“How many people with short attention spans does it take to screw in a light bulb-wanna go on a bike ride?”

An article from Ryan Lawler on GigaOm the other day, the ubiquity imperative and the economics of attention shines a bright light on the importance of ubiquity among content companies clamoring for the attention of consumers. It struck a chord with me in the context of libraries from the simple fact that patrons are always customers to companies, in and out of the library.

While the post speaks specifically to video content, the message is clear:
“…consumers are now in charge of when and how they [consume] content. No longer content to be stuck to someone else’s schedule, consumers expect to be able to access their favorite content whenever they want and on a wide range of devices. As a result, the media companies that will win are those that recognize the need to be everywhere.” Full GigaOm Article here

Libraries have to be everywhere, on every device, to compete for patron attention. More time and money to spend, more technologies to sign up for and support. Not great news, but also not entirely true.

The strategy many libraries are implementing to solve this: Pick and choose your battles by choosing ubiquitous technologies rather than trying to be everywhere. For example, in mobile technologies, if you want to reach the largest amount of patrons on their mobile phones, you have 2 great choices: voice calls and text messaging. All mobile phones, smart or not-smart (aka “feature phones”) have both capabilities and are used by nearly everyone. At Mosio, we say “texting is the new talking”, not because we don’t enjoy talking to people, but because people are texting more than they’re talking on mobile phones. It’s simple, more efficient and enables time-shifting for busy schedules.

There are some amazing mobile technologies in the world. If we had unlimited resources and time, I’d have a developer working on as many as possible, but I don’t know any organization that has unlimited resources. With mobile messaging utilized twice as much as voice calls on mobile phones in the U.S. and around the world, we happily have our hands full offering solutions available to the largest amount of mobile users.

SMS FTW,

Noel

Text messaging is awesome. So are infographics. An infographic about the power of text messaging? Super sweet.

This infographic from MBA Online showcases some powerful stats about text messaging as a communication medium. A few of our favorites:

* Texting is the #1 most data service in the world.

* 193,430 text messages are sent PER SECOND.

* The feature phone (not smart phone) is the #1 selling electronic product in the world.

We’ll let the infographic take over from here…

Created by: MBA Online

Mashable’s post today, “Why Mobile Users Aren’t Checking In [Infographic]“, caused some mixed feelings around the office. Some of us were surprised to find out only 17% of mobile users “check in” to Foursquare and Facebook Places, others weren’t surprised at all. Should libraries implement a mobile technology strategy that appeals to less than 83% of patrons? It’s not really for me to say, but this report and infographic on the “reality behind the hype” is definitely eye opening for any organization deciding what to spend resources on in staying relevant using mobile technologies.

Random Four Square Fact (the real game): This year on February 25 and 26, 15 students from Manchester College broke a world record by playing Four Square for 30 hours. (via: Wikipedia)

A colleague sent me a stack overflow thread today entitled “How much does it cost to develop iPhone applications?” It’s worth taking a look at, most interesting is an answer suggesting around $10,000 ($50/hr for a Developer and $50/hr for a Graphic Designer x 200 total hours), which the stack overflow community quickly jumped on, providing insight and information to back up a more realistic $50k-100k (and some say $200k) price tag.

At Mosio, naturally we get asked about mobile applications from clients all the time. I love my MacBook Pro, iPhone and iPad, but Apple has spent plenty of money in advertising to convince us all that “There’s an App for That.” They even spent money trademarking the phrase and that’s fine, they benefit by doing so. The craziest thing about the mobile apps hype is that it caters to less than 1/3 of the mobile subscriber market. Consider recent research about Mobile Content Usage for the month of July 2010 in the image above from Wireless Week:

Among all U.S. mobile subscribers ages 13+:
31.4% Used a Downloaded App
33.6% Used a [Mobile] Browser
66% Sent a text message to another phone

Why, then, do people think it’s so inexpensive to develop iPhone apps?
I’m not exactly sure, but my guess is that it’s a combination of people wanting to believe it costs less combined with the misinformation from people selling shoddy development services or app workarounds trying to capitalize on the hype. And before those of you developing “affordable” iPhone applications start flaming me in the comments, consider the fact that by saying it’s inexpensive and cheap, you’re essentially selling yourselves short, commoditizing your expertise. The misinformation hurts your skills and service.

