Mobile video usage Q1 2007

NewTeeVee points to a Nielsen study on mobile video viewing for the first quarter of 2007.  Here are the highlights:

• Eight million persons 12 and older viewed video on their mobile phone (this excludes videos created with a phone’s camcorder function)
• The mobile video audience skewed somewhat older and male: 46 percent of the mobile video audience is 35 years or older and 54 percent of the audience is male.
• At least 7 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds viewed mobile video programming in the first quarter of 2007, while at least 25 percent used their mobile phone to connect to the Internet
• As of May 31, more than half, 55 percent, of primary users of video-enabled mobile phones lived in households with total incomes of $75,000 or above

The study indicates that the price point for mobile video is still too high for most users.

Collaboration 2.0

Back in the day, 1.0 collaboration tools like Groove and, to a lesser extent, the remote presentation tools like WebEx, presented a compelling idea: let remote teams work together in a shared, virtual workspace. However, the experience was just too clunky for the benefits to overcome the costs.

We were early users of Groove and wished that it really worked well. Now we're trying out several of a new generation of tools -- starting with Thinkature, described by it's creators as "a collaboration environment, a meeting room, a personal web-based whiteboard, or something entirely new." (Thanks, TechCrunch for the lead on this.) Well, that's just about the same promise Groove made -- how will it work in a 2.0 world?

Not having to download a client is possibly the most compelling feature of the 2.0 take on collaboration. In the past, clients helped keep local copies of files synched across the workgroup. With ubiquitous web access, I'm more comfortable with the shared work living on the web. (Of course, nothing terribly secure goes out there -- next level of problem to solve.) And the lack of a single answer is annoying -- Thinkature is good for whiteboarding and mapping, Vyew adds document sharing and web conferencing, but the visual collaboration isn't as good. Can this stuff be mashed up?

The question at the heart of the issue, of course, is how will our own ability to ideate in relationship with others evolve. For most of my generation, we just do it better in a f2f setting. We're wired that way. We've grown quite used to serial collaboration remotely, first via email, IM and now via wiki... but parallel collaboration continues to work best around a table. Preferably with good coffee and snacks.

How quickly will the capabilities of the organism adapt? We see lots of evidence of  adaptive behaviors among the young, including simultaneous use of multiple media. But amidst all the CGMM, social networking, crowdsourcing, and even the work to date done in virtual worlds, parallel collaboration still seems to be at the horizon.

This geezer will continue to try.

Grasshopper, there is no kimono

It's become clear that a fundamental shift in thinking that needs to take place if marketers are to make the transition to a media 2.0 world. We've all heard (and probably said ourselves) expressions about "opening the kimono" and how the internet was the medium that required doing so -- well, true, but not far enough, because the entire concept retains media 1.0 artifacts of thought that can critically damage your brand -- as evidenced by the Walmart/Edelman "flog" fiasco.

In a 1.0 world, there is a "kimono" -- a veil of separation between your brand and your marketplace -- that marketers choose to open and close to varying degrees at various times and in various media. Marketers in effect wholly own their brands and play the role of geisha, cleverly and seductively showing a little ankle in order to entice markets into a branded relationship.

In a 2.0 world, it's clear that brands are co-owned with your markets. This isn't a new lesson -- the New Coke debacle/triumph (depending on where you are re that conspiracy theory) illustrated this concept years ago. New media vehicles just exacerbate the issue. When you have truly wrapped your head around co-ownership, you will find that you have very different notions about how to use these vehicles. 2.0 blogging for Walmart? Well, on the one hand, your brand co-owners will expect a highly authentic blog from Walmart leadership, addressing the real issues and opportunities facing the brand in the marketplace. Marketing campaigns that incorporate blogging are fine -- but are either openly "made up" -- think about an interactive ad campaign in which an obviously manufactured teen cartoon character blogs about back to school -- or "authentic" - in which, say, four real moms (and a single-parent dad) blog about getting their kids back to school and the real challenges they face. OK, these ideas are off the top of my head, but serve the purpose to illustrate the  principle at work here: wake up and smell the sake, folks -- there is no kimono.