It’s a silly excercise, but everybody does it.  After a banner year for mobile in Canada, here are 10 outrageous predictions for 2008:  

1. SMS third-party advertising – every SMS you send is 150 characters…most of which is sent as blank space. I predict new services will take advantage of this in 2008 to deliver SMS advertising to off-set mobile costs for the consumer (but only if they opt-in of course)
2. Mobile Web advertising will take a piece of your media buy. We’ve seen it happen with online media…now with more inventory becoming available off-deck, the time is right to test and pilot this channel
3. MMS Common Short Codes will finally arrive and usher us into a new era in Mobile marketing in Canada….or at least catch us up to the rest of the world.
4. Mobile payments (m-Commerce) will start to emerge from text books, blogs, and sales pitches.  Look for pilots from Interac, Visa and at least one of the major banks next year.
5. The iphone will finally arrive in Canada – but it will be the second generation 3G phone that will support higher internet access speeds and cool features like video calling. This will be offered exclusively on the Rogers network – but don’t be surprised if another non-mobile retailer offers them for sale first
6. Fixed or low-cost data plans will be universal across all carriers in Canada. It’s already started with Bell and Rogers now offers an $80 / month plan for 500 megs of data – plenty for most of us. It’s still a long way from other plans around the world that are 4 times cheaper or better, but it’s a start
7. Due to fixed or low-cost data plans, look for the mobile web to catch fire.  Marketing campaigns will start incorporating mobile web strategies as part of their marketing mix
8. A new mobile carrier will be announced. The Canadian government announced the opening of new spectrum and is reserving a piece of it for a new player and with special engagement rules that will make it easier for a new competitor to enter the market.
9. Google will continue its charge towards world mobile domination. Look for their gphone sometime in the 3rd quarter and look for them to either bid on spectrum in the U.S., buy a carrier like Sprint outright to own a piece without having to go through the auction process or leverage their new mobile platform called Android to get direct access to many subscribers across many carriers.
10. Social Networking will make the leap from desktop to Mobile as a primary interface / access point 

Even if only a few of these come to fruition in 2008, it will be a great year for Marketers and a great year for Consumers.

Happy Holidays!

In the past few months we’ve been watching as Google, AOL, Yahoo, and Nokia have been making moves to extend or enter the mobile advertisting space.

Microsoft has decided to also join the party and has started placing ads on their U.S. MSN mobile page to follow efforts already made in Belgium, France, Spain, Japan, and the U.K.

The Bank of America will be one of the primary buyers of ad space – supporting their innovative mobile banking website and experience at bankofamerica.mobi. Paramount Pictures and Jaguar are the other two primary buyers.

Microsoft also plans to bring new features such as astrology, movie tickets through movietickes.com, ringtones, wallpaper, games and video clips on MSN Mobile via an agreement Microsoft has with Thumbplay.

Although Microsoft is late to the game, the mobile advertising space is still young and relatively small.  This is not like the nineties when Microsoft had to catch and kill Netscape who already dominated the browser market.  

Here are the latest stats from facebook as noted from last week’s Toronto breakfast on their enhanced marketing platform:

1. 1 in 4 Canadians (or 8 million) are now active users. There are 57 million active users worldwide
2. 65,000 new users in Canada added each day on average
3. 12 billion page views on facebook in Canada every month
4. Average Canadian views 62 pages on facebook on each visit
5. 65% of Canadians go to the site at least once a day – compared to 54% in the rest of the world

Other interesting tid bits…

1. It took the ilike application 4 days to get 1 million users to install their application on facebook. This demonstrates the power and reach of building an application that is relevant to users
2. There are now over 80 applications with at least 1 million users
3. Applications are not advertised – people find out about them through the mini-feed

Currently facebook insights (their marketing dashboard page), beacon, pages, and social ads are not supported on their mobile platform. Look for updates to the mobile platform to incorporate these new services in 2008.

Today the federal government of Canada announced that they are opening up the wireless communications industry in May of 2008 by making spectrum available specifically for newcomers to break up the Oligopoly of Bell, Telus, and Rogers in Canada.