The world is mobile and we want to provide a mobile experience beyond text messaging. What should we do?

If you are a library and looking for a great way to mobilize your website or catalog, we recommend you visit our friends at Boopsie. They have a great team and wonderful experience in helping libraries on an existing platform that makes the process simple.

Thanks Rob for the great interview!

Video embedded below:

We absolutely love when clients are happy with our service. It might sound a bit cliche, but it’s true. We love happy clients because they make our job so much easier. With a few of us as parents or parents-to-be, we’re proud to have the PTA as a client.

Taken from an article entitled PTA: The Power of Parents: “Educators, administrators, academics, parents-even the mass media-all have been awakened to the overwhelming positive effect parent involvement can have on students’ academic performance.”

The PTA is one of the most powerful associations in education and we were honored to be chosen to power the mobile technology portion of their recent national conference.

Below is a testimonial from the client who has since acted as an amazing reference for us as well. Thanks Rebecca!

Just wanted to drop you a quick note of thanks and gratitude for engaging our attendees in a new way through Mosio! The alerts, info center texting and polling during our general sessions were a huge hit and we are hoping to continue all three with even greater usage amongst our attendees next year. Thank you for your patience and ongoing support throughout the set-up process. We look forward to the possibility of working with both of you again in the near future.

— Rebecca Burns, Director, Meetings & Conventions, National PTA

For information on how we can help engage your attendees through our text messaging solutions for conferences, events, meetings and trade shows, visit us at www.mosio.com.

This post is from an entry I did a few months back for Attack!, a guerrilla and event marketing services agency I co-founded and where I served as President before co-founding Mosio, but the fundamental ideas are the same: new technologies and gadgets are great for those of us who love the newest shiny things to come out, but implementation and adoption at your organization is tricky at the bleeding edge. At Mosio / Text a Librarian, we see a full spectrum of technology interest/knowledge/experience in libraries, including a lot of librarians who are truly at the bleeding edge of new technologies and social media. I remain on the fence about QR Codes, but I certainly appreciate the enthusiasm. Rather than “Ctrl+F and Replace “Business” with “Library”, the original post is below, unchanged.

Being a marketing and technology fan, I was excited to read Ad Age’s Insights White Paper, Shiny New Things (pdf). Attack! has always been a very technology-friendly company. The mantra for our success is “People, Process and Technology” so I read the white paper on my flight to our LA office, excited to present some ideas I had brewing in my head along with any new nuggets of wisdom I found. In reading about the behavior and general importance of early adopters to brands and marketers, I couldn’t help but think how early adoption, while a passion (and sometimes expensive hobby) for many consumers, is dangerous for businesses. And as David Berkowitz points out, “many agencies will include it [the iPad] in their pitches and plans without thinking whether it’s the best platform for meeting their clients’ objectives.” It’s apparent that the danger of early adoption, for iPads or other shiny objects, can be easily overlooked in the search for innovation. Here’s why:

Shiny new things (SNTs) require employee training.
Regardless of how simple a Shiny New Thing (SNT) is to use, implementing it into your business requires implementation and training with some employees needing morHe than others. Implementing anything new into your business process needs careful thought so the learning curve and mistakes are minimized. Throwing SNTs into the mix increases your chances of confusing and/or frustrating your staff.

The first version is never the best, don’t bet the farm on Beta.
Every early adopter knows that the first version of a new technology is never the best. This means your business is subject to all of the glitches and bugs of the brand new product. It definitely pays to wait it out for the next version if you determine it is something that could prove beneficial to your employees or clients.

