Greetings from Monte Carlo
by Helen Keegan
Well, it’s my first morning at the Global Messaging conference and Ewan and I are already ranting! We’ve only been in to see one session on mobile instant messenger and email. John Maynard spoke from the point of view of Vodafone and Martin Harris spoke from AOL UK, on the mobile side of things. Both speakers were somewhat constrained by NDAs and toeing the corporate line which wasn’t their fault.
Anyway, the upshot is, all the operators want to make more money out of mobile email and Mobile Instant Messenger but there are some barriers to success which they didn’t really discuss in any depth.
So, the good news is that Vodafone has introduced a flat rate data plan for pay as you go customers limiting liability to a £1 a day. Great! There is a but… if you imagine that youth is probably the biggest segment to drive and influence mobile IM use and mobile email use or even mobile messaging use on something like MySpace then even at a £1 it’s going to be too much. Here’s why.
You don’t know what experience you’re going to get on your phone when you access these services if you’ve never used them before. You’ve no idea how long you’re going to use them for, and if you only use messaging on your phone intermittently, then even a £1 a day is too much. Are you really going to spend £1 to click on one link to see a myspace message which might not even be from your pal, but from someone promoting their new track or whatever? Vodafone’s target email customer on average receives 8 to 10 emails a day. Are you really going to spend £1 to see those emails? And then if you get into heavy usage, are you really going to spend £30 a month?
And anyway, most customers don’t understand the pricing or what ‘data charges’ even means. When I’ve asked a few teenagers I know why they don’t use mobile web services, the answer is ‘well it’s a £1 a minute isn’t it when I click on a link in a text message or the icon on my phone’.
So, I guess it’s baby steps.. flat rate data pricing models are certainly the way forward, but the pricing models still need some work. Why can’t it be something like a penny a minute up to a maximum of a £1 a day or £10 a month, whichever is less and then add in technical support at £1 a minute? This model we’re used to as in the old days of dial-up and when this structure was introduced, Freeserve made a killing and signed up 900,000 users with 700,000 of them active within just 16 weeks. This was against AOL who took 3 years to sign up half a million customers.
I think there’s a lesson to be learned there.
