Logic+Emotion:

The Future Isn't About Mobile; It's About Mobility

Originally posted on the Harvard Business Review

While the globe grapples with uncertain economic realities, "mobile" appears to be gold.

Facebook is expected to announce their uniquely targeted mobile advertising model before the end of the month. Amazon is talking to Chinese manufacturer Fox Conn with ambitions of building their own mobile device to serve as a complement to Amazon's considerable digital ecosystem of products and services. China itself has surpassed the US as the world's dominant smartphone market with over a billion subscribers and roughly 400 million mobile web users. Advisory firm IDC predicts that by 2014 there will have been over 76 billion mobile apps downloaded resulting in an app economy worth an estimated thirty five billion in the same year. Mobile business will become big business in the not so distant future.

However, there will be blood as the business world pursues the mobile gold rush.

We've seen this movie before. In the early days of the web, it was the website that created a browser-fueled gold rush — until organizations realized that maintaining a website that provided real value was more difficult than launching something quickly. The same story is now playing out in social — getting something launched on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest is easy, but building an engaged and meaningful following isn't. And the same will happen in the rush to mobile if companies take a "channel" approach vs. a behavioral approach. In short, it's not about mobile as much as it is about understanding mobility.

In the early days of digital, the core behavior we needed to understand was that people wanted information at their fingertips and the convenience that came with digital transactions. In the social era it was all these things plus social connectivity. Mobility means information, convenience, and social all served up on the go, across a variety of screen sizes and devices.

Mobility is radically different from the stationary "desktop" experience. In some cases, mobility is a "lean back" experience like sitting on a commuter train watching a video. In other cases it can be "lean forward" — like shopping for a gift while you take your lunch break at the park. And in many cases, it's "lean free" when your body is in motion, or you're standing in line scanning news headlines or photos from friends while you wait for your turn to be called.

Mobility trumps mobile. The difference between mobility and mobile is like the difference between hardware and software. Mobile is linked to devices — it is always one thing, wherever it is. But mobility changes with context: cultures incorporate mobile technologies differently. For example, in Africa, SMS technology helps farmers pay bills electronically. In America, it helps teenagers keep up with their friends — an average of 60 times a day. Mobile itself is the nuts, bolts, and infrastructure, while mobility is the context which determines if it all works together or doesn't.

To avoid "bloodshed" in mobile, learn from past lessons in Web, digital and social. Improve your understanding of the nuances of mobility and mobile behaviors before you ramp up your investment in mobile. Resist the temptation to rely too much on a guru; hiring a guru will only take your organization so far. Many of the organizations who brought in "social media gurus" learned this lesson the hard way. A single individual cannot scale. However, if the organization is willing to put real teeth behind their mobile efforts, a single smart person can help form a center of excellence. Establishing a center of excellence that puts mobility at the core, and integrates it with other business initiatives, can get a business thinking about mobile more strategically.

Secondly, realize that going mobile is not the same thing as having an app. In fact, avoid the temptation to "app everything." A lot of content — whether video or text-based — can easily be optimized for mobile consumption. Popular apps such as Flipboard or Pulse point to a future of consumer "appgregation" — using one app to aggregate many sources of content. Instead of creating a whole host of apps that few are likely to download, invest in making your "digital ecosystem" more mobile-friendly.

Lastly, don't put mobile tactics in front of strategy. In the early days of the web, every site seemed to have an animated GIF or a clunky site-counter. In the early days of social, companies spent millions on costly Facebook apps with cute gimmicks but no real utility or sharing value. Today, companies are scrambling to come up with something "mobile" whether or not it makes sense for their long-term business goals, and whether or not users will actually want it. The outcome is the same in across all of these examples: a low number of visits/installs/downloads and ho-hum business results. Tomorrow's winners of today's mobile gold rush will boast significant (and sustainable) usage numbers due to the value of their content, whether it's sheer utility or impossible-to-ignore entertainment value.

Today's mobile realities are stark. Competition is fierce and users are demanding. If your company wants to put out a fitness app, you're competing not just with Nike FuelBand or Run Keeper, but with dozens of other apps put out by scrappy start-ups.

Before doubling down on mobile, any business should first ask themselves if they really understand mobility as a behavior and lifestyle, followed by tough questions about the role mobile plays in their business. From there, a strategy for mobile, built on an understanding of mobility, can take root.

Build on the expensive lessons learned from past bubbles and there will be less "blood" all around.

