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Posts Tagged ‘Mobile in Analytics/Marketing/Development’

That Ever-Evasive Calculation of Mobile ROI

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

Mobile ROI

Caught this on the 271st Carnival of the Mobilists (hosted by MobiThinking) and thought it just great to put into the stream of posts given the direction the past two have taken:

Many execs put items on their roadmap that their gut tells them are important, but it’s difficult to calculate the ROI.

While I agree that it’s impossible to calculate the exact ROI of soft ROI initiatives, I think you can calculate the ROI enough to objectively assess your priorities.

In fact, I think it’s critical that you do so. The mobile landscape is littered with too much wasted money because of executive gut decisions that didn’t end up the way they expected.

So, let’s walk through an example…

Read the rest of Mobile Roadmap: Calculating Hard ROI on Soft ROI Initiatives at Mobile Manifesto

In other words, it can be hard as counting black beans in the dark but its not impossible. A lot of how you determine that ROI starts from what you know and don’t know. Perhaps in light of the piece at Mobile Manifesto, these posts will help make your ROI calculation, and project viability measures, a bit easier to understand and work through:

Tags: Carnival of the Mobilists, cost analysis, cost-effectiveness, methodology, mobile in analytics, Mobile in Analytics/Marketing/Development, mobile in development, Mobile Manifesto, MobiThinking, ROI, statistics
Posted in Devices and Software | No Comments »

2012 Mobile Global Market Update from Chetan Sharma Consulting

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

Chetan Sharma, a long-time and well respected voice in mobile, has recently published a report which paints a global picture of what’s happening in mobile not just in relation to itself, but also in relation to other large-scale trends and appliances which seem normal to many of us. The big picture summary of this report paints an interesting picture not just for mobile and connected spaces, but how economic factors will play a part in mobile as an avenue for ministry:

The global mobile industry is the most vibrant and fastest growing industry. We expect the total revenue in the industry to touch approximately $1.5 Trillion in 2012 with mobile data representing 28% of the mix. Mobile data services revenue stood at 33%. Global Mobile Data revenues eclipsed $300 Billion for the first time in 2011. It is also the first year in which non-messaging data revenues will make up the majority of the overall global data revenues at 53%.

By the end of 2011, the global subscriptions exceeded 6 Billion. The first 1 billion took over 20 years and this last one took only 15 months. The primary growth drivers are India and China which are cumulatively adding 75M new subs every quarter. China became the first country to eclipse the 1 billion mark in March 2012. India is likely to arrive at the milestone by early 2013.

Smartphones are driving tremendous growth around the globe. Amongst the major markets, US leads with 69% sales. The global figure stands at approximately 32%. Some operators expect 90-95% of their device sales to be smartphones in 2012. In terms of the actual smartphone penetration, we expect the US market to eclipse the 50% mark in 2012.

China leads in the number of subs but US dominates in both total and data revenue. A number of emerging nations are now in top 10 – Brazil, India, Russia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Mexico while once dominant – Korea, UK, Italy, Germany have dropped off or slipped in rankings.

A few of the facts highlighted in this report include

Total Global Subscriptions to exceed 7 Billion in early 2013
– China exceeds 1 Billion, India 950 Million. Subscriber growth is in Asia, Revenue growth is in Asia+North America
China and India represent 27% of subscriptions but only 12% of the global service revenues
– US represents only 6% of the subscriptions but 21% of the global service revenues, 26% of the data revenues, and 27% of the global CAPEX
Mobile Devices are now exceeding traditional computers in unit sales + revenue
– 70% of the device sales in the US are now smartphones. Device Replacement cycle is shrinking
Samsung and Apple now account for 50% of the smartphone unit share and 90% of the profit share
– Difficult environment for other OEMs esp. when ZTE and Huawei are coming strong from the bottom. It will be difficult for pure play device OEMs to survive long-term
Tablets (iPads) has created a new computing paradigm that is having a significant impact on commerce, content consumption, and developer investments
– Apple will continue to dominate the segment and iOS will be the leading OS for the segment. Amazon, ZTE, Huawei, to chip away at the sub-$200 tier.

