I got the ten-minute version of his work. For your convenience, here’s a two minute version, covering some of the figures that might be surprising or interesting to readers of this blog.

Q: How big is mobile?

A: Very big.

The population of the world is 6.8bn. There are 4.6bn mobile phone subscriptions. That’s 700,000 more than there are FM radios; three times as many as there are TV sets; four times as many as there are land line phones or PCs; five times the number of cars in the world.

In the Industrialised World, the penetration rate is 133%. In other words, a third of us have two mobile subscriptions.

In the Emerging World, representing 4/5 of the world’s population, the penetration rate is 56%. Not so high, but mobiles nonetheless account for more than double the number of radios; five times the number of televisions; six times the number of PCs. Ahonen states that mobile is the first media in the emerging world; it’s the “only medium able to reach half of the population”.

Q: What makes the most money?

A: Contracts and access, of course, and then voice calls.

Voice revenues – worth $615bn in 2009 and growing.

Messaging (SMS & MMS) is worth $153bn, and also growing. MMS – which I still consider quite niche and unused – was worth $29bn in 2009.

Q: And the mobile internet?

A: It’s growing fast, but even the largest parts of this area don’t do half of the business that ‘lowly’ MMS does.

Mobile data services are worth $98bn in total. The largest segments of this are video ($14bn), music and ringtones ($13.9bn) and video games ($11.6bn). These revenues are growing at 15-25% year-on-year.

The fastest-growing segments of the data market are mobile learning and search, each of which has grown over 200% in the last year. Mobile advertising and marketing is finally starting to happen, too, grossing $5.9bn last year, up 85% on 2008.

Mobile social networking is the fourth biggest earner overall in data, worth $10.3bn in 2009.

Q: Should I make an iPhone app for my publication/brand?

A: If you are looking for reach, no: you should make a Nokia app. Even better, Java or (best) an SMS or WAP-based service.

Overall, Nokia has 38% of mobile device market share. Samsung has 20% and LG 10%. The fourth and fifth place are taken by SonyEricsson and Motorola.

If you restrict the sample to smartphones, Nokia is again way out front with 39% market share. Then it’s RIM (Blackberry) with 21%. Apple has 15% and HTC (Android) just 5%.

Smartphones represent only 13% of the mobile device market. On the other hand, 95% of phones can do WAP and every phone can now do SMS. Over 90% of phones are capable of 2.5G or faster transmission speeds now, so this isn’t the WAP you remember from the nineties. 53% of the phones in use world-wide can do Java apps.

Picture credit: RoamMobility

PS: Tomi has given me permission to pass on the full data he sent me via email, so leave a comment if you’d like this.

Note that this isn’t the same as digital maoism. Reznor and the rest are still focused on making music and being rock stars, not selling T-shirts and so forth. Masnick also makes the point that getting all the extra “business” stuff done is a useful job for an agent or even a label, and might help justify their existence.

Like other media owners, computer games publishers have a hard time with piracy and other unauthorised distribution. You know this is true because you were a teenager once yourself and you copied disks and downloaded cracks. In my case, it was copying cassette tapes of Spectrum games. It’s really quite a big problem: 2DBoy, the publishers of indie puzzle game World of Goo, had a built-in mechanism for tracking every copy of the game in circulation. They discovered that 90% of those copies were unauthorised, and that’s discounting any versions whose distributors had found a way to circumvent the tracking. While that doesn’t mean that game publishers only get 10% of the revenue they would in a world without piracy, I think we’re likely to agree that it’s probably a fair chunk.

Distribution

When Dragon Age came out, I had several options for getting hold of it.

I could go to a shop

• advantages: I get a box, a disc and a printed manual.
• disadvantages: I have to go to the shop. I might scratch or lose the disks. I have to put the disk in the machine to play. Costs £40.

Or I could buy it through a digital distribution service like Steam (it’s like iTunes for games, basically).

• advantages: I get it right now; Steam looks after the installation and any patches; can’t lose or scratch the disk.
• disadvantage: need to be connected to the Net to play; no printed manual; costs £40.

Or I could download an illegal, cracked copy through PirateBay or similar.

• advantages: I get it right now. No need to jump through copy protection hoops. Costs nothing.
• disadvantages: err… might get caught.

