Building Empowered Mobile… With the Contact Center? Yes.

With all of the hype in mobile, the conversation most often shifts to “who is doing it right” or even, somewhat prematurely, “who is doing it best?” Altimeter showcased a method to take a look at mobile applications and understand how mature an app strategy is and what steps can be taken to move to the next, higher maturity phase. I’ve since had conversations with clients and others suggesting that taking this maturity model and looking at the present state and impact assessment areas and using those as a way to measure maturity of an overall mobile strategy, beyond just apps.

Who Is leading the charge in mobile? Is it you?

It seems almost every time that I speak with someone inside of an enterprise that they’re involved, in some way, with helping the organization go mobile. Some are strategizing how the company can better service its interna constituents – something I’m researching now – some are trying to capture the attention of their customers, while still more are helping deploy mobile from an IT perspective. Then there are the firms doing this work for their own clients, acting as external centers of excellence for mobile.

I think all of these roles are important, and we stand to learn a lot about where we are in mobile’s evolution as a capability by understanding who does what, how roles are evolving and – in the process – connecting to one another to share best practices.

That’s why, in the spirit of my colleague Jeremiah Owyang’s list of Corporate Social Strategists, I’m creating a Mobile Influencers list and I want you to sign up, here are the criteria:

• You must work at an enterprise-class organization, of 1,000 employees or more;
• Your role should be in IT, internal mobile strategy, customer facing-mobile strategy or client mobile professional services and consulting;
• You must work in a role where “mobile” is in your title (I know, this is limiting, but will change as I can get a sense of how much scope creep removing this qualification will allow.)
• You must currently be in this role.

I’ll verify these things using public LinkedIn profiles, so you must have one of those to participate. I’ll be batch updating submissions to a public list that shares only the LinkedIn profile link and, if supplied, a Twitter handle.

In addition to celebrating those that are at the forefront of the mobile movement, I expect that this list, similar to Jeremiah’s, will emerge as a preeminent source for networking, job hunting and future employee identification. I want it to serve as a resource and it will not be opened up as a prospecting tool for vendors or others, as I will maintain control over the list.

I’ve set up a GoogleForm which is live at http://bit.ly/mobileinfluencers for you to sign up, submitting information about you – or a colleague that you think is a good fit – in the comments is fine as well.

I’ll be posting my first update to the public list here once we’ve got some critical mass.

New look and feel

I’m experimenting with a new look and feel for the site, updating some information on the research agenda and, overall, sprucing things up. I’m eager for your feedback on the new layout and design and whether it’s working better or worse for my readers. Please leave comments so I can continue to make the blog work better for you!

Where’s My Billion?

Over the past week, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about what makes an app worth $1 Billion. I’m not sure I have the final answer, but I’ve got some thoughts on how Instagram got there.

The Polaroid Land Camera logo evokes emotion, nostalgia even in the majority of users who've never even seen one!

The heart of most of the questions I get is whether there’s a firm, quantifiable link between popularity, users and, ultimately, valuation.  I don’t think it’s that simple. I do think that, for the same reason iOS cultivated a more fervently devoted following than Android when it’s losing the feature-for-feature battle. Talking about Instagram vs others in adjunct spaces I think the equation is more complex and involves less tangible strengths like emotion and overall “feel.”My main thoughts on how this maps to Instagram and its wildly successful exit come down to three things:

Where in the world?

From time to time, travel gets heavy in the analyst job. It means time away from writing in many cases, but it almost always means a chance to reconnect with those I’ve not had a chance to see in a while and who I’ve yet to meet. In that spirit, I wanted to share some of my upcoming travel.

April 17 – April 20th, Genesys G-Force conference, Seattle, WA

April 23 – 25th, Austin, TX for client work

April 30th – May 2 – Las Vegas (tentative)

May 8th – May 11 – San Francisco and Bay Area, Speaking at SIIA VIA Content on May 9th

Please leave a comment send a direct Twitter message or even an good, old fashioned email to connect, and we’ll see if we can make schedules connect. I hope that we do! I try to keep my speeches and events page updated as often as possible, to, so you can keep tabs on me on a running basis.

What Is An App?

I was presenting a webinar on the intersection of mobile and social with my colleague Jeremiah earlier this week, when, in the Q/A an interesting question arose, amidst the other tactical queries about partners, data points and development philosophy, this question stood out because of it’s seeming simplicity and inherent complexity:

What is an “app” and how do you define it?

My snarky side wanted to offer up, “how much time do you have,” but it bears exploring, so I did so on the call and wanted to also start the conversation here.