To read this report in detail, visit Chetan Sharma Consulting’s website, where there is a PDF downloadable version of this report complete with graphics and other source data useful for analyzing this data.

Once you have gone through it, does anything stick out for you? Does any of the data presented alter your plans or current activities in mobile?

View our complete listing of Resources and Statistics

Tags: Chetan Sharma, global trends, metrics, mobile in analytics, Mobile in Analytics/Marketing/Development, smartphones, statistics, subscriptions, tablets
Posted in Devices and Software, Future Trends | No Comments »

You can Log Off But Not Opt Out

Monday, May 21st, 2012

A few weeks ago I came across this article, Social Media: You Can Log Off But You Can’t Opt Out, which has put forth some interesting viewpoints, and to a large degree puts the right perspective on social media tech and the constraints they impose socially. Here’s a snippet:

…So technology is political in the sense that it is a site of struggle (perhaps, one could say, communication technologies are “places where revolutionaries go“) but it is not political in the naive sense that it determines the outcomes of social action (i.e., there are no Facebook or Twitter revolutions). Most relevant for the present conversation is this concept of non-optionality—that we can neither opt-in or opt-out of the socio-technical system. We are all touched by the emergence of new technology, even those who are most marginalized within the system. Because, at any given historical moment, technology and social organization are always linked, we all inevitably feel the ripple effects when new technologies are introduced. This very point was the premise of the South African slapstick film The Gods Must Be Crazy, where a single Coke bottle tossed from a plane is imagined to upset the entire social order of a remote Bushmen tribe (caveat emptor: racist and inaccurate portrayals abound)…

Read the rest of Social Media: You Can Log Off But You Can’t Opt Out at The Society Pages

So, going back to a question we posed a few times already, if you are gong to tell people to use mobile or social networking (an app, for announcements/broadcasts, etc.), are you going to spend the same energies talking to the, about it’s downsides?

Tags: Communication, Mobile in Analytics/Marketing/Development, mobile in marketing, mobile in media, mobile in psychological, mobile in spiritual, mobile in spiritual/theological/psychological, mobility, social networks, tech, The Society Pages
Posted in Commentary | No Comments »

RESS (Responsive Design w/Server-Side Components), Keeping Context in View

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

In the web design/development community, there’s been a lot of energy, excitement, and critique around responsive design. Responsive design is essentially the pracice of building a website from the perspective that it will be viewed across mobile, tablet, and desktop/laptop screens, with the (usual) approach of targeting the leveraging of CSS’s media queries. There are positives and negatives to this approach, and indeed, its something that can add some considerable time to the building and testing phases of a project. However, the results – having one website that adapts its content display on the basis of what the device, device’s screen/resolution, and browser capabilities – is an attractive proposition to other routes (building/managing multiple websites, dealing with User Agent scripting, etc.) for many.

Going down this route of responsive design, there’s a fork in the trend when discussing responsive design. Specifically, how does a developer manage responsive design when pieces of the the website are driven by scripting and dynamic generation from a server (responsive design leans heavily towards the browser/client making the decisions towards the display). I saw this linked on Twitter last week, and its probably one of the better tutorials on the subject of RESS (Responsive Design w/Server-Side Components). Here’s a snippet:

…With this setup we have two sources of information about the browser. Modernizr is a feature detection framework that makes it easy to detect browser features. It simply runs a test in the browser to get a boolean answer as output: “does X work?” and the answer is mostly “true” or “false”. The beauty of this is that it works on all browsers, also those that are not released yet. But it does not have much granularity, and the capabilities that are available is limited to what is possible to feature test. Examples of features that are possible to test include boxshadow, csstransitions, touch, rgba, geolocations and so on.

Device detection on the other hand, is something different. It all happens on the server and it’s a framework that analyses the HTTP header of the device. It then looks up in a database of known devices and return a set of capabilities for that device. The beauty of this is that it’s a database of information that is collected and maintained by humans and it can hold incredibly detailed information about capabilities that is currently impossible to feature test. Examples include device type (desktop, TV, mobile, tablet), device marketing name, video codec support and so on.