So, the method that earns EA no money is, in many respects, the most convenient. They should probably try to dissuade me from doing that somehow. Here’s what they’ve done and what they might have done.

Digital-Rights Management

Games publishers have traditionally responded to the threat of unauthorised copying by introducing more and more sophisticated forms of copy protection and DRM. You have to have the DVD in your drive to start the game. The game requires you to enter a unique serial number. It might check this number against an internal algorithm. More recently, it’s likely to check the number against a database on the publisher’s server – a key that’s used more than a few times will be blacklisted. It might check that key every time you play. Dragon Age employs all these methods. But it doesn’t really work very well as a means of protection.

First, it’s a pain in the neck for legitimate customers. Why should I have to go hunting through my discs every time I want to play the game? What’s with this trillion-character serial number? Hang on, my Internet connection is a bit flakey – what do you mean I can’t play? These methods aren’t just inconvenient; they are also disrespectful. They treat paying customers like potential criminals.

Second, the pirates appear to be really rather good at thwarting copy protection. Cracks to make a game playable without any of the above are easily obtained. So it turns out that the only people who are inconvenienced are genuine customers. Nice work!

Score: 1/5

Enrich the Genuine Copies

In recent years, the idea of giving ‘extras’ to paying customers has gone by the board somewhat. I recall buying games in the nineties that came with 2-3 different manuals, a map of the in-game world, a poster, occasionally novelties like a metal figurine or a sound track disk. Nowadays, games come in DVD-style boxes and so the possibilities for novelties are rather limited.

Nonetheless, EA have actually done quite well with Dragon Age on this score. Rather than physical extras, they come in a virtual form. My box came with a coupon with two extra serial numbers I could enter into the game. These added new content to the game: a couple of extra adventures and unique items and powers to make my character stronger.

I had to register my game with the publisher in order to unlock this content and so there’s no way for pirates to get hold of it. I really like this idea: the illegal copy is impoverished while legitimate buyers are rewarded. And thinking about gamer psychology, I believe it acts as a strong motivation to get the real thing. Those using unauthorised versions will know that their character isn’t as strong and hasn’t got the same resources as those belonging to users who bought it. Gamers hate having a ‘lame’ character.

Unfortunately, Bioware slightly botched the execution. Using the premium content requires the game to check in with the server every time it is run, spoiling the experience for those with a flakey internet connection or wanting to play the game on the move.

On a more positive note, the title is being actively maintained by the developers. Two patches have already been released with a third in the works. Once again, it’s unlikely pirates will be able to use these, again making their copies inferior.

Score: 3/5

Sell a Platform

But EA did more with add-on idea than simply providing bonuses for registered customers. It has built Dragon Age as a platform as well as a game. You can go onto the site and purchase Bioware points to spend on extra chunks of content, such as the Return to Ostagar expansion. Again, you need to be registered to buy and use this content, which once again devalues the pirated releases. Since the game’s launch, there’s only been one piece of additional content to purchase, with a further expansion due in March.

The developers also released a toolset for the game allowing users to create their own tweaks and content for the game that can be distributed and installed in a similar fashion to the official add-ons.

Score 4/5

Build Community

The toolkit is just a small part of the ways that the publishers have attempted to foster a community around the game. Registering the game automatically creates a MySpace-style profile page for every user which automatically records achievements within the game and your character’s progress. You can add comments and screengrabs, and the site comes with the normal tools to twitter/facebook/tell others about what you’ve managed to achieve.

While I think this is useful for games, it’s not especially so in this case. Dragon Age is a resolutely single-player game so there is no particular reason why anyone should be remotely interested in another player’s progress, unlike, say, multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or Eve Online. Oh well – I’ll still give points for good intentions.

Score 2.5/5

Conclusions

A mixed score overall, then, with overly zealous DRM casting a shadow over some more insightful ideas to make piracy a poor option for users. Nonetheless, it appears to have been relatively palatable to users, with over 3.2mn copies shipped by the beginning of February. At £40 a unit, not including any after-sales of extra content, that equals um… squillions in revenue.

