Mobile for Dingbats Part Two: Mobile Terms and Facts

HOW A MOBILE PHONE WORKS

The World’s mobile infrastructure is basically a vast network linking walkie talkies. The signal for your phone travels from a sender via a cell tower near them, to the main network. If the call is to a land line, it then enters the land line system. If the call is to another cell phone, it travels through a phone network until it reaches a tower near where you are. Your phone detects it and presto! you’re talking to Mom.

The towers themselves are distributed across the country in varying levels of density. This is why you get a good signal in some places, and a bad one in others.

How the System Knows Where You Are

When you turn your phone on, it essentially listens for a signal from nearby towers. It responds with a signal of its own that tells the closest tower as well as other nearby towers where you are.
That’s how your calls can find my 510 area code phone when I am in the 212 area code. And how you can retain a phone number from one area code even if you move to another area.

Jumping from Cell to Cell

Essentially, when you are moving while on a cellular call, the phone is communicating with two towers when you are nearing the edge of one cell and entering another. If all goes well, the new tower will pick up your transmissions before the other tower drops your transmissions. This is called a handoff. When

your calls are dropped it’s often because of a failure in this process, for example that two cellular areas are not juxtaposed together.

All Cells Are Not the Same

We’ve all heard about cellular companies making towers look like palm trees and other ambient objects to better blend into the environment. But all towers are not the same. Macrocells are large service area cells. Microcells offers smaller coverage areas. A cell provider might add microcells in very populous areas or along a major freeway to help mitigate issues with network capacity. Picocells are still smaller transceivers that serve a very small area like the floor of a high rise.

Not all are towers, BTW.

SOME OF THE LANGUAGE OF MOBILE

Let’s talk terminology for a minute. Mobile has a lot of lingo. The Mobile Marketing Association offers a 57 page glossary of mobile terms. And I encourage you to download it for reference. But here’s the two minute drill of the stuff you’ll probably hear and read most often.

APPLICATION: The software that enables an action.

APPLICATION PROVIDER: Provider of an application. So, for example, Vindigo provides a great number of applications to its users.

ARPU: Average revenue per user. This refers to the amount of money a subscriber generates for a carrier. This would include, for example, the monthly charges plus the carrier’s share of 3rd party services like ringtones and the like.

BLUETOOTH: A system that allows a mobile user to send and receive data over a short distance. Blue tooth is empowered through a special chip.

BREW: Literally Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless. Open source application environment for Mobile. Works with both CDMA (think:”old technology”) and GSM (think “new” technology). Supported by less phones and carriers than WAP.

CARRIER: The company that provides phone service to the consumer. ATT and Verizon are carriers.

CLICK TO CALL: By clicking on a link on a mobile Web Site, the user automatically initiates a call. Ideal for direct marketers.

CHURN: The percentage of people who leave one carrier and transfer service to another.

CLEAR AND CONSPICUOUS NOTICE: An FTC standard that governs how charges, instructions, and other critical brand information must be communicated. This is relevant to the marketer, for example, as a standard by which costs of a piece of premium content, like a ringtone, must be disclosed.

DECK: A deck is basically the portal or walled garden provided by the carrier that offers content to the user. Content could include news, sports, weather, or opinion – essentially anything that a web portal offers. Decks also offer content for sale, like wallpapers or ringtones.

G, as in 1G 2G 3G: G refers to generation. 1G is the first generation of mobile phones and technologies. 2G, the second, 3G, the third. G1 generally means analog technologies. G2 means more advanced services AND data services like web browsing, etc. 3G refers to high speed data transmission. From a marketer’s perspective that means data services that are “always on” and that allow transmission of video and other heavy bandwidth content.

MMS: Literally Multimedia Messaging Service. These are messaging services using multimedia, including photos, video, and audio.

MVNO: A company that provides service to customers using another company’s network. For example, Boost Mobile has a direct relationship with customers, but does not have its own network of signals and towers. Instead, it leases bandwidth from Sprint.

NUMBER PORTABILITY: The ability to retain a phone number as you transfer service between carriers. Years ago, one of the disincentives to changing providers was that you lost your phone number. No more.

OFF DECK AND ON DECK: Carriers provide access to certain content within their portals or walled gardens, while intenet access lets consumers buy content outside those gardens. So, for example, if you look for ringtones on your phone, the first place the carrier will want you to search is within their portal. Content on the portal is “on deck.” Content available on the web, by contrast, and not within the walled garden of the carrier is called “off deck.”

The term is relevant to the marketer because carriers prefer consumers to buy on deck, because they get a cut. Carriers do not get a cut of off deck sales, so third parties, like ring tone makers, often prefer offdeck sales. At the same time, third parties also vie for placement on deck because on deck sales can be an important source of volume. In the US, a greater percentage of content is sold on deck versus in Europe and Asia. US carriers make more effort to keep sales on deck, and US consumers seem to be less aware of off deck content.