As reported by the Toronto Star today, the move is expected to increase competition in Canada to create better pricing, more options and better service. Canadians are already paying as much as 33% more for similar data plans in the U.S. for average users and up to 56% more for heavy users.  Mobile usage in Canada is among the lowest in the developed world at around 58% – compared to some European countries that are close to 100%. A fourth major carrier is bound to drive down prices and drive up adoption in Canada.

This is great news for consumers. This is also great news for marketers.  Better pricing means marketers can boldly go beyond SMS campaigns and leverage the full potential of the mobile web and mobile applications which rely on the mobile web for data to create a rich experience on mobile devices. Yahoo for example has a great downloadable mobile product called Yahoo! Go which provides a rich mobile internet experience…but can result in an outrageous bill from your carrier if you don’t already have a hefty data plan. Cheap and / or fixed data rates means consumers will be able to enjoy products like Yahoo! Go without fear of having to re-mortgage the house after binging on data.

Since my last post on Bell’s introduction of fixed rates in Canada, Telus has started offering $15 fixed data plans as a retention strategy for existing customers. With both Bell and Telus dropping their data rates as a pre-emptive strike against the pending introduction of the iphone in Canada, we can only expect universal fixed data plans are on their way.  Adding a fourth carrier can only help.

Mobile as a mass medium may no longer be restricted to countries not named Canada.  Pretty cool, eh?  

Although often referred to as the “third screen” – there are actually more mobile devices (2.8 billion) world wide than internet PCs and TVs combined (2.5 billion)!  

A few reports have been released over the last week that highlight the fact that adoption continues to grow in Canada and how people (and marketers) are using Mobile devices are changing too.

Here are some highlights:

Text Messaging (SMS):  793.3 million text messages were sent in June 2007 alone – or about 26.5 million per day. 4.3 billion text messages were sent up until June of this year – which equals the total of all text messages sent in 2006. It’s very possible that we’ll see upwards of 10 billion text messages sent this year in Canada.  One reason driving this trend is the mass adoption of all you can eat SMS plans in Canada. For about $10 / month, you can text all you want.  Marketers have also been getting more into the game – there are about 300 active shortcodes in Canada right now.  Source: CWTA

Mobile Browse: With no “all you can eat” data plans yet available to the consumer in Canada, usage of Mobile browse is still pretty low at around 11%.  This is less than half the world’s average which is around 25%.  In countries where data plans are either fixed or really cheap, the mobile web has really taken off. The top 5 markets for the mobile web are the U.S., India, South Africa, UK, and Indonesia.  Also interesting is that 4 of the top 10 mobile devices in the U.S. are PDAs – three blackberry models and the Samsung blackjack.  Until the Canadian carriers offer really cheap or fixed data plans, we don’t expect the same growth in mobile web as other mobile channels. This may all change when the iphone eventually makes it way to Canada…so stay tuned!

It’s been an exciting year so far for Mobile. It may be time to start referring to mobile as the “first” screen.

Terri Hardin has published an article in Successful Meetings Magazine this week on using web 2.0 or social networking sites to promote meetings, events, and conferences. The articles covers a lot of ground and aligns with what I presented at the Canadian IncentiveWorks show in August.

From my perspective, leveraging web 2.0 / social media sites are not just a new way to promote your meeting, event, or conference – it’s a shift in philosophy. Meetings as monologues are dead.

Although it’s true that social media is affording us new ways to reach our potential audience for promoting our events… the true power is in creating community – not just advertising within them. By creating your own social networking experience for your meeting (or leveraging somebody else’s), you can create meaningful interactions and value exchanges before, during, and after your event.

With traditional meetings, events, and conferences, the networking part begins once you show up & register. By creating your own community, you can facilitate meaningful interactions before people even show up. The social networking continues during your event and well beyond the conclusion of the event. Your community can now propagate, grow, and build momentum for your next event. A great example of this concept put to use is the social networking site launched as part of the Motivation Show in Chicago. Like most social networks, when you register you provide some profile information. For a meeting, event, or conference you may ask people to self-select issues that are important to them. You can then leverage this data to “match” like-minded people together who may have an interest in connecting at your meeting, event , or conference.