The downside is that User Agent analysis can go wrong some times and many devices tend to have a non unique UA string or to fake the UA string, but using a framework will minimise the rist of false detection. Device detection and feature detection cannot really be set up against each other as they are not two sides of the same coin…

Read (and bookmark) the rest of the RESS Tutorial. Some of the tools, APIs, and templates noted in this tutorial are listed here.

The original article on RESS was penned by LukeW – much of what’s covered in the tutorial leans on what he’s written. There’s also a SlideShare Presentation on the topic worth taking a look at.

Responsive design is something that’s been considered for MMM (given our content focus). As of now, we aren’t leaning towards that direction. There are things we have been learning from responsive design, and especially this tutorial given its server-side focus, that allows us to consider tweaking potential new routes for creating device and context-respecting content.

If you’ve gone the route of starting or implementing a responsive website, what are some of the challenges you’ve run into? Or, if you’ve visited a website that says it has employed responsive web design principles, has the context of how you wanted to use the site been lost or accented in that approach?

Tags: LukeW, Mobile in Analytics/Marketing/Development, mobile in developement, responsive web design, RESS, SlideShare, web deisign, web development
Posted in Devices and Software | No Comments »

Trying Out the biNu Mobile App Developer Platform

Friday, May 11th, 2012

Per our usual activities here, we occasionally check out processes and software which would be relevant to the #mobmin (mobile ministry) world. A question for many groups is the process of making a mobile application, and so we definitely like to take a look at the various application creation platforms that are out there to get an idea of what’s needed in terms of graphical, technological, and marketing knowledge to get things up and running. The latest of these development platforms we are looking at is the biNu platform.

biNu is a software delivery platform. Think, something like an app store – but optimized for feature phones (non-smartphones). When there is an opportunity for an engagement to be accented with a mobile app on a (most likely) Java-based mobile, biNu is positioned through its delivery platform to refactor your RSS feeds or any other custom (mobile-lite) page content into a downloadable application for these mobiles.

We took a look at it from the perspective of a content owner who’s looking to gain a presence on feature phones (its a good idea to read Should Our Church Have an App or Mobile Website prior to this). Therefore, our most important places of entry happen through the biNu Dev portal (still in beta – this comes up again).

Note: the screenshots and activity here were performed on a Windows 7 laptop using the Google Chrome browser. For the benefit of the impression, this is an imposed boundary to using the product.

Step 1: Registering for at the biNU Developer Portal

As with similar services, you have to go through a short process to register for the biNU developer portal (http://developer.binu.com/). After filling out the form, you get a confirmation screen noting that you need to complete a step in your email in order to complete the process. Nice and simple in this respect.

Step 2: Navigating

Once you login, you are presented a straight-forward list of what you’d want to do: List Apps (see all the apps you’ve built), or create a new Basic or regular app. First up on my listing was to do the Basic App (this would most likely be the used option for 1st time users of this service).

Step 3: The Basic App Wizard

Once you get into the Basic App creation wizard, you simply just add the title and description to your app. You do need three graphic files here. Though the sizes were specified, I noticed in the test view that all of them seemed to be resized fine. I’d recommend here not using anything smaller than the recommendation, and you will need to ensure that its a PNG graphic w/o transparency for best effect.

You will also need the URL for the RSS feeds that you would use to populate the app. I took our raw feed, in addition to our Twitter feed and the Twitter feed for the #mobmin hashtag (we’ve done this previously with other apps) and there seemed to be no issue with either of those kinds of sources.

Step 4: Testing/Further Edits

biNu offers a Java-based emulator that gives you an impression of how your content will flow to the smaller screen and different input controls of a feature phone. On the PC that I used, I didn’t update the Java client in order for this to work properly (but you would probably want to do this).

Step 5: Publishing

Once you have created and tested your app in the emulator, next is to publish it. There are two avenues for publishing – the first puts the app on the biNu platform “store” where those who’ve downloaded biNu would be able to search and download it among other similar apps/services. The second avenue is for you to generate the app yourself using biNU, and then use publish that app on your website or wider-serving app stores such as GetJar.

