Henshall

The unveiling of iPhone OS 4.0 caused a bit of a stir last week. Apple will finally allow multi-tasking on iPhone devices, which means that true communications clients can finally be built to run on iPhone. No longer will users be required to load and run the Skype, Truphone or Google voice clients – they will simply run in the background.

In a lengthy piece written April 8, Stuart Henshall outlines the implications for this development, the biggest of which is the disintermediation of the traditional telecoms industry. Stuart posits that, with the huge numbers of mobile clients in the market – and especially iPhone – telephone numbers will finally go the way of the Dodo, and identity will migrate to the owners of cloud assets – the Yahoo’s, Skype’s, and likely (although Stuart doesn’t say this) Facebook’s of the world. “Caller ID” will become the information presented by the identity network, and not just a phone number and name. And so, after resisting for decades, the telecom companies finally really do become dumb pipes running a stupid network with smart end points.

The upcoming eComm event in San Francisco seems to be pointing in that direction too. With its heavy emphasis on policy, networks and end-point technologies, a whole day devoted to Augmented Reality, and presentations from just two carriers (not including the Verizon cameo in Day 2’s panel on the US National Broadband Panel), the momentum in the industry seems clear, and the carriers have apparently absented themselves from the discussion.

Would that it were as easy as everyone implies. If we’re not careful, however, we’re headed for the same IM Gulag that exists today, now spread across mobile devices. Communications networks will splinter into a myriad of smaller islands, and by default, the phone number will remain our pre-eminent identity, simply because nothing else is universal.

Last week I reconnected with a friend I hadn’t chatted with since dumping all other IM networks for Skype in November 2008. She doesn’t use Skype, and we don’t call each other that often. I reinstalled MSN messenger, and soon we were talking. It was a stark illustration. Our identities, and consequently communications applications which require identity, were walled off from each other by entrenched corporate interests. It was as if I were a Verizon customer, and she an AT&T customer, and neither network had agreed to interoperate with the other.

Do we really want that kind of identity network?

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I was very flattered, yesterday, to have Stuart Henshall hold me, this blog, and iotum, up as an example of folks living a social strategy in marketing. Didn't know quite how to respond, which is why I waited until today to write anything. As hard as it is to believe, I am a little self conscious about public praise. I guess it's a Canadian thing.

When I began writing, almost five years ago and long before iotum existed, it was simply to have a voice in the conversation called the web. I wrote about politics (local, national and international), technology, and wine. When Howard and I started our company, it was a natural to have some of what I wrote about here be reflective of what we were doing in the work place. And along the way a small following (I get about 70,000 unique visitors per month) of people developed who read what's written here. Over the past 5 years the subject matter has become more industry focused than at the start… although you still get to hear about my vacations, political views and wine drinking occasionally. That's the voice of this blog.

Thank you for the recognition Stuart.

The genesis for Stuart's post was that a couple of days ago, writing about the negative response of bloggers to the Ooma launch, I said:

That's a failure of the company's marketing programs, and nothing more. An intelligent outreach program could have mitigated the negative sentiment which now has the potential to turn into an outright disaster for the company.

Andy Abramson added:

I don't think though its simply a matter of "a good outreach" program. A lot of it has to do with telling people about a product versus giving them the product to try. This is called Hype.

Stuart chimed in with:

Where I want to pick a bone is on your perceptions that the PR and Marketing failed to have the right blogger outreach. While it may have helped the real problem is still the product and the price point. Still I think it goes further than just the product and there are lessons for hardware / physical product launches everywhere.

In a 2.0 world marketing is reframed; the consumer is dead, and the users are people. Every product requires a social strategy. Products like the message are inherently social. All media is now social. I know you know this. Iotum has a presence and SOCIAL standing way beyond it's footprint. This traces to trust, transparency and a sense that "we" know and understand what you and your team are trying to do. Most importantly Iotum seems communications as social.

The Ooma marketing failed on all these fronts. They are not transparent about the technology. The product suggests security compromises. They brought in an Actor and and that's supposed to make it cool. They thought they were in control of the "message". That's an old school thought and thinking that too many companies are continuing to make. Ooma is not a social product.

The brand manager cannot own the message. We the "people" are the message and collectively "place" the product. In many ways it's always been that way. Just in this case — no one seemed to ask… "what will the WOM (word of mouth) be?". Andy perhaps characterises this very well describing it as "Hype".

I agree with both positions. What I casually called "marketing programs", and "outreach" is best exemplified by the kinds of programs that Andy Abramson's Comunicano runs, and it's the sort of thing that Stuart describes. At its best, PR is a series of engaged conversations with stakeholders in the market. The worst, and today most easily recognized and dismantled by commentators on the internet, is old-style command and control messaging. Hype and unsupportable statements are at most spin, and sometimes little more than bald-faced lies. How do you build a relationship and trust with your customer in that environment?

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