Here is some bullshit I heard recently that made me laugh out loud and I thought I’d deliver a little dose of reality when it comes to clueless people selling to uninformed masses. For example:
Over 100% of your clients have a mobile phone.
When polled, over 200% of them said they prefer to communicate over it. That’s 80% more than email, 126% more than postal mail and staggering 600% more than those who prefer to receive messages using smoke signals and sky writing.
It follows that you should dedicate 100% of your time, sales and marketing effort after the mobile user.
Holy shit. I almost dropped my Blackberry onto my Windows Phone when I heard those numbers! Of course, the numbers are about as real as my Blackberry and my Windows Phone but let’s agree not to let math interfere with some good bullshit.
No thing is unpossible for someone that failed stats
Yes, there are lots of mobile phones out there.
Yes, there will be more.
Yes, it’s an exciting platform and few people have figured out how to profit from it so naturally it is ripe for unproven exploitation. Granted, hat tip for the effort.
But any sensible, reasonable and honest smart phone owner will tell you that they only prefer to get mobile information on their smartphone that they want when they are looking for it. Everything else for any other purpose at any other time is a cyber version of a Jehovas witness or an inbound call without a caller ID.
Try to trespass my device with stuff I don’t care about and your “app” is gone.
Reality is that the phone is by behavior a consumer device not business device
This nonsense of you must start your development on the phone first is very popular among the stock analysts and unemployed industry experts… the notion that one day the computer as we know it will disappear and that the mobile device will be the de facto communicator of all commercial communication.
OK. Maybe.
In the meantime, using my device as a billboard will only get you shitlisted and your stuff removed. It’s even more effortless of a task than trying to unsubscribe from newsletters – newsletters get filtered and ignored – apps (that are chewing up the bandwidth or throwing up announcements) are gone.
The successful apps on the smartphone are simply extensions of great services online. With the exceptions of games and entertainment, mobile is just another display factor for what you use online. If you don’t love something online you’re definitely not about to start loving it on your tablet or an even smaller form factor device. It condenses the suckiness. It doesn’t open another channel, it just contributes to the annoyance factor.
Currently Google, Yahoo and Facebook are fighting a huge uphill battle of trying to monetize “the mobile space” and so far only Apple and Google are having significant success on advertising and app store transactions. Beyond that, phone is something that spends far too much time next to my privates to be considered anything other than private.
If I’m ignoring your phone calls, your emails, your web site, your portal, your newsletter, your twitter, your Facebook, your instagram.. I think it’s safe to say that it’s not the matter of you not having the right medium to reach me, it’s more that I just don’t really care about what you have to say/sell. But since I’m a nice guy I will lie to the survey and say “Sure, I’d love you to annoy me in yet another way”
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