Why aren’t all things mobile as high a priority for marketers as they perhaps “should be“?

I was invited to address this topic as guest speaker at yesterday’s Mobile Monday lunch in Edinburgh.

In addition to sharing my own views, based on observation and anecdotal insight, I conducted a survey of Blonde clients to canvas their opinion on all things mobile. Twenty people kindly completed the questionnaire and provided some very useful additional insights.

These responses come from clients in a variety of sectors – Financial Services, FMCG, The Arts, Public Sector, Transport and Retail.

The individual respondents all have smartphones of some description and all use these for a wide range of “high order” tasks. So if anything is holding mobile back in these organisations, it certainly isn’t any lack of familiarity with the functional potential of mobile devices.

Here are the results of that survey. Remember when viewing the quantitative charts that the sample size is only 20. I suspect that the verbatim responses to the open-ended questions will be of most interest.

It may be that the text size on some of the charts is a bit small to read within this blog post. Perhaps better to view at a larger size on the Slideshare site.

We have soft launched You Are What You App. The premise of this simple site is that your choice of iPhone applications probably reveals something about you.

And so it would seem. It’s the iPhone equivalent of having LLoyd Grossman looking through your keyhole.

The site appeals both to the iPhone exhibitionist and to the iPhone voyeur.

At the time of writing it’s early stages in terms of the number of active participants, but the average time on site is 7 minutes 30 seconds, suggesting that people are enjoying having a good nosey at other people’s apps.

I’ve already downloaded a few new gems as a result of seeing and reading about the apps that other people can’t live without.

There’s Byline, a mobile Google Reader app, which is perfect for keeping up with RSS feeds on the train.

Instapaper is an interesting looking application that allows you to save and read web pages offline at your convenience.

Around Me elegantly answers the question “where is the nearest x, y or z?”

And people are clearly sufficiently impressed with productivity applications like Omnifocus and Things to part with decent amounts of cash for them.

If you have an iPhone and a Twitter account please do add your apps to the site.

You Are What You App is our latest “hobby” project, following in the footsteps of WeMet for EdTwestival and EdTwinge.

What’s your poison?

We’ve been hired by Channel 4’s 4iP fund to promote a new iPhone application called You Booze You Looze.

4iP is an investment fund administered by Channel 4 that is designed to support non-broadcast public service initiatives.

You Booze You Looze (YBYL) is one such initiative . It is the brainchild of a game developer in Dundee called Digital Goldfish. DG is already responsible for “Bloons”, one of the biggest selling games on the iPhone ever.

YBYL is an app that keeps tabs on what you and your friends are drinking. In a fun way it also informs you of the short and long term financial and health impacts of your drinking. It has Facebook Connect technology built in to allow groups of friends to be acutely aware of what everyone else is drinking. It features various sobriety tests/games that measure the effect of alcohol on things like balance, co-ordination, reaction time and concentration.

What has this got to do with public service you may ask.

Well.

One of Channel 4’s core values is “Making trouble in the public interest”. (One of my favourite brand values of all time).

The aim for this app is that it will be fun. Being fun will lead to social use in bars etc. Social use will hopefully lead to discussion.

Anyone who has read Nudge will be aware of the Amerian campus survey that showed that students tend to overestimate what their peers are drinking, and increase their consumption accordingly. Once told that their friends are actually drinking considerably less than they thought, their alcohol consumption dropped markedly.

So this app approaches the issue of excessive drinking by accepting that social drinking is fun, in the hope that it will provoke discussion. It is very different in tone from your average public sector anti drinking campaign.

Blonde is working with Stripe, Opticomm and one of our EdTwinge friends, Andrew Burnett, to promote the app through various channels, with a heavy dose of social media activity in the mix.

Read more at http://www.youboozeyoulooze.com/.

And if you have an iPhone click the Buy Now button to get one. A bargain at only 59p.

Follow @BoozeLooze on Twitter too.

Partick Thistle are riding high at the top of the first division Score With IRN-BRU league table.

Details of the promotion are all in this previous post.

Here at Blonde we’re speculating that Partick’s table-topping performance and the fact that the club has one of our Score widgets embedded prominently in its homepage may not be entirely coincidental…

With just over three weeks to go, they’re currently looking good for the £7,000 prize for youth development at the club.

As part of its ongoing sponsorship of the Scottish Football League (SFL), IRN-BRU has just launched a new £70,000 fund to help with youth development at the 30 SFL clubs, and a promotion mechanic that will allow the fans to determine how that fund is allocated.

The promotion is called Score With IRN-BRU. It is an SMS text based promotion that is being prominently featured on a number of pack variants. Participants text “Score” plus the division and first 4 letters of their club to the promotion number.

You can win for yourself, in that all participants (over the age of 16) are entered into a draw for one of five home cinema systems.

And you can win for your club, in that all texts feed into a series of league tables hosted on the Phenomenal Footy website. The higher the position of your club when the competition closes on 28th May, the more money it will get for youth development.

To allow ardent fans the opportunity to keep a close eye on league table movements, we’ve developed widgets for desktop and social media. These give real time updates on the progress of your team. These will no doubt become increasingly useful as the competition progresses to its climax at the end of May. The promotion is only a few days old but there is already a healthy level of activity. If this competition is anything like the Real WAGS competition we ran last year, then things will hot up in the final furlongs. Over 47,000 Real WAG votes were cast in the last 15 days of that competition.

The Score With IRN-BRU promotion is another example of the brand’s “Real Football” approach to its sponsorship of the SFL. This marries the strong grass-roots community presence of the brand with the strong, grass-roots community passion that characterises the support for SFL teams.

A week ago we set out our stall to provide live tracking of EdTwestival socialising as it happened.

The idea was to do this using a newly created Twitter account @wemet. By sending a direct message to WeMet with the Twitter @names of the people you met, you would help to create a real time database of all the social interactions as they happened.

That was the theory…

In practice in turned out pretty well. The EdTwestival event itself was an unqualified success – well organised, well supported and much appreciated by all who attended. By comparison the live tracking element was more of a mixed bag.

What worked

• Roy, Andy and Fraser did a grand job in a short space of time to grapple with the Twitter API, develop the application and sort out the front end interface.
• Excellent support for the idea ahead of the event from the EdTwestival team and the “community”.
• At the event itself there was a generous spirit and plenty of good intentions to participate in the idea.
• In the end, from a universe of 189, a total of 58 people sent direct messages detailing conversations with 118 others. These “meetings” involved 124 unique names or 66% of the universe. The resulting social graph of the event is shown in the image above and the movie below. You can also view a replay, condensed into 5 minutes, here.

What could have been better

• Despite the best efforts of the EdTwestival guys the venue wifi couldn’t cope with demand for bandwith resulting from the furious content creation of 200 avid twitter-bloggers. We ended up running the application through a 3G dongle that could only manage a 2G connection.
• A design that looked great on screen could have been better optimised for large scale projection.
• Despite the predictably high penetration of iPhones within this geeky group, many people simply weren’t packing the right kind of mobile devices to make participation easy.
• Even with an iPhone, sending a direct message at the start of every new conversation is actually an anti-social act. In the end, an idea that was enabled by technology was also limited by technology. More accurately, and reassuringly, the idea was limited by people’s desire to be socialising rather than technologising.

Nonetheless a big thank you to all who did “technologise”.

To retweet this post, copy and paste the text below into Twitter, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Twhirl, or twhatever.

Results of Wemet live tracking at #EdTwestival – http://bit.ly/yblG3