The Motivation Show is doing exactly this – some colleagues who have registered for this event have received emails highlighting the 10 people they need to meet at the conference.  The email is personalized, dynamic, and based on the criteria selected in the registration process. The email also includes links back into the social network to initiate a conversation or to do further investigation (or creeping as we call it on facebook).  

I’ve evaluated / piloted / implemented several white label social networking platforms and all the best ones also come with great community tools built-in – like RSS feeds, personal blogs, group forums, chat areas, user polls, and your own media bin where you can upload images, links, documents – or whatever.

Not everybody is going to participate in your community - but the early adopters will drive content and word of mouth will mean constant growth and continued engagement. You’re not likely going to reach 100% engagement, but it’s not unusual for events that leverage this type of software to see 30% or more of their audience engaged. In a world where we deem a good marketer as somebody who gets 3% return on traditional response mediums and great marketers as those who get 5% – don’t you agree that this is an area worth your attention and further investigation?

It’s here, it’s cool and now all our friends have given in to the peer pressure and have signed up. Now that we’ve setup our profiles and added all the widgets that help you score cool points, what’s next with facebook? Some in the media are already predicting its demise, or stating that people will move on to the next coolest thing. That may be true…but until that next thing manifests itself, I have some thoughts on what I think would make facebook a better place for us all:

1) RSS all the way. Why not allow ALL content within your profile AND groups be exportable through RSS or through a widget builder that will allows user to repurpose existing content on their own personal blogs, sites, or communities? Seems only logical…and it will make groups more viral & relevant again.

2) Be nicer to outsiders.  Allow assets from other social networking sites to be imported into facebook, and allow facebook profile info to be exported to others too. Kind of like a universal avatar – a concept that has been discussed here and in the blogsphere. If facebook is truly going to become the new platform within the internet platform, they need to do this. It will also make it easier for marketers to reach and provide relevant messaging to a targeted audience. Sweet.  

3) Stop being so darn self-centered. I’m talking to you. Yes you. Your entire facebook profile is about you. You only add applications that improve your social standing through karma points, bragging about travel destinations and competing for the most number of friends while being a top friend the most often as well.   It’s not your fault – facebook is setup to be a self-propagating self promotion tool. In the old days of web 1.0, we used to join forum communities / discussion boards. They were highly effective in community building because every time somebody added content or responded to your post, you were notified via email. Facebook NEEDS this in the worst way for their groups to stay relevant beyond the first week a group is setup.  It will never reach its potential as a true community tool until they figure out how to leverage the power of groups.  

4) Friend categorization. I know I can choose who can see my limited profile and define what that means…but that’s not enough now that facebook is more then a friends network. It’s becoming a professional network too…and scarier still….our parents are starting to come online too. Do you really want your mother to have the same access to your friends network as anybody else? Maybe you do… then maybe you are a momma’s boy too.

5) Optimize the mobile channel. m.facebook.com kicks butt. Text alerts and commands we can do through the shortcode stack are awesome too. I can go a week or more without going to the website because of it. Having said that, what’s up with only pushing 60 characters at a time on messages? I hate pressing “n” 17 times to get the full message. It may be a case of optimizing for the lowest common denominator…but why not allow us change or choose different options? I have both a treo and blackberry – i can handle more text!

6) Expand the mobile platform. At facebookcamp Toronto I asked the 400 or so assembled if anybody was developing an application specifically for mobile or ensuring their apps will work on mobile. Only one person raised their hand. You can start by allowing people to take media from their profiles (or groups) and allow them to download them to their mobile device as a wallpaper…or maybe ringtone for audio-related media. This is also a good revenue stream potentially for developers taking advantage of the new open APIs… 

I’ve just come across this link at one degree on five predictions for facebook. Check it out…and feel free to add your own wish list here!