Communicating with the next generation

If you’re one of the bazillion players looking for a slice of the mobile social networking pie, listen up, because Paul Coulton has some advice.
Coulton, a “senior lecturer” who specializes in mobile games and social networks at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, addressed developers at Nokia’s S60 Summit ’08 in Barcelona, Spain last week. He used the closing keynote to point out that younger users – you know, the ones everyone in mobile is targeting – communicate very differently than the rest of us.
“They’re multimodal,” the quirky professor claimed. “They use text, IM, Facebook (and other social networking sites). They’re different forms of communication, but they use them interchangeably, and they manage them interchangeably.” (Interestingly, though, there’s one platform that is decidedly out of favor among the tech-savvy youth: e-mail, which to the millennials is today’s equivalent of the pigeon-delivered handwritten letter.)
Teens have grown up with a host of ways to communicate digitally, Coulton stressed, while “older” users – which could mean all of us over the age of 25 or so – have had to retrofit our behavior to adapt to the latest methods and technologies. So while many of us still think of communication in terms of one-to-one dialogue – or, in the case of broadcast media, one-to-many monologue – youngsters have a very different concept of the word. Communication now includes the digital equivalent of bumper stickers (“Here’s my favorite band!” “This is what I’m doing right now!”) as well as online journals and blogs. And it has expanded beyond PCs, with mobile playing a crucial role in the new universe of integrated platforms.
Just as importantly, it encompasses photos and videos, giving images a quality beyond just memories to be passed around the living room on occasion.
“Pictures are very much part of the conversation,” Coulton continued. “We can think of photos as part of the conversational process now. They’re not strictly representations.”
The implications for mobile go far beyond Facebook and MySpace. Not only is there plenty of room for others – including online players moving into mobile as well as mobile startups looking to go cross-platform – community will increasingly influence the spectrum of wireless content and services. If Coulton’s observations hold true, social networking components will figure more prominently in all sorts of things mobile, from gaming to music to simple news sites.
Mobile virtual communities won’t just impact other segments in wireless. More and more, they will become a crucial component of those segments.
Which is not to say that cashing in on the latest step in the evolution of communication will be easy. Consumers have become accustomed to free access to online communities, leaving little room for premium subscription services, and ad revenues in social networking communities have yet to approach the sky-high forecasts proffered by analysts.
But while there’s no guarantee that big traffic will result in big dollars, there’s little doubt that if developers build it – and build it the right way – users will come.
“They’ll come for the technology,” according to Coulton. “But they’ll stay for the community.”