Obviously it does mean, that the typical iPhone owner is very affluent, in any country, and is a very desirable type of customer for any brand for example for advertisers, and is a good candidate to buy other premium and luxury things (and well-designed things).

But please, for all that hype, do understand, at the iPhone Apps Store market potential, the way the iPhone is today, it is NOT a mass market phone. And don't be fooled into thinking that somehow Apple dramatically dropped its price from 600 dollars 'premium' pricing to 200 dollars 'mass market' pricing. That price drop was an illusion. The iPhone does cost 600 dollars and that is its value, and that places it squarely in the luxury phones category, super-premium cost phones.

It is NOT like the iPod which became a mass market music player, or the Apple branded PCs which have been mass market PCs. Don't be misled by the press headlines of Apple having 17% of smartphone market share. That is like saying Porsche has 17% of sports cars. The sports car segment in cars is still the luxury bracket. You need to look at all phones, not just follow Apple's PR spin to look at only smartphones.

The reality is that currently only 3% of Americans have an iPhone and if its price stays at around 600 dollars in real terms, it will never hit 10% of Americans or 2% of the world. That price level has to come down dramatically, for the Apps Store market to ever be a viable mass-market consumer channel.  There is nothing wrong with having a premium luxury product and selling goods (apps) in a premium luxury store - but that will not get you the mass audience. It cannot. 97% of all Americans do not own an iPhone. Most cannot afford the deal AT&T is forcing them to sign up to. no matter how much they may 'aspire' to own an iPhone. Many people want to own a Jaguar or Beemer or Benz or Cadillac then buy a Toyota or a Chevy. For American readers, the Apps Store is like having your product sold in Saks 5th Avenue stores only, not at K-Mart. You will make sales at the Apple Apps Store, but it is only a tiny niche of the addressable market of all mobile phone owners.

NOT ALL APPS DOWNLOADS ARE PAID APPS

Now, back to the Apple iPhone Apps Store. It has a lot of free content, and a lot of paid content. The early evidence suggests that the majority of apps downloaded are free apps. Now, that is not such a bad thing, even free apps have to be developed, so there usually is some sponsor or owner of that application concept who was willing to foot the bill. A lot of the free apps are adver-apps, and that is also a good concept. But do understand, that of the massive download volume we hear about, most is free and that should not be very surprising.

What of paid apps? Here the early evidence suggests the majority of paid apps is games. That is fine too, but then we are looking at a relatively narrow market of consumers who are willing to pay for videogaming. Again, don't think they'll buy your clever information news management application, if most Apple paid apps are games. Or then try to turn your idea into a game perhaps?

The biggest category of 'applications' by volume of titles at the Apple iPhone Apps Store used to be games, and just this month it shifted so that today the biggest category of 'apps' is ebooks. Yes, we do download them and save them to our device, but is that really 'an application' or are we now selling 'content' or 'titles' via the apps store? So the Apps Store is murphing into being a smartphone-oriented rival to Amazon bookseller and Kindle eBook reader? Pay attention to this shift, some of that revenue that is being generated is not any type of app, it is pure content (eBooks for example) not applications.

So - lets take a breather here. Apple's iPhone Apps Store is great, it has tons of apps and gets massive amounts of downloads. However, whether its a hundred million downloads or a billion downloads, the total accessable market did not grow whether apps were 100 million or a billion - its still only 35 million total iPhones out there globally, and total installed base of iPhone users is by definition less than that, as some iPhone users have upgraded and thus some of the newer iPhones were sold to those who already owned an older model.

Not all iPhone users will download apps. Those who do, will greatly prefer free apps. With free apps, there will be a disproportionate amount of downloads compared to apps that are actually used. Out of paid apps, most are games. Today, out of all items available at the Apps store, the largest category is eBooks - which are not even true applications. (Incidentially, I applaud this strategy by Apple, but just want this to be clear - lets not now fall into more hype and hysteria about it, if Apple manages to rival Amazon via the Apps Store and somehow equate that as an 'applications' opportunity. Mobile phone books are a far bigger opportunity sold directly to phones, without 'apps' and in Japan generate half a billion dollars of revenues already, sold directly from the mobile internet websites of Japanese booksellers or direct from m-books publisher sites)

It can well be said, that the iPhone (and iPod Touch) is the nearest rival to the Playstation Portable, as a pocketable gaming platform. And offering eBooks, it is turning the iPhone into a viable rival to the Kindle style of eBook readers, while making the Apps Store a rival to Amazon. As the total 'downloads' shifts from real apps to 'content' like eBooks, please do not be deluded into thinking just because it was sold by Apps Store, it is an application. That is Apple cannibalizing Kindle and Amazon sales, not creating a bigger market for any developers out there coding applications.

Does that mean that every title in the Apps Store is an app, no. Does it mean that there is something unique here for Apple. No. But yes recognize on the most hyped Apps Store, at Apple, not all iPhone users download apps, not all apps are paid-for content, and of paid content, not all are real apps. So far so good. This is Apple's best market, the USA  where the iPhone has 3% of American and under 1% of the rest of the world's phones.

OTHER APPS STORES

Ok, so Apple is a special case. What of the bigger smartphone platforms? Symbian has 10 times more smartphone handsets in use around the world. RIM's Blackberry has about twice the installed base of smartphones than the iPhone worldwide and is far the biggest smartphone platform by installed base specifically in the USA. And there is Windows Mobile, Google Android, Palm etc. Will their users download apps. Yes they will. But will they do so as much as Apple sees now in the Apps Store. I think not. Makes no difference how 'good' their Apps Stores and how many 'titles' they may have.

Why? Well, first the Apple is a very uniquely consumer-only focused smartphone platform. It is the least business/enterprise oriented smartphone platform. Compare it to Blackberry, which is predominantly a business/enterprise smartphone, which is currently breaking into the consumer smartphone space. So while the Blackberry does have a vast library of apps, they are mostly business/enterprise applications. These are sold through various business/enterprise solution providers and are not sold via any 'apps store' but rather they are installed by the IT departments of the enterprise/corporate customers who deploy Blackberries by the thounsands as employee-phones to mid-managers and executives. So if they have some app built to do say CRM system integration with the company's SAP based CRM solution - that is an application for a smartphone, it will be deployed to thousands of Blackberries at that corporate customer, but it will not equate to thousands of individual SAP apps 'bought via an Apps store' at the RIM apps store.

So for at least Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile and Palm, a significant part of all apps that are truly sold to their smarphones - do not show up in any apps store statistics (Google's Android is still so new, we don't have a clear idea of their precise focus area).

The Apps Store measurement is a consumer focused opportunity and when we obsess about it, we ignore a huge already-well-established mobile applications opportunity for business/enterprise apps. Not sold via apps stores. Don't think, if for example RIM or Symbian/Nokia 'apps store' sales are not as impressive as Apple's that their 'total' apps opportunity isn't bigger. Blackberries and Nokia E-Series phones both have bigger installed bases among just business/enterprise customers worldwide - than the total installed base of Apple iPhones. And I'd suggest for practical purposes every single enterprise/corporate smartphone for large corporate customers has at least one 'application' installed for the business use - corporate email if nothing else. That is not your Hotmail or Gmail or Yahoo email client. A robust, secure corporate email solution, and its smartphone client. An application for a smartphone... Most likely business/enterprise smartphones have many apps, pre-installed by the IT department before the employee even gets to turn on his new Blackberry or E-Series.

EMPLOYEES OFTEN FORBIDDEN

Palm, Windows Mobile and Nokia's E-Series (Symbian) are typically strongly enterprise/business customer -oriented, so again, there often business/enterprise employee phone guidelines expressly prohibit the employee phone from being used for personal uses, ie installing Facebook etc and installing games and so forth. Out of all smartphones out there, Apple is singularly not successful in the enterprise/corporate space (had something like 2% of all US based iPhones with corporate customers according to their CTO earlier this year) so Apple does not have this 'hindrance' to its iPhone users coming to its apps store and 'freely' buying apps.

Now, all smartphone makers are rushing to capture the bigger consumer market (bigger than the enterprise/corporate market) and Nokia's N-Series is a good example of this strategy already years prior to the launch of the iPhone. But recognize, of the total installed base, the Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile etc smartphones - many are with corporate/enterprise customers and this will distort the total pattern of downloads of apps. Conversely, far more true enterprise-apps will be sold to RIM, Symbian and WinMo smartphones than ever can hope to sell to Apple iPhones for the same reason. And enterprise apps often feature corporate licenses - often annual licenses - rather than single unit downloads - can be far more lucrative business than trying to develop a hit app game to the consumer market, for example.

On most other smartphones, a large proportion of apps will be sold to the enterprise/corporate client, bypassing any apps store. And with many employee phones, there are restrictions of what may be installed to it, limiting their total market potential to sell consumer apps. No other smartphone platform can replicate Apple's performance, when counted as a percentage out of its installed base of phones, due to these unique reasons about Apple's situation in smartphones.

USA MARKET IS ANOMALY

There is a further dramatic distinction. One third of total iPhone users are in the USA. but only 6% of all mobile phone subscribers of the planet are in the USA. The success of the iPhone is totally disproportionately in the USA. The smartphone applications market opportunity is dramatically more 'mature' in the USA than in the rest of the world. The US is very highly penetrated on personal computers in the homes and offices. Most PC users are quite familiar with application downloads and installs, and have personally done it many times, on many PCs, and are quite comfortable doing it. And no doubt, PC users find that the experience of an application installation onto an Apple iPhone is particularly pleasant, easy, hassle-free.

The rest of the planet is not like the USA. Even in the advanced parts of the Industrialized World, Europe and advanced Asia-Pacific, the penetration rates of PCs lag those of the USA, and their history of use by consumers is often far shorter. So users are far less familiar with the concept of apps to install to PCs. There is more 'fear of computers' so to speak, among regular consumers, especially those who in their work do not use PCs. Beyond the 1 billion people who live in the industrialized parts of the planet, the other 5.8 billion people do not have easy access to PCs at all (one PC for every 20 people on avarage, most of them have not touched a PC in their life). There is not a historical precedent for any kind of 'applications downloads' or installs.

What this means, is that the hysteria around smartphone apps stores is centered in the USA, especially around Apple fans and enthusiasts (but also Google, Microsoft, RIM and Palm) and they get ample 'good evidence' from their home market, which will (probably) not translate to the rest of the world. It actually distorts the picture being artificially strong in favor of an applications market for smartphones. Just like for example push-to-talk, a great mobile communications idea that worked in the US market due to it being so far behind in SMS, and never took off in the rest of the world who were far more advanced in mobile at the time.

By the way, while we are on the history side, Apple did not invent this apps store concept in 2008. The world's first Apps Store was launched by Japan's NTT DoCoMo as far back as 2001, as the i-Appli. All three big mobile operators in Japan have had apps stores for most of this decade

So, not all Apple iPhone smartphone users will install apps. Both the Apple and the US markets are 'extreme' and thus more apps-oriented than the rest of smartphones and rest of the world. Even among all other smarphones, the proportion of customers and the total number of downloads - will not be as great as Apple sees today with iPhone Apps Store.

Conclusion number 1 - the apps store maximum opportunity is a sub-set of all smarphones, and will be proportionately less successful on other brands of smartphones than the iPhone and in countries other than the USA.

Conclusion number 2 - Apple's iPhone Apps Store is a small subset of all smartphones and even in the USA, a far larger installed base of RIM Blackberries exist, and worldwide more than 10 times bigger Symbian installed base exists for apps. Lets not obsess only about the iPhone. If you do want to discuss smartphone applications, please do note Apple is a small slice of all smartphones. And apps stores exist for all major smartphones, and - very importantly - apps are also sold through other means, including business/enterprise apps, and don't forget embedded apps to the phone directly.

SMARTPHONES IS SMALL PART OF ALL PHONES

So we then compare and contrast. Smartphones are actually a very small part of all mobile phones in the world. When compared to personal computer sales, if we hit 180 million smarphones sold this year, that is about 64% of the size of total PC sales worldwide, and since last year, more smartphones are sold annually than all laptop style PCs (laptops, notebooks and netbooks) combined. So it is very easy to see why the global PC focused IT press is very eager to study smartphones.

But yes, we will sell roughly speaking about 1.1 billion new mobile phones this year. The market for non-smartphone mobile phones (cellphones) is over five times greater than the market for smartphones, out of new phone sales this year. When we look at the installed base, its even worse. There are about 3.8 billion actual activated mobile phones in use this year (out of a total of 4.6 billion phone subscriptions)

The total installed base of smartphones is about 550 million in round terms. So about 14.5% of all mobile phones in use on the planet are smartphones, 85.5% are simpler 'feature phones' or basic phones. Before you think - but I can't sell my app to simpler phones - think again. This year 50% of all phones in use are Java/Brew capable, meaning you can install apps to them! Thats 1.9 billion devices - almost twice the total worldwide installed based of PCs, and 3.5 times more than all smartphones - oh, and 54 times bigger opportunity than total installed base of iPhones. Did I get your attention?

Now, I am not in the least bit suggesting that its 'easy' to develop to this market, and yes, Java has all sorts of problems starting with a zoo of specifications, and you'd need to go through a myriad of environments to get the apps to your consumers - but hey, lets be clear about this. If we talk apps, Java/Brew will get you the world's biggest apps platform, far far bigger than all types of PCs. Why isn't anyone talking of this side of the business?

Conclusion 3 - a far greater mobile applications opportunity exists beyond smartphones, for all phones, on simpler platforms but with plenty of global coding and software competence, such as on Java and Brew.