When you choose the option to generate an app, you are taken to a screen that’s similar to the app wizard where you refine the details about your app. What’s most interesting here is that you see the option to generate either a “regular” Java app (ideally, compatible with most Java mobiles) or an Android java app (an apk, compatible with Android devices). Apps can be unsigned or signed using Verisign or Thawte. Again, good options for an app which could be distributed in an open market environment.

Generating the app was the only point in the process where I entered an issue that I had to escalate to biNu directly. As of this writing, this is something being looked at.

Step 6: All Done, Go Build Some More

Once you’ve finished making your app (testing, publishing, and generating Java versions), you are pretty much done. As seen in the publishing step, you’ve been given a URL with which to publicize the app (I’d recommend using a URL shortening service like TinyURL or Bit.ly to make it smaller, more share-friendly, and easier to add to marketing materials). View/Download the 1st MMM biNu app.

Conclusions:

Overall, using the biNu app wizard enabled me to build an app in less than 30min. When I went back through the process to build an app from scratch (see Step 2: Navigating), the process took even less time because the source for the app was an existing mobile website (in this case, our alternate mobile site which is written using HTML5 and jQuery). Given the speed and costs (free) to just get on their platform, this isn’t a bad idea for many sites. I’d like to know how some of the more interactive content offerings would fare here – for example, those doing church online might want this for a presence, but the experience of viewing media on a 2.2in screen that’s not optimized for such “snack time” viewing might be a turn off in some respects. Still, there’s some sense that could be made from doing this and perhaps pointing to your YouTube feed of content.

For more information about biNU, do check out their website. Again, the developer section of the site is in beta right now, so if you enter into any issues with it, do chalk it up to that aspect of things. Still, there aren’t too many mobile services specifically targeting feature phones (more people use these than smartphones by a very wide margin). If your content is ready to go, then biNu should be ready for you.

Tags: biNu, developer issues, developer tools, developers, mobile apps, Mobile in Analytics/Marketing/Development, mobile in development, mobile in media, mobile in missions/evangelism, mobile website, tools
Posted in Devices and Software | No Comments »

Nice Set of Mobile Metrics/Stats from TNS Global, Learn the Present While Crafting the Future

Monday, May 7th, 2012

Woke up this morning to see many in the mobile tech world talking about this set of survey results (metrics and stats) from the folks at TNS Global.

What’s best to note about this data is the size and depth of it. There’s not just the usual “how many people could or do” but there’s some inspection into some of the trends of usage that can lead to some future applications. I like how Tomi Ahonen broke this down across some of the major trends, and where the financial opportunities lie for some of the lesser explored areas of mobile. In the near future, its those spaces in which the best prospects for disruptive growth will happen.

Now, I know that for some, it might be a bit far reaching to go beyond the present mobile/connected tech as a means to move the needle forward, but that’s just what we have to do. As I commented on this piece at Church Relevance, mobile apps isn’t the future for how engagement happens, its the now. What you do in the future is going to be in part determined to how you look at the now.

If you want our opinions towards how you should take data like this from TNS and build towards the future, it would simply look like this:

create the spaces where people want to engage their faith as if they were a craftsman: build the tools, create the sandboxes, and lessen the control grips.

There’s nothing too difficult about that. But, identifying the opportunity is why this data is needed.

Tags: metrics, mobile in analytics, Mobile in Analytics/Marketing/Development, stats, TNS Global Marketing, Tomi Ahonen
Posted in Communication, Future Trends | No Comments »

6 Steps of Mobile Engagement

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

Now that we have a methodology to embark on practice of doing mobile ministry, how about we take it a bit further with thinking about how a person engages your mobile product and their basic behaviors in that engagement process. You can think of this along the ‘Experience’ focus we talked about when we described layers or focuses of mobile ministry.

