Who is in control of your brand?

You’d think a mobile company like Optus would understand how people use mobiles, they’d also know what devices their customers use. Somehow they seem to have forgotten these two key pieces of information when doing today’s SMS campaign.

Here’s how it went

1. I’ve got an iPhone.

2. They just sent the following SMS promoting their iPad plans.

3. Good concept…

4. They promoted a webpage to view the plans

5. The webpage wasn’t compatible for mobile

6. Good concept but Optus DM Fail!

A simple solution & lesson for us all.

When sending an SMS to your database with a URL make 1 or 2 pages compatible for mobile.

And not to mention…

The SMS doesn’t even make sense, although I guess that’s what telecos do well… complicated bills and apparently now strange iPad plans too.

“…Get Unlimited Data within Australia for $50 recharge…”

When you look at the plan webpage there’s nothing about $50 or Unlimited Data.

I’m confused.

This swell article on SMH yesterday arvo enlightens us on the fact that Australians no longer only use mobiles for phone calls & texting, lots of us are using it for email, web browsing and entertainment. These kinds of reports are critical to my job as it helps make or break business cases on where clients should invest their money.

Some interesting results in the research report got my attention including:

• 9% of participants have iPhones
• 32% of respondents accessed social networking sites from their handsets
  • and half of those accessing social networks daily

However, skepticism started to creep in as the second stat seemed a little out of kilter with general social networking site usage in Australia…. So I dug a little deeper into the research report. One of the first places I usually look (and I’m no researcher) is who they surveyed – sometimes this skews the results – and in this case there was an issue.

The decision to implement the survey online and to promote the survey via mobile banner ads has some implications in terms of disseminating the results to the wider population.

SOME IMPLICATIONS?

I’d say a little more than SOME IMPLICATIONS – considering the survey is about mobile usage.

If you do a survey of people who are clicking on mobile banner ads it’s pretty stupid to ask them if they use mobile internet and applications – THEY JUST CLICKED ON A BANNER AD.

If AIMIA or the research agency can clarify the number of people that responded via mobile devices the report might be of some value – maybe not.

Footnote: I’m a digital advocate, believe in all things online/mobile/social, but flawed research reports make it difficult for me to judge the potential value of the research & therefore difficult to recommend it to my clients.

UPDATE: 13th October

Marisa from mNet has clarified the issues that I raised in this post in the comments below. Until I’ve reviewed the report in further detail assume that the research is sound. My question is why they didn’t clarify this important fact in the report.

The last time I checked

About 3 months ago I did some work researching the viability of developing a mobile website for one of our key clients. We reviewed the potential traffic we could drive through search plus the total traffic already coming from mobiles.

From the research I found that about 25% of Australians had access to 3G (this doesn’t mean they use it) and this % had grown rapidly since the introduction of the iPhone. However, based on potential mobile paid search & our current mobile visitors we were able comfortably get 1-2% of our total website traffic to be mobile, pretty darn low. So we, and the client, decided to hold of on a mobile site and focus on other digital activities.

A profound Sensis research study

It’s 3 months later and Sensis have released a research report (pdf) by Sweeny Research that indicates that 26% of Australians have accessed the internet from their mobile – a pretty astounding number.So therefore all advertisers should start spending more on mobile…

So I dug a little further

So I jumped back into their 2008 report to see what the change was year-on-year and I was surprised to see that it wasn’t there… weird. At this point I got a bit skeptical and something else popped out at me – Yellow Pages (Sensis) just released an iPhone app of their directory – what a perfect time to release research that tells their advertisers to spend on mobile.

So maybe I’m skeptical, maybe it is finally the year of the mobile (which the mobile industry has been claiming for 3 yers now) or maybe not. I’m just questioning the background, approach and validity of the research. Maybe they should’ve asked “How many times have you accessed the internet via your mobile in the last 12 months?”.

My personal recent experience

In a recent campaign for another client, the media agency negotiated some bonus media with a big publisher, some mobile media. The publisher also offered to build a mobile site for the product, as there was no cost or risk to our client we couldn’t resist.

So we received a bunch of banner impressions and a really nice mobile site and we measured the results. This client has an ROI calculator that helps compare the performance of different media online, it calculates what the value of the media was to the business. So, if we calculated the value of the mobile site and the media provided by the publisher it would’ve been worth about $50 – not awesome at all.

What does this all mean?

Now I love and advocate mobile apps and advertising, particularly considering it’s potential growth with iPhone, Google Android and many others entering the market, and telcos rapidly reducing the cost of data. However, will it currently deliver a strong ROI? Is this the best place to spend $50k? That all depends on your marketing objectives, but for some of my clients I’d say no

Its a very simple tool that enables you to manage a mobile campaign, from free/standard template to low-cost/customised solutions. I’m not saying everyone or even anyone should have a mobile mini-site, but its worth a play around.

I setup this identity  mini-site today, in about 20 minutes

http://simontsmall.2urmob.com/

Some of their most recent improvements include:

• Broadcast Campaigns: You can now simultaneously broadcast multiple campaigns.

• Web2Mobile Campaigns: We recognise that our clients prefer to be responsible to their clients for marketing innovation so we have removed the Campaign Mobile brand references (“Powered by Campaign Mobile”) from the web2mobile pop-up, so it will integrate even better with your site.

• Mobile Page Builder: Now you will be able to upload images which name includes any special characters i.e. mobilepicture20%.jpg.

You can read more and create your own mobile site here
http://campaignmobile.com/

or read the company blog here
http://www.mnetcorporation.com/products/campaign-mobile/

It seems easy so far, I downloaded the app, popped my login details in then here we are.

And ofcourse the great camera/add photo button works a charm.

It’s great and easy, but I wonder how often I’ll really use it.

Good night, am heading off for Japanese for dinner!