value to a person physically in-store versus a person physically "near" a store. This is especially helpful for physical locations where cell tower triangulation is not possible or certainly not as accurate at identifying a person's precise location within the store.

I applaud both Placecast and Shopkick for continuing to innovate in the field of LBS marketing. I don't see them as competing but rather as complementing simply because their approaches are founded upon different assumptions.

In the Placecast model, ShopAlerts is like the sideshow barker, whose job it was to grab your attention as you were walking by, and get you to do something that you originally weren't planning on doing.


In the Shopkick model, the consumer is specifically going to the retail outlet either in direct response to a prior call to action or just because there is a totally unrelated need to go there.

Personally, I'm less likely to respond to the ShopAlerts model and more likely to respond to the ShopKick model. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, when I'm out of the house, I'm usually going from Point A to Point B - fast. I'm not interested in detours to my flight plan. On the other hand, I like BestBuy (one of the brands piloting ShopKick). I shop there quite frequently 'cause I like shiny things with little blinky lights. As long as I'm already there, it's nice to be rewarded.

I'm thinking that Shopkick is good for brands whose own online marketing efforts still relies heavily on in-store conversions. For example, Hot Topic is a clothing retailer whose prime market is the 14-18 year old. Hot Topic has a strong online presence with not only its branded web site, but also its Facebook page with almost a million followers. The catch is that 14 year olds aren't old enough to have a credit card, so calls to action for online purchases are not very effective. As a result, almost all of their promotions - online and email - are designed to drive in-store traffic. So for this brand, awarding Kickbucks to their online followers that are redeemable in-store at Shopkick-enabled outlets could be a resonator with this audience.

So...are any of you subscribing to either ShopAlerts or ShopKick? I'm unfortunately not living in an area where either of these two services are being tested, so I can't comment on my personal experiences. But if any of you are, I'd love to read your comments.

Getting Mobile Marketing Strategy On the Right Path

Mobile marketing is one of the hottest topics right now. Following the trade journals and newsletters, it seems that if you're not doing anything mobile right now, then your business is doomed to collapse within the next six months.

While there is a lot of excitement about mobile, just remember how journalists get paid and how all those conference speakers get paid.

The natural human response to the generated hype is "We need an iPhone application" or "We need to do SMS right now."

Marketing is a strategic activity. All successful strategies are built upon successful processes. In this article, I submit Forrester Research's POST Methodology that Josh Bernoff, Charlene Li, Cynthia N. Pflaum, and Scott Wright originally introduced in October 2007 as one process you can apply as you develop your successful mobile marketing strategy.

Forrester's POST Methodology builds upon the following tenets:
(1) People: Get to know your people - not the average person, not your competitor's people; your people.

(2) Objectives: Decide upon your goals. Is it to increase brand awareness? Is it to cut your support costs? Is it to move your customers through the lifetime value cycle? Is it to do damage control (think millions of downloads of flaming laptop battery movies)?

(3) Strategy: Determine your approach to meet your objectives.

(4) Technology: Choose the right technology that best enables you to implement your strategy.

I've seen a lot of different strategic processes before, but I like Forrester's POST methodology because quite frankly, it keeps it all simple. It's easy to remember and it's easy to keep straight. When you're talking about marketing strategies that could run into the millions of dollars, the more simple the process, the better the chances of a favorable ROI.


Forrester Research Analysts Julie Ask, Charles Golvin, Michelle De Lussanet, and Laura Wiramihardja recently published their research article on applying the POST methodology to developing a mobile marketing strategy.

Step One of understanding who your customers are is to take a look at the Mobile Technographics Profile they've developed.



The ladder shows progressive mobile interaction and "sophistication" as you go up higher in the rungs.

Inactives, Talkers, and Communicators tend to be mutually exclusive categories. On the other hand, there is overlap between Connectors, Entertainers, and SuperConnecteds.

So now that you have a breakdown of mobile technographic profiles, the key question you need to ask yourself is "where do my customers fit", and more importantly, "where do my customers that I want to target with my marketing strategy fit?"

There are many different ways that you can answer these questions; time and money are your two resources. The first way to learn the mobile technographics profile of your customers is the most obvious but most often overlooked: ask them. If you have an online presence, how easy would it be to put up a simple survey? Give people a simple incentive to fill out the survey. Keep the questions short and simple - no more than 10 questions and make sure the questionnaire can be answered within 2 - 5 minutes.

Another way is to compare the demographics of your customers (based on your marketing objective, remember?) against the mobile adoption "national average" by age breakdown that Forrester Research Analyst Julie Ask presents in her research, Mobile Technographics.