THINK BEYOND THE APP

If you are thinking of your application, and the service you want to deploy. In most cases, you can deploy your mobile service either as a stand-alone installed app, or a 'service' on some service platforrm like HTML/web, or WAP or MMS or SMS etc. Now the economics get stunning. On the PC based web, you can reach a total internet-connected PC population of 1.0 billion (the rest of the 1.7 billion internet users access in web cafes or on their phones).

Then on the WAP so-called 'mobile internet' environment, you reach an installed base of.. get this.. 3.4 Billion phones ! Obviously not nearly all are actively using WAP services, but over 1.2 Billion people already do use the mobile internet - Yankee Group said 29% of the planet were active users of browsing on mobile phones at the start of this year. So you have an installed base of 1.2 Billion who need no training, their phones are correctly configured, they have the right pricing plans, etc, and they already consume mobile content via their mobile phone browser. It may be news via WAP or get their weather or sports scores or do Google searches or access Facebook etc. And if you are adventurous, to reach beyond - yes, globally you can target a potential market of 3.4 billion conneced WAP-capable devices in use around the planet.

Now consider the money involved. If you think your clients are willing to pay 2 dollars for the app 'download' on the Apps Store, wouldn't they be willing to pay a dollar a month for the 'service' instead? And you get 12 dollars of regular revenue annually from your customers, rather than one 2 dollar payment? This is the magic of mobile apps. The CEO of Softbank (Japan's third largest mobile operator/carrier, and its exclusive iPhone network) was just speaking at the Mobile Asia Congress this week and said the total value of mobile content service revenues in Japan alone - are worth 14 Billion dollars annually! Japan has had apps stores since 2001. Softbank is Japan's iPhone network. Yet its CEO says mobile internet content revenues is the giant market opportunity. Perhaps he knows something. Nobody is suggesting Apple's Apps Store generates even one tenth of that amount of revenues globally, this year...

But if you are willing to keep it a bit more simple and standardized, on a sounds, pictures, videos and interactivity -level, then there is a multimedia standard for mobiles, called MMS. You may think of it as 'picture messaging' and think its a lousy idea to try to charge consumers enormously to send pictures from one phone to another. That may be true, but the astonishing part is that MMS is a global hit.

MMS is enabled at more than 2.8 Billion mobile phones and their networks, and has 1.4 Billion active users. Yes, more users of MMS than all PC based internet users, far more users than total user base of email or Google or Facebook or YouTube or Twitter. MMS has almost as many users worldwide as there are TV sets on the planet (its neck-and-neck this year, next year MMS will be bigger). All sorts of entertainment and news services are being deployed on MMS from pictures to clips to sounds to games to quizzes to coupons etc etc etc. And MMS is fully interactive, like SMS. How big is MMS ? Globally worth 26 Billion dollars last year said Portio.

While many who do not understand this industry very well, still think MMS is somehow a 'failure', in advanced markets its totally normal, used by the majority of mobile phone owners, and generating tons of money. The CEO of China Mobile (the world's largest mobile operator/carrier with 500 million subscribers) just said at the Mobile Asia Congress that MMS in China is a 'mature' mobile content type in line with SMS. In Norway 84% of the public send MMS. It is experiencing phenomenal growth. In Australia MMS grew 300% just last year. Even the USA is getting into MMS, as four out of ten Americans have sent an MMS according to Jagtag. If you can deliver your customer mobile experience on a simple multimedia format, then MMS is your best bet. The Apple Apps Store total revenues are likely to be far less than a billion dollars. MMS delivered 26 Billion dollars of revenues last year. Hello?

And if you go really simple, there is SMS text messaging. 3 Billion active users on the planet, and over 99.9% of all 3.8 Billion connected mobile phones on the planet has that ability. 76% of all mobile phone subscribers are active users of SMS text messaging. There is simple SMS and premium (paid) SMS and it is obviously an interactive medium. SMS even has the ability to launch WAP page sessions, so you trigger 'mobile internet' experiences from SMS. Worth globally over 100 Billion dollars, SMS is the data giant, either on mobile or on the PC.

So Conclusion 4 - for a truly massive audience and a truly massive revenue opportunity, that is totally viable today, go mobile 'services' not mobile 'applications'. Use WAP, or MMS or SMS, depending on your need, and you reach an active user base that is at a minimum 34 times bigger than the total installed base of iPhones. Except that these WAP users are all already experienced to pay for their WAP experiences. On MMS the total active user base is 40 times bigger than the total installed base of iPhones and on SMS it is 88 times bigger - and every one of these users is willing to pay (at least a little bit) extra for that MMS or SMS experience. Most iPhone users don't pay for apps, they only download free apps.

Obviously we can do free on mobile services as well, do free experiences, adver-games, promotions, coupons, trials, sponsored messages etc. But best of all, the user is not whining like on the web that somehow 'everything needs to be free' but the consumer on mobile is quite willing to accept, that all content and services on mobile cost something.

THIS IS OUR BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY: SERVICES NOT APPS

So, apps are a great opportunity - not for mobile, but for the much smaller IT/PC industry. Apps are a great chance for any service developer to get some money now, and if the Apple iPhone market is suitable for your needs (especially any developers in the USA), it is the easiest to develop for. Their total market however is tiny. Less than 1% of all phones on the planet are iPhones. Even in its best market, the USA, only 3% of all mobile phones (cellphones) is an iPhone. You can only reach 35 million iPhones globally and about 12 million in the USA today. It is a niche only, a rich person's luxury niche, no matter how you slice it.

If you do apps, then remember, Symbian and RIM/Blackberry are far bigger by reach of their audience - but yes, you get device fragmentation issues etc. It makes sense especially if you are based in the USA, to start with the iPhone because it is so easy to develop to and to sell on. But don't limit yourself to that tiny lake, go for the big seas of the other much bigger smartphone platforms.

If you do apps, think also beyond smartphones. The Java/Brew market is several times larger than all smartphones of all operating systems, rolled together. Its not always a friendly developer market, but you have reach into most pockets of most consumers in the Industrialized World, and well into a quarter of all pockets in the Developing World. So if the iPhone app market is a lake, and other smartphone markets are seas, the Java/Brew apps market is the ocean.

Beyond apps, think services on mobile. WAP, MMS and SMS will totally dwarf the smartphone market size. In all countries today these are viable service environments to deliver 'browser-based' and 'web-like' (but definitely not 'real internet') experiences via WAP, or very robust and compelling interactive multimedia experiences on MMS, or basic interactive messaging services via SMS. It is different selling applications for download, or selling a monthly service, but the scale is so enormous, its like comparing the reach of the oceans, to the reach of the air on planet earth.

Thats my view of apps stores. I am certain, that when we look back at the industry ten years from now, the vastly greater opportunity in mobile content, apps and services was selling services than applications, no matter how successful smartphones may become this coming decade. Apps are a side-show, the services are the main event. If you develop apps now, please study the services opportunities, and make sure you capture a piece of that bigger pie now, before everybody else is doing it too.

Our regular readers know that I am an ex-Nokia guy and I come from Finland, so often this blog, and my books reflect an unfair balance of over-emphasizing the contributions of Finland and Nokia, and unfairly under-emphasize the contributions of other countries and companies, in particular those of Japan and NTT DoCoMo. I hope in a small way to correct that today, and will go on record to state, that the country that has given most to the mobile telecoms industry is, by a huge lead, Japan; and of many innovative companies in Japan, the one that has single-handedly turned a potentially niche geek market into a massive global giant, has been NTT DoCoMo.

And yes, I hope many will write celebrations and tributes to the mobile phone around December of this year, and wanted to provide the facts of when things happened. And to get the basics right, this industry was launched in Tokyo Japan, not Chicago USA.

Go get a cup of coffee, this will not be brief, but I think I will surprise you with some of the stories that came from the land of Nippon.

FONZIE, ABBA AND MORK FROM ORK

1979. Thirty years ago. The movies frightened us with the China Syndrome of what might happen in an accident in a nuclear powerplant, and then Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the USA did have a nuclear accident. On TV Dallas was the big hit globally, while we laughed at Fonzie in Happy Days and the alien Mork in Mork & Mindy. Serious movie fans flocked to Kramer vs Kramer and Manhattan. Space was big in the movies, as Alien scared us, and James Bond made his sad space adventure in Moonraker.

Margaret Thatcher had been elected Prime Mininster of the UK, the Ayatollah Khomeini had taken over the rule of Iran, and peanut-farmer president Jimmy Carter was getting deeper and deeper into trouble with inflation, high oil prices and a hostage crisis - in Iran. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, to be entangled in a decade-long quagmire battling something called the Taliban. And in Iraq, a military coup put a young officer in charge by the name of Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile a second-rate actor was suggested as a long-shot to perhaps become the presidential candidate of the Republican Party, a guy named Ronald Reagan, known for movies such as acting with a monkey in Bedtime for Bonzo.

On the airwaves it was the time of disco, with Donna Summer singing of Bad Girls, Earth Wind and Fire taking us to Boogie Wonderland and Sister Sledge telling us We Are Family. Anita Ward asked us to Ring My Bell, while the Village People took us to YMCA. Even rocker Rod Stewart was into Disco asking Do Ya Think I'm Sexy. While some classic rock was also born, from Pink Floyd's the Wall album and its anthem, Another Brick in the Wall, to the Knack singing of My Sharona, Blondie releasing Heart of Glass, to Queen telling us to Don't Stop Me Now.  And yes, of course there was all that Abba on our radios from Gimme Gimme Gimme to Voulez Vous.

30 years ago there was no CNN, there was no MTV, there was no Playstation. Madonna had not released a song yet. There was no digital music, no CDs. Movie rentals were on video cassette, not DVD and we had a format war of Betamax vs VHS. The internet had only 200 connected computers, all mainframe computers at this time. The personal computer was five years old and IBM had not bothered to release a PC. This was the context of 1979.

 


(this picture is from the launch time, and is at the NTT History website at this link picture first mobile phone service NTT 1979)

It was December 1, 1979, and Japan's national monopoly telecoms operator/carrier, NTT, launched the world's first mobile telecoms service commercially, with a fully functional network covering the 23 districts of Tokyo to start with, and by 1984 would offer national coverage across all of Japan. The early phones were carphones and cost thousands of dollars, a sign-up fee (remember those?) of several thousand dollars and a minimum monthly fee of about 250 dollars. Plus voice minutes costing two dollars per minute. These new mobile phones were seen by all experts and analysts including management at NTT as only a niche product for the wealthy and powerful. But that was the starting point.

This blog will celebrate some of the major contributions of the Japanese mobile telecoms industry from that point on, with some context and numbers to illustrate the relevance.

1G ANALOG CELLULAR

So yes, December 1, 1979, NTT of Japan launched initially for the Tokyo metropolitan region, the world's first commercial mobile phone cellular telecoms network, consisting of 88 cell sites (base stations, or "radio towers"). This was a 'cellular network', with 'handover' and on an automated system ie the caller just dialled the number, and no human switchboard operator was needed to connect the call. Previous carphone systems existed in many advanced countries, but never had all three elements, so for example Ericsson had an automated non-cellular carphone system out of Sweden, while Finland had a nation-wide cellular system on ARP technology which did not have handover, and was no automated.

This NTT system, is genesis. It is what we now call a first generation or 1G mobile network. It was an analog system and still with phones big and batteries weak, these were mostly carphones, but soon also 'luggable' portable phones emerged, suitcase/briefcase sized monster-heavy phones, with shoulder-straps, weighing about 10 kg (22 pounds) that did allow callers to bring their phones with them. By the middle of the next decade, hand-held phones would appear in short succession in America, Europe and Japan.

While the utility of a mobile phone was obvious, the early costs and size issues prevented mass adoption. In Japan it would take about 15 years to connect the first one million users to the network. As prices would come down, in the second 15 years they would add a hundred million more.

In 1981 the innovation spread, and early 1G networks started to emerge in many countries in addition to Japan, first in the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden on the NMP standard and then rapidly in many countries from the UK to Mexico. The USA joined the growing list of countries with cellular mobile phone services quite late, on October 13, 1983 when Ameritech launched their commercial service in Chicago.

FIRST 10 YEARS, 4 MILLION

It was slow going, by the time the industry was ten years old, in 1989, we had only 4 million mobile phone subscribers in the world. In terms of total penetration rates, the cellular phone was strictly an expensive executive gadget, for busy businesspeople only. The networks were mostly city-networks, so you pretty much expected that as you drove into the suburbs and away from the city, the network would disappear and you would not get a cellular phone signal. Phones were still very expensive, cost more than a thousand dollars each, and voice minutes cost over a dollar per minute and a good phone would not last half an hour of talk-time. In terms of human penetration levels, after ten years, there was a cellular phone for well under one tenth of one percent of the total population of the planet. Or in other words, one cellular phone for every one thousand people. An interesting gadget perhaps, but definitely not a mass market device, its market penetration was only a tiny 'niche' and the gadget was strictly for the exclusive few, and the very rich.

SECOND TEN YEARS, 740 MILLION

But phones kept getting smaller and the services more affordable, and the first analog 1G mobile phone networks gave way to digital second generation mobile phone 2G networks from 1991, and by 1999, at the 20th year anniversary of mobile phones, the world had 740 million mobile phone subscriptions in use, and globally one in eight humans had a mobile phone, or global penetration rate was at 12% of the human population. Some were even suggesting one day there would be more mobile phones than fixed landline phones.