The key to good practice here is giving customers more than they expected, rewarding their patronage, hooking them in as they experience the game and up-selling them with extra content to extend the experience. These sorts of ideas might easily be applied to other media forms, such as a music CD or a magazine subscription. If I pay, give me more, exclusive extras that add a lot more value to the legitimate edition than the unauthorised copies. Make it easy for me to use it as a want to. As we all know, the bits and bytes of any digital product can and will be copied by people who are determined to do so. However, if you make those ones and zeroes just a fraction of the whole product experience, then there is still a business in making media.

This is a slim volume – 162 pages which includes a lot of pictures, in the form of greyscale screengrabs. It currently costs just £7.99 on Amazon UK, though it’s £15.99 if you buy it in a shop. The book is aimed at both senior executives thinking about what a company’s strategy ought to be for a blog and those tasked with managing the execution. It would also be useful for sole-owners and small businesses looking to expand their online offering, though the text assumes that you’re part of a larger organisation.

It’s well-written and contains lots of examples. Unusually for a book about the Internet, it’s also pretty-much up-to-date, appearing to have been finished late last Autumn. The case-studies, while uniformly North American, are mainly fresh and the authors aren’t afraid of criticising companies and organisations whose blogging strategies seem to have gone awry. The information and advice it gives is sound and practical and is careful to remain focused on meeting business objectives like more sales, better customer relations and reduced support costs.

So an overall recommendation from me, if you are interested in the idea of having a blog for your business but are not entirely sure why or how to start. But I do have a caveat…

The book is trying to do two things at once: provide a strategic direction and management information for corporate blogging and give a practical guide to choosing platforms, deciding policies and creating content. It’s already really thin, so this means that it doesn’t provide much detail on any particular aspect. For example, it talks about some of the pros and cons between different platforms such as Moveable Type and Wordpress, and hosted solutions such as Wordpress.com, blogger and typepad. But since it can only spend 50 words on any particular platform, and there’s a redundant half-page picture of each of these, you’re left with ‘there are lots of different platforms, each of which have some advantages’ as the overall message. There’s also some misinformation in this section, such as: “[because it owns the platform] Google place[s] Blogger blogs higher in Google search results.” See, for example, Andy Beard countering this. The sections on business strategy are similarly starved of detail or any theoretical underpinning for some of the assertions made.

In fairness, most business books are a bit like this: thin. They aim to give executives enough information to make some reasonable decisions, but not so much that they get bogged down in the minutiae or put off by the bulk. IMHO, though, readers would have been better served by choosing between two books: one for executives about strategy and one for the person managing the blog.

To give you an overview, this is my two-minute version of the book:

Ch1: blogs are a rising media force and they can bring customers and potential customers to your website. Also good for search.

Ch2: get people to read your blog through integrated marketing, tools like RSS, other social media platforms and by providing useful information and good service.

Ch3: there are lots of different types of blog – so choose one that best serves your business. It might end up being a tumble-log or podcast, for example.

Ch4: be useful to your readers and responsive to comments. Take comments on board and deal with criticism fairly and calmly.

Ch5: use your business’ expertise to find topics to write about. And why you might want an internal blog for staff as well.

Ch6: get people who are enthusiastic about the subject matter to do the content. This will probably involve the Marketing department, but also others like R&D and freelancers. Make it sound authentic.

Ch7: get eyeballs [sic] for your blog with good writing and content, a readable design, SEO and conventional marketing techniques.

Ch8: getting multimedia content onto your blog isn’t that hard. You can use other people’s – if you get permission or it’s CC licensed – or you can create your own. [This chapter is one that particularly suffers from the word limits: making a podcast – get audacity – open source music here – put it up on iTunes.]

Ch9: get ready for the future by using semantic features and maybe mash-ups. Oh, and mobile. Oops – we’ve run out of words.

The second book is Tris Hussey’s Create Your Own Blog. It’s a bit thicker, so expect that review in a week or so.

Via Stuart Bruce, I found this funny clip in which social media marketing guru David Meerman Scott lambasts client-side marketing managers for continually asking about the ROI of social media projects.

His point is that marketers don’t know the ROI of traditional forms of advertising like billboards and 30-second TV slots, so why is it such a stumbling block when it comes to social? It’s nonsense, he says. Often, the objection is really that people don’t like doing new things.