While gender is no longer a differentiator for mobile technology adoption, age is still one - though rapidly disappearing. So just to get things started, do a test campaign matching your targeted audience by age to the type of mobile campaign you should do. Test your assumptions. Do your customers line up with the average? They may or may not.

If you've been reading about the social media space, you'll also know by now that this is a wealth of information that people are divulging about themselves via their tweets, Facebook posts, etc. Social media data aggregators (like Unbound Technologies, and Rapleaf) are building social profile data on individuals based on this public divulging of information. You can certainly take advantage of these services to build mobile technographic profiles of your customers.

And finally, I suppose you can always contract Forrester Research to construct the mobile technographic profile of your customers (no, this is not a paid endorsement, just a suggestion).


The key takeaway is that while mobile marketing is hot right now, you need to find out whether its hot right now for your customers. Follow the POST methodology. Don't start with the technical solution without first understanding your customers, your objectives and your strategy. Remember: if there is a mis-match between your customers, your objective, and your strategy, then no technology in the world can save you - it will only cost you...BIG TIME!

Why Mobile Email Marketing Does Matter

People are using their mobile devices to talk to their friends and family, browse the Internet, to watch video and live TV, to take pictures and movies, to communicate with their peeps on social networks, to find out where the heck they are and where they are going, to play games, to buy things online, to broadcast the banalities of their lives in 160 characters or less, and much more. If people are using their mobile devices for so many things integral to their lifestyle, then how could it be possible that they would *NOT* be using their mobile devices to read and send email? I'm just asking a rhetorical question, actually. The truth is that email is the Number One data activity that people use their mobile devices for.

Why, then, are mobile marketers ignoring mobile email? Why are email marketers ignoring mobile email?

I subscribe to six of seven email newletters all tracking the mobile marketing industry. I have my Tweetdeck configured to display all tweets relating to mobile marketing and email marketing. No discussion at all about mobile email marketing. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Bupkis.

Mobile email marketing has as much to do with traditional email marketing as mobile web sites have with traditional web sites. Savvy interactive marketers know that mobile web sites are not simply traditional web sites shrunk down to a teeny tiny screen. Likewise email marketers should regard mobile email as a totally different animal complete with a totally different strategy and totally different call to action. Mobile marketers need to realize that SMS and ad banners are not the be all and end all for the mobile channel.

Email marketers need to understand something about the medium that their message exists within. Computers are used to display the emails that they send by the billions to their subscribers. (I'm talking about legitimate retention email marketers; I'm purposely ignoring all those spammers out there.) Computers are not portable. They are tethered to either a phone line or an ethernet cable. Because of the immobility of computers, people are reading emails only at certain times of any given day. Laptops and netbooks? Wifi and Wimax? Oh puh-lease! Try using your laptop while standing in the subway. You get my drift...

People use their mobile devices to read their email anytime and anywhere; and I do mean anywhere. As an email marketer, I should know this. And further more, I should craft messaging specific to these on-the-go people. What message should I have for them? Perhaps an email displaying pictures of products at my retail outlets that -oh by the way, since they are out and about, why not drop by for an exclusive time-limited discount? Perhaps a news article with pictures and link to online video for late-breaking events? Perhaps pictures of my late night menu with driving (or staggering) directions to the nearest diner?

Mobile marketers likewise need to understand the medium that their messaging exists within. Text messaging enjoys the immediacy of response because people are more likely to quickly respond to a text message than check their email. But this advantage is short lived. I spoke with someone from Spain recently who said that he receives so many text messages that he ignores them now. Also, just how rich of a customer experience can you have in just 160 characters? Text-to-vote, text-for-coupon, etc. is nice, but it's not enough.

As a mobile marketer, I should think beyond 160 text characters. Have I really counted the cost of SMS messaging? How much to provision a short code? Do I really have $500 to $1000 to blow each month just on the short code alone? How spontaneous can my campaigns be with 6 to 8 weeks for every single wireless carrier to review my campaign brief and approve it to run on their network? How much longer can I keep paying for the cost of sending and receiving text messages? How much longer can I afford to ignore the fact that text messaging costs me 10 times per message compared to email messaging? Also, not every one has an all-you-can-eat text messaging plan. In fact, 45% of mobile device owners don't. This means that more than 4 out of every 10 persons I send a text message to actually pays to receive that message when at the same time, email is free. How about triggering the sending of an SMS message based on the response or non-response of an email message? That will greatly cut down on my costs and add some smarts to my SMS messaging program. What about mobile email to add to my mobile marketing mix?