On a global basis, that number of mobile phones by 1999 was now bigger than the number of personal computers in use, more than total automobiles registered and far bigger than the number of internet users. But still, mobile phones were far off from the most widely spread technologies of the planet, fixed landine phones, TV sets and FM radios.

That 12% global penetration rate was of course not uniformly distributed. The 5 billion people living in the developing world had almost no mobile phones far less than 5% penetration rates, but in the most advanced markets, like Japan, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Hong Kong and Singapore, the mobile phone penetration levels were passing 60% national levels and Finland became the first industrialized world nation where the number of mobile phone subscriptions grew bigger than total fixed landline phones. An enormous change was happening and early evidence of it was starting to emerge in those most advanced markets.

TODAY 4.6 BILLION

Fast forward to today, and in December 2009, thirty years later, mobile phone subscriptions have reached 4.6 Billion people, and there is a mobile phone subscription for two thirds of the planet. Even in the developing world there is more than 50% penetration rate with mobile. We are now adding half a billion new subscribers per year, and the industry sells over a billion new phones annually. Mobile phones have become the most widely spread technology on the planet, with more phone subscriptions than landline phones, more than TV sets, and more even than FM radios worldwide.

If we plot the growth of the industry, in terms of customers, the mobile industry grew at a sustained compound annual growth rate of 130% for the first whole decade (ie more than doubling every year) up to 4 million users; then at the breathaking rate of 68% annual growth rate for its second decade to 740 million users, and now still an amazing 20% rate this third decade to reach 4.6 Billion users.

For contrast, the landline phone business took over 120 years to reach 1 billion subscribers. Radio achieved a billion receivers in use in about 80 years. Television took 65 years to reach a billion. The internet took 38 years. Personal computers reached a billion units in use in 33 years. But mobile reached a billion users worldwide in just 22 years.

And if we think of a Trillion dollars in annual revenues, Mobile achieved that enormous milestone level last year, in 29 years (with 800 billion in service revenues, and 200 billion in phones and equipment sales per year). The landline phone business never did hit a Trillion dollars in annual revenues. Neither did radio. Neither did television, come to think of it. And the internet, is a far cry from a Trillion at less than a quarter of that size. Not only is mobile telecoms a giant in terms of users, but it is also the monster in terms of total worldwide annual revenues, as an industry sector. What is more, over the past year, while the global economy shrunk, the mobile telecoms industry still grew subscribers by 15% and grew revenues by 8% WOW! What a healthy, dynamic, robust, powerful industry. Thank you NTT.

THE MOBILE INTERNET

That NTT Nippon Telephone and Telegraph company was privatized and then it spun off its mobile division, which was branded NTT DoCoMo. But this young hungry growing company has continued with the innovations for this industry.

On the eve of the 20th anniversary of mobile phones, 1999 saw perhaps the most important innovation to this mobile telecoms industry, when NTT DoCoMo launched the world's first dedicated mobile internet service package. This is what we might think of a 'portal service', in what they called i-Mode in Japan. This was a radical innovation, and industry-shattering. They brought an internet-like experience to phones, but with many gigantic improvements. The most obvious is that every item or service on the i-Mode service can be billed for (while you may think, 'we can do that on the internet as well' - that is not true. None of the content on the internet can be billed through the internet. You have to set up a Paypal account, only about 10% of internet users have one, or you have to provide a credit card etc. But on the mobile internet, all you need is a phone account, and you can pay. This is a radical improvement over the legacy internet).

This was the birth of the money internet. Every officially authorized content brand or provider on i-Mode had an automated billing relationship by which they could charge micropayments and get customers to pay for content and services, typically charging 100 to 200 Yen per month - roughly between 1-2 dollars.

MOBILE INTERNET USE STATS

And ever since i-Mode, Japan grabbed and has held the lead in global statistics for mobile internet use in the Industrialized World countries, whether in proportion of internet-capable handsets; or percent of mobile subscribers to the mobile internet; or total mobile internet traffic; or the shift from the PC based internet to the mobile internet. So if you think the iPhone is cool in causing a shift from laptops to the iPhone, that phenomenon was first observed in Japan.

To illustrate how these matter, since 2006, the Japanese regulator has reported that the majority of all internet use is from mobile phones, not from personal computers. And what of usage? Since 2008, the Japanese regulator reports that the majority of internet use has shifted also to mobile. So in Japan, obviously all internet pages are by default formatted for the small screens of mobile phones.

So how did this "another crazy Japanese innovation" fare in the rest of the world? Yankee Group told us earlier this year, that 29% of all mobile phone users on the planet now surf on mobile web pages. So at the start of this year, it meant there were 1.1 Billion users of the mobile internet worldwide (if the same rate holds, that is 1.3 Billion active users of the mobile internet by the end of 2009), and yes, that means there were more users accessing browser-based content on a phone, than the total population of internet-conneced personal computers on the planet. In just nine years, the 'pocket' internet had grown to have more users worldwide than the 'original' PC based worldwide web. Remember the PC based equivalent, the Worldwide Web, was launched in 1989, onto a platform of the internet, to an established base of personal computers. It took the WWW 17 years to pass a billion users. The mobile internet reached a billion users in almost half the time.

MOBILE INDUSTRY BUSINESS MODEL

But if the prototypical mobile internet service, i-Mode was a radical innovation, the parallel introduction of a new mobile internet business model was pure genius. NTT DoCoMo said they would pay back 90 cents out of every dollar to the content owners of any mobile service, content or application, when charged through the i-Mode service. So if a Disney screen saver cost 200 yen, about 2 dollars, then Disney would get 1 dollar 80 cents, and DoCoMo would only charge 20 cents for that billing transaction. Fast forward to today, and Apple is cheered by applications developers, for its developer-friendly revenue-sharing model, where Apple takes 'only' 30 cents for every dollar charged on an application sold through the store. NTT DoCoMo a decade earlier already offered a far better deal to content owners and developers.

At this time most carriers/operators around the world were thinking the business model on the emerging mobile internet would be a 50/50 split. But the industry leader NTT DoCoMo boldly promised a 90:10 split. Content owners and application developers and various partners flocked to the i-Mode service. The backlog for accepting new partners grew to even 3 months at DoCoMo as tens of thousands of Japanese internet companies wanted to get authorized to become official i-Mode partners. Wired magazine reported in 2001 of the first profitability turnaround, of the famed loss-making Japanese internet giant, Cybird, as having turned profitable suddenly, only through its mobile internet arm. Hundreds, thousands were to follow the same success story.

The i-Mode revenue-sharing model was instantly copied in Japan by the two rival networks, KDDI and J-Phone (now Softbank). Then in neighboring South Korea and Taiwan, very similar models were adopted with carriers/operators there soon offering about 85:15 or 80:20 deals. In Europe in the most advanced markets like those in Scandinavia, soon similar deals in the 75:25 range or 80:20 were offered. And mainstream Europe was moving away from 50:50 deals to more like 60:40 and 70:30. Not surprisingly, the more friendly the revenue terms were for the content providers, the bigger the mobile internet success and adoption was in that country. Japan continued to lead and South Korea in a solid second place, but advanced parts of Europe where deals were better than 70:30 would also show very strong mobile internet adoption.

MOBILE EMAIL

Now, many applaud RIM for bringing email to mobile phones with the full solution, of the email servers, etc, optimized for mobile use. RIM did do that, for the Western markets of North America and Europe. Again, Japan was there before, and this innovation too has to be credited to Japan and NTT DoCoMo.

So today, if you ask a Japanese if they would want to have email on a PC, they will first say, oh, I didn't know you could do that - as they obviously will all use email on their phones. And then they will ask - why would you want to have email on a PC? Think about it, if everybody had a Blackberry, then why would anyone really want to use a PC for email.

MOBILE BOOKS

There is so much to the mobile innovations from Japan, one I want to mention is mobile books. Yes, books that are consumed on mobile phones. Most who have not heard of this, are usually laughing that it cannot possibly take off. Yet in Japan last year, nearly half a billion dollars worth of mobile books were sold (and yes, just earlier this week stats from iPhone apps revealed that books now form the biggest part of 'applications' on the apps store, bigger than games, in terms of titles offered, so don't laugh. Mobile books can be huge).

Back to Japan. Big? Mobile books outsell eBooks by 8 to 1. There are so many compelling reasons why printed text delivery of 'book format' works better on a phone than in traditional printing, in the whole value system of book selling, that all major global booksellers have rushed into this idea. Even me, a tiny private publisher of 3 electronic books, I made them mobile books, readable on smartphone screens.

But here is the truly weird part. Most of the mobile books are youth-oriented books, ie youth novels, young girl falls in love with married man, he won't divorce his wife, she gets pregnant, gets a sexually transmitted disease, commits suicide. You know, youth novels, very predictable storylines, simple characters etc. And written by the youth! What is worse, most mobile books out of Japan have actually been written on mobile phones!

Talk about repetitive thumb syndrome.. but this is the same generation that walks around with Playstation Portables and send 100 short messages every day and update their Facebook accounts whenever they go to the bathroom etc. They are totally comfortable with the small screen and keypad of a modern phone, and think nothing of turning their private diary or blog into a book - especially if some real book publisher is willing to pay them for that. And for the book publisher, it is a trivial cost to publish books on mobile, and minimal risk. If the young author is successful, then the books get printed also in paperback format. A true revolution for the 1st mass media channel, print and its oldest format, the printed book. And this too came from Japan.

MOBILE ADVERTISING

And where there is media, there is advertising. There were many independent web services on the mobile internet that had some kind of advertising models. But then NTT DoCoMo took the fledgling tentative experimental industry, and turbo-charged it. Japan saw the first national giant ad agency dedicated to mobile advertising, in D2, the 50/50 partnership between NTT DoCoMo the biggest mobile operator of Japan, and Dentsu, the biggest advertising agency of Japan. Today Japan's mobile advertising market is both the biggest in total revenues, and most innovative, and D2 has been a major force in enabling that. Japan was the first country to launch engagement marketing concepts on mobile, stuff that Alan Moore and I wrote about in our book Communities Dominate Brands in 2005. Most of the innovative ideas of mobile advertising globally have come out of Japan. Thank you Japan.

THIRD GENERATION

Most of you reading this blog are employed adults working in the media, IT or telecoms space, and will have an advanced mobile phone in your pocket. You may not even have noticed, that you migrated to the third generation recently. Most smartphones today, including the iPhone, the Blackberry, and of course the main top-end phones from Nokia, SonyEricsson, Samsung, Motorola and LG tend to be 3G phones. Your N-Series or E-Series Nokia are 3G phones. And you might not even notice, that often when you make voice calls, those are handled on the 3G network. And most of the time when you access Google or your email or get the sports scores, weather report or stock market update, you are actually using the 3G network. More than half of all mobile phone users in Europe and advanced markets of Asia now have a 3G phone on a 3G subscription. This mostly silent revolution has been the rapid expansion of the 3G technology. And once again we go to Japan.

On October 1, 2001, NTT DoCoMo used the WCDMA standard to deploy 3G commercially and the era of the third generation of mobile formally commenced. By the end of the year South Korea had launced commerically on the rival CDMA2000 EV-DO standard, and within a year, Japan had all three networks with their 3G networks in commercial production. Europe would have to wait until March of 2003, when Italy and the UK received their first commercial networks on 3G. The US had its first commercial network on 3G, Monet, but that went bankrupt and the first viable 3G network in North America would be that on Verizon a lot later.

While the technology press obsessed about such technologies as the iPod, the Blackberry, the iPhone and the PlayStation Portable, a 3G revolution silently took over. Today the installed base of 3G phones is at over 800 million in use, and of paying subscribers on 3G telecoms price plans and subscriptions, we are at about 600 million customers who pay for 3G access, and who produce annual revenues of about 325 Billion – yes that was right – 325 Billion dollars of annual revenues. Abi Research has estimated that this year 2009 will become the first year when more 3G phones are sold worldwide than 2G phones and my consultancy, TomiAhonen Consulting tracks the revenues and projects that within wo years half of all mobile industry service revenues will come out of 3G. Thank you Japan!

CAMERAPHONE

While NTT DoCoMo was very visibly launching 3G, its smaller Japanese rival, J-Phone (later brought by Vodafone, and then sold to Softbank), was developing a technology innovation that would have an even wider impact than 3G, the cameraphone. The idea at first seemed quite bizarre to even the most friendly enthusiasts, and seemed positively suicidal to most analysts. A completely 'only in Japan' type of innovation that could not spread beyond the island nation. Cameras were mostly still film-based in 2000, and still most mobile phones in use in most big countries like the USA were analog phones of the first generation. The screens of most phones were tiny and only text-based, in monochrome. Who would want to view any pictures on those? And the early cameras were even worse – the first cameraphone by Sharp, that J-Phone released, had a resolution of 0.1 megapixels, yes you read me right, not 1.0 megapixels, but 0.1 megapixels. 300 pixels by 300 pixels. That is literally the size of a postage stamp - a small postage stamp. But still, J-Phone believed this would be popular with consumers, and with a handset manufactured by Sharp, released the first consumer cameraphone in November of 2000.

The early phones and digital cameras had very little overlap. The camera needed its lens and shutter and sensor construction, none of which were parts of a phone. And the camera needed a big screen, in color, and a lot of memory to store the images – pictures were far more memory-hungry than the phone numbers we stored in our phonebook. Meanwhile the mobile phone was shrinking and becoming overloaded with electronics, calendars, clocks, basic video games like the Nokia Snake. The battery life was a problem as was CPU processing power. Meanwhile the big cameramakers like Nikon, Minolta, Canon and Konica, were releasing 'proper' digital cameras with camera resolutions of 3 megapixels, even 5 megapixels.