Shiny new things can make you lose focus.
I want an iPad. I want one badly. I think they’re a game changer for many industries and as I anticipated their arrival, I started brainstorming all of the possible ways Attack! could use them for our client projects. I’ll admit, I also tried to brainstorm how I could use one at work, ready to enlighten my partners on a revelation in Non Traditional Marketing Agency Management. My “Reasons Partners Should Get iPads” brainstorm notes are below:

There’s nothing wrong with getting an iPad because you want one and we’re headed to the Apple store at lunch to get them, but the mistake in the above thinking that it was rooted in “a solution looking for a problem”: I tried to think of reasons an iPad could be useful rather than thinking of all of the inefficiencies and challenges needing solutions and concluding that the iPad was the perfect tool to solve them. There is great wisdom in knowing the difference.

If you absolutely can’t resist…
There’s nothing wrong with being an early adopter. It’s great (and fun) to be in search of the New New Thing, of new ways of being innovative at your company. Some of the best ideas come out of being open to new technologies and products that can help your business grow. If you can’t resist the temptation to look for new technologies to implement, here are a few things to consider:

Make a list of your challenges and areas of improvement needed at your company.
By defining what it is that you need to improve on, ways your employees can improve process and efficiencies, when SNTs show up, you’ll know instantly where there is a fit. You’ll have a problem looking for a solution. We’ve recently defined several areas in our business where text messaging can improve efficiencies in our Account Management teams and can be sold as add-on services by our Account Executives. The end result will be time saved, archived data in contractor communications and additional revenues to our programs by giving events and street campaigns a longer tail.

Create a new technologies decision phase.
It’s pointless to tell early adopters to wait. Early adopters wait long enough hearing rumors, seeing leaked photos, specs and standing in lines to get their beloved new technologies. Instead, implement an internal timeline and process where you will explore if and how a SNT can help your company. Start with 60 days. Use the time to attend demos, identify pros and cons and ultimately make an informed decision on how you will implement the SNT into your business. You might need more than 60 days, but after the launch of a product, that should be long enough to help you determine if it will be good for business and also to hear about when the next version is coming out. See if you can wait for version 2.0.

Know which employees are technology-friendly and who aren’t.
This will be helpful in the implementation and training phase. Employees who are excited about new technologies can be the ones who help you test them out before you decide they should be implemented and they can help you educate the others who are less comfortable. If over 50% of your employees are not technology-friendly, every new SNT you add will be a struggle, so it’s best to pick your battles. If you have an employee or two helping you test things out in the new technologies decision phase, make sure they understand that you ARE testing out the technology against your needs, not trying to find a place for it to work.

Know when to cut bait.
You should default to “we don’t need this” then see if the solution it creates beats the need to let it go. But, as soon as it becomes apparent (hopefully sooner than later), stop testing the technology and let it go. Your time is valuable, your employees time is valuable, so there’s no point in hanging on to wait and see if something magical will happen.

I’m off to buy my iPad…because they’re awesome and I want one.

As we gear up for another ALA Annual the company has had some interesting discussions on new announcements and our directions in the world of library software.

A couple of weeks ago I had a great meeting/conversation with one of our partners and the discussion of library customer service came up. At the end of our partner meeting, someone said “we can give patrons access to all of the data in the world, but if we aren’t there for them from a customer service standpoint, it won’t matter.” Very true. Andy Woodworth’s blog post “Why Closing More Public Libraries Might Be the Best Thing (…Right Now)” [link below] came up in an internal company meeting, specifically his two points about customer service and advocacy (from the comments it seems the post got a lot of people talking).

The idea of improved customer service, whether at libraries or businesses in general, will continue to be a significant function of an organization’s success in the information age. Aaron Tay’s recent blog post about regularly scanning Twitter and the web for feedback is great (he gives some tips on how to do so) [link below], obviously taking a page from what many companies are doing as part of their customer service: listening to social media mentions for good and bad comments. Neither are the first to talk about the ongoing need for pro-active/reactive customer service in libraries, but both are current and relevant.

