If any PR person out there is questioning why mobile is important, they need shooting. Give up and go home. Really. With more people owning mobiles than fridges, not considering the mobile aspects to anything we do is unforgiveable.
(And yes, I know I need to dogfood where this site is concerned – I’m on the case!)
So here are a few predictions from last weeks mobile meetup (at Tech Hub) in highly visual form (note that these are the concerns from a primarily developmental perspective):
Mobile predictions for 2012
It was fantastic that Mike Beardmore managed to capture a fantastic talk from this week’s Reading Geek. It’s well worth watching for an insight into the big trends.
Given the predictions here for heavy duty, faster downloads to mobile this year, and absolutely nothing to do with Apple, (indeed lots of focus on busting away from Apple/itunes) I’m beginning to regret having upgraded my phone from Blackberry to the iphone 4S already this year. Combined with all sorts of predictions about a Nokia comeback with their rather sexy new phone, I will, as usual, be the laggard stuck with yesterday’s phone for two years.
I’ve always felt professionally that it was important for my technology to stay mainstream to help understand users’ reality, but with mobile looking this exciting, it’s going to the the year of the green eyed monster for me on the phone front, I feel.
I started this working year with the Global Integration team meeting in the first week back.
Global Integration works on the people capabilities within large, complex, matrixed organizations to help them work faster and more efficiently – and make them somewhat nicer, less confusing places to work.
The team meet works for clearing the mental cobwebs.
I am always struck when we’re together at how applicable what they do is to PR companies. How many Monday mornings or team meetings do PR teams spend hearing about what everyone else is doing, gobbling up almost a full day before we even get started on any real work? How many times have we sat going through ‘to do’ lists and allocating tasks? Yet the most important meeting, the one with clients once a month, is an hour or two long. That’s some kind of madness!
The Global integration team gets together three times a year and we use the meet for some really constructive ‘moving things forward’, big picture work, and people dip in and out as appropriate. And we usually have a team exercise – sometimes one which takes us outside of our comfort zones.
Ironically for me as a water baby, the one that had me most out of my comfort zone last year was white water rafting/raft building. Any invite from work colleagues that starts ‘bring your swimming costume’ is, in my books, a nightmare. Despite the worrying, however, it was one of the best meets I’ve been to.
Early in the week I visited Elegant Cuisine, who have had some changes. There are some super plans ahead for their Cafe Bar @ Cornerstone, based in the Cornerstone Art Centre in Didcot. It has some lovely engagement going on through its Twitter account @BarCornerstone – making some firm friends along the way, without worrying about the numbers game – and has plans for great things using social media. It’s even holding a Tweetup in December (in Didcot), a brave move for a small bar.
Elegant Cuisine also briefed me on a pretty amazing wedding package on offer – more details on this later – and a website refresh in the offing: more on this later as well.
On Tuesday I worked with SIG – the Software Improvement Group – on some multi-cultural, multi platform media training, which was great fun, and again, it wasn’t just traditional offline media that we discussed. We had been discussing a fun campaign, but off the back of the training changed tack a little, and are developing a campaign based around great software development teams.
Global Integration’s global working video competition has been getting a lot of attention, if no entries yet (although we’ve had some brave attempts from spammers). This has been an amazing learning curve. We knew before we started that we wouldn’t expect thousands of entries, even with a prize as big as $15 thousand. What we perhaps hadn’t anticipated was that the real value has been around the conversations that people have been having and the interest stirred, and if just one of the ideas that people have been discussing materialises, the competition will have been well worth it, and may well run again next year.
The Global Integration new website is also developing behind the scenes, and we may have something to show there soon.
If any PR person out there is questioning why mobile is important, they need shooting. Give up and go home. Really. With more people owning mobiles than fridges, not considering the mobile aspects to anything we do is unforgiveable.
PR practise, tech & telecoms | claireatwaves | 
January 16, 2012 8:30 am | 
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