But despite all the conventional wisdom, cameraphones took the world by storm. By 2004, just three years later, cameraphones already sold more units than stand-alone digital cameras by the big camera makers. By 2006 more cameraphones sold than stand-alone digital cameras and film-based cameras combined, and since then pioneering  giants of the camera industry, Minolta and Konica, have pulled out of the business. Today about 2.5 billion cameraphones are in use, and for almost all of the planet, the only camera type owned is a cameraphone.

If you want to track a truly breathaking spread of a new technology, consider that of the cameraphone. TV took 65 years to reach a billion receivers in use. The personal computer 33 years, the mobile phone 22 years. But cameraphones reached a billion devices in use, in only 7 years. Domo Arigato Japan!

SHA-MAIL

A related innovation was also introduced by J-Phone, the picture message. What we mostly know as MMS multimedia messaging, was originally offered in Japan by J-Phone as 'Sha Mail' and also dismissed as a crazy idea. Yet as cameraphones spread, and being connected, they did open the door for new communications sending pictures. Today picture messaging has 1.4 billion users worldwide - yes that is more than all users of email globally, and in advanced markets like Norway the usage has passed the level of one picture message sent per week (four MMS per month) across the whole subscriber base nationally. Globally picture messaging delivers over 25 billion dollars of service revenues to the mobile telecoms industry and MMS seems particularly suited as an advertising media channel. Were it not for the immense success of SMS text messaging, we would hail MMS as a massive global success in only eight years.

LOCATION-BASED SERVICES

While NTT DoCoMo was launching 3G, and J-Phone were merging cameras with phones, the third Japanese mobile phone operator/carrier, KDDI saw its opportunity in location-based services (LBS). They observed that many Japanese who commuted to work would tend to do most of their shopping and other chores near the two train stations either the one at home or at work. And the cellular network offered even back in 2001 accuracy to the degree that you could position phone users by a network cell radius, that was roughly the reach of the shops, restaurants and offices near any train station.

KDDI deployed their first LBS solutions to give localized advertising and information, essentially for all within walking distance of any one train or underground station. And in the process they embarked upon a journey into LBS that has produced the most amazing location-based service portfolio with the best reliability and accuracy, on the planet today. Their mapping solution called EZ-Navi is so detailed today, that all of Tokyo's buildings have been rendered in 3D, so the service can not only show you a map pinpointing where you are, but show the whole street view in 3D images, so you can see which building is where... 

KDDI has been a continuous journey of service improvement. They were the first to offer GPS based mobile phone navigation as far back as in 2002. Their service portfolio is second to none. The LBS services soon included parcel tracking, friend-finding, personalized weather, tourist guides and yes, location-based advertising. And games, lots and lots of location-based games, with the location-based treasure hunt Mogi as the most widely referenced. Alas, inspite of all the enormous expenditure in the perfection of the technology, LBS has not proven a commercial hit, and while an interesting innovation, and copied in almost every country and every network, the location-based services turned out to be more of an illusion of promise, than any commercial success.

APPS STORE

The hot new story in the tech and telecoms press today is "Apps Stores" after Apple released their iPhone oriented mobile data applications shop in June of 2008. Since then there have been a whole slew of apps stores including those, some by handset makers like Nokia Ovi or RIM Blackberry, some by operating system like Windows Mobile and Google Android, yet others by mobile operators/carriers like Verizon and China Mobile

It would be easy to think this was an Apple invention, but once again, we need to look to the Land of the Rising Sun. It was yes, Japan, and NTT DoCoMo who launched the first applications store for mobile phones, branded i-Appli, all the way back in 2001.

WIFI

Do you like that WiFi connectivity on your smartphone? Many in America first had WiFi on their phone with the original iPhone in 2007. Europeans had their first WiFi smartphone back in 2005 with the 9500 model of the Nokia Communicator. But the first in the world to embed WiFi on a mobile phone was NTT DoCoMo who did it for their premium business phones already in 2003.

VOIP

Do you use Skype? Want Skype on your phone? Yes, that is now becoming possibe on some networks in some countries. Who had that technology first? It is called VOIP Voice Over Internet Protocol. The first mobile phones and service using VOIP comes from Japan. It was KDDI who launced it in 2005, branded as "Metal Plus".

REAL TONES

Felt the ploink-ploink sound of basic ringing tones is 'not real music' and you want to hear Shakira or the Black Eyed Peas or Camillionaire or yes, Abba on your phone? That idea to take real samples of real songs, and using those as ringing tones is what the industry calls 'true tones' or 'realtones'. Who did it first? The Japanese. KDDI released their first Chaku-uta real tone ringing tones and compatible handsets in 2002.

FASHION PHONES

Did you notice that fashion brands are rushing to release branded phones? Armani, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, even watchmakers TAG Heuer are releasing branded phones. Who can we thank for this innovation, to bridge fashion with phones? Not the iPhone. That was NTT DoCoMo with the first Benetton branded phone in 2005.

QR CODES

If you are in the advertising industry you probably have heard of the QR Codes or 2D barcodes, square squibbles that look a bit like an out-of-focus thumb print. They are now appearing all over the planet in innovative ad campaigns. A new way to jump to web pages without any typing, using a camera phone. They say this is the next big thing in consumer interactivity. Who can we thank for this? The Japanese. NTT DoCoMo launched QR Codes in 2005 and I was very privileged to be one of the first Westerners to see this technology even before it had launched, on a private screening by my dear friend, then with NTT DoCoMo's London office, Voytek Siewierski. He said I'd be impressed, and boy was I. I liked it so much that since 2006 I have had the 2D barcode on my business card 'just like Japanese mobile industry executives' haha.. By the way, in just two years from launch, over half of Japanese were using the feature, and in three years, it had shot past three out of every four mobile phone owners. Expect this to really become big in your neck of the woods as well.

FELICA

And if you believe your money is shifting from your wallet and credit cards, to your phone, like 46% of banking accounts in Kenya already are mobile accounts, then you probably also can foresee a future of the "mobile wallet", where our phone is not just our communications and media and memories, but also our cash, our bank account, our credit card; but also collecting our loyalty card points for our purchases and our frequent flier miles for our journeys; and furthermore to be our integrated identity card, our passkeys to work and digital keys to our home door locks. That mobile wallet concept is becoming reality in many of the most advanced markets such as South Korea and yes, Japan. The world's first commerically launched full mobile wallet service is called O-saifu Keitai, and yes, it was launched by NTT DoCoMo in 2004. Part of that is the FeliCa payment system, which you can use in tens of thousands of points-of-purchase all over Japan.

IDLE SCREEN LIVE CONTENT

Wow, how could I forget this? After I posted this blog I attended the GSM Association Mobile Asia Congress to present, and saw presentations by the CEO's of NTT DoCoMo and Softbank. These presentations reminded me of two more huge innovations from Japan that need to be added. Idle Screen. NTT DoCoMo pioneered the live content news feeds to the idle screen of the phone. They call it i-Channel and have launched it now also in India on the Tata network where the most popular content is Cricket Scores. Other markets have copied the idea too, but the first idle screen news feeds were from NTT DoCoMo.

FLAT RATE PRICING

And flat rate pricing. Where would Apple's iPhone impressive mobile internet use be, if it wasn't for flat rate pricing. But that was not an AT&T or Apple invention, no that idea traces its roots to the KDDI network in Japan early in this decade. Flat rate pricing, how could I forget that.

CAMERAPHONE TRANSLATOR

When I visited Japan on one of my many visits, my dear friend Lars Cosh-Ishii of Wireless Watch Japan (and Mobikyo, and MoMo Tokyo) showed me the Cameraphone Dictionary. At the time it was a radical high tech solution, using the cameraphone to scan images of any printed page in English, and momentarily, displaying the same page, translated into Japanese, on the cameraphone screen. Cool. Super high tech. Yes, today this idea is copied many times over, but this kind of innovation is coming from Japan all the time.

CONNECTING PLANTS

How far can it go? I just blogged a couple of months ago, about a new Japanese service provider, AgriHouse, who offer a gadget that lets your plants communicate with you, when they need water, they send you a message to your phone. Connecting plants! No, not connecting plants, translating plant needs into human communications, wow, this is cool.

The mobile phone is the most widely spread technology on the planet. It is our voice calls, our text messages, our Twitter and Facebook updates, our YouTube viewer. It is our camera, our video recorder and image viewer. It is our web browser, search engine and breaking news resource. We get advertisements and coupons on it. We use it to store our critical phone numbers, our anniversaries and birthdays, addresses and all sorts of personal information from banking passwords to health data. The phone has replaced our wristwatch. We use it even as our alarm clock. It is the last thing we see when we go to sleep, and it is the first thing we see when we wake up.

Mobile is such a compelling media, that over half of us now sleep with the phone ringing turned on at night, so mobile can literally reach us even when we sleep. No, I will call your "sleep" and raise you "death". Yes? We reach dead people with mobile? Kind of. Follow me on this. Japan became the first country where they now offer QR Codes used on grave stones in cemetaries. So now, the dear departed can have mobile internet pages made in their memory. You can access the pages when you are at the graveyard, and you can leave your thoughts and prayers and greetings, via your phone of course. Only mobile allows us to connect plants, to reach us when we sleep, and yes, even let our loved ones connect with our memory, after we have died. What a technology!

TRANSITIONS

Thirty years ago we said goodbye to an automobile industry icon, when the original VW Beetle stopped production. Another icon the sporting legend Muhammed Ali announced his retirement from boxing. On TV we said goodbye to Battlestar Galactica, and saw the last season of John Cleese as the bumbling hotellier of Fawlty Towers. This was the last year the original three Charlie's Angels were together. It was the last time we saw the most invincible Bond Villain, Jaws, - remember that giant with the metal teeth - on the silver screen.

Still through all of that, Gloria Gaynor consoled us, as she sang, I Will Survive. But there were transitions into something new, like Archie Bunker went from All in the Family to Archie's Bunker's Place, and SOAP spawned his own series for the sarcastic butler Benson. Previous superstar TV icons went to the big screen, with Star Trek, Superman and the Muppets all having their first movies out that year with countless sequels to follow. Sigourney Weaver would create her iconic Ripley to play against that iconic Alien monster in so many space monster remakes. And a successful pop quintet had a stunning break-up when their youngest member of the Jackson 5 decided to go solo and we heard Michael's hit Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough. That year, 1979 was the commercial break-through of rap music, when Sugarhill Gang gave us Rapper's Delight (sampling the earlier hit of the year, Chic's Good Times). And they thought rap music was only a fad..

Meanwhile an iconic personal entertainment gadget was born with Sony's Walkman launched in Japan, as well as the first videogame cultural icon, Pac Man also first appered, initially in Japan in 1979. And NTT launched commercial mobile telecoms as an overpriced executive carphone service. December 1, 1979, 30 years ago. Who would have thought that the most influential change of them all, was that last one. Mobile phones. We cannot imagine life without them anymore.

Well, we see ever more impressive numbers of internet users, now nearing the 1.7 billion user level. That seems a nice number, but it includes those who access on a PC at home or work, plus those who access at a shared PC like an internet cafe or a school, and those who access the 'mobile internet' on a phone. So lets take a breather here. To start with lets examine personal computers. Actually, not all of them even are connected to the internet...

So yes, there are now just about 1.1 billion personal computers in total in use around the world, counting all desktops, laptops, notebooks and netbooks. How do they divide?. We in the Industrialized World have most of them, 675 million PCs for 'us' meaning a penetration rate of 56% per capita, The density means there is a little less than 2 people per computer in use. How about the Developing World? Well, they have 425 million PCs in use. Those are spread very widely, with 12 people having to share, the penetration rate of PCs is only 8% in the Emerging World.

Now, what of internet access at home and work PCs? In the Western economies, essentially every PC has either dial-up or broadband access. It will not be 100%, but is close enough, that we can call it 675 million actually connected PCs to the internet, so the per-capita internet connectivity on home and work PCs is 56% in the Industrialized World. But in the Developing World not all PCs are yet connected to the internet. Only about three out of every four PCs is, so the total home and office connected PC internet penetration rate is only 6%, at 325 million connected PCs. Yes, one internet PC for every 17 people on average.

So then there is shared PC access to the web. The internet cafe style of access, for those who do not have a PC at home or at work. Again, this is a difficult number to pin down, so this is based on only sporadic data from around the world, but I am reasonably confident the scale is right. In the  Industrialized World, there are an additional 25 million people who do not have access to a PC at home or at work but still use the internet, via an internet cafe. Note most users in the internet cafe situations do have access at home or work, this is those who have not. This forms 2% of the population in the Industrialized Countries, and gives a total combined PC based internet access population, at home, at offices, and at shared internet cafe types of situations, of 58% per capita. 700 milllion internet users.

Compare that with the Developing World. Here the majority of PC based internet users do not have access to a PC at home or work, and use only an internet cafe. I measure that at 375 million people or 7% of the total population in the Emerging World who use internet cafe access. When we add the 325 M who use home and office PCs, we get total PC based internet users at 700 million, or 13% per capita. One internet connection for every 7 people and only half of them have reasonably easy daily access via their home or office PC. Makes you re-think the digital opportunity, doesn't it?

