Mobile 2.0 in the Enterprise

Someone sent me this  link about Mobile 2.0, the conjunction of community and mobile and whilst I agree that tagging will clearly be important as the article suggests location awareness with be the cause of growth.

I had a look at this area a while ago, there are some interesting MoSoSo games coming out for instance which do this linkage of community and mobile and location. The one I looked at was https://www.mogimogi.com/mogi.php?language=en which gave extra points if you physically met up with other players. I can see this growing dramatically in Asia for instance and for very specific things such as events and conferences. Clearly Google think the same thing as they bought dodgeball. I think another element around the growth of these applications will be population / phone density which does not bode well for the US (which has a poor cellphone system anyway).

I hadn’t really thought of Mobile from an enterprise point of view, I can certainly see it working for intra enterprise apps such finding that meeting in microsoft campus J or at conferences (I have seen lots of people at conferences with mobile radios for this purpose for example) where it has an interesting overlap with backchanneling.

Outside the enterprise it could again be used at conferences and events to link people with similar interests or who want to meet their buddies but I suspect there are some untapped applications in the customer space. I have been talking to some enterprises about location aware mobile applications which downloads elements of interest in the area to prospective purchasers which also links them to a local agent in a dogeball type style. Obviously hugely interesting from an advertising standpoint.

Looking at the 4 areas of web 2.0 in customer relationships for the mobile area in turn:

Minimizing sales and marketing cost: Adding present location and mobile information will have a dramatic impact on this. Imagine that you want a drycleaner and you type it into your phone which gives you directions to the nearest and best rated… an obvious application.

Improve customer satisfaction. Again giving immediate and relevant information will improve customer satisfaction.

Product and Service Feedback. This is an interesting one, imagine if you use a service / go to an event and are asked to give feedback through the phone. This would work well, especially if the message is free.

Advertising. Providing relevant (advertising) information is valuable rather than annoying.

Actually you could see how to make enough money through targeted advertising to pay the sms charges and make the service free.

Bottom line, location based services over cellphones will be very big and self funding. The other big opportunity will be in improving customer sat. Both of these are important new areas of customers and revenue for the enterprise.