Implications of the Mobile World

Implications of the Mobile World

By Justin West, MPS Specialist at Nationwide, Vice President of MPSA

I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.
-Steven Wright

Print, Recordings, Cinema, Radio, TV, Internet and Mobile. The seven mass media.

The big events of 2011 are well covered by others so instead I’ll discuss my “peripheral” view of what happened in 2011, specifically how mobile has reached a tipping point for becoming the leader in mass media. For the managed print industry it’s prudent to understand how people communicate and share information today. Even more critical is to understand how people will communicate and share information in the future.

Are you still skeptical about social and mobile? Think that Twitter and Facebook are just for Generation X’ers and tablets just for games? You believe mobile phones are primarily for phone calls and all that “texting” is teenage nonsense and grammar gone amuck?  You’re wrong. In fact, as Geoffrey Moore wrote in his white paper (A Sea Change in Enterprise IT,) if you’re not participating then “you will be hard pressed to participate in the planet’s future. To be more specific, amidst the texting and Twittering and Facebooking of a generation of digital natives, the fundamentals of next-generation communication and collaboration are being worked out.”

For the first time Pew Internet Research indicates that 50% of all US adults use social-networking sites. For ages 18-40, it jumps to 75% of the US

85% of all US adults have a mobile device. In 2011 for the first time, there were more mobile device connections (327.6 million) than people in the US (315.5 million)

The way we communicate has changed. The tools we use are different. Who we communicate with has expanded and the strength of our collected voice has grown.

The medium for our knowledge and memories has transformed into a global, digital, socially interactive entity. Mobile has become not just a trend in providing information, but is poised to overtake all other forms of media.

Mobile has reached critical mass.

In the future we can hear;

“And digital objects so familiar
That mothers shall but :>) when they behold
Their infants repelled by the effects of old;
All pity choked with customs of analog and unconnected:
And Job’s spirit, raging for requite,
With iPhone by his side come hot from heaven,
Shall in these confines with Siri’s voice
Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war!”

-Justin West (Borrowing and translating to the digital time from Shakespeare)

You likely remember the biggest headlines and have seen the year’s best and worst moments written about countless times.  How did you hear the news? As I sit on the eve of 2012 reminiscing about this Earth’s most recent spin ‘round the sun; I think about what I was doing and “how I heard” about the big events. This year, something is different, the “how I heard” has become something quite extraordinary.

May 2nd 2011- The Peabody Hotel, Orlando Florida. I remember sitting at the bar with MPSA President Joe Bargainer, Greg “the Leopard” Walters and several other attendees of the 2011 Photizo MPS Global Conference. In between sips of my cold drink and trading quips with my friends I checked my Twitter stream on my phone. A second look was necessary, but confirmed what I read. “Osama Bin Laden -DEAD.”

The Bin Laden raid received the most sustained tweets on one topic to date, over 5,106 tweets per second. I attempted to interrupt the Leopard with the news but he was on a roll, something about “Soylent MPS” and the “other, OTHER white meat.” Finally I got a word in and everyone stopped and we looked to the TVs mounted above the bar to confirm. We saw the silenced “breaking news” report and all quickly went back to pockets to get our ‘true news’ provider. We all got up-to-the-minute updates from our smartphones, made reflections on what the news meant and then tied it all back into MPS somehow. “MPS gets Bin Laden.” We were certain that they likely tracked him based on re-furbished toner cartridges purchased on bulk from the last Asia-Pacific ITEX conference and sensitive data copied from his copier hard drive.

We all know the event.

But did you know….Twitter was the first place to report that President Obama would address the nation on a national security issue — that happened at 9:45 ET. At 10:24 ET the former chief of staff for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Keith Urbahn broke the news via Twitter. “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.” The rest of the media didn’t “officially” confirm it until 20 minutes later. President Obama didn’t speak until 11:35 ET. For the first time I can remember, significant TV news was “old news.”  Twitter (from a Blackberry) broke the news for the biggest National Security development in the nearly 10-year-long war against terrorism. Think about it.

If you knew that… were you aware that Twitter was unknowingly used to “live blog” part of the Bin Laden Operation? Sohaib Athar is a 33 year old guy from Lahore, Pakistan. A computer programmer who now lives in Abbottabad (the location of Obama’s compound.) Working late that night Sohaib tweeted to his friends about a helicopter hovering over the city at 1am, a huge window shaking bang, and shared that the Abbottabad “helicopter/UFO” was shot down.  (http://tweetlibrary.com/damon/osamaraidlivetweets)

According to data from Highbeam Research, Twitter was discussed in about 50 percent of all media coverage of social networks throughout 2011.

40% of users don’t tweet, but use it to see what’s “going on.” 92% of respondents when asked “What makes you retweet a post?” answered “Interesting Content” (WhiteFireSEO).

Remember those texting teens? Think texting is just a fad for kids who can’t spell, don’t know how to write, let alone carry on an actual conversation? Perhaps a somewhat accurate stereotype in some parts of the world but SMS texting reached an incredible achievement at the end of 2011. As noted author and mobile consultant Tomi T Ahonen excitedly reported, “It’s time to stop calling it mobile PHONE.”

Tomi’s blog (http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands) shares:

The primary use of “mobile” phones is no longer voice calls. The first non-voice service has now passed globally the number of total voice users. That service is SMS(texting). SMS in fact is the MOST used communication technology on the planet. In 2010 SMS had more than twice the total number of users than all the internet and more than 3x the total number of television sets in the world. In less than 17 years (half as old as email) SMS has 4 billion users (email has about 1.4 billion.) SMS is used by 53% of the total population of Earth. In Finland, where SMS was invented, out of all people who know how to and have the physical ability to read and write, there is essentially 100% adoption of SMS text messaging. Statistics from the Mobile Data Association reported that the majority of UK-based executives used SMS for work – receiving as many as 40 work-related SMS messages daily – and that they considered SMS their most valuable time-management tool.

Ahonen has expounded, with Mobile, all the things the previous mass media can do are possible and mobile has distinct advantages over all the others. These are the VERY reasons that mobile will dominate, destroy and surpass all other media.

Part 2: The Unique Capabilities of Mobile and Predictions for 2012

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