TV AND RADIO

So lets go to television. There are about 1.5 billion TV sets in use on the planet. In the Industrialized World we have nearly one TV set for every person alive, at 79% per capita, and 950 million TV sets in total. In some countries like the USA, there are more TV sets than people. So what of the Developing World? there are 550 million TV sets in the Developing World, so there the penetration rate is just shy of 10%. Not one TV per person, one TV per ten people. Where the average household size is 4.3 people, it means that outside of the Industrialized World, of the rest of the world, essentially half live in households that do not have even one TV set. Obviously nearly a billion people live in homes with no electricity, so we need to understand this in context..

So then radio? FM type of radio has a total worldwide installed base of 3.9 billion receivers (not counting the new mobile phones with in-built FM radio). We in the Industrialized World have tons of them, in our cars, our HiFi stereo sets, our boom boxes and our clock-radios. There are 2.7 billion FM radios in the Industrialized World, so we have on avereage 2.2 FM radios per person, a penetration rate of 225% per capita. In the Developing World there are 1.2 billion FM radios, so that penetration rate reaches an impressive 21%. Or of all technologies mentioned so far, the most widely spread, where there are a little under 5 people per FM radio. Still clearly this leaves hundreds of millions of homes without even a radio to entertain and inform the family.

MOBILE BREACHES DIGITAL DIVIDE

So then we have mobile. Here in the Industrialized World we have more mobile phone subscriptions than we have people. At 1.6 billion subscriptions, there are 1.3 mobile phone subscriptions for every person alive, in the Industrialized World today. In many cases, but not all, this means two phones, so for example an iPhone owner can also carry a Blackberry. But in other cases, typical of Eastern Europe for example, there are multiple subscriptions via inter-changeable SIM cards, using typically only one phone, and the user splits traffic across different networks to save money on calls, etc. Still, like with FM radios in the Industrialized World, we have more mobile phone subscriptions than people here.

What of the Developing World? Consider the math. There are 3 billion mobile phone subscriptions, for a per capita penetration rate of 53% ! Yes, even in the Developing World, mobile phones are now so common, that across the whole region, there are more than one phone subscription for every two people! This is an enormous number in and of itself.

COMPARE

But understand, in the Industrialized World, there are roughly similar 'scale' of the main technologies. More mobile phones than TVs, PCs or cars, yes, but not dramatically more. Roughly speaking twice as many phones as PCs or fixed landlines, only 50% more mobile phone accounts than TV sets, and actually less mobile phones than FM radios.

But in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and the Developing parts of Asia, mobile is alone, far far bigger than any other. There are nine times more mobile phone accounts than cars. There are seven times more mobile phones than personal computers, nine times more mobile phone accounts than home or office PCs that are connected to the internet. There are seven times more mobile phone accounts than fixed landline telephone connections, and five times more mobile phone users than total number of TV sets in use. Even radio, there are 2.5 times more mobile phone subscribers than all FM radios in use in the Developing World.

By every measure, mobile is the giant, the only giant, and the other technologies are the lilliputs. If you intend to communicate with prospective customers in the Developing World today, then you cannot think of mobile as the 'fourth screen' and consider possibly including it in your communication mix, as we still can think in the Industrialized World, as a luxury today. No, in the Developing World mobile is the first screen - and obviously, for as many as 1.8 billion people - one quarter of the planet - it is the ONLY screen. These 1.8 billion people do not have a PC, not a TV, not even FM radio, but they have a live, active mobile phone account. Out of all 3 billion people in the Developing World who have some kind of connection, a massive 60% have no other way to connect, than their mobile phone! Did I get your attention now?

An internet connected PC will get you 325 million people or 6% of the population in the Emerging World. A fixed landline will ring in the homes of 425 million people or 8% in Africa, Latin America or Developing parts of Asia. A wealthy 10% of the population, 550 million people have a TV set and one in five, 1.2 billion people are lucky to own an FM radio. But more than half of the population have a mobile phone subscription, 56% per capita or 3 billion. And yes, 1.8 billion people - that is six times the size of the USA - have no other connection or technology, than a mobile phone.

SMS, MMS, BROWSING

While I have you. How do you communicate with them then? You don't buy ads on newspapers, and you don't put ads on TV or radio. You also can't send them emails or hope to reach them via some clever social networking marketing on Facebook or MySpace or YouTube or whatever is the current flavor of social networking. The way to reach the populations in the Developing World is four ways - voice calls on mobile, SMS text messaging, MMS picture messaging, and WAP basic banners and browser services on the very rudimentary 'mobile internet' services.

Lets put these also into context. Voice? In the Industrialized World about 88% of mobile phone users place voice calls (oh, you didn't know that? Already 12% have stopped voice calls and use their handsets for primarily texting or instant messaging, or some other mobile internet services). In the Developing World there is the trend to abandon voice calls and it is even more pronounced in some markets. like in India where 30% of mobile phone users do not originate calls, but this then hits issues of illiteracy, such as in Africa, where if you can't write, you really can't use SMS, and voice calls are the only viable way to communicate. Still, voice is a viable communication method in the Developing World for about 85% of the mobile phone user base. That is 2.5 billion people - twice the total population in the Industrialized World.

Second comes SMS text messaging, used by 76% of the mobile phone users on the planet. In the Industrialized World out of 1.6 billion mobile phone subsciptions you can communicate using SMS and reach an active user base of over 1.2 billion. Yes, in the Industrialized World there are more active mobile phone subscribers, who send SMS text messages, than all internet based email users globally. Yes, SMS is that big. And we haven't even touched the bigger part of SMS..  Because in the Developing World, you can reach 2.2 billion active users of SMS text messaging. SMS has four times the reach of TV, twice the reach of FM radio, and 8 times the reach of home/office internet connected PCs in the Developing World. This is where you start, unless literacy is an issue in that country. SMS is the most widely used data application on the planet with yes, nearing 3.5 billion active users at the end of this year. Remember President Obama and why he used SMS in his campaign...  This is the big one.

And then MMS. Yes, that 'quaint' picture messaging service that for some reason Apple didn't even include in its wonderful iPhone. Yet MMS is the second most widely used data application on the planet, having 50% more users than email or internet search...  In the Industrialized World MMS is one of many interactive multimedia options, and only 550 million people use the technology or 34% of mobile phone subscribers. This is by the way the fastest growing part of our industry, in many leading countries it is very high majoirty of all mobile phone subscribers already, in Norway 84% of all mobile phone users send MMS messages. CNN iReport receives hundreds of thousands of user-generated pictures and videos and Informa counted that across all mobile phone subscribers on the planet, we average 3.5 MMS sent per month - counting yes you and me who don't send that many.. That means the average level is nearing one per week sent across all subscribers, and is far more among active users, obviously.

Now, lets switch over to the Developing World, where for most people their only multimedia device is the mobile phone, often a second-hand Nokia basic cameraphone from a couple of years ago, discareded in the West and imported to Africa etc.. How is MMS? This is a big number, MMS alone has a billion active users in the Developing World, and is used by one in five people in the Emerging World. Yes, 19% penetration rate by total users. While in the West we can still afford to experiment with MMS in our ad campaigns, in India, China, Indonesia, etc it is totally a must. Like with SMS, there are twice as many users of MMS in the Developing World as there are in the Industrialized World. If I could urge you the reader to do one thing with your company this week, I would urge you to expedite your involvement with MMS. It has globally 1.6 billion active users, is a very powerful interactive multimedia technolgoy, that has a 'reach' in terms of devices and networks already pre-configured for it, of over 3 billion. You can reach almost half the planet if you create something cool on MMS. The Apple Apps Store cannot reach 1% of the planet, and all forms of the internet access will not reach half of what MMS can do for you. And yes, in the Developing World, MMS is the next big thing, happening right now. Not WiFi, not Bluetooth, not 3G... MMS.

And what of browsing, basic WAP type of basic 'mobile interent' use? That splits globally so, that we have 420 million active users of the mobile internet in the Industrialized World, or about 26% of all mobile phone subscribers. We have a strong infrastructure of broadband connected PCs in our homes and offices, so the rival mobile internet is one of our options, and needs to find its place, like with the Blackberry for example, or the iPhone. But in the Developing World there is no viable rival. Mobile browsing on basic WAP services have already 780 million users, more than all other types of internet access combined, home, office and internet cafe based PC access. Globally about 1.2 billion people use the basic 'mobile internet' browser services, but the vast majority of these are in the Developing World. How many people is that per capita? it is 14%, or one in seven people in the Developing World use Yahoo or Google or Amazon or Facebook or YouTube on a phone, and importantly - more than twice as many do so than have an internet connected PC at home or work, and also, nearly twice as many access internet services on their phone, than use any internet cafe to access browser content.

So there you have it. The digital divide. In the Industrialized World we have TVs, PCs, FM radios, fixed landlines and mobile phones to consider and compare and use and more than half of the population has one of each of those. In the Developing World, the only technology that reaches half the population is mobile telecoms, and all others are tiny in comparison. For the Emerging World, mobile is not only the first screen, for over 1.8 billion people  that is four Europes or six USAs in size, it is literally the only screen. 

For anyone who wants to quote these numbers, the source for all is TomiAhonen Consulting 2009, except where explicitly mentioned as sourced from somewhere else like the ITU etc. Anyone who would like to read my Thought Piece, a free 2 page pdf file on understanding mobile in the Developing World, please send me an email to tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com and I will send it to you by return email.

I remember the hype was all over the blogosphere when Nokia announced its self-reproted market share im smartphones to be down to 35%, and many pundits were all over the space predicting the end of Nokia. We here at CDB reported the numbers, and wondered, who actually had 'stolen' Nokia's strong market share, in who moved my cheese and its follow up blog, we know half of who moved the cheese.

But it was far too much of a total shift in market shares in one period, to be able to be explained just by Apple and RIM, after the full results of all makers came in like Samsung, SonyEricsson, Motorola, LG, HTC, Fujitsu etc. Now we have the 'final' numbers, the 'official' numbers for Q3, 2009. The two major analyst houses who are regularly referenced as the most credible sources, IDC and Canalys have both reported their final count of the third quarter of 2009 for Smartphones. They find a bit of a difference by one or two percentage points, as might be expected, but have no argument of the order and magnitude of the big four, but if we average the two, we get these market shares for smartphones Q3 in 2009:

Nokia 39%
RIM 20%
Apple 17%
HTC 5%
Fujitsu 3%
Samsung 3%
All others 13%

Most of the story is more-or-less the same as in the "who moved my cheese" blog postings, plus or minus one percentage point, but the Nokia share is dramatically different today. Note this is reality, not the early reporting. The reality is that Nokia still holds 39% market share of all smartphones, is still bigger than the next 2 put together (RIM and Apple) and only lost 2% market share from Q2, and actually grew 1% market share from the same quarter the year before. Most importantly, the way I look at it, the relevant metric - Nokia is doing BETTER in smartphones than their handset market share globally, meaning 'all is well' in terms of their strategy.

Yes, Apple is growing very strongly from the last quarter (although, according to Canalys measurements, this quarter in 2008 vs this quarter in 2009, Apple actually lost market share compared to this time a year ago) and RIM is either holding steady or growing (IDC has them holding, Canalys growing). RIM is always a difficult smartphone brand to factor in, because they report one month later in their quarter, so their 3rd quarter is not like the others from July to September, the RIM quarter runs from August to October, and we get RIM numbers always a month later than the others. So the analysts have to make a guess about RIM.,,.

But yes, we heard a lot of hype about Nokia doing a death-dance in smartphones, like Motorola doing its death dance in mobile phones. Rubbish, Nokia is doing just fine. It did lose 2% of market share, yes, and Apple actually gained more than 2%, so Apple is winning currently and Nokia has lost some market share, but no time to panic. Nokia is still the giant, and most importantly, their smartphone market share is better than their global handset market share, so here is a global handset giant, clearly set on building its future as well in the smartphone space. None of the other big 5 handset makers, Samsung, LG, SonyEricsson or Motorola, have smartphone market shares anywhere near their global handset market shares. If you think smartphones are the future of handsets, then Nokia is executing 'perfectly' in that space. But who of the tech journalists is now going to write this story? The more 'fun' sexy and glamorous story is to write about Android or Apple being the hot smartphone. Incidentially, Android has about 3.5% of all smartphones, split across dozens of models and many makers, so in size, they are about as relevant to smartphones as Fujitsu or Samsung, far smaller than HTC. How often did you think HTC, Fujitsu or Samsung are the leaders in smartphones?

And one comment on RIM. I may still have to come back to this statistic and correct it one more time. RIM hgas said recently in October that they expect their total shipments at 9.9 million smartphones for this quarter. If that is true, and the Canalys and IDC numbers had them in the 8 million plus range, then expect RIM market share reality to be boosted by about 2 percentage points more, so the 'real' RIM market share may be as big as 22%, would be a dramatic growth rate indeed. But we wait until RIM reports officially. Certainly both Canalys and IDC indicated in their smartphone press releases that RIM is growing strongly compared to this time a year ago. The question only remains, exactly how strong had their growth been..

Ok. to the mystery of who moved my cheese, nobody really. That 2% shift in market share from one quarter to the next for Nokia is well within their normal fluctuation. As long as their smartphones outperform the overall company, they are doing just about as well as we could expect. Why the discrepancy by the way? beacuse when Nokia reported their Q3 numbers, thay only had their internal numbers to compare to, and they had over-estimated the total market size, and thought they had lost more than they had. In reality, the global market for smartphones had grown less than Nokia thought, and thus their market share in reality was better than they thought. This can easily happen in these kinds of volatile times, when the global economy experiences big shifts.

Social Media Guidelines. What exactly are they? How should they be written? Do we need them? How do we enforce them? We’ve had this discussion a lot this year. From the firestorm that erupted upon the release of the Washington Post’s social media guidelines to the equally riveting conversation surrounding ESPN’s social media policy.

