Mobile Commons

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.