Bruce rightly points out that social media people have been guilty of muddying the waters by equating ROI with an increase in page views, twitter followers and whatnot. While those things might be the objectives of a particular campaign, they’re not the same as return on investment. ROI is just about money:

In finance, rate of return (ROR), also known as return on investment (ROI), rate of profit or sometimes just return, is the ratio of money gained or lost (whether realized or unrealized) on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. The amount of money gained or lost may be referred to as interest, profit/loss, gain/loss, or net income/loss. The money invested may be referred to as the asset, capital, principal, or the cost basis of the investment. ROI is usually expressed as a percentage rather than a fraction. (wikipedia)

I’m sympathetic to these arguments. The objectives of social media campaigns can be as broad as increased awareness, employee retention, customer satisfaction and R&D. They are rarely just about flogging more stuff. It’s not like some coupon campaign where you can add up the number of coupons redeemed to see how much it was worth.

But there’s a problem. And that problem’s name is The Grumpy FD. Because he turns round and says:

Hang on, sunbeam. If you can’t calculate a monetary value for all these social shenanigans, then why am I going to sign-off your invoices? Furthermore, I note that you’re charging me £150 an hour. So you have already put a value on these activities, not to mention all the other costs you’re incurring in terms of my staff’s time. Where is my £300 an hour that I should get from employing you?

If you stick to your guns and insist that ‘it’s all about the love, man’, then the conversation could end quite briskly.

I’m not terribly experienced in these things, but there are certainly better solutions.

I think you need to unpick what you’re doing a little more carefully. Everything you’re doing has to result in increased profitability, otherwise the Grumpy FD isn’t going to pay your invoices. The difficulty is in obtaining the proof and putting a precise value on it.

Ultimately, a lot of the time, the information that you’d need to calculate the Rate of Return is too difficult to obtain – or won’t be available within a sensible time period. I think the main thing to do is to get the GFD to agree to some conservative estimates.

Let’s say you agree with a client to look into a new project. You’re planning to set up an online, but private, staff ideas forum, with the aims of improving the firm’s service offering. Something like Dell Ideastorm but internal (you can buy solutions off the shelf for this).

To work out how much that’s worth, you’re going to need to guesstimate some things:

• How much time people will spend on the forum and the value of that time.
• Likelihood of anyone having a good idea over an agreed period of time.
• Likelihood of that idea being workable.
• Value of that improvement to your service.
• How much you’re going to charge for implementation and training.
• Potential reduced R&D costs.

The added benefit of improved staff morale, recruitment and retention probably exists and has value, but I think it should be left out of your sums. It’s a gift, rather than the objective the GFD is paying for. Also, although the product ought to have lasting value, stick to an agreed time frame for measurement. A set period is part of the definition of what constitutes a project. If things get sticky, you might remind the GFD, however, that his ROI is going to recur long after you’ve disappeared on your micro-scooter.

My point is that every investment in anything is an educated guess. You don’t know whether the price of gold will boom or bust, but before you invest, you’re going to do some research and some sums and arrive at a probability of each of those two outcomes. If your chances look good, then, depending on your level of risk aversion, you’ll take a punt.

What people won’t do – least of all the GFD – is invest in ‘this thing’ you’ve just found on the Internet that may or may not be successful and you haven’t got any more information to inform a decision.

photo credit: Iscan

AdWeek covers a story that most people working in the digital sector will already have had some intuition of:

Forrester Research conducted a “state of interactive agencies” survey of about 100 global interactive marketers. It found just 23 percent believed their “traditional brand agency” is capable of planning and managing interactive marketing activities. About 46 percent did not believe them capable, with the rest neutral on the question.

While that held good news for digital agencies, particularly as digital becomes a much larger part of marketing, Forrester found few clients are willing to give them responsibility for the brand’s direction. Just 22 percent agreed that their interactive agency is “ready to lead my brand.” Another 33 percent said their digital shops aren’t ready, with the rest neutral.

via ‘Great Race’ Between Traditional, Digital Shops.

In brief: clients think traditional agencies can’t be trusted to do online; digital agencies can’t be trusted to lead.

The article postulates a ‘Great Race‘ as traditional agencies struggle to acquire digital skills and people, while digital shops expand their offerings to include more mainstream marketing activities to prove their wider competence.

The trouble here is that it slows down and distracts both sides.