OPT-IN: Purchases via mobile phone typically require an opt-in process in which the buyer must confirm their willingness to be charged.
1. Single opt-in refers to a process that makes a person confirm their understanding of purchase when an item is ordered.
2. Double opt-in adds the extra step of requiring the user to confirm a purchase by responding to an SMS message they receive after making their purchase
3. Triple opt-In (which is now uncommon) requires the user to respond to TWO SMS messages before they are charged.
Carriers demand opt-in purchase confirmations because of the potential for confusion and their desire to avoid billing disputes with their customers.

PAYG or PAY AS YOU GO or PREPAID: All three terms refer to phone service that is purchased by consumers as an alternative to having a credit card account with a carrier. Pre-pay helps people too young to have credit, or with bad credit, or whose bill payers want to control their monthly pone expenses, get some cellular service. All major carriers offer PAYG programs

PREMIUM SMS: Premium Text Messaging refers to special programs that require an additional fee to subscribe. Examples of Premium Text subscription campaigns are:
1. Sports alerts: MLB, NFL etc.
2. Weather alerts, jokes, stock quotes, horoscopes, etc..
3. Trivia.
4. Mobile coupons.
5. Interactive TV shows and voting such as Idol.
Standard messaging rates always apply along with premium charges.

RINGTONE: The sounds you hear when your phone rings. Can be anything from a basic ring, to a section of a song, or dialogue. There are three basic kinds that offer three different levels of fidelity:

1. Monotone: The most basic variety, reproduces the basic melody of a song.
2. Polytone: More closely approximates the actually instrumental melody of a song.
3. Truetone: A real sample of a recording.

Older phones tend not to be truetone enabled. Newer phones use true tone compatibility as a selling point.

RINGBACK TONE: A “ringtone” that plays to the caller when calling a phone.

SHORT CODE: A short code is a set of four numbers that substitutes for a full ten digit phone number in mobile. Marketers like short codes because they make it easier for consumers to respond. The most famous short codes in America are the four digit contestant numbers that Idol uses to collect votes from ATT subscribers. Instead of dialing 1-866-IDOLS02 (1-866-436-5702), for example, users simply text VOTE to a number like 6766. Short codes can be great for use on highway billboards, where you are relying on someone to remember 4 digits like IDOL versus 1-800-555-1244.

SMS: Short message service or “text”. It is a “short” message because a text cannot have more than 160 characters.

WALLPAPERS: A graphic that serves as the background for a phone screen. Wallpapers are a popular form of personalization content, and many consumers are willing to pay for attractive ones.

WAP: The most common application environment.

Those are some essentials. And I promise not to use even these very often in the rest of this document. I promised plain English.

One term that is tough to avoid is “data services”. This is used to refer to non-voice functions that a phone may offer. Data can take many forms, from text to audio to video to a Flava Flav wallpaper. A game is a data service. While data services makes it sounds like we're talking about business applications, it really refers to anything other than voice that a phone transmits or receives.

THE FACTS OF MOBILE

There were 177 Million mobile telephone customers in the US in 2007.

Use of Data Services

Of those 177Million, the following statistics outline their usage rates of different cellular data services:

Percent of Users Who
Use the Service Now

Send and receive text 35%
Take photos 28%
Play games 22%
Access the Internet 14%
Send/receive email 8%
Perform searches 7%
Send and receive IMs 7%
Play music 6%
Record video clips 6%
Get mobile maps 4%
Watch video 2%
(Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project)

In addition, many consumers have stated their intent to use more data services in the future.

Percent of Users Who Don’t
Use a Service Now But Plan to
In the Future

Get mobile maps 47%
Send/receive email 24%
Perform searches 24%
Play music 19%
Take still photos 19%
Record video clips 17%
Access the Internet 16%
Watch video 14%
Send/receive SMS 13%
Play games 12%
Send/receive IMs 11%
(Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project)

So mobile campaigns can certainly achieve critical mass in many categories so as to warrant the effort. But the data also point to likely explosive growth over the next 1-2 years.

Age continues to be a key predictor of digital usage. While the information is somewhat dated, research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project show that teen usage of SMS, for example, is more than eight times higher than that of seniors.

As SMS is the most developed data service in the US, figure for many other technologies like ringtones and wallpapers are even more age skewed.

Race is also a predictor of digital behavior. African American and Hispanics tend to use cell phones more and are quicker to adopt data technologies. They also tend to use such technologies more frequently.

Men tend to adopt new mobile technologies slightly faster than women, but the differences are small.

One of the key trends in mobile usage, in addition to use of the applications listed above, is the growth in users of mobile for social media. Major social networks like MySpace have mobile offerings, and new mobile-only social networks have been launched as well. Wikipedia lists the following as major mobile social networks:

• Jumbuck
• AirG
• Mocospace
• Bluepulse

Also according to Wikipedia, the first two listed above have agreements with specific carriers, while the second two work across carriers.

GPS navigation will likely drive enormous growth in the already brisk pace of growth in mobile social, as location based communities can freely develop.

Tomorrow: How to Think About Mobile