May 9, 2006
Moving To The Groove: The Rise of Mobile Social Networking – And What It Means To Marketers
By Rick Mathieson
Adapted from the book, BRANDING UNBOUND: The Future of Advertising, Sales, And The Brand Experience In the Wireless Age
Available wherever books are sold
When 30-year-old Manhattanite Dennis Crowley wants to party, he can always count on 10,000 of his closest friends.
Like many young tech industry professionals caught up in the dot-com implosion of 2000, Crowley’s sizable circle of friends, colleagues and acquaintances found themselves laid off and drifting apart – their social networks crumbling as the number of familiar faces at favorite nightclubs and watering holes grew fewer.
So Crowley did something about it. Drawing on his programming skills, he developed a rudimentary mobile system that would allow the first of his buddies to venture out on say, Wednesday night, to broadcast his location to the whole gang so they could all meet up.
“For the first couple of years, there were maybe 25 of us using it, and then we started to look back at what had happened in the last couple of years – text messaging having become ubiquitous and everyone was starting to use camera phones, which I knew because I was even getting camera phone messages from my mom,” he says.
Venturing back to school for a Master’s Degree in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University, Crowley teamed up with classmate Alex Rainert, 30, to turn his idea – called Dodgeball.com – into a formal service as part of their thesis project.
“We looked at the online social networking space – Friendster, Meet-up, Nerve.com – and we asked, how could we take some of the lessons learned from that and apply it to [the mobile space],” he says, referring to online social networking sites that enable friends, and friends of friends, to synch up and plan get-togethers via the wireline Internet.
By contrast, Dodgeball would be designed specifically to help you get it on when you’re on the go.
By the time of its formal launch in April of 2004, over 5,500 New Yorkers, along with 3,000 users in San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles had signed up for the free service to alert friends of their whereabouts so they can meet up, make plans, or just get their gossip on.
Since then, Dodgeball has evolved into a social networking cause célèbre for hip young singles on the move – spawning numerous competitors. In fact, by the following May, search giant Google had acquired the service for an undisclosed sum – telegraphing, as it were, the ascendancy of location-based mobile social networking.
Meet up, get down
Here’s how it works. You pull up a seat at Tom & Jerry’s at Elizabeth and Houston at 7:30 PM. You send a message: “@Tomnjerry to [email protected]”. Instantly, your entire buddy list receives a text message about your whereabouts. But Dodgeball doesn’t stop there. In addition to pinging your friends, the system also pings all the friends of your friends that are within 10 blocks. They receive a message such as, “Joe is over at Tom n Jerry’s. You know Joe through Karen. Why don’t you stop over and say hi.” These friends of friends often send pictures via camera phone to each other so they can find each other in crowded bars.
“It’s like a short cut,” Alexander Clemens, a thirtysomething political consultant in San Francisco, told The New York Times. “All it takes is one quick note to tell friends where the party’s at.”
Which is all very cool. But there’s still more. Since users sign up for service through the Dodgeball Web site, where they’ve included profiles and, if they wish, photos, they can browse other members and build “crush lists” – up to five crushes at a time. Whenever one of those crushes comes within 10 blocks, the system gives you a head’s up. The crush gets a message: “Hey, this guy Joe is over at Tom & Jerry’s. He thinks you’re cute. Why don’t’ you stop by and say hi?” Joe gets a more enticing, if more cryptic, alert: “One of your crushes is within 10 blocks. We won’t tell you where, we just told them where you are, so make yourself presentable.”
Which is to say this wireless wingman is less about “smart mobs” than about booty calls.
“The moment we turned this feature on, it was like 1:30 Tuesday morning, and 10 minutes later, the first message got sent out to a friend of mine,” says Crowley. “He goes down the street to meet the girl, who’s just realized she received a photo on her phone, and was showing it to her friend. There was this strange, awkward moment like, ‘Hey, you’re the guy in the photo, this is kind of weird.’ But they had a drink together. That was the first time it ever happened, and now it happens all the time.”
What it means to marketers
Advertisers have always been the bête noires of social networkers.
But for certain lifestyle brands, Dodgeball’s unique blend of cell phones and over-sexed singles seems like a natural fit, as long as they tread carefully.
“We’re the number one users of the system in terms of number of friends, and the last thing I want to build is something that’s going to cause me not to want to use it,” says Crowley.
Enter: Absolut vodka, the first major brand to take notice of Dodgeball, testing the nascent service as a way to reach affluent young hipsters when they’re most likely to be enticed to indulge in the marketer’s product.
In addition to sponsoring SMS messages to remind subscribers to use Dodgeball when they’re out, Absolut tested a campaign called “Flavor the Summer,” in which Dodgeball members could click on a banner on the Dodgeball home page to add the beverage as a “friend” to their network. Once members opted-in, Absolut would send messages to users asking them to tell Dodgeball about their current whereabouts in exchange for information about nearby events, happenings, happy hour venues, after-hours venues and more.
For example, every Tuesday at 6 PM, the system would cross-reference a weather database and send users a message that reads, say:
“What a gorgeous day! Reply with @venuename telling us where u are. Dodgeball and Absolut will send the closest outdoor patio.
When they reply, members would then receive a follow-up message based on their location:
“Dodgeball & Absolut suggest you work on your tan and enjoy a cocktail at The Water Club (at 30th Street)”
(Absolut is one of the first major brands to test out social networking services like Dodgeball as a way to reach hip young consumers on the go. Photo: Dr. Jaeger.com.)
“Our consumers are more and more mobile and we need to look at alternate message delivery vehicles to reach them,” says Lorne Fisher, spokesperson for Absolut. “If Absolute is top of mind, it may be a way to generate more ‘call’ in bars, restaurants, liquor stores, and so on.”
In the future, look for social networking capabilities to be built into a number of products.
New-fangled electronic t-shirts, available from high-tech retailer Cyberdog, for instance, come with a postcard-sized passive-matrix display that enables the wearer to flash 32-character messages across the chest. Combine that with an RFID tag within a wirelessly connected environment, or even just built-in Bluetooth, and whenever a member of a particular social network comes within range, the shirts could flash messages to facilitate a hook up.
All sponsored by a mutually preferred brand name, of course.
(For more, pick up a copy of BRANDING UNBOUND wherever books are sold, today.)
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Adapted from BRANDING UNBOUND: The Future of Advertising, Sales and the Brand Experience in the Wireless Age © 2005 Rick Mathieson, Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission. All rights reserved. http://www.amacombooks.org.
Available wherever books are sold
www.BrandingUnbound.com
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