This was one of the biggest tasks I tackled for my company this year as head of our social media task force, and the approach we took seems to be working well. Because of my experience with this, I decided to kick off the lists for 2010 which are certainly to come in droves over the next few weeks. So here is my personal list of social media guidelines that I strongly discourage anyone from adopting across the board.

Don’t be Stupid!

This is an all-encompassing statement that you may think conveys trust in your employees but what it really does is set them up to fail. Let’s consider the word “stupid.” What exactly is the definition? This term is way too subjective and is often based on one’s sense of humor. My interpretation of the word will differ from yours. So imagine how many variations of stupid exist in a room of hundreds?

Consider this: Is it “stupid” to tweet that you had a bad day at work as long as you don’t provide details as to who contributed to that bad day?

Is it stupid to announce that you’ve acquired a new client? It may not be a smart move from the perspective of top management, but an employee who closed a deal may think that putting that out in the universe is a good move and could potentially attract more clients.

That’s the problem with merely issuing this edict. Stupid must be defined, and that means actually putting thought into a strategy to provide your staff with guidance and expectations.

You always represent the company!

Again, what exactly does “always” mean? Does the employee represent the company only when they are “clocked-in” during working hours? Are they representative of the organization on the weekends, during vacation? While the word “always” indicates infinity for some, there are many employees who disassociate themselves from their employers the minute they leave the premises. Sure, the die-hard company man and woman will get this because they are used to representing the company, especially if they’re a manager. You have to be clear with this type of directive. If everything that the employee posts on every social network represents the company then spell it out. Provide a definition that will leave little room for misunderstanding.

Be smart!

This is very similar to “Don’t be stupid.” However, it is more of a “we trust you” than the former. Translation: We are not going to spend our time worrying about this because you guys know how to conduct yourselves. But if you don’t, there will be consequences.”

Consequences for what? Not being smart? I might think it’s smart to share some details about the latest company-wide initiatives, especially if we are striving for “transparency.” What? That initiative was confidential? I didn’t know. Guess that wasn’t very smart of me, was it?

(See, “Don’t be stupid.”)

We’re watching!

Scare tactics are a sure way to create bad blood between employer and employee. Maybe you are watching, and that’s fine, but is that how you want to rule, with fear? Consider providing tips on how the staff can use social media in ways that reflect well on the company, and watch that. In many cases highlighting favorable behavior is preferable than a detailed list of “don’t.” Encourage and reward the good, don’t hunt down the bad.

Add value!

Again, great intention that can be poorly executed due to misinterpretation. What is value? If my network of friends, followers and readers are all vegetarians, they’d be happy to know that I made an amazing vegetarian dish last night that would make Martha Stewart proud. Is that valuable to my company? Maybe, maybe not. It might be if our overall social media mission statement includes being personable and having fun so that people get to see that side of our staff. But let’s say I work for a huge meat manufacturer and they see me promoting the vegan lifestyle all across the social web. Is that a faux-pas in this case?

Please don’t think this is extreme. This is all still so very new and there will be instances when the most mundane issues take the forefront and cause a meltodwn or chain reaction that seems impossible to turn around.

So there you have it. Five ineffective social media guidelines for 2010 and beyond. Now, could you combine some of these and create a more cohesive message for your staff? Absolutely, but do stay away from the one-liners that lack context, and do allow your guidlines to evolve.

My biggest piece of advice here is to first start with a social media mission statement.

When you’re clear on your reasons for being in the space, the guidelines to support that mission will come.

Good luck.

//

One of the 18 Rules of Community Engagement I outline in my book is simply “Ask Questions.” I believe that people want to express their opinions and asking questions is a sure way to get them to do so. Throw in your own personal story before asking the question and you may strike gold. I’ve gotten many great conversations started that way in the community I manage. It is quite effective.

But I am noticing a trend among bloggers, some that I really respect, and that is ending every blog post with a question.

Come on! Do you always have to ask what we think about something or ask us to contribute to the list that you’ve developed or provide additional steps for whatever it is you’re providing steps for? We will probably do that anyway, so it really isn’t necessary. Not for every post. And my favorite is “What did I miss?” If you know you missed something then maybe you should spend a little more time thinking it through and give us your complete thoughts on the topic at hand before hitting “publish.”

I know that asking questions is a way to ask for input and it really is effective in many cases but lately it has felt like you are trying to crowdsource almost everything and I am just asking you to reconsider that approach.

See what else you can do to keep us engaged. We follow you because you’re smart. Now dazzle us.

I received a nice surprise yesterday upon learning that I was listed among 451 Marketing’s top social media strategists to watch in 2010. I don’t look for such accolades, I just do my own thing…but it does feel nice.

So this is my public word of thanks to those who read this blog, follow me on twitter and elsewhere, send me emails asking for advice and insight, challenge my thoughts and share my work with their peers.

It is always my goal to inform, sometimes persuade, rarely convince but always provoke thought.

Here is the list. There are some really smart people on that list and I am just honored to be there. Oh, there’s also a twitter list of everyone included on the list, here.

It was compiled by the very smart, Tom Humbarger. He should be on your radar.

Have you thought much about how you will take your community to the next level in 2010. I’ve been giving that a lot of thought and I’m not sure that it’s new features for me. We’ve done that and I think our users like what we’ve offered. I’m thinking more in terms of content and by content I mean multimedia content that adds value to their lives and what they indicate is interesting to them through their behavior in the community.

So when I received the latest briefing from Trendwatching.com, my wheels started turning. Instead of viewing it as merely a list, I am thinking more broadly. If these are trends for 2010, how can I be ahead of that and what can I do to bring that to the community?

I will share the list with you here and come back over the next few weeks as 2010 approaches and share what I think I can do to integrate this new list into my overall community strategy. You do the same.

Here it is:

Ten Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010 (Trendwatching.com)

1. Business as Unusual
2. Urbany
3. Real-time Reviews
4. (F)luxury
5. Mass Mingling
6. Eco-easy
7. Tracking & Alerting
8. Profile Myning
9. Maturialism

See the full report here and further definitions here.

There is easily three on the list that should give you ideas right away. What do you think? Does this approach make sense to you? i say we try everything because with communities, you never know just what will stick.

I received this note from a member of my community today and it came at a great time for me because I have been feeling the weight of community management on my shoulders for a while now. I am sharing it because these are the types of comments we have to relish. We need them to get us through the tough times. So when you get one, hold on to it and read it on the days when you feel as though you’ve reached the end of your rope. Here it is:

Hey Angela, Just wanted to let you know that through the efforts of GOLO I was able to send my son, 82nd Airborne, Afghanistan, 100 packs of beef jerky. He said it was hard to find over there. I mentioned it in a blog and it snowballed into a ground swell of donations, thanks to Sandra, Lolly, and Gingerleigh, as well as other GOLOers that donated. Gingerleigh used her military credentials to buy the jerky at Fort Bragg. She’s so awesome. Zack said he would hide his stash and hand it out at church this Sunday. But anyhow I just wanted you to know that GOLO is doing good things, so don’t get discouraged by the trolls. We love you!

It’s nice to know that the members of your community care about one another and their actions underscore that sentiment. I can’t tell you how much I needed that today.

The next time you get one of these, please share it with me.

Have you heard of GetGlue? It’s another sharing community that allows you to keep your friends in the loop on what you’re reading, listening to and other things you find interesting across the web. Glue shows you items that you’ll like based on your tastes, what your friends like and what’s popular with everyone else.

I caught up with Fraser Kelton, VP of Business Development to learn a little bit more about Glue:

Who is AdaptiveBlue and what is Glue?

AdaptiveBlue is a young NYC-based company that was founded by Alex Iskold. Our mission is to create a better browsing experience for individuals on the web. We’ve created a product that connects you to friends around the things you like on popular sites around the web.

What was your motivation for creating GetGlue, and what needs were you originally trying to meet?

The motivation for Glue was that the current web required too much work from people to get valuable information when looking at books, movies and music online. Currently, if you’re interested in books and you’d like to know what your friends are reading and what they think of a specific book you have to do a lot of work – you have to either send them an email, contact them via IM, or dig into their profile on a social network. None of this is easy work. Glue works hard to make it easy to find out what your friends think of the books that you visit on the web. When you visit a book on Powell’s (for example) Glue appears automatically to show you friends who visited the same book on any popular book site around the web. You can see who visited it, read their review, and then access smart shortcuts to interact with the book in deeper ways.

What made you decide to move forward after realizing it was a good idea?

Alex drives the vision for the company and the team is filled with stellar people who can help realize the idea. What has been awesome is that the community on Glue has really started to gel so we can get a lot of feedback and insight on changes to make to the product, features to add, and functionality that people would like to see.

When I joined GetGlue during the Tweetchat with you and Phylis Zimbler Miller several months ago, I noticed the ability to connect with my Facebook and twitter friends. Do you plan to add any other social networking sites?

Not right now. We think that between Facebook and Twitter we have most of your friend relationships covered and adding more sites would introduce additional complexity with minimal benefit. We do, however, allow you to claim a number of different social networking sites on the web – you can claim your Blog, LinkedIn, Last.fm, MySpace, and other online profiles.

How do you convince those who are on the fence or don’t really see how GetGlue will fit into their lives to give it a try?

We rely on the strength and passion of our user community to help spread their love to Glue. You can read some of the incredible testimonials on our website, on our blog or by doing a Twitter Search.

One of my favorite features is the 140 character reviews which you call “2 Cents” and the ability to interact with others via private messaging. What other features are you working on?

We’re really trying to keep Glue focused on a small set of valuable features. Glue-rs love the ability to add a short 2cent comment to a book and have it appear on all of the popular book sites. Another great feature is the ability to look at all of the books that your friends like. Probably the newest, most popular feature is the ability to see what’s most popular with your friends. You can go to a screen called Glue For You and see the most popular books with your friends.

You’re clearly building community here, or helping others do it. What are your thoughts on online communities overall, and how to make them effective and successful?

The best way to grow a community is to be authentic and genuine and take a sincere interest in each individual who contributes to the community. We pride ourselves on openness and excellent customer service. We actively engage with our passionate users and solicit them for product feedback. Part of being sincere and genuine is to only ask them for input when it matters – that is, be willing to execute on the feedback that’s provided. In the most recent release there are a dozen features that were suggested directly from people within the Glue community. Another way to encourage a healthy community is to appropriately thank those who provide so much. We’ve recently created shirts for a select few as a way to say thanks. We call them Super Glue-rs

What are your plans for the next 6 months? How about the next 2-5 years?

We’re going to continue to deliver an excellent product that people love and provide improvements to Glue.

Since I have you, in what communities are you active, mainstream and not-so-mainstream?

I used to be very active in a music community on IRC but I’m now predominantly active on Glue (it’s important to eat your own dog food) and Twitter.

And one final opportunity to toot your own horn:

Toot toot!

On several occasions I’ve shared with you one of the most popular franchises I created and continue to produce in my online community. What I do is interview members over the phone and then transcribe the conversation into a blog post. People love it.

Well, one day last year, members of the community were asked to turn the tables on me by a co-worker and they submitted their questions they’d like to have me answer. I answered them all and again, the community loved it.

I just realized that I never shared that with you and I think it is something you may want to consider in the future. Sharing a bit more of yourself with the community always makes it easier for them to share more of themselves. If you’re interested in the 47 comments posted, here is the original interview. But I’m also posting the entire interview below. Warning: Some of the screen names are a bit wild. Enjoy!

Well, since you decided to go behind my back with the help of web editor, Kelly H. with a sneak attack and force me to do my own profile, I suppose I had no choice but to succumb. And since it would be a bit odd to introduce myself in the third person, I won’t. So, without further adieu, here are the answers to some of your questions. Enjoy!

Bosoxbaby: How in the world do you put up with some of the attitudes on here day in and day out?

Angela: I really don’t know. I guess I have a high tolerance for “crazy.”

Meh_whatever: I’d like to hear more about Angela’s history prior to coming to GOLO. What sort of jobs she’s held, etc.

Angela: I’ve worked in newsrooms my entire career. I started out in Cleveland, Ohio where I was an assignment editor at the CBS turned Fox station and Planning Editor at the NBC affiliate. I then moved to Tampa and worked at WFLA as an assignment manager. After that I worked at WPTV in West Palm Beach and then moved to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel where I was a broadcast producer and ultimately managed all of our media partnerships and served as multimedia editor.

Prayergirl: Do you read ALL of the blog posts everyday?

Angela: I could never get through them all but I do read a great deal. I suppose there are days when I read about 90% of them though. It really depends on my workload, what other projects I’m working on and how much administrative stuff I have to deal with. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t sit on the GOLO homepage all day waiting for the latest posts. I will look at something if a person points it out though. And I do have to read those that are reported as abuse.

Mythoughts22: When you read racial comments does it bother you?

Angela: What bothers me most about those types of comments is the fact that the person behind the comment is probably raising children. I mastered the art of not caring much about what others say about me a long time ago. Particularly when I know it’s not true.

Beauty Comes from within: Did you know this was what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Angela: I knew I wanted to be a journalist. I love to write and research and I can never ask enough questions. There was an anchorwoman in Detroit, where I grew up whom I admired a great deal. I thought she seemed so smart and I wanted to be like her. She’s still on the air.

Kewlmom: What is your criteria for screening comments? Do you try to keep people from being offended, or do you simply look for cursing/public attacks?

Angela: I try to be fair and adhere to our guidelines. But oftentimes I do it based on what my gut tells me. I know that many will beg to differ, but it’s tough.