Here are the steps of mobile engagement:

Interest
Access
Redress
Reset
Enable
Archive

Interest
First, the mobile product has to engage the user’s sense of interest. Interest invokes curiosity to investigate the experience further. If it doesn’t seem interesting (active interest from it being discovered by the consumer or passive from it being described/marketed from a 2nd or 3rd party perspective), then it will not be engaged. Its not just the content therefore that makes a play here, its also that “judging a book by its cover” perspective. Does whatever the mobile product wants to convey come across as relevant to the consumer (remember: technology is only relevant when it is personal)? If no – meaning that it makes sense to shareholders and developers, but not the actual users – then there’s a good chance that continuing forward is a losing proposition. If yes, then we’ve got something to work with.

Access
Secondly, the mobile product has to be accessible. Accessibility doesn’t just mean catering to those with detuned sensory capacities, it means that aspects of doing whatever behavior the mobile product wishes to engage us in is accomplished easily. A good term here to use is “frictionless.” Meaning that after it was interesting enough to try, that the mobile product was also effortless enough to dive into.

There are times when adding friction to the experience might be necessary – for example, you are creating a mobile service and some form data needs to be filled out by the consumer. In this case, access needs to also be effortless, but also take into account that someone is on a mobile device (so asking them to check their email for a special code to activate an account might not be the best method of access engagement).

Redress
I will admit, I used this word because it rhymed. But, when you look at the definition of ‘redress,’ you see exactly the point that’s being conveyed here. Now that a person is engaged within your mobile product, what is to be solved, alerted to, or changed? How easy is it for a person to determine this? Remember, we had that frictionless/effortless step to access this mobile product. That approach needs to continue here if the product will remain in a positive light.

Reset
This is the fourth step listed, but could easily be step 3B. After the user has been prompted to redress within the mobile product, how do you reset them to that same state they were in when you product was accessed? Did your message prompt clearly state what changed when they addressed updating their profile? What about achievements – what are you doing to show on a mobile screen, or for a mobile context, how much progress towards addressing the product’s purpose is easily discerned?

Enable
Every application has to have an enabling point. If you will, as the mobile product is being engaged, what is being enabled? What should the consumer of your mobile product be enabled to do after they leave your product? Does your product even have such a goal, or does it just stop at collecting information (or like some church websites do you simply enable people to locate your building, but get no reference as to the actual pulse of your community’s engagement to the Gospel)?

Here’s where you start (re)asking the question of whether your mobile product fulfills the definition of mobile ministry. If it can clearly support all or part of that definition, there’s a good chance that you enable a maturing of the faith of the individual, community, and faith group.

Archive
What actions need to be forgotten? What needs to be stored for reference for the next time the mobile product is engaged? The final step – after you have enabled the consumer towards some mobile ministry behavior – is to archive what is no longer needed, and store for easier access later whatever is vital for your mobile product’s experience to stick. Simplicity and discretion is needed here. For example, after you’ve successfully built and deployed your text messaging (SMS) prayer list or announcements, how you archive the value of that first time experience in their minds/behaviors determines how often they come back to using it. So you don’t just give someone instructions for managing an SMS account once, you program that system to remind the subscriber at regular intervals how they can stop/edit messages, get help, etc. You talk about some of the successes or efficiencies gained in that communication channel as they happen (via blog, social media) or with a larger group at regular intervals (during announcements section of church service for example).

Managing Mobile Ministry Experiences Starts with Understanding the Consumer
You cannot just expect that just because you have created a ministry-centric product that it will be used. As a matter of fact, you can expect that not only will it not be used, but it won’t be used how you have designed it. To avoid those kinds of misplaced expectations, understanding not only your produced product, but the steps people take in engaging your product helps you spot the gaps in your approach and point out efficiencies that can be gained when your product moves into its future iterations.

Tags: engagement marketing, Mobile in Analytics/Marketing/Development, mobile in marketing, mobile ministry methodology, Paper for iPad, process flow
Posted in Social Engagement | No Comments »

Is Keeping Up All Your Community Amounts To?

