What Comes Next Will Reshape Mobile Marketing, the Issue is "How?"

While delivering a speech at the San Diego Social Media Symposium, hosted by Nuffer, Smith, Tucker, the question of “what comes next,” or “who comes next,” in terms of computing industry leadership, came up.  

The reason for the question is that technology enables new forms of marketing at the same time technology changes the potential effectiveness of existing channels. Among the best examples is use of social networks for marketing.

Facebook finally has figured out how to use display marketing in a PC context. It is just now exploring how to do advertising and marketing in a mobile device context. Twitter has developed the promoted tweet, a new form of marketing messaging.

At least 40 percent of all Facebook activity, for example, now occurs on mobile devices. And though all channels used in a PC context can, in principle, also be used on tablets and smart phones, there are key contextual challenges.

The substitution of a touch and swipe user interface rather than keyboard and mouse are examples. The amount of screen real estate are other key issues.

Beyond that, the use case for each device tends to be distinct. Smart phones are the “best” device for “on the go” apps and messaging. Smart phones are best suited to location apps and communications.

Tablets are less “mobile,” and suited to content consumption activities, though the setting is more “couch” than “on the go.” It is nevertheless true that smart phones get used at home or at the office more than “in transit.”

PCs increasingly are being “relegated” to work or desktop settings.

The truthful answer is that nobody knows yet how computing, and marketing possibillity will change in the next era. Part of the indeterminacy is that it is hard to figure out what era, epoch or age is coming. We all sense that mobile and Internet will be foundational, as will the pervasiveness of computing.

But that doesn’t help refine one’s search for the “next big thing” or the characteristics of firms or enabling technologies that might lead the next era, epoch or age. It seems clear, in retrospect, that virtually nobody, or almost nobody, could have foreseen the power of “search” or “social networking.”

Few seem to have recognized the importance of the “browser” or visual computing. Many would be surprised that Apple could be called the most important technology firm on the planet, or that a technology firm as large as Google could be funded by advertising.

Asked to speak about mobile marketing, one has to acknowledge the immediate difficulty. Mobile is many things, including discrete devices ranging from notebook PCs to tablets to smart phones to game players to music players. In principle, any current form of digital or online marketing can be applied to any Internet-connected device with a screen.

So email, text messaging, display advertising, promoted tweets, promoted stories, content marketing, social networks, blogs and websites all are channels that can be used across all screens, whether mobile or stationary. So too are tactics including earned media, paid media and owned media.

What isn’t yet so clear is which approaches will ultimately emerge as ideally suited to each category of screen, type of user interface or application setting. Mobile is a bunch of things, marketing is a bunch of things and so is “digital” or “online.”

A 2008 Microsoft paper described eras largely in terms of the relationship between computers and people. In the mainframe era, one computer served many people. In the PC era (for analytical purposes, Microsoft apparently did not see the mini-computer era as qualitatively significant) there was one PC per person. In the 2000s, which Microsoft describes as the mobility era, there are several devices per user. In the coming ubiquity era there will be thousands of computing devices for every user.
You might therefore represent the change quantitatively. But it is the notion of pervasiveness that probably gets to the heart of the matter. In any era where computing is literally embedded widely into the fabric of life, “computing” itself fails to stand out. It becomes something like electricity, an underpinning more than a discrete pursuit.
Nobody would call the present era the “era of electricity,” as one might have spoken of the “age of the automobile.
In fact, geologic time is the polar opposite of computing or Internet time, where the taxonomy of eonothem (eons) , erathem (eras), system (period), series (epoch), and stage (age) are used to refer to the layers of rock that correspond to these periods of geologic time. On a scale where the most-granular measure of time is “millions” of years, the entire history of computing occurs on a time scale too short to measure. 

To the extent that one can apply the geologic taxonomy, the Internet eon and pre-Internet eon might make sense, as use of the Internet spans multiple computing eras.

Perhaps we are have mistaken eras for ages or epochs, though. Mainframe, PC and mobile “eras” might be better seen, from a longer time frame as ages, epochs or periods within the broader framework of tool use.

The point is that people might instinctively sense that Internet, broadband, web and apps have some significance in the history of computing that we’ve not had time to digest and put into perspective. Clearly something important has happened with the Internet, and clearly something important is coming in terms of mobility and mobile devices. Precisely how that fits with the taxonomy of computing is not so clear.