BlaBlah: How do you keep sane, Angela?

Angela: Why do you think I’m sane?

Rocknhorse: OK, here’s my question: We know by your comments and the job you do here that you are very dedicated to both your family and your job. But sometimes everyone needs those “ME” moments. What do you do for yourself that keeps you grounded and at peace?

Angela: I enjoy bubble baths and I love to read. Put the two together and I’m good for at least a day.

Historians_13th: Tell us about the report you wrote on Ella Fitzgerald in the fourth grade, and what it meant to you then and now?

Angela: I don’t remember the details 100%, but listening to my grandfather talk about her and mimic her singing and dancing was quite the treat.

Sue Donym: If you could have dinner with any famous person past or present, whom would you choose and why?

Angela: Past: Harriet Tubman. I’d like to understand that kind of determination and perseverance. Also (and this might sound a little crazy) Adolf Hitler. I once interviewed three Holocaust survivors for a story I was producing and the way they recounted their experiences has stuck with me since. If I could talk with him in a controlled environment where it was impossible for him to kill me, I’d like to get to the root of all of that hate. Present: Oprah Winfrey and Tom Brokaw. Oh, and maybe Alice Walker. Love The Color Purple. Okay, one more…George Washington Carver. I’d like to know how the heck he got so involved with the peanut.

Deer Slayer: Do you like venison?

Angela: I’ve never had it. Does it taste like chicken?

Squirrelingdervish: If the Mothership flew down and picked up one Golo’er and took them off forever, who would you pick?

Angela: It already came and got him. But a few more trips would be welcome.

Godbless: When you started this, did you have any idea it would be as successful as it is? Or were you thinking this was temporary?

Angela: I really didn’t know what to expect. I’m pleased, but I’d like to see it grow exponentially. I keep a notepad in my passenger’s seat because I’m always flooded with ideas. My mind runs a mile a minute.

Full_Decker: What are some features that you feel would benefit GOLO even more?

Angela: It’s not so much the features. Those are easy. More members. More distinct voices. Active participation from the majority of the members. I’d like to see GOLO filled with invaluable content.

GoldenLvr: I would like to know what job you would like to move up to in the WRAL family after you finally go insane babysitting all us Golo’ers. By the way, Kelly is a cutie!
Angela: I’m not sure where my career will lead me. Hopefully to some amazing job that doesn’t yet exist. Oh, and I’ll be sure to let her parents know you think they did a good job.
Sweet Rose: I’d like to know more about her growing up … where she was from … how she came to be in NC … how does she like the area.

Angela: I’m from Detroit. Most of my family is still there. I left for college at 17 and never went back there to live. I visit often. I enjoy NC so far, but I’m still learning. The verdict is still out on whether or not this is home for good. I don’t think I’ve lived here long enough to make that assessment.

Sue Donym: What advice will you give your daughters when they get old enough to start playing on sites such as golo?

Angela: Be smart, and use common sense.

Tarheel Army Mom: What kind of meds do you have to take to manage GOLO?

Angela: I believe that’s classified information.

Sue Donym: It is clear that your work entails MUCH more than simply moderating golo comments. What are some of the other responsibilities you have as part of your job?

Angela: Well, I am responsible for all things GOLO and all things generated by our users for GOLO and WRAL.com. I also hire, train and supervise the moderators. I interact with users a great deal so a large part of my responsibility is communicating with people. I manage the Pet Page on WRAL.com and make decisions about a lot of other projects. I am called on to incorporate community into our products. There’s so much more…but I’ll stop there.

Rabid_Wolf_3: When I talked to you at the outing, you told me that your lawyer got you off of a triple murder charge after you spent 12 years in a maximum security prison, on a technicality! Can I have that lawyers name?
I really can’t believe they called you ‘Cell Block Momma A’ either . . .
Did you really make the warden cry?
I know, I know . . . rabid_wolf_4 . . .

Angela: Go talk to Tarheel Army Mom about getting some meds. You need them more than I do.

Nauticagirl501: How many children do you have?

Angela: Two girls. And they are fabulous!

Patty002: Angela, why do some of the blogs get through with offensive words and some don’t?

Angela: I can’t see everything. That’s the answer.

Iluvwilmy: How much does WRAL pay you? I would love to be a co-editor of Golo. Golo as a job? How awesome would that be?!

Angela: There are two things you never ask a person. When the baby is due, and how much money they make. Remember that.

Chill0913: Angela, if you and rabid_wolf? were driving in a car having a debate and he wanted to get out, whould you A: slow down and pull over, ask him to calm down, close door and continue your route. or B: Pull over slow down some when he opens the door shove his behind out and proceed on with your business?
LOL…Personally, I’m prone for option B. LOL

Angela: I would be hesitant to get in a car with him.

Con Amor: Angela… Does anyone in your family GOLO? …. Do you ever GOLO under a different profile? …. Do you secretly enjoy looking at the juicey hott hunk blogs that I post before they get pulled for being too hott?(hahahahahahahaha!)

Angela: No. I would never go incognito. My ethics won’t allow. No family members on GOLO. I plead the 5th on the hunks question.

NCMomof3: Angela, I think you do an awesome job referring, mediating, and just plain babysitting us characters on GOLO. Are there times where you have to sit back, take a deep breath, count to 10, then go outside and scream anyway?

Angela: Yes.

Made in USA: Angela… What part of your job gives you the most satisfaction and what part of your job do you dislike the most?

Angela: Making a difference is extremely satisfying to me. If I tell you what I dislike the most, I will be exposed and vulnerable. I don’t want to be either.

Steve Crisp: How much does Canada weigh?

Angela: I thought you knew everything. That’s what your profile says.

Javajoe: To our dearest, most tolerant Mother-of-GOLO, Angela — what’s your biggest, worst, skin-crawlingest, nerve-splittingest pet peeve?

Angela: The sight of chewed gum. YUCK! And please, NEVER read over my shoulder.

Halyard: If you only had ONE chance, what person, living or dead, would you like to sit down and have a one-on-one conversation with?

Angela: My father. He died when I was 16. I’d love another chance to talk to him.

I recently interviewed Ning’s Chief Operating Officer Jason Rosenthal for an article that will appear in the January issue of EContent Magazine. (It will also be on their website and I will be sure to share the link.) Only portions of the interview will be used in the article, so I’ve decided to share the complete interview with you.

1. How many Ning sites are there currently?

More than 1.6 million Ning Networks have been created on the Ning Platform and we currently have more than 36 million registered users.

2. How would you characterize your growth since launch?

The Ning Platform has increased in size by more than 300 percent in the number of Ning Networks created, registered users and active Ning Networks in the past year. We see approximately 5,000 new Ning Networks being created every day and we are adding about one million registered users every 12 days.

3. Does Ning have any plans to offer more analytics as companies look more towards specific measurements to gauge the effectiveness of their communities?

We are committed to arming our Network Creators with the tools to make their Ning Network as successful as possible. We currently offer Ning Network Creators a variety of management features to optimize the effectiveness of their Ning Network. This includes the ability to edit the layout of their Ning Network, bring in features unique to their needs, and manage the invitation flow. We also give our Network Creators the ability to easily integrate Google Analytics into their Ning Network.

In addition, for those running Virtual Gifts on their Ning Network, we offer a rich set of analytics tools to measure and quantify gift transactions and frequency.

4. What are some of the most successful communities using the NING platform?

Success on Ning comes in all forms depending on the goals of the Network Creator and the interests of their members. Some examples include:

The Twilight Saga – A Ning Network for fans of the Twilight book series with over 200,000 members

- Brooklyn Art Project – A Ning Network for fans of Brooklyn artists with over 6,500 members

- GovLoop – a Ning Network for over 20,000 government employees and contractors at the federal, state, and local level

- IPL Nation – a Ning Network for over 700,000 fans of the Indian Premier Cricket League

-The Pickens Plan – a 200,000+ person strong Ning Network for grassroots organizing of T. Boone Pickens’ “wind energy army.”

5. What are your short and long-term plans for the future of NING?

Ning’s vision is to enable everyone to live the most interesting and vibrant life possible by giving people a platform where they can join and create Ning Networks around interests and passions. We also want Ning to be a service that provides people with a way to become more and more unique through membership in a wide array of Ning Networks and express that uniqueness to the world. With this in mind, we want the Ning Platform to grow with people as their interests, passions and friendships evolve in ways that we can’t even imagine today.
We focus every day on adding more value for our Ning Network Creators and their members. We recently launched two new products, Ning Apps and Ning Virtual Gifts, which we will continue to expand upon. We will also have more to announce in the coming months – stay tuned!

6. Do you find that many communities become dormant shortly after launch? If so, why?

We see a lot of experimenting on Ning, as well as Ning Networks created for timely topics, which leads to some Ning Networks becoming inactive, or having activity spikes at certain times of the year. This experimentation is natural in the area of social creation and technologies. However, many of our Ning Networks only increase in growth due to the way that we’ve built the invitation flow and other features inherent in the Ning Platform.

7. What are your thoughts on what it takes to run a successful Ning community and how are you working to spread that knowledge to your users?

The Ning Help Center and the Ning Blog are great resources for Network Creators looking for ideas on how to maximize all the options and features Ning has to offer.

(Author’s note: I’ve also interviewed a slew of community managers currently using Ning and will publish their thoughts on it’s beneifits and shortcomings in the next few weeks.)

I asked a question of the Social Media: Engage panel at Internet Summit ‘09 about 30 minutes ago and since that moment I’ve been thinking about online anonymity. People seem to hate it.

When I blogged about the upside and relevance of anonymous comments as they relate to news stories, some people balked. Jason Falls said at Social Media Business Forum last month that he wishes newspaper sites would stop allowing anonymous comments altogether. I get that. I know the drama that ensues when people hide behind the cloak of anonymity. Heck, I live it as part of my job and I don’t always like it.

But I still maintain that there is a place for it. You shouldn’t always have to be who you are just to communicate across the web, whether you’re on a social site or otherwise.And not everyone has awful intentions. So, I am going to take this to the extreme.

If anonymity is no longer needed in society, let’s just get rid of the Witness Protection Program.

Let the people who snitch on the mafia boss and turn in the mass murderer come forward publicly and deal with the consequences that may come their way because they decided to speak up. It’s all about transparency and openness right? That’s what everyone is saying. Be who you are. Show your face. Is this a fair comparison? Maybe not, but I think you can better see what I mean by bringing it to that level.

The statement I made during my question of the panelists was that people are trying very hard to separate their personal lives from their professional lives in the social space, and even though that is probably impossible, they shouldn’t have to share their identity with everyone who visits your site just to interact with your content. That is how I feel about it. Alex Withers, head of Digital Media at the US Golf Association Association agreed. He discussed other options for registration on their site that do not reuire revealing your true self, as did Jennifer Sargent, CEO and Co-Founder of Hitfix. Withers had stated earlier that you should not create your own database of anonymous people, particularly when you can use Facebook Connect, something they didn’t do when placing a live chat window next to a live video stream of the U.S. Open. He went on to say that the content in that chat was not something they wanted on the site so they killed it. That was what they had to do. I’m sure it was ugly. But maybe it would have been better if it were moderated. I know, I know you need resources to do that and not everyone wants to hire people to do that….

I also know this is a topic that many people disagree with me on, but we can’t agree on everything.

Forcing people to share themselves with your audience may keep them away. So let’s keep that in mind. Perhaps the strategy to focus on if you take this route is engaging lurkers, because I think you’ll have many of them. May as well figure out how to keep them.

I’m attending Internet Summit ‘09 tomorrow and plan to live-tweet and live blog, sharing what I find most interesting. At this point, these are the sessions I will attend, unless I change my mind at the last minute. If you’re interested in these sessions, follow me on twitter. I’m @communitygirl. You can also check my blog for updates and I may post over on SiliconAngle.

Blogging: New Media and Personal Branding

Panelists: Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim; Brad Hill, Director of Weblogs; Rick Klau, Business Product Manager, Blogger/Google and Tim Schigel of ShareThis.

Meebo: Social Graph Optimiztion Analytics

Panelists: Seth Sternberg of Meebo; Doug Miller of Expedia; Ricci Wolman of The Body Shop; Matt Van Horn of Digg; Jermaine McPeek of the Phoenix Suns; Eric bBsco, formerly of AOL and Wayne Sutton of OurHashtag.

Social Media: Engage

Panelists: Robyn Cobb of Cliqset; Alex Withers of the US Golf Association; Jennifer Sargent of HitFix and Bob Butler of Best Thinking, Inc. and Matt Van Horn (mentioned above)

Others I will likely attend include:

Online Advertising Strategies

Online Video Discussion OR Digg: Social Media Integration for Content Producers

Twitter/RealTime

Panelists: Robbie Allen of StatSheet Network; Don Brown of Twitpay; David Eckoff of Revolutionary Ventures; and Jermain McPeek (mentioned above)

Keynote: Joe Kennedy, CEO of Pandora

Should be interesting.

(The pic above is one I took from last year’s inaugural Internet Summit, in Chapel Hill, NC)

It’s a small community of elite consultants (you need to earn over $1m per year). The community talk online and regularly meet in ridiculously exotic locations to discuss ideas and improve each other's businesses.