Mobile email marketing does matter. It's time to break down the barriers between these two channels in the minds of the marketers. It's time for creative thought. Both text and email messaging can be highly complimentary on the mobile device. Enterprise marketing platforms should enable marketers to construct effective integrated cross-channel campaigns in which subscriber data is available for targeting, personalization, and reporting across both communication channels. Responses or non-responses to messages in one channel should be used to trigger follow-ups in the other channel. Give your customers options in how they want to receive communications from you, and what types of communications they want to receive depending upon each channel.

Have you experienced any effective campaigns combining email and SMS? Leave me your comments. I'd like to hear from you.

The Death of Email is Greatly Exaggerated

I am often asked whether the popularity of text messaging means that email as a marketing channel will become passe. Gartner estimates that there were 1.9 trillion text messages sent across the major networks worldwide in 2007. But make no mistake about it - these messages were pretty much all peer-to-peer. Peer-to-peer communication always occurs on a vastly larger scale than does marketer-to-customer communication. Case in point: I can guarantee you that there are a heck of a lot more telephone conversations between friends and family on a Sunday night than there are between telemarketer and sales prospect.

The smart phone market is white hot right now. Devices from Nokia, Research in Motion, Apple, HTC, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Palm, Samsung, and many others are in high demand. To no surprise, people are using their mobile devices to read their emails. Just as the cell phone enables me to talk to anyone, anytime, and anywhere, the smart phone enables people to read their emails anytime and anywhere. Most people read their email when they are sitting at their computers - which can only be done on certain days and at certain times of the day. Imagine when more and more become emancipated from the temporal and physical constraints on the desktop computer thanks to their smart phones. What new, different, engaging, and more enriching types of communications could email marketers have with these people?

Text messaging as a marketing channel will not supplant email. There. I said it. This is a fact founded in Old-School economics. Carriers don't see 1.9 trillion text messages flowing across their networks. Instead, they see dollar signs, euro signs, yen and peso signs. They've discovered that they have a captive audience hence an inelastic economic model. In fact, they've doubled their text messaging rates even though the number of text messages have increased. And by the way, I'm refusing to drink the mobile carriers' Kool-Aid . All-you-can-eat data plans have absolutely nothing to do with why they raised their rates.

Text messaging is still in expensive channel - both for the consumer and for the marketer. Because it's so expensive as a marketing channel, the high cost causes low adoption. Email on the other hand is cheap; it's free for the consumer and very inexpensive for the marketer. The global economy is contracting and marketers everywhere are being asked to take a hard look at their ROI. Email will continue to prove itself an extremely effective marketing channel especially in the mobile world.

There's a lot of spaghetti on the walls

Last year, Jupiter Research projected that firms would be spending up to $2.2 billion over the next four years on mobile marketing. So what's the big buzz? It's how to make mobile marketing messages relevant to the consumer and how to integrate it into the marketing mix. Seems to me that there's a lot of spaghetti being thrown on walls as marketers look for the few successful concepts that stick. Yogi Berra said it best, "This is like deja vu all over again."

Seems like there's a new agency specializing in mobile marketing springing up each week. But let's not forget about Email Service Providers - especially those providing agency services. (Full disclosure: yes, I do work for such a firm.) Email service providers have been providing insight into customer engagement for their clients over the past ten years. In my opinion, Marketing is a strategy, not a technology. Given the right strategy, the technology is irrelevant. And no technology - no matter how flashy - can rectify the wrong strategy.

I believe that email as a marketing communication channel will continue well through the next decade. Consider this: from its introduction in the summer of 2007 to the end of that year, the iPhone had captured a whopping 28% of the smartphone market by year's end. The numero-uno data function used by iPhone users? Reading email! And let's not lose site of the fact that reading email on mobile devices has been around for quite a long time thanks to the millions of devices running operating sytsems from RIM, Microsoft, Symbian, and Palm Source.

Mobile email is intriguing to me. No wait. It's REALLY intriguing to me. Consider this: people usually read their email being fettered by both a physical and a temporal constraint. The physical constraint is their computer - either tethered via a network/phone cable or at least within a Wi-fi hot spot. (Cellular modems? Oh pul-lease! WiMAX? Getting there but not yet as ubiquitous to my liking) The temporal constraint is the times of the day that they have access to their computers. Smartphones free us from the shackles of the physical and temporal constraints. People are checking their emails ANYtime and ANYwhere. (Those of you who check email while on The Throne...you know who you are!) As a brand marketer, what communication strategy could you develop if you now know that you can reach your customer anytime, any place? Would you have a different communication strategy to those who are out and about on a Tuesday afternoon versus one to those that are checking their emails at 10:00 at night after the kids are all in bed?