The theme for this year’s TEDx in Liverpool was The Future of Mobile. Although the focus was from the technology and design point of view, my personal interest is from the marketing and PR standpoint.
Taking place at FACT, this was a really well organised and thoroughly interesting event. For those who are not familiar with the name, TED stands for technology, entertainment and design. These conferences in California have become so popular that they lend the name to independently organised events, which are denoted by the ‘x’.
More than 300 people were gathered together because those devices that each and every one of us possesses have untold potential. Mobile technology has developed so quickly. Internet enabled phones have been around for a while, but it was Apple’s revolutionary iPhone touchscreen, launched just four years ago, that was the game-changer.
Smartphone sales have already overtaken that of PCs and there are many countries where large percentages of smartphone owners have never used the internet on a desktop.
Talks were kept short, which kept the whole afternoon fresh and interesting as ideas and new concepts were thrown around. Talks ranged from the futuristic vision that our mobile phones will talk to chips in our bodies monitoring our health, through to Mill’s concept of ‘succailure’. This was his account of which iPhone apps have failed in popularity, and those that were massively popular but still didn’t make any money, which was really interesting.
But what I wanted to think about was how do these changes in communication and internet use affect the PR and digital marketing industry. Many people in the industry are still discussing the most effective ways to do digital PR, develop content marketing strategies and utilise search, as well as the best way to measure the effectiveness of these. Of course, it doesn’t mean these things just disappear overnight – they’re all still valid. So essentially it means that people are consuming information differently when using a mobile device.
In some ways, this could be a positive for the marketing industry because there are increasingly diverse ways to target consumers. Along with desktop web use, there is now mobile and tablet use, which gives us three channels to communicate our messages.
But then again, are we going to be given three times to budget to roll out our communications to these different platforms? Unlikely, so we’ll have to figure out good ways to tailor the marketing to each platform.
One of the points raised at the conference was that Google has a smaller role in internet use for the mobile user. They are much more likely to use social networks to search and learn about new content because the screens are too small to use Google exactly as you would on a laptop or desktop.
Overall, it was useful to find out just how fast mobile is growing and how the market is developing so fast. It’s something we all need to integrate into marketing strategies and understand the needs of the mobile user.
