Mobile MR: Hope or Hype?

Recently, Facebook began publishing statistics about its user base. I want to highlight some of their statistics about mobile and talk a bit about what these facts point to about the future of online research communities.

The first is this: There are more than 100 million users currently accessing Facebook through their smartphones on a monthly basis.  This represents approximately 20% of all Facebook members.

Now, think about this statistic for a moment:  To me, this implies that people are already comfortable with the concept of participating in an online community via a smartphone.  With numbers of this magnitude, we’re not talking about a”fringe element” or something that only early adopters do.  Nope. When over 100 million people are doing something, its clearly something that has mass appeal.

Perhaps even more compelling for a researcher is this:  People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active as non-mobile users.

Simply put, smartphone users are far more engaged than their non-mobile peers.

This makes a lot of sense, since it’s much easier to steal a snapshot or update your status “as it happens” when all you need to do is pull your phone out of your pocket.

But, the story gets better.  Projections show that within 12 months more people will be buying smartphones than feature phones. This tells me we are quickly reaching a powerful tipping point that will have ramifications for the research industry for years to come.

Despite not having a fully-functioning crystal ball, I’m lucky enough to be paid to foresee major trends in consumer behavior, and figuring out what it means for marketing research.  In doing that a couple of years ago, our mobile research strategy was born.  Embracing the two megatrends above led to the launch of iCommunities mobile for iPhone and iPod touch.

txteagle helps global organizations learn, educate and grow in emerging economies by leveraging the power of the mobile phone. Through a network of over 2.1 billion mobile phone subscribers across 80 developing countries, txteagle leverages the emerging market workforce for two inter-related services; i) GroundTruth: gathering local data and opinions ii) GroundSwell: leveraging those insights to improve consumer engagement.

GroundTruth is a patent-pending mobile data collection platform that provides unique insight into the opinions, needs and behaviours of consumers in emerging markets – from brand reputation and product performance, to pricing and even local product availability. These insights are incorporated in GroundSwell, txteagle’s mobile consumer engagement platform.

GroundSwell enables global organizations to engage with their next billion consumers in emerging markets. As these economies undergo rapid expansion, hundreds of millions of consumers are joining the middle class – resulting in trillions of dollars of new purchasing power. txteagle’s GroundSwell mobile engagement platform provides clients with the ability to communicate and incentivize over 2.1 billion people.

Founded by former MIT faculty member Dr. Nathan Eagle and Dr. Ben Olding from Harvard’s Statistics Department, txteagle has raised funding from top-tier investors that include Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Flywheel Ventures and Esther Dyson.

I’ve been lucky enough to have been invited to consult with txteagle as they develop their overall strategy for entering the MR space, and I can tell you that these guys have the potential to be a game changer. They are already working with some of the biggest brands in the world and largest MR firms, all before even making a formal entry into the industry. txteagle is truly a case of the supply creating the demand; once a few folks learned about what they had done for BPO, the requests to help engage heretofore impossible to reach global populations via their mobile devices have started to flood in. It’s early yet, but I expect BIG things from them in 2011 and beyond.

So there is the evidence of why I think mobile MR has crossed over from hype to hope. We’re seeing broad adoption from suppliers and clients, projected increases over the next 24 months, and players that are delivering both data collection technologies as well as access to a global population of respondents. It’s time to get ready folks; this rocket is about to launch!