Monday, April 30th, 2012

Sunday mornings in the SE USA offer a distinct impression towards communities and what people value. For some people, the hours between 8AM and 1PM are spent in within their faith communities, singing hymns, listening to sermons, and reconnecting to people they may or may not see throughout the course of their week. For some, those hours are a recovery period from work, parties, or family engagements held throughout the week. And for some still, those hours are spent leading the charge for the new week – whether that’s working in retail, starting meeting, project, and lesson plans, or getting in that exercise regimen that can other times during the week be more elusive. Indeed, there’s a lot of life that happens in these hours, and within those contexts noted above, there’s a question that a few moments on a recent Sunday begged me to ask in light of what kinds of communities we’ve become.

Two contexts…

The first sees several of the local broadcast channels displaying current or replayed messages from local, regional, and national churches. Within one of these I stopped on, the encouragement from the pastor was to align the fact analogy of the resurrected Jesus walking with the two gentlemen on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). Inside of the sermon, the pastor goes inside and outside of the margin of the text – beginning first with the aligning of the appearing of Jesus as a matter of comfort to the situation which was a matter of shock and anxiety for those who walked with Jesus and knew him. And then he ends towards another margin, speaking to the need of people to be connected to the community of believers whom are on the road of life as well, with a chance that at some point in the relationship they will meet Jesus. As this broadcast happened, there were several points where the camera panned to various persons in the congregation, as well as the on-screen notation of the name of the pastor and the church. No address, website, etc., just the pastor’s name and the church’s name. After the sermon ended, I continued to parouse other channels to see what else might be asking for attention.

The second was a few hours after the above sermon was broadcast, while setting myself to work on a few pieces for the site in a local Starbucks. As I entered, I overheard a group of people talking about the communities they grew up in. Seemingly excited to know that there was so many similar connections between them, one of the women mentioned someone in her circle that has some local nortoriety. At least from her tone, she was proud of the connect. Then male in that small group spoke up about him going to school with her. He remarked about going the entire gamut with the famous woman in the same classes, all the way through to the end of high school. Then he said, “these days I’m connected with her on Facebook. That’s how you keep connected to people you used to know. Well, I’m only as connected as seeing her updates. We don’t interact all that much.”

It was the latter context that led me to sit down and write this much. In the latter, we have a participatory medium – the Internet – and a common channel – Facebook – being used for communication between those people, organizations, and brands who wish to interface with one another. In the former story, we have the one-way medium – TV – and itself a common channel – the rhetoric of the sermon – being used to share a central message that’s designed to knit the listeners around that common experience of listening, and moreso around how they share in the interpretation and activity because of what they listened to. And yet, both of these medium choices (Internet and TV) bill themselves as creating a community, or at the very least enabling community-defining behaviors.

What are the communities that are intended to result from these media actions?

If I’m being critical of the TV message, I found it confusing to be getting a message about being connected to both faith and community, but nothing in the broadcast – at least while I was viewing it – left a bread-crumb trail as to how to do that to that specific community or another one. At least, not the bread-crumb that we are used to – there was a name of the pastor and name of the church – certainly the Yellow Pages would be sufficient for making the next steps.

But then, there’s the critism of of Facebook users I overheard. They already had their Yellow Pages, and indeed something more defined than a name and address, they had some cycle of activity so that they could see for themselves when and how best to build some kind of relationship with another. However, it was only being used as a signaling channel – connection only good enough to get reception of what’s going on in another’s life, but not to build into their lives or be built from their’s. Very much similar to listening to a TV message in application despite the Facebook’s ability to be more than simply receiving a broadcast message.

I wondered, is this the kind of community then that we create with social networks? Yes, I know that many of those visiting here are quite active on their social networks, mixing broadcast announcements with rebroadcasts of other’s brands/announcements, with conversations. But, we can’t assume that everyone who uses these social networking channels are doing the same behaviors. In fact, if one were to take our second story as the norm – following people to keep tabs, not to have a conversation – then we might want to make a better question about social media strategies and approaches that mark our use.

What is the community that you are building as a result of how you utilize one-way (broadcast, P2P) and participatory (Internet, social networking) media channels? Could the resulting behaviors you notice within those be influenced by something more than the content you are filling it with?