So what does this mean for Mosio and Text a Librarian?

We’re still very new to libraries and we LOVE working with them. Frankly, we’re just getting started. While we have friends who are librarians and have a handful of amazing people advising us, we’re not librarians ourselves, nor have we ever pretended to be. In many ways we see this as a distinct advantage to building our product: we cast aside any preconceived ideas of how things should be done and focus instead on simplicity, usability and feedback from our customers. We also know the inner workings of mobile technologies, enabling us to offer reliable (and certified) mobile services to libraries. We recently made an announcement that Mosio’s Text a Librarian is being used by over 500 academic and public libraries. It’s something we’re very proud to have accomplished in such a short amount of time, but we could not have done it without listening to the people who matter most to our success, the librarians who use our software with the benefit of communicating with more patrons on-the-go. The combination of our expertise and passion about creating an amazing library service will continue to be the keys to our ongoing success.

Text Messaging: It’s Not Just for Reference Anymore

In the same announcement we also mentioned that Mosio is now offering our full list of mobile services to libraries. Text messaging can be used for so many things beyond virtual reference and we’re set up to offer additional services to the benefit of our customers. We’re thrilled to be able to continue working with new and existing customers in offering technology solutions that will help us fulfill our vision for our library software: Patron Relationship Management.

Patron Relationship Management

We truly believe this is going to be one of the key tools libraries will need in the future to maintain great patron relationships and relevance in the community. Two comments we hear often are “I wish we could answer all patron questions this way” and “I wish everything could be in one place.” One of those comments we take as a compliment, the other we are taking seriously as a wish list item. Our goal for Text a Librarian was always to start simply, create web-based software that’s easy to use, reliable and certified by the mobile carriers, then grow additional features, elements and uses to continue giving more patrons access to libraries on their mobile phones. You can expect to see more from us in the mobile technology space, but every new product or service we add will have patron communications and relationship management in mind.

Links

Andy Woodworth: Why Closing More Public Libraries Might Be the Best Thing (…Right Now)
Aaron Tay: Why libraries should proactively scan Twitter & the web for feedback – some examples
LISWire: Mosio’s Text a Librarian in Over 500 Libraries, Announces Add-On Mobile Services

What really grabbed my attention was the mention that both Obama and Medvedev would rather communicate with each other directly than involve their staff members having to print out messages and deliver them by hand.  (Somewhere out there a White House staffer is looking for a new internship.)  Truly the speed at which you get information is important and sometimes saving a few extra minutes makes all the difference.

The notion that the world’s leaders can all text and email each other from their mobile devices adds quite a wrinkle to the term International Diplomacy.  International agreements, arguments and accords can now develop and take place via the clicking sound of QWERTY keypads.  I’d like to point out that Medvedev uses a decidedly less compact mobile device.

How this affects and changes a process that used to be carefully prepared and reviewed may be too hard to tell but the truth is that people will always want to find ways to make communication easier, more effective and more accessible.

This got me thinking.  If I was Obama would I want to be able to reach Medvedev via SMS?  Of course!

Obama: “OMG thanks for your help at the nuclear security summit.  I told you that DC in the spring is nice.”

Medvedev: “No worries.  Hey, while I’m in town can you get me tickets to the Hockey Playoffs?  Ovechkin FTW!”

Obama: “Settle down!  It’s the Blackhawks time!  Let me see what I can do, brb.”

In February we launched a “Post to Twitter” function within the Mosio mobile messaging platform and Mosio’s Text a Librarian. We wrote a blog post about why this was good for libraries: user generated marketing.

I’ve pasted the original blog post about why it was good for libraries below. It’s great for every business and now the post to Facebook function gives organizations the ability to post questions and answers to the world’s largest and most powerful social network. If you’re a librarian you can read the information below as is, but if you’re a marketing or customer service manager at a company, simply replace the word “patron” with “customer” and “library” with “company” and you’ll see that the feature holds the same great function for either.

Enjoy!

Original Post