Initially, at least, they are likely to do a poor job of imitating their competitors on the other side, despite sinking what probably seems like an inordinate amount of resource into them. The two sides come with very different mind-sets in the majority of cases, and adjusting to the world of mainstream brand marketing or interactive media will be a painful and slow process that will inevitably involve several failures.

I am sure that there are some marvellous full-service agencies, but when I look at the ones I come across, it emerges that they’re actually formed of five or six different business centres created through acquisitions and spin-offs.

While they’re busy getting nowhere fast, new disciplines like interactive signage or phone apps appear, and specialised agencies pop up to fill the gap. Neither the digital nor traditional agencies have a handle on these disciplines because they have been spending all their time watching their competitors.

So now there are three, four, five and more agencies looking for a slice.

I’m not convinced that getting involved in the Great Race is likely to lead to a winning position. Better surely, to display leadership, integrity and genius in the bit that you’re actually good at?

Life just got better. At the end of last week, Google announced that its personalised search had now become available to ‘signed-out’ users.

What does that mean?

Well, personalised search means that Google uses its history of what you have searched for before to provide more relevant results for subsequent search queries. It records everything you’ve searched for and every result you’ve clicked. This allows it to profile you and produce results that are more likely to be about what you’re interested in. If you live in Birmingham, UK, for example, and often click on results for places in that city, then you’ll be less likely to get results relating to Birmingham, Alabama.

Signed-out users are people who don’t log into a Google account prior to conducting a search. That would include people who haven’t opted in to have their search results saved. This is done through a cookie file saved on your computer. Unless your Internet privacy settings are set very high, this will happen without you noticing.

So, whoever you are, your search history is saved and analysed. Without your permission.

In a similar vein, the rollout of real-time search means that Twitter comments are instantly catalogued. And don’t worry – you don’t need to change any account settings or opt-in to anything. They’re doing it anyway. There really is no ‘undo’ button on the web.

Any lily-livered liberals clinging to outmoded ideas like a right to privacy need to move on. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt told CNBC last week:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

Well, maybe I shouldn’t. Or maybe I just don’t think it’s any of your business. Or that you should ask me first.

Oh wait – you are allowed to delete your history and opt out. But you’ll need to explicitly opt-out of survei personalisation on every computer you use.

I really wish Bing produced better results.

Postscript: I notice Alan beat me to the punch on this and is typically incisive.

I was in Venice last week. I’m afraid to say that it looks a bit different.

In the middle of the picture above you can just make out the Bridge of Sighs – it’s the thing in the middle that isn’t an advert for a bank.

Below is the Museo Correr end of St Mark’s Square.

After picking myself up, I went to the Migropolis exhibition which made me think a little differently about these apparent acts of cultural vandalism.

One of the themes of the exhibition was Venice’s identity as a truly global city and marketplace. For 1000 years it has been a trade centre and the meeting place between East and West. While in medieval times, this might have meant Arab merchants with galleys full of spices, today it is about glassware and masks made in China, Somalians with fake Gucci bags and – yes – real Gucci bags. Venice has always been a shop front, a meeting place between rich western customers and eastern traders. There’s something strangely apt about the advertising hoardings on the sides of the city’s famous landmarks.

Looked at from a slightly different perspective, it’s potentially the city’s quintessential expression.

I also learned about this:

It’s the Venetian: a resort hotel in Macau, filled with facsimiles of the original’s famous landmarks and canals – it’s apparently the largest building in Asia. I don’t know if you can see it from space, but wouldn’t be surprised. The Migropolis exhibition noted that the original city risks being replaced by this and the Las Vegas version – they get the shopping done more conveniently and efficiently for all parties.

PS. If you’re interested, I’d recommend a dip into Against Venice, a splendid rant against the city as a kind of Euro-Disney for snobs. I love Venice, personally, but it never harms to read a different perspective.

The survey is here.

Thank you very much indeed.

[Don't worry about this any more the survey has closed and the powers-that-be are considering their response.]

I’ve been writing recently about living in a post-digital world. Not that computers have gone away in any sense, but rather that the digital world now penetrates ‘normal life’ to such an extent that to make a distinction between digital and other media seems archaic. Anyway, cleverer people than me have been having similar thoughts.