Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

Smart money on smartphones?

 

panasonic eluga

 

With less than a week to go before #mwc12 kicks off, both Fujitsu and Panasonic have played their hand and announced that they’re breaking out of the Japanese smartphone market to conquer Europe. It’s possible that both companies were emboldened by the record quarterly profits announced by Samsung last month, which were driven by its smartphones division, and Cisco’s recent projections that there will be 10bn handsets globally by 2016.

Android-based smartphones are clearly the product category to be in at the moment. HTC’s rise a few years ago and its subsequent decline in the face of Samsung’s dominance shows that, as technological development continues apace and people adapt to new interfaces, no one has really cornered the market just yet.

It’s worth keeping an eye on the margins though. Apple makes a 37.4% operating profit on its iPhone. In comparison, Samsung makes just 11% on its handsets. As volumes grow, it’s reasonable to expect component prices to fall. There is a danger that the companies that only make handsets will rapidly fall down the value chain and see their profits squeezed.

The situation may not be too dissimilar to that currently being witnessed in the market for TVs, where manufacturers are operating on slim margins and many are losing money. Still, that’s no reason not to make money while it’s there and, unlike 3D TVs, smartphone technology looks to be something consumers can’t get enough of at the moment.

IMAGE CREDIT [Panasonic]

This piece was originally posted on Racepoint’s #mwc12 blog

Social influence and social media

This morning I went along to Like Minds’ Social Media Week debate on Trust and Social Influence.

The good people at Like Minds pulled together a great panel and the debate was very wide reaching, so I’m only going to focus on a couple of the useful points I took away with me.

Behaviour, not values

The first point is that the tools that currently measure influence base their scores on your online behaviour, not your values or work or your offline behaviour.  Now, I love watching rugby, I used to love playing rugby, I still play squash, however, I rarely ever tweet about either sport.  I’d like to think I influence some people about rugby and squash, but no tool that uses social media as its data source is likely to pick that up.

Margin of error

For PRs it’s important to note that tools that provide influence scores or assign which topics someone is interested in, work best when aggregated.  That is to say that individually they’re either right or wrong, but across 1,000 or 1,500 of the vast majority of people they’ve highlighted as being influential on topic X should indeed have some influence on topic X.

Don’t shoot the messenger

Azeem Azhar from PeerIndex made a point that perhaps is the most important one to note on a personal level.  Tools like PeerIndex, Klout and Kred all publicly tell you what they think of you.  Other tools, some developed for proprietary use by large brands, judge you and assign a value to you without you ever knowing what they think of you.  A good, recent example is American chain Target figuring out a teenager was pregnant before her father knew.  So, as much as people knock PeerIndex and its rivals for inaccuracy, at least they’re making their mistakes in the open.

This piece was originally posted here on the CommsTalk blog.

Who’s winning on the sub-continent?

I recently went to Delhi for a few days. On my way back to London, sitting in the departure lounge at Indira Gandhi International, I noticed a phone charging station and it got my attention for one reason.

docking station - delhi

Take a look at it on the left (sorry for the terrible photo – I was working with very harsh light). What do you notice?

What I noticed is that this docking station in the international airport of the capital city of a BRIC nation is sited in a place only accessed by wealthy Indians (i.e. those who can afford to fly) and foreign visitors, and that Blackberry and Nokia are the dominant brands. They’re the brands that take pride of place and have the most docking points.

Now, this is just a snapshot. The trends might favour Samsung and Apple. I don’t know. What I do know that there’s an Indian elite who still use Blackberrys and Nokias and they haven’t fallen out of love with them yet. This means phones like the Lumia (which I saw heavily advertised in Delhi’s upmarket shopping malls) aren’t perceived to belong to old fashioned brands.

For all the talk of Nokia’s decline and turmoil at RIM, I wouldn’t write off the incumbents just yet.

NOTE: this post was also published on Racepoint Group’s #mwc12 blog

Nudge nudge, tweet tweet

Having had a chance to play around a bit with #newnewtwitter, two changes strike me as particularly interesting, one is a small change in mobile browsing and the other focuses on anonymity. It seems to me that they are both changes designed to alter users’ behaviour.

Placing Twitter at the centre of mobile browsing

On the updated iPhone app you can no longer copy a link and paste it into a browser. This means you have to browse through the app’s built-in browser. Facebook’s app takes a similar approