I spent yesterday speaking at, and attending, Informa’s Mobile Communities & User Generated Content conference in London. Actually, the quality of the speakers and delegates was so high, I really wish I could have found the time to go back today, or at least do a little more networking last night. In fact, because of my job and how long I’ve spent observing and analysing the mobile (and mobile marketing) sector, I rarely go to conferences these days and really so get much out of so many of the presentations, if I’m honest, though meeting other people is always great. However, this was the exception and every speaker that I saw had an interesting point of view or new way of looking at things, even if I didn’t necessarily always agree - and it would have been boring if I had agreed.

I didn’t catch every speaker, but a few who stood out were:

Marc Davis from Yahoo! Marc is an ex-Berkeley academic, who Y! cleverly persuaded to move with his lab to the commercial side of the world and he had some very interesting ideas and a vision for the direction mobile and advertising was going to go. As Mark Curtis of Flirtomatic was later to say (I paraphrase) “I’m sure that mobile advertising, when it grows out of its infancy, will look very different in 5 years from today’s models, which have been essentially borrowed from the internet world”. Although, I would also add that these borrowed mechanics also work exceptionally well in today’s mobile environment, though I’l sure will be see some radical evolution to come.

Marc (Davis) had some interesting theories about what format these might take.

I was particularly intrigued with his idea of gifting advertising - a kind of souped-up viral advertising. Supposing (the theory goes) that you’re my pal and are visiting Munich, where I live. You want a good restaurant near your hotel and you ask me for my recommendations. Firstly, I’ll know you and will be in a better position to pick somewhere you’re likely to enjoy, as I know your penchant for dressing in leather trousers and slapping your thighs than some impersonal source, like a guide book. But I could also send you a coupon for you to use tonight as my gift to you.

Obviously, a lot will depend on presentation of this idea to stop it being tacky, but if dressed up as a “Tell ‘em Russell sent you”, I can see that it would be very effective. Marc’s point is that such a gift ad would have near to 100% click through and a very high likelihood of being used. Therefore, the measure of effectiveness (like Cost Per Acquisition) would be off the scale in comparison to today’s metrics.

I’m not sure how this would scale exactly, but interesting nonetheless.

Marc also made an interesting observation about why Yahoo’s Answers service thrived and Google’s version failed. Yahoo’s Answers, if you don’t know, is a forum where people can post questions for the community of 90 million people to answer. So if you want to know how to clean a fish tank, or why we relate to comic super heroes, ask away and you’ll benefit from the collective wisdom on the crowds.

The key differences between Google and Yahoo! was that Google paid people to post answers and Y! didn’t, recognising that a pure economic reward can never be high enough to make the effort worthwhile. More importantly, it focuses the reward on the wrong thing, which is the “showing off” gene (my phrase - Marc would never use such an unscientific description). It’s the same gene that makes us so happy to be on the leader board in a game, write or edit a page on Wikipedia or frankly, write a blog post, or leave a comment on one.

But the same economic equation works in other areas too, such as paying people to watch advertising - the amount you can pay them, never equals an amount interesting enough to the individual to make it worth their while.

The right equation always seems to come back to RRR - Reputation and Recognition Reward, or Whuffie as Cory Doctorow memorably called the concept in his excellent novel “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom”.

The last area Marc talked about, which I thought was interesting, was about the explosion of User Generated Content, which is set to continue. When you think that UGC includes something as simple as posting pictures and video online, the question for us all becomes “how will I know what to pay attention to?” in an age where too much choice becomes a fact of life. Search (as we know it today) just isn’t going to help find the best picture of a cute puppy, although it will tell you the most one visited. But does “most” visited mean “best” and is your best the same as mine? Maybe, but there’s certainly an opportunity for someone to do better.

I think I’ve gone on more than I intended, so I’ll leave a couple of speakers for another future post.