Evolution of the cellphone

Understanding all of the excitement and confusion about mobile marketing is summed up in this 90 second fun video.
via videosift.com

Ads welcomed with valuable content

“We see an increasing trend of consumers willing to trade off and receive advertising to gain more–and better–mobile content,” Nielsen Mobile VP of mobile media Jeff Herrmann said today, looking at their most recent research.

“Successful mobile marketers will meet the challenge offered by consumers by engaging with them in a way that adds value to the mobile user content experience,” he concluded.

Easy does it

As we’ve noted, mobile technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, which is great news for users and content providers.

But, don’t get too excited because users are not getting excited. Last month, the Israeli “Service Adoption Management” firm Olista published the results on their in-depth analysis of who is doing what in the real world of mobile. Their findings, from from monitoring over eleven million mobile users across five different mobile operators, using their software is worth noting.
As Cellular News first reported, usability rather than price is slowing the adoption of new mobile data services.

One eye-opening stat: 85% of mobile TV users abandoned the service after the first viewing and after passing through the advice of notice charge without hesitation. “The indication from the Olista findings being that the user was experiencing navigational difficulties in moving from one TV channel to the next,” Cellular News said.

Even more interesting was that over 70% of users who sign up to content bundles failed to consume any mobile content. They had paid for it but did not use it. Another worrying statistic for content providers showed that around 50% of all application downloads failed to complete successfully.

Oren Glanz, CEO of Olista, said in releasing this data, “The key to unlocking the pent up demand for mobile content lies in understanding and addressing these barriers to adoption.”

Mobile data continues to get cheaper

Sprint has announced a new plan called “Simply Everything.” The U.S. pricing plan is said to offer subscribers “unlimited voice, data, text, email, web surfing, Sprint TV, Sprint Music, GPS Navigation, Direct Connect and Group Connect for $99.99 per month.”

Gad. Now, if there could be come progress on getting mobile devices to use similar formats for display and agree on some software standards, the market for mobile data really might boom. And, you know it’s going to happen.

But, we’re not there. Yet, at the same time people’s habits are forming, new channels are being created. Mobile can’t be ignored, but who has a lot of time and money to risk on formats that may or may not work.

The same week Sprint announced this, they were in the news with a reported $29.5 billion fourth quarter loss.

To reach young readers, use parents (Duh!)

A new study about teenagers’ attitude regarding the news reminds me of when, several years ago, I got deep into the massive amount of research done on how to keep children from starting smoking and how to convince kids who had started to smoke to quit. Everyone wanted to discover the major influences on pre-teen and teenage children’s behavior.

Northwestern University’s “If It Catches My Eye” report released this month offered the same thing I learned, time and again, from my readings what influenced teen smoking: Reaching parents is about the best way to influence their kids. Believe it or not, kids do listen to (and watch) their parents.

WuduPlz is a web service for the parents of pre-teen and teenage children. While using the online service regularly, WuduPlz is designed to deliver advertising messages from local newspapers. We are also, however, strongly recommending that our newspaper partners place linked appropriate news headlines on WuduPlz’s concluding pages to attract parents into their online newspaper.

Having more eyeballs of active parents has value to many marketers, but don’t discount the long-term value of also attracting more family leaders into the habit of reading the news which, the research shows, is a habit they will pass on to their children.

Download the report here: If It Catches My Eye (pdf)

What did you mean by THAT?!? (WuduPlz calm down)

According to research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we only have a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study, reporting on in The New York Times, also showed people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mail messages they receive 90 percent of the time.

This is email messages, not text messages, which have to be shorter and are often done on the fly. And this report covers all people, not parents communicating with their pre-teen and teenage children. My conclusion: Yikes!

People (not just kids) reading messages unconsciously interpret them based on their current mood, stereotypes and expectations, the study said. Despite this, the research subjects thought they accurately interpreted the messages nine out of 10 times,  psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago told the Times.

The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, says Epley. In other words, people aren’t that good at imagining how a message might be understood from another person’s perspective.

WuduPlz should help with this problem, at least in terms of communicating household tasks. First, the message is identified as a WuduPlz.com message. (Some people have told us that saying “WuduPlz” takes the edge off. Some, however, have said it sounds sarcastic, which backs up Dr. Epley’s research.)  Coming from the WuduPlz website, it should be more difficult to assume one can read “mood” into the message. Second, we have crafted our messages to be polite and clear. Our checklist should be a help.

“People often think the tone or emotion in their messages is obvious because they ‘hear’ the tone they intend in their head as they write,” Epley explained to the Times.

WuduPlz should help parents be more clear. Maybe, at times, a bit kinder and more helpful even. After all, your kids really, really, really, really did mean to take out the trash like you asked, but–like children everywhere– they “forget.” Because they’re kids. (We don’t have any research to explain this, but then you don’t need any.)

Where families are moving online in 2008: Peter Grunwald reports

Peter Grunwald has gotten the respect (and ear) of organizations such as the National Association of School Boards. His Grunwald Associates LLC is said to be a pioneer with “new media market intelligence and industry surveys including Children, Families and the Internet.” Grunwald’s “Social Networking Study” has established useful benchmarks regarding the media habits and attitudes of American households, according to the Ypulse newsletter.

Grunwald has now gotten interested in the “multi-generation networked family,” which, of course, has those of us involved in WuduPlz interested. A polite email from him last week said he’ll have more data later this year.

It will be interesting to see if he has something to say about WuduPlz when it’s released, considering how Grunwald sees the major trends shaping up.

Here, in a nutshell, is how he sees 2008 shaping up, according to an article he wrote for YPulse.:

• Collaboration: Web users will seek “sites where their contribution, in collaboration with others, realizes a common higher purpose.”

