Former Nokia Exec Encourages Businesses to “Get Married” to Mobile
Former analytics exec for Nokia Greg Dowling spoke to a Web Managers Roundtable in Washington, D.C. this week about how to get smart with mobile.
By Avery Fellow | February 25, 2010
Greg Dowling, vice president of mobile strategy at Web analytics company Semphonic
With five billion mobile devices in the market today and global mobile commerce expected to triple by 2013 (to $68 billion), now is the time for businesses to adopt a mobile strategy, said Greg Dowling, vice president of mobile strategy at Web analytics company Semphonic.
Speaking at a Web Managers Roundtable event at the U.S. Holocaust Museum on February 23, Dowling compared the current mobile market to the "Wild West" of the Internet in the mid-to -late 1990s.
"If you’re not thinking about mobile and committing to mobile, it’s time to reconsider," Dowling said.
"Mobile is the most popular and rapidly rising adopted personal technology in the world," Dowling said. According to an ITU World Telecom study, 67 percent of the world’s population is currently mobile subscribers. In contrast, about 26 percent are Internet users.
"And the United States is behind other markets, such as Asia-Pacific," according to Dowling. "There is a lack of comfort right now with mobile commerce." In the 2009 holiday shopping season, 23 percent of Asia-Pacific users made a purchase using their phone, whereas only 3.5 percent of U.S. mobile users did.
In congruence with this market change, eMarketer expects U.S. mobile advertising spending to triple by 2013, from $593 million to $1.56 billion.
"Get married to mobile," Dowling said, encouraging companies to craft a mobile strategy by first nailing down consumer data. Dowling said Nokia’s initial mistake when they got into the mobile market was thinking about its customer, mobile carriers, and not the consumer. "Consumer data is telling a story about how customers are interacting with your brand."
Dowling said companies should identify a specific part of their product offering that has a fit for mobile and then make the offering suitable to the mobile environment, such as creating an iPhone app.
Then, have customers engage with your brand or company, Dowling said. "The social media aspects of an application are going to make or break it," he said.
The Web Managers Roundtable, formed in 2003, consists of one-third each corporate, government and nonprofit members, according to Julie Perlmutter, founder and events manager for the Web Managers Roundtable. The group uses the "best style of business networking," Julie said, working strictly by referral.
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