I
CAN'T SAY THAT I personally understand the appeal of
the Sprint Friends Lounge. When I pop into this mobile chat
and community service, it just looks like a bunch of random
posts organized into a few themes, demographic groups, and
regions. Dozens of fellow cruisers are in any of these rooms
at any time, and cruising is precisely what it seems they are
doing. A long scroll of posts are mostly one and two word
come-ons: "Whassup?" "I'm here in Dover" etc. And I am an old
fart from Jersey. My idea of socializing is
white-wine-and-chat about that latest PBS documentary. Yeah,
I'm an old fart, but even so, this does not look a thing like
"community" to me. According to the major provider of this and
many other mobile lounges, airG , I probably shouldn't
understand what is going on here. Over 80 percent of the 10
million airG members across many carriers and "lounges" are
between the ages of 18 and 30, and almost 60 percent don't
even own a PC. "People who use social networking on cell
phones are not in front of their PC all day," says Frederick
Ghahramani, co-founder of airG . "They are the people who power
America, who work in hair salons and work in Starbucks." They
are the folks who take five-minute breaks and pop open their
cell phones to seek out a friend in one of these lounges.
The encounters are not always random. You
can collect friends in buddy lists and check their presence
when you log in. Ghahramani insists that mobile community
requires three elements: identity, presence, and
interactivity. Others need to be able to find out who you are
and what you are about, know you are there, and make exchanges
with you across different formats. Mobile blogs are not really
enough, because there is little live community involved. The
average airG user is spending nearly an hour a day on a
service that lets him or her post text messages or flip into
IM and chat sessions.
Ghahramani is hoping that his army of 10
million not only power America but also power an emerging
mobile marketing engine. He is pitching the airG network as a
media platform with over 2 billion WAP page impressions a
month that can be targeted according to the profiles all of
these millions of users provide. airG has their age, sex, and
general location, often their income levels and a host of
general interests. The beauty of social networking is that
users volunteer detailed profile information in order to make
better connections with other like-minded folks. Ghahramani
says he can locate Latino males in the New York City area of a
certain income level, if a marketer wants them. The profiles
are so precise, he says, that you can do a keyword targeted
promotion and focus an offer on members with very specific
terms of interest in their profiles.
airG is already running about fifteen
campaigns this quarter, including Schick and Verizon DSL and
says they garner CTRs in the 5 percent range. With the right
target and offer, however, you can get tremendous response in
a social network, Ghahramani claims. By offering a free game
trial to a gaming segment on mobile, one campaign aproached an
80 percent clickthrough.
I have to imagine that advertising into a
social network on mobile is just as dicey and uncertain as it
has proven to be online. Brands never know exactly what kind
of content or exchange is crawling beneath their ads, whether
it is a harmless exchange between like-minded home theater
enthusiasts or a randy discussion about watching porn on that
new HDTV.
Regardless, the advertisers are sure to
be in this space, because that is one of the places where
mountains of eyeballs are headed even faster than they are
embracing mobile TV and other more familiar types of content.
One of the lessons of the Internet circa
2000 is worth remembering on mobile. It is the media companies
that want to make phones into another content distribution
platform, not the consumers. Back in the day, big media
wondered why users had no trouble paying Match.com $20-$30 a
month for their dating service but wouldn't pony up $5 a month
to get behind an online magazine's subscription wall. People
will pay to connect to other people long before they will pay
to connect to media companies. Not only that, but they will
tell a peer-to-peer service like Match.com or airG a lot more
about themselves, too, because the payoff is a better real
relationship to other human being, not a phony "relationship"
with marketers.