• Ubiquitous networking: Constant networking is blurring the line between our online and offline lives. “While most consumers will appreciate the novelty, convenience and immediacy of information anytime/anywhere, advertisers will face challenges mastering associated short-form communications and optimizing drill-down.”

• Technology is a family affair: Grunwald Associates Social Networking Study found more than a third of parents already text message with their children and two-thirds of kids say they’ve gone online with mom or dad at least once in the past month, including more than 60% of teens. “Look for new applications and communication tools designed with families in mind as a unit for both entertainment and communication,” Grunwald says.

• Schools are driving home internet use:  Now many districts, even poor districts, are directing their students to use the Net outside the classroom

• Marketers need to move toward “integration and interaction” instead of “intrusion.”

It’s his last point where we believe WuduPlz best makes the case for sponsors. WuduPlz demands that the user creates content. WuduPlz is a highly-personalized environment. Users will, therefore, have a heightened sensitivity to advertising and news they see on the service.

“Smart marketers have begun to provide tools, information and environments that enhance online experiences and user control, building brand loyalty through voluntary participation,” says Grunwald.

Shopping for a worthwhile idea on parenting? Here’s one

Last week YPulse’s Anastasia Goodstein made a remark in her blog that voiced what I think about often. The savvy observer of modern parenting noted that “we all want five easy tips or simple rules you can use.” Parenting isn’t that easy. (What is?) Setting guidelines “depends on you, your values, your kid, what they’re doing online, its value, its effect on your kid, etc.”

The Onion developed this fake magazine cover for laughs, but I fear too many of us are looking for simple answers we can buy.

The benefits of getting the kids organized

It’s now three days old, but the article in the New Year’s Day issue of The New York Times about tutors helping boys do better in school remains at the top of the list as the most popular.

The thrust of the article is very simple: Boys seem generally to have more difficulty getting organized and multitasking than girls.

“The guys just don’t seem to develop the skills that involve organization as early,” Judith Kleinfeld, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska and founder of the Boys Project, a coalition of researchers, educators and parents to address boys’ problems, said in the article.

The answer is, according to the article, is giving boys more attention and following up in a positive way about being organized.

It’s our hope WuduPlz.com might be seen as a simple but clever tool that parents can use to help their boys and girls be more organized and responsible. Even the name of the service “Would you please” is a good start.

WuduPlz helps the adults in the household be a bit more organized, using the power of the list. By sending a short, timely list regularly to young family members, kids see how adults handle the world in a responsible way.

WuduPlz, used thoughtfully, can be a great teaching tool. And, it can get the trash taken out or the dishwasher loaded, too.

Better managing “extreme complexity” useful to parents?

“Intensive-care medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered,” Atul Gawande explains in his article about Peter Pronovost’s simple but powerful idea.

For many families, “managing extreme complexity” might also describe parenting in the 21st Century. Can what Peter Pronovost is using to save lives in hospitals help parents? Or, as Gawande’s December 10 article in The New Yorker asks in its sub-head, “If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?”

Pronovost’s simple idea is a checklist. “If a new drug were as effective at saving lives as Peter Pronovost’s checklist, there would be a nationwide marketing campaign urging doctors to use it,” says Gawande in his article. (Gawande is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston and an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. In 2006, he received the MacArthur Award for his research and writing.)

Gawande explains that the puzzle of intensive care is “you have to make sure that a hundred and seventy-eight daily tasks are done right—despite some monitor’s alarm going off for God knows what reason, despite the patient in the next bed crashing, despite a nurse poking his head around the curtain to ask whether someone could help “get this lady’s chest open.” So how do you actually manage all this complexity?”

The medical industry’s response has been to create a “super-specialist” for ICU care.

Peter Pronovost says, instead, a simple, better, management technique is what is needed in hospitals. Gawande tells the story of how using “a checklist” instead of depending on better training is what made it possible for pilots to fly complex, modern airplanes. Would a checklist work in ICUs?

In 2001 a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Peter Pronovost decided to give it a try. “He didn’t attempt to make the checklist cover everything; he designed it to tackle just one problem, the one that nearly killed Anthony DeFilippo: line infections. On a sheet of plain paper, he plotted out the steps to take in order to avoid infections when putting a line in. Doctors are supposed to (1) wash their hands with soap, (2) clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic, (3) put sterile drapes over the entire patient, (4) wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves, and (5) put a sterile dressing over the catheter site once the line is in. Check, check, check, check, check,” reports Gawande.

“These steps are no-brainers; they have been known and taught for years. So it seemed silly to make a checklist just for them. Still, Pronovost asked the nurses in his I.C.U. to observe the doctors for a month as they put lines into patients, and record how often they completed each step. In more than a third of patients, they skipped at least one.”

Gawande says that Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them.

Why did it work?

“The checklists provided two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events….

“A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes.”

You can read Gawande’s 7,800 word article (well-worth the time) online here:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande

WuduPlz’s presents a checklist of household tasks with a means to easily and simply communicate to family members what needs to be done, when it needs to be done. If this kind of management can work well for doctors in a hospital and pilots in fighter jets, perhaps it should be tried in homes as well.

Family life–which is suppose to be loving and caring–may not sound to some like a place that could be better served with a checklist. It doesn’t sound “natural.” But, then, it doesn’t sound like doctoring to some people, either.

Using a checklist “pushes against the traditional culture of medicine,” explains Gawande. Some families who try using checklists are sure to feel the same or get some push-back from others.

“It’s ludicrous, though, to suppose that checklists are going to do away with the need for courage, wits, and improvisation,” he concludes. “Good medicine will not be able to dispense with expert audacity. Yet it should also be ready to accept the virtues of regimentation.” I suggest that the same could be said of running a household.

Therefore, I’ll attempt to answering the question the New Yorker headline asked (“If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?”) and point families to WuduPlz.