Mobile Commons

Kip Williams at DIAtribe has a great post about the FCC. FCC policies also have huge implications for mobile communication. Read more about that here.

Last month, the American Association of Political Consultants presented their annual “Pollie” Awards for outstanding political media. The awards for mobile – all four of them – were awarded to campaigns using the Mobile Commons platform.

It’s Our Healthcare won the Gold and Sliver for its text to screen campaign.

Bronze went to the DCCC for its State of the Union campaign.

Honorable Mention went to the Human Rights Campaign’s mobile action network.

We would like to thank these organizations and their partners - Blackrock Associates for It’s Our Healthcare and MSHC Partners for Human Rights Campaign.

Our clients and their partners continue to amaze us by using our applications in innovative ways. We’re very grateful.

Mobile Commons and Convio and Get Active recently announced an integrated partnership. Until now mobile data was special because it stood outside of the rest of your data and information. Now all of your records are where you need them and it makes all of your data more powerful then ever.

For example:

• If someone signs up on Convio or Get Active, they can be automatically signed up to the mobile channel.

• If someone opts over their mobile phone in at a live event they can automatically have an email waiting in their in box waiting for them when they get home.

• You instantly know who responds how to mobile, or email and send out the most effective messages to your constituents.

• As widgets increase your presence across the web, you can easily spread their reach to 250 million mobile phones.

• If someone seeks some information over the mobile phone they can be instantly added to your database.

This brings us a giant step closer to our goal of having all of your data and information work together. It immediately allows you to grow and use your database to greater effect. Click here to read how people are beginning to use our integrated solution.

Different members of Mobile Commons are going to be on the road and we wanted to share our schedule. We love to meet up with customers and people interested in mobile when we’re on the road, so if our geographies will overlap, drop us a line.

• Benjamin Stein is going to be at Txting for Health at Stanford University on February 29th and March 1st. He’ll be leading a workshop on mobile technology on Saturday the 1st.
• Chris Muscarella is going to be at SXSW from March 8th-March 10th. He’ll be speaking on a panel at 2pm on Sunday the 9th called Mobileactive: How Mobile Technology Impacts Politics and Vice Versa.
• Jed and Chris will be at the MEC Education Conference in Tempe, Arizona from March 10th-12th. We’ll be demoing some great ways to bring mobile into an educational setting.
• Matt Bieber will be at IPDI in Washington, D.C. on March 4th and March 5th. Matt will be on a panel called Nobody Leaves Home Without Their Cellphone: Mobile Strategies for Political and Advocacy Campaigns at 3pm on the 5th.
• Jed and Chris will be at the NTEN Conference in New Orleans, LA from March 19th-21st. They’ll be speaking on several panels and there will be a big annoucement.
• Jed Alpert will be at the Aspen Institute’s Arab-U.S Media Forum in Dead Sea, Jordan from March 26th-28th.

Hats off to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for their fantastic use of mobile surrounding President Bush’s State of the Union address!   The DCCC ran a number of mobile programs around the event, but the award for Most Innovative has to go to their “George Bush Lie Detector” text messaging initiative.

Each time President Bush said something in his speech that the DCCC felt was untrue, the Dems sent their subscribers a “Lie Detector” text message that challenged the president’s assertions and provided their own perspective on the issue at hand.  Incredible - even while the president of the United States spoke uninterrupted to the Congress and the nation, his opponents were able to respond and get their own message out in real time.  The Democrats didn’t have to wait until the president was finished speaking in order to offer their rebuttal - they could do so point-by-point, in exact parallel with the president’s speech, and without even having to ask viewers to step away from their televisions!

This is the first in a series of posts that will address mobile, measured media, and the Mobile Commons mission.

Whether it’s the Sacramento Kings, Proctor & Gamble, or John Edwards’ presidential campaign, organizations all want the same thing – to connect with people and measure the results.  Measured media allows organizations to better understand how people interact with their brand and what people want from that interaction.  All of this means connecting with more people, more meaningfully, and for more time.

The advent of measured media is good news for mobile (and for us here at Mobile Commons, of course).  After all, mobile connects and measures like nobody’s business.  Here at Mobile Commons, our applications are designed with connect-and-measure functionality baked right  in.

Here’s an example: Let’s say the Muscarella Brothers Ice Cream Company (a dream of our President of Product and his brother) wants to encourage people to connect with them by giving users the power to easily find a restaurant with ice cream and easily connect people to that restaurant by phone.

Here is what they do.  They go to the park on a nice day with a tub of Muscarella’s best and give away samples large enough to cause a deep craving in anyone who tastes it. The side of each sample container (and what could be more off-line and real-world then a sample container?) reads, “To satisfy your new habit for Muscarella Ice Cream, text your zip code or address to the short code 12345.”  When users do so, they get an automatic response with the name, address, phone number and description of a nearby restaurant, and they are encouraged to reply “Call” to be connected to the restaurant’s reservation line.  When users make the call, they hear a message about the restaurant and are then connected.

