Success in mobile social networking will come for online marketers when they learn to make investments in the user's flow experience.
I often save my social networking tasks for my train ride home. It's a good time to approve friend requests in Facebook, answer questions from my LinkedIn network, and update my Twitter feed with my latest 140-character news nuggets.
All of this can be done from my BlackBerry Pearl, a smartphone that is a couple of years old, but by no means lagging behind the pack from a capabilities standpoint. Facebook has an application built specifically for BlackBerries, which I've been using for several months now. It's great for approving friend requests, sending and getting private messages, poking someone, or maybe writing on someone's wall, but it's definitely not the full Facebook experience that can be had on a PC. Still, I've used it to connect with friends and business associates alike, and the application is valuable enough to me that if I got a new phone today, I'd be looking to make sure whatever phone I bought was compatible with Facebook's mobile experience.
Twitter has a nice mobile site as well, stripping down the interface so that mobile phones can digest it more quickly and easily. Posting a tweet is easy, as is catching up on feeds from followers and folks you follow.
It's not as if Twitter had an ad-supported model to begin with, but when I network over my phone, there's a distinct and very noticeable lack of advertising. The targeted Facebook ads I'm used to seeing, as well as the generally irrelevant skyscrapers down the left-hand side of the website, are not part of the mobile experience. I don't see ads on LinkedIn when I log into my account.
It's obvious that decisions have been made that are favorable toward usability. I'm sure the social networking players have had offers to monetize the mobile channel but have made the decision to stick with keeping their applications easy to use. So the question on my mind is: "Will there ever be an ad opportunity in mobile social networking?"
I've long said that my own firm tends to shoot down many more mobile ad proposals than it approves for client media plans. By and large, this is due to a systematic problem with the ability of mobile ads to deliver. For direct response campaigns, the information-gathering process is often too cumbersome for mobile devices. (Not always, just the majority of the time.) For branding campaigns, we often don't have enough screen real estate to positively impact brand metrics. Couple all this together with the bandwidth restrictions of the typical mobile user and the fact that their mobile consumption tends to reflect a higher degree of immediacy of need for something other than a client's product, and we're stuck in a spot where most mobile proposals don't meet our needs.
Now, let's fold in some of the intricacies of social networking. I've said in this space before that extending utility to the end user and being a part of the flow experience are better approaches to the social space than straight advertising. I think this goes double for mobile social networking.
Think about it for a second. If you're managing your social life online, as many people both young and old do today, and you're on a mobile device that may or may not have a good enough connection in the next five minutes to continue a private message conversation or approve a connection request, how tweaked are you going to be when you find out that the thing holding your connection up is 45K worth of banner ads?
On the other hand, if a brand extended value in the form of a mobile app that supported multi-user mobile chat, would that not be a better position to be in? Instead of mobile users dreading the connection-clogging properties of your ad, they're actually looking forward to it. Seems to me that I'd rather have people welcoming my marketing material than shunning it.
To me, success in mobile social networking will come for online marketers when they learn to avoid straight messaging and make investments in extending utility and becoming an uninterruptive part of the user's flow experience.
译文:
寻找手机中的广告商机
● 「福乐经验」(flow experience)，福乐经验是一种乐在其中的忘我经验，在「福乐经验」中，个体忘记时间的存在、全神贯注在创意工作中，并感到愉悦。
制定在线营销投资计划的时候把用户的“福乐经验”考虑进来，手机社会网络世界的成功便离你不远了。
我总是把社会网络的“任务”留到在回家的火车上进行。在Facebook上通过别人加为好友的要求，在社交网站LinkedIn上回答问题，在我的Twitter Feed上添加各类的新闻。
我是通过我的黑莓珍珠手机（BlackBerry Pearl）进行这些操作的。这是一部智能机，几年前的旧款机了，但是性能还算是够用的。Facebook有专为黑莓手机开发的应用程序。这几个月我一直在使用这个应用程序。相当不错的玩意：通过好友申请，收发私人信息，和别人开开玩笑，或者在别人的空间留言。但是，这些绝对不是Facebook能在PC上实现的全部功能。但是，我还是喜欢用手机来和我的朋友、客户联系。而我特别喜欢那个应用程序，如果我考虑买一款新手机，我会考虑新手机是否能使用相关的软件，能否兼容Facebook的手机体验。
Twitter也有一个非常不错的手机网站。设计者把界面拆开以加快手机浏览的速度，相当便捷！在tweet上发布信息很简单，而且能同步更新feed，方便好友和粉丝实现追踪。
并不是说我建议Twitter建设的初始就应该采取以广告为支持的模型。只是我用手机上这个网站的时候，明显感觉这个网站没什么广告。Facebook上常见的针对性广告和左下栏 “摩天大楼式”广告，却也没有在手机上网中体验到。我登入LinkedIn的帐户时也没有看到广告。
显然，手机网页的建设更强调使用的方便性。我相信社会网络的设计师会接到货币化手机网页的任务，但他们还是更多地遵循应用程序建设的易用性原则。我脑海里出现一个问题：在手机社会网络中究竟有广告商机吗？
我一直都有谈到我自己的公司放弃了很多手机广告的提议，很少采取手机广告的客户媒体手段的事情。总的来说，这个问题源于手机广告投递的系统功能有限。和直接反应广告活动相比，手机设备信息收集实在太麻烦了。版面太小，没有足够的空间展示品牌形象。再加上一般用户有限的带宽，以及手机消费潮流显示的更高程度、刻不容缓的客户需求—我们需要的不是“广告”手机！于是我们便陷入了这样的困境：大部分的手机广告提议都没法满足我们的需求。
现在，让我们加入社会网络的各种元素吧。我在空间中说过，终端用户的延展功能供给以及“福乐经验”的传播比单纯直接的广告要有效。我认为这对手机社会媒体来说也会是事半功倍的。
稍微想想：如果你也进行这个老少皆宜的活动――在网上经营你的社会生活。你正在使用手机上网，然后网络突然变慢了，你的信息发送出现问题，或者是一个通讯要求没法被通过… …而你最后发现原来是一个45k的横幅广告堵塞了通道，你的感受会是怎样的呢？
从另一个角度看，假若一个品牌的价值延伸是通过提供一个支持多方通话的手机应用程序来实现的，这种方法是不是更能让品牌者立于更有利的位置呢？这种方式不仅能排除用户对你的广告会造成网络堵塞的担忧，而且能激发他们的期待。我的看法是：我肯定愿意我的客户欢迎我的营销产品，而不是屏蔽它。
总的来说，我的观点是：要在手机社会媒体中取得成功，在线营销者要学会避免信息直接传达，要把投资重点放在延展功能和“福乐经验”的传播上。