Posted by David Armano on Monday, August 20, 2012 in Business, Technology | Permalink | Comments (13)

Technorati Tags: mobile, mobility

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Social Business for Complex Organizations

Several years ago, your CMO or maybe the corporate head of communications shot you an e-mail with a call to action around doing something with “social”. Since then, you’ve launched numerous Facebook, Twitter, YouTube initiatives and yes, you even have a company Pinterest page. Now comes the hard part. As an organization with a national if not global footprint, you find yourself in a chaotic situation as regions scramble to “do their own thing” at the local level. You find this out only after you’ve seen yet another unsanctioned social property launch. Integration becomes a massive headache. You have several websites and mobile apps with poor or misguided attempts at social integration. Employee social usage becomes a black hole–your employees are all over social media, but mainly you just don’t want them saying the wrong thing. Vendor management has become a nightmare–your organization is using every new technology vendor under the Sun and losing efficiency and dollars in the process. In short, you operate in a complex organization and there is nothing simple about integrating social, mobile, and the latest iteration of digital into your legacy systems.

These are the types of challenges we’ve been tackling over the past few years with clients–many who are large, complex organizations. If you can relate to these pain points you are not alone. The good news is that you can address them if you shift your mindset from social media (tactical) to social business (strategic) and look at problems and opportunities more holistically.

Here are a few considerations for those of us tasked with integrating social into a complex and sometimes complicated business environment:

Perform Stakeholder Interviews

Partner up with an objective third party and interview the critical stakeholders across your organization who will feel the impact of social integration. The interview guide should be designed to extract nuggets of insights which can prove to be immensely helpful if articulated correctly in a summary. Often themes tend to emerge when you talk to a variety of individuals.

Establish a Center of Excellence

Companies like Adobe* and Intel are well known for their social centers of excellence , but this construct is not limited to tech companies. When an emerging business trend hits the mainstream, a center of excellence becomes mandatory, not optional. When set up correctly, they can help guide a complex organization as it grows and scale efforts around the emerging opportunity.

Organize for Integration

You may not like it, but there is no way a complex organization can deal with change without changing itself. Organization design around social business challenges is becoming more commonplace amongst companies who are doing more than lip service when it comes to social integration. We’re not talking about “social media gurus,” we’re talking about roles, responsibilities and formal job descriptions with social woven into them.

Design New Processes

Does your organization have a process for launching a new social property? Maybe it should. No initiative can scale or be repeated without some degree of process. A true social business will always be flexible enough to launch pilots, but it also has to have enough process in place to ensure that programs can be executed with a certain degree of rigor.

Formalize Governance

Who approves what and what groups need to be in the know? Governance is painful, messy, difficult to construct and see through to fruition, but it also sets a foundation that will deter chaos from taking hold of your initiatives.

Expand Globally

Whether your organization is national or global, if it’s big then you need to able to scale efforts around a methodology. Figure out what methodology works for your organization and roll it out globally.

Define a Role for Employees

Social media guidelines for employees are really a fancy way for a complex organization to “C-Y-A”. A social business understands that not all employees are created equally, and yet some of them are not only connected to multiple social networks, but they are actually great representatives of the organization itself. These companies match up employees with opportunities in social both internally and externally.

Social Business for Complex Organizations from Edelman Digital

Establish a Communications Protocol

There are literally millions of conversations in play thanks to social technologies and the desire of individuals to share and connect. These conversations happen inside your organization and of course out in the open. Having an established communications protocol provides helpful guidelines for how social interactions for business should go down.

Collaborate In Real Time

For the social business, e-mail has its limits. Working groups form “clusters” around project initiatives and often need more connected ways of sharing files, knowledge and project updates. And it’s not just about Chatter, Yammer, Jive or a host of other enterprise collaboration platforms, for example at Edelman multiple Facebook Groups started by employees have been popping up around topics such as trends, community management and even Pinterest. Instead of an e-mail alias, these groups allow employees from around the globe to gather around a more connected virtual water cooler to share tips, links and exchange knowledge.

Launch a Command Center

A “command center” does not have to be a physical space but should be the system a complex organization has in place to monitor and potentially respond to a host of scenarios generated by social media. A social command center is also a great way to make sense out of social data. Edelman’s SICC is designed not only to monitor and analyze social data but to craft content informed by social signals, not unlike how a newsroom operates.

Establish a Measurement Framework

How does a complex organization measure what it does in social, digital and even mobile? The starting point is to combine data points from across multiple digital properties and initiatives and align what gets measured to business KPI’s. A measurement framework can also integrate traditional Web metrics with emerging social metrics and set the foundation for creating standards across multiple brands and business units.

With business trends moving toward connectivity and adaptability, complex organizations may find dealing with change more challenging than ever–but it needs to be done. The above initiatives represent a sample of the types of programs organizations will need to undertake as they make the journey from operating as a business built on the legacy models of yesterday toward becoming the fully integrated social business of tomorrow.

*Adobe is an Edelman client

This post was compiled in conjunction with Edelman Consulting.