Tags: broadcast, engagement marketing, Facebook, Internet, media messages, Mobile in Analytics/Marketing/Development, mobile in marketing, mobile in media, mobile in moment, mobile in moment/personal, social networking, TV
Posted in Communication | No Comments »

Measuring the Impact of Mobile Ministry

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Rule app for iPad and iPhone
Continuing down the hole of understanding the implications of life at the intersection of faith and mobile technology, I came across an article that puts forth some perspectives around some research that has sought to quantify the actual change from connectivity and communication technologies advancement over the past decades. According to the post over at Irving Waldawsky-Berger (Measuring the Forces of Long Term Change), Deloitte’s Center for the Edge has published this first in 2009, and again in 2011 – so it is relatively new in terms of research. The findings reach backwards well though upon inspection and do leave much to consider about the benefits of communicaitons and technogical change, with and without the human element.

As I read that post, I was prompted to investigate the profitability of mobile ministry along similar pillars. Granted, this isn’t a field that has much length of change, let alone can be said to be as disruptive as some would like at this point. But, this magazine has been in the business of making introspective looks at the validity of this approach, and throwing itself against the wall to see what sticks. Here’s what sticks as suitable measuring sticks for this approach:

The Foundation index captures the first wave. It measures the fast moving advances in technology performance and infrastructure penetration, as well as the shifts of global public policy that are reducing the barriers to entry and movement. The Foundation index has been growing at a ten percent CGR since 1993, and is the primary driver of all the other changes.

The second wave, represented by the Flow index is designed to measure the flows of capital, talent and knowledge across institutional and geographic boundaries that have been enabled by the first wave. In the past, our stocks of knowledge, – what we know, – was a great source of economic value. This is no longer the case, because the increasing rate of change all around us is rapidly obsolescing knowledge. Therefore, the real economic value has now moved from the stocks of knowledge to the flows of new knowledge that we are now able to quickly acquire, and thus refresh and expand our rapidly depleting stocks of knowledge. Since 1993 the Flow index has been growing at seven percent CGR.

The Impact index is a measure of the transformations underway in markets, firms and people. It aims to quantify the ways the overall economic environment is changing, as well as how those changes impact companies and individuals. This third wave has been significantly lagging the first two, growing at a much slower 1.5 percent CGR since 1993. The intensified competition and increased pressure on business performance caused by the first two waves accounts for the lagging growth of the third wave.

It makes some sense right: Foundaton, Flow, and Impact. Go back to the mobile ministry methodology. There, you have a process for iterating throughout a mobile ministry-focused project. But, the measuring of what is success or not kind of sticks on the point of whether you make it through the project or not. If you add the filters of Foundation, Flow, and Impact to your goals for the project, there is a good chance the you would be better able to see the full-impact (long-term, if using these in context) for your efforts.

Part of the problem with that is that these measurements are long-term in context. To date, I don’t know one mobile ministry project that isn’t tightly focused on the short-term. In fact, that’s part of the problem with many of the projects, their aim is to enable something to happen through technologies or processes that works at a speed which is much more towards a human-scale.

Time is the sticky in all of this. What is the value of time in relation to mobile ministry? What about time are you trying to alter someone else’s perception within mobile ministry activities? Perhaps, something I wrote on my personal blog fits here as well:

…For years, I have been trying to understand the intersection of faith and mobile tech, but didn’t realize until a few minutes before writing this that it was all about time. Does the use of mobile invite someone to redeem time in their life to live the faith they have bubbling on the inside of them? Chances are, it doesn’t. And all of these layers (apps, media, services, sign ups, etc) to make mobile the right channel is ultimately a failure to understand and speak to what actually matters. Time to live…

Every miracle that Jesus did add time to the lives of others. When you are measuring the Impact of your mobile ministry efforts, do you see the same? Or, are you more applicable to the Foundation and Flow aspects of change? If so, those rates are much faster than people, and probably should be regarded a bit less until change happens.

Tags: metrics, Mobile in Analytics/Marketing/Development, Moore's Law, Shift Index
Posted in Communication | No Comments »

Mobile Ministry Magazine (MMM)

Posts Tagged ‘Mobile in Analytics/Marketing/Development’