The Muscarella brothers have now closed the loop, connecting people who like their ice cream to restaurants where that ice cream is available.  It gets better, though – the Muscarella brothers can also measure all kinds of crucial information about their marketing effort.  They can measure how many people responded.  When they responded.  Where they live.  If they wanted to be connected to a restaurant serving ice cream.  What restaurant they chose.  In short, the Muscarella brothers can tell whether their marketing money was well spent, all while learning a lot about what kinds of interactions ice cream lovers want from their favorite brand.

The benefit of knowing whether their outreach led to an interaction and what the consumer wants out of that interaction is hard to overstate.  By connecting and measuring, the Muscarella brothers can refine their outreach efforts and provide current and potential customers with immediate and tangible value.  This means more meaningful connections over longer periods of time.

Most of the time, connecting and measuring is extremely hard to do – you need to make lots of assumptions and sift through lots of different kind of data just to get started.  With mobile, it happens by design, because the media (or connection) is the measurement.

Wisely, you say, “Wait – this is a made-up example, and I wasn’t born yesterday.  Is this real?”  Yes.  CREDO Mobile uses our mCast application to connect with and measure new customers by inviting the public to project text messages on walls at live events.  Climate Counts uses mData to connect with and measure environmentally conscious consumers by integrating mobile outreach into their product packaging.  Political candidates connect and measure audience responses at speeches and rallies.  Poke around our site a bit, and you’ll find even more information about how organizations are using mobile to connect with and measure their target audiences.

Human Rights Campaign recently launched a great mData campaign that allows users to learn about their favorite companies’ GLBT-inclusiveness policies via text message. Users text in the word “shop” and then the name of a company to receive a text message rating of that company’s GLBT-friendliness. (Give the service a whirl: text SHOP and then the name of a company – SHOP KELLOGG, for example – to 30644.)

HRC’s mData program allows consumers concerned with companies’ GLBT policies to get specific information about those companies anytime, anywhere. Most importantly, it allows users to get that information right when they’re considering making a purchase – at a store, while browsing the web, or even when they’re making investment choices.

mData also allows HRC to track all of their users’ incoming queries and learn which companies (and industries) users are most curious about. If HRC chooses, it could even publicize these statistics to put additional pressure on companies that aren’t particularly GLBT-friendly.

Creating this program took just a few minutes – HRC uploaded a spreadsheet of data (in this case, more than 1500 company-specific ratings), chose their SHOP keyword, and off they went!

We saw something very revealing recently. During an mCast (that’s what we call our very good text-to-screen tool) we saw large numbers of people pointing their phones at the screen as if they were using a remote control, even though there is no connection between sending a text message and the direction your phone is pointed.

Here’s what happened: an organization called It’s Our Healthcare ran a program last month which asked people to text in their views about health care; users’ messages were then projected on a jumbotron in front of the California Statehouse. Both passersby as well as those viewing via webcam participated, and the program was a great success (you can read about it here). Lots of other organizations have already benefited from utilizing mCast, and we expect that many more will soon. More on that at another time.

For now, though: what did all this phone-pointing reveal? It told us that people not only like to use their phones to get valuable information and calls to action, but that they also like to use their phones as remote controls. Users sent an SMS and the impact was not merely on the phone but on a screen hundreds of feet or thousands of miles away. The phone-pointing revealed a visceral connection that people feel when an action they take on their mobile device affects something at a distance.

We have long thought the one of the great benefits of mobile communication is its ability to draw people into interactions with other media - live events, television and computer screens, signs and billboards, and really almost anything else. After all, the world is a lot bigger and more interesting then a tiny mobile screen. Based on how users are interacting with our programs, and the startlingly high response rates that we continue to see, it’s clear that users agree.

A few weeks ago, Blue Ocean Institute launched a service using our mData application. The service - called Fish Phone - allows users to text in the name of a fish and receive information about the health and environmental impact of eating that particular fish. In just a few weeks, thousands of people have come rely on this data before they buy fish. A small amount of marketing and some web mentions led to a fast and substantial word-of-mouth awareness success for Fish Phone.

We were not surprised. We have have long believed that if people have access to concise, trusted and valuable information when and where they need it, then people will make good use of that information. Mobile is the best way we know to give consumers access to vital information about the products they are about to buy - whether it’s fish, clothing, (Is this shirt made in a sweat shop?) or anything else (How many Weight Watchers points is this Malomar?).

Here is the bonus: data. Blue Ocean now has lots of data that is vital to their mission. They know what type of fish consumers are asking about. (It turns out that people are really interested in the many different types of tuna out there: blue fin, yellow tail, pole-caught, net-caught, and so on). Blue Ocean also has data on people’s second choices, the time of day they ask, etc. And the possibilities are much greater. Blue Ocean could - though they don’t with this program - ask people to text in their email addresses. They could ask people to report retailers and restaurants that mislabel products or mislead consumers. All in real time. All on their mobile phone, something people always have with them. All by SMS, which is quickly becoming one of the most pervasive forms of communication on the planet.

Any organization that wants to get specific information to as many people as possible and learn how people use this information can benefit from this kind of program.