Contextual Relevancy
I recently read an entry from Nurul Haque, Editor at Mobile2Mobility about how mobile advertising is really starting to come of age and becoming more contextually relevant. Sprint is certainly seeing this trend. This blog is one of the many ways that we are adjusting the manner in which we communicate with the market. Customers today want more social interaction with advertising content - they want to discuss it and challenge it. Most importantly in this multitasking millennium, customers want information to be contextually relevant.
One of the companies Nurul mentions is ChaCha. On the ChaCha blog, you can read how mobile advertising plays a role in its “mobile answers” service. With mobile answers and search, a user can ask any kind of question via SMS and then, behind the scenes, a pool of human subject-matter experts will find relevant information about the specific query and SMS it back to the mobile user. Advertising is then targeted to the user based on their location and the nature of questions the person asks.
These innovative services depend not only on the creative genius of the developers but also on underlying service provider capability. This is why Sprint recently announced that third-party developers can use certain platforms to create new location-based applications. On the surface, it may seem like this technology has a play only with individual wireless consumers, but the underlying applications that are driving these innovations in the mobility space are all about using context to facilitate faster and more accurate interactions — regardless of whether the end user is connected via a wireline or a wireless connection.
At Sprint, we look at mobility from a broader perspective. For example, mobility can mean being able to start a phone call via wireline connectivity at your desk and seamlessly transferring it to your mobile phone as you start to commute home. We’ve been demonstrating this capability for years and it really only hints at where all this is going. Seamless, data-rich convergence will require that applications have access to more contextual information than simply a phone number and GPS location.
The enterprise communications applications of the future will incorporate user-context like never before. This could take into account the role of users (permissions that regulate how users can communicate with each other), the groups users are a part of (what projects each user is working on, including the progress toward completion of each individual’s assigned tasks), and even what users are doing at that very moment, who are they communicating with, and what media would be appropriate for communication at the time, given such context.
For the future of convergence to be seamless, communications applications must bring in context from a number of other information sources — regardless of whether the end user is currently on a train using a mobile device or at the office on a PC. That’s why Sprint built an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) into our networks to increase the interoperability between our wireless and wireline networks. These investments have lead to a number of product launches, such as the recent launch of Sprint Mobile Integration with Cisco.
In the future, you will continue to see Sprint focus on ways to use these unique IMS capabilities to create an improved communications experience for customers. Clear communications in the future will be more about eliminating the noise from too much contextually-irrelevant communication than it will be about eliminating static on a phone line. In this era of 24×7 multitasking, only increased context across all types of wireless and wireline communications will help enterprises deal with the “too much information” syndrome currently stuffing corporate inboxes and resulting in missed deadlines and delayed deliverables, decreased customer satisfaction, and lower product and service quality levels.
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SubscribeTags: Cisco, IMS, IP Multimedia Subsystem, mobile advertising, mobile integration, Mobility, SMS
January 9th, 2009 at 3:02 am
Hi Shaun,
Thanks for refering to my article.
I agree with you on centextual relevancy. Almost everybody in the industry is now aware that mobile services and specifically mobile advertising has to be made personalized.
In 2008, we witnessed an increased focus on LBS. Many social networking and dating services launched that claim to offer location relevant personalized services to the users. The idea of convergence that you have written about in the article may not be a distant future. However, to acheive that we have to understand what the users want, how they want it and when they want it.
Regards,
Nurul