To join this community you need to fit the following criteria:

• Seven-figure revenues for your firm over the year prior to the meeting.
• You must be either the owner or co-owner of the firm, or a solo practitioner.
• You must be willing to share your intellectual property, ideas, and advice freely, without ego, and without reservation. (I vet members to ensure the “chemistry” will be good.)
• Commitment to attend the annual meetings as a top priority, not “bumped” by business or professional issues.
• The first meeting would be in 2010 at a mutually convenient time and mutually appealing place. The meeting fee is $15,000{...}

These are dozens of failed attempts by businesses (FT amongst them) to create similarly elite communities of top business professionals. 

If you're trying to create an elite group of people together in your community have two options. The first is to be a peer amongst them. Alan succeeds where FT fails solely because of this. The second is to find an elite person or persons to be the public head of the community. You take the back seat.

• Contacts. Amateurs are typically passionate fans with lots of friends they can tell about their new online community. This helps a lot. They have trust and respect from the people they want to join.
• Knowledge. They know what the big issues are, who the most influential people are, the personality of the people and what the audience intends to talk about.
• Passion. They’re passionate about the subject, they work on the online community during off-work hours (the times when people can visit and participate). They enjoy doing this. 
• No Objectives/Time Frame. Amateurs aren’t concerned with objectives, ROI or time frames. They’re not burdened with anything other than creating an awesome community for the community. No extractions are necessary.
• No Budget. Amateurs aren’t burdened (yes, burdened) with a budget. They’re not forced to waste a five-figure sum and countless months on a bespoke community site reflect an organization’s brand image.
• Technology Luddites. They pick a simple technology they know how to use. By coincidence, this is also a simple technology their audience knows how to use.
• No plan for growth. Amateurs don’t try to grow big. They focus on making the community fun rather than huge. If they don’t want more members, they don’t  try to get any more members.
• They stick around for longer. Amateurs don’t abandon the community when they find a new job, or get given a promotion, or their work load picks up. They make the time every day (or evening) for the community.

You’re competing against amateurs. If you can’t run a better online community than the amateurs, members will leave for one run by one. The very online communities that most businesses want are the communities they would have if they acted less like a business and more like a passionate amateur.

A 30 second, prime-time, advertising slot will cost you about $300,000.

That could hire you a small team of community builders creating several thriving online communities around your brand. You would never have to spend a penny to reach these people again.

They’re pushed for time, they’re hard to reach and they don’t especially want to talk to each other. Worse, you could be competing against every other company they buy from.

This isn’t to say that a community for retail buyers is a bad idea. I’m sure it isn’t. It’s to say that a community solely about your brand for retail buyers is a bad idea.

What can you do? You can be a bit player in a larger online community. Think carefully, if you were a retail buyer what would a dream online community look like?

You can create a community for retail buyers, at your own expense.You can create a community, that isn’t about you, but would give you permission to speak to every retail buyer you want to reach. Imagine hundreds of retail buyers are in a community you control.

It’s still a hard sell, but it’s a far more realistic sell.

Nearly 400,000 posts by less than 10,000 members. It’s exactly the sort of engaged, highly active, online community most businesses crave…and never get.

It’s a perfect combination of general chatter, advice and events. But note the three most popular forums, ‘General discussion, ‘stories and pictures of finds’ and ‘off topic’.

Stop forcing members to talk about you. Encourage members to talk about their passion, talk about themselves and talk about whatever they like. The results will be stunning.

There is another clear lesson here. Use simple technology. Forums work fantastically for your members. It’s you that needs an attractive website.

They assume they matter far more to their customers than they do. They assume people want to hear about their latest news and products. Most fundamentally, they assume people want to talk about them, that’s horribly wrong.

If you made a list, right now, of a community you would love to join, it might look like this:

• It will be a community about {your interest}
• It will have a few hundred members, possibly a thousand. Not too few, not too many.
• You will have fun, conversations wont be too serious not restricted
• You will get to make new friends.
• There will be events that you can attend.
• You will learn interesting stuff.

Can you spot the problem? There is nothing in here about products, businesses, crafting messages for supporters to rally behind and being seduced by a business.

You’re looking through the wrong lens. The lens through which you see yourself is very different from the lens through which your customers see you.

Perform this task before creating a community. Brainstorm what a dream community would looks like for you. Make it about your personal hobby. Now create a community like that.

Don’t just document it. Make it an epic story. Your community should sound as interesting as possible.

Talk about the motivation behind it’s founding. Who were the first members to join? What were the big issues? Where was the conflict and drama? Who fought who, what opinions divided the community? Who became the most popular members? What events brought the community together

You should also update your epic history every 3 months. 

We usually advise against the intern. They simply don't know what it takes to develop relationships between members. The problem is the intern is often the best available choice. Note: available.

Given a choice between an intern who will commit their entire time to building a community or an experienced marketer who will spend half their time on the community, pick the intern.

You want someone that can focus their full efforts to cultivating an online community. Very few professionals can handle the change. It's hard to be planning a PR campaign for half a day then dive in and start chatting to members. The nature of engaging in thousands of micro-interactions a week is contrary to every habit many have learnt over the years. 

If you don't have someone that can dedicate their full time to building a community, hire an intern that can. 

The IAEA know exactly who to reach (nuclear professionals), they know exactly how many they want to reach (about 400). They know how to reach them (existing networks and contacts) and they have credibility to talk to them.

If you have all five of these, you should launch your community right away. If you don't, then you should get all five first before launching your community. 

Communities that form quickly have weak connections. These communities tend not to last very long.

#amazonfail was a huge community. It was formed in a few hours and lasted about a week. Obama’s online community took a few months to build and lasted a few months once he was elected. 

You should decide you want to spend months and years hustling and stitching together connections between members as your community gradually grows.

Speed is your enemy. Don’t be tempted to fall for speed – nor aim for speed. Very few of the lasting communities in this world were formed overnight. They took years of hustle. Speed and size are seductive – but remember they mean nothing without strong connections.

…and connections take months to develop.

You don’t need any real technological knowledge and it only takes a few hours a day.

Here is how you start.

1. Spot an opportunity. Find something people care about. It either has to stoke very strong emotions or be a major part of your target audiences lives (animal cruelty being an example of the former, work communities being an example of the latter).
2. Build relationships. Follow what is already out there for your target group. Begin interacting with members. Build relationships with 40 to 50 people in the industry. If they’re the right 40/50 people those are all you need.
3. Forge a small group. E-mail the 5 to 10 members your closest too about launching an online community in the field. Get their feedback. Engage them in the process of creating and growing the online community.
4. Increase the group to 20. Add another 10 members to the mailing list. Focus on keeping everyone active. Update members on process. Allow some side-conversations and let the engagement grow naturally.
5. Launch. After a few weeks launch your online community. It might be a Ning site, a Facebook group or something bespoke for you. Give everyone on your list opportunities to help. Someone might try and get you coverage in key magazines, others will invite people from existing forums/groups etc.
6. Create community content. Develop some content about your community. Don’t do this all personally. Try to get other members interviewing each other for the community. Have a central news page for the latest info.
7. Approach relevant blogs/trade press. Once your community is going, drop a note to relevant media and invite them to cover the community. Your community might grow quickly, stand by to harvest the attention.
8. Recruit a few more helpers. Get a few more people involved in helping. Give them positions of real responsibility and power to resolve disputes and make some changes. Let them take on some of the work load.
9. Host events. Begin arranging regular events. Try some online VIP guest chats or regular polls/quizzes/real-time conversations. Perhaps even book a venue and sell tickets to a meet-up.
10. Money & Fun. Careful balance here. Try finding some advertisers for your community or selling souvenirs to members. Be sure to keep the community fun (or you become MySpace).

At the least, adding running a successful online community isn’t a bad addition to your résumé, at best it should greatly help you network with professionals in a field you’re very passionate about.

1. Getting to know you (small talk). This is the getting to know you conversations. The topic matters less than bonding between members.
2. Objective focused. This is where people communication information to achieve a goal. It might be their goal or it might be the group’s goal. You probably don’t have many of these conversations in your community.
3. Banter. Friendly conversation about generally unimportant topics in which members use humour, insults and other politeness taboos. The purpose is to feel comfortable enough to push this far without causing offense.

Here is some homework. Find five members that joined your community three months ago. Read up on the posts they have made since then. How many are objective focused, how many are getting to know you and how many are banter?

If members aren’t joining in on the banter (or if the banter simply doesn’t exist) then be sure to engage new members early on in the community spirit.

Do your best to measure and increase the level of banter.

1. You will leave and it will die. Statistically, this is what happens to most online communities. The founder/community manager leaves and the community dies.
2. The slow, steady, decline. Gradually activity begins to drop and you end up in death spiral of less people visiting due to less activity. This is by far the most common cause of death.
3. Moving to a new platform. This is a huge community killer. An organization tries to move a community from one platform to another. The community resists or splits and the two halves die. Be very careful about changing the platform.
4. Top members quit. This happened at UKT and iGUK. The top members left and the level of activity and community spirit declined until nobody visited anymore.
5. A rival community. A new community develops that offers something better than your community can. This is a big threat, be careful of it. Often it’s your own members who launch the rival community.
6. Spam. You begin to spam or encourage members to do things (or forget to moderate away the junk). Members get bored trailing through the crap to find the good posts. This can kill a community quickly.
7. The BIG fight. This is, by far, the most over exaggerated threats. Big fights rarely kill a community. However, it’s possible if too much fighting happens it simply isn’t fun anymore.

All 7 of these are preventable with a little planning and the willingness to take big actions when things begin to go wrong.

200m drive in North America, so why not build a community where they can talk about driving?

The problem is 200m people in North America would rather not drive at all. Driving is what they must endure to get where they want to be. People don’t want to talk about driving any more than they want to talk about the commute on the train. In the short term I predict it will be moderately successful. It’s a gimmick. In the long term, less so.

Communities only thrive when its members are really passionate about the subject matter. They have to be passionate enough to find some real friends, spend their personal time helping create content and participating in the community.

This is the difference between a community for casual drivers and, say, parenting communities. Parents want to be parents, it’s a huge part of their lives. Driving the kids to school is not.

If you’re building a community, find a group of people that are very passionate about something and connect them together. If that passionate or interest isn’t there, don’t create a community.

If the answer is yes, we can begin working on the outreach and developing a small group. If the answer is no, we need to go through a 3 month pre-launch strategy to gain the permission and trust of these people.

Don’t skip or lie about your answer. If you don’t have relationships then you have to build them before you want them to do something. That’s part of community building.

Unfortunately I feel that most companies are still unable to fully grasp the importance of a dedicated social media team. They do not see a direct correlation between social media and ROI, and therefore are hesitant to put as many resources (both people and money) into social media as is typically necessary. Granted, I was on the periphery of social media for the last three years while I was in graduate school; however since my graduation and re-immersion into social media, I haven't noticed much of a change. Most social media job postings are for intern positions.

I think, even still, a lot of organizations (executives and HR) don't understand what we do, and therefore tend to undervalue it. I was laid off from my previous job last year and although I found another job fairly quickly, compensation was a struggle. I ended up settling for less compensation than I wanted in order to get back in a job quickly.

Engagement with the online community and interacting with others in the field is the most rewarding part of my job.

Because community management is often rooted in customer support organizations, compensation tends to be determined relative to CSRs. In fact, more and more community managers play a critical role in shaping customer experience and ultimately brand, and their compensation needs to reflect that value in a way more commensurate with significant marketing roles.

Perhaps the only one other comment I would suggest is that the corporate world needs to understand that community building is a full time job and as such we need official job descriptions put together by HR that are aligned with the business needs as well as the personal career development opportunities from knowledge workers. Something we haven't even started to think about just yet!

Unless Online Community and Social Media is considered a valuable part of an organization and an intrical part of the overall customer touch processes, it won't get the resources and funds to grow. The value given directly correlates into the # of bodies dedicated to support it and the salaries that are paid.

• Defining and creating a community strategy by working with organizational and customer stakeholders to determine needs, goals and key influencers.
• Determining what metrics are important to track, what is currently being measured against what many companies want to measure, and current key performance indicators, featuring research from the Online Community Research Network.
• Defining the value of online communities through the key sources of value, including: cost reduction, lead generation, increased engagement, building customer loyalty.


The virtual event is featured in two time sessions on November 11th.

• 5am to 10am PT / 8am to 1pm ET / 1pm to 6pm GMT, or
• 10am to 3pm PT / 1pm to 6pm ET / 6pm to 11pm GMT




Social CRM Virtual Summit Agenda

The social media revolution has changed everything, including how customers choose to interact with companies and each other online, and where they turn for trusted information. This virtual summit comes at a time when companies are starting to see tangible financial results from deeper online engagement with customers, and will explore the current capabilities of and future for Social CRM.

At this five-hour live, virtual summit you will experience:



• Webcasts by industry luminaries such as Mike Fauscette (IDC), Bill Johnston (Forum One), Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group), and Ray Wang (Altimeter Group) in a virtual auditorium
• Scheduled live chats with industry experts and practitioners from companies including Barnes and Noble, Lenovo, National Instruments, Redfin, Best Buy, Juniper Networks, and T-Mobile
• An interactive exhibit hall with dynamic sponsor booths, including Genesys, ON24, Ant's Eye View, Forum One Communications, CRM Media, Cognizant, and Liveperson
• A resource center with dozens of valuable white papers, podcasts, and presentations for download
• A virtual networking lounge to meet other like-minded professionals through live chat
• Keynote speeches from CRM thought leaders, Paul Greenberg (The 56 Group) and Brent Leary (CRM Essentials)


Summit keynote speakers include Social CRM thought leaders, Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary.

Go here to register for this free event and to see the complete agenda.

As with other recent waves of innovation (Web 2.0 and cloud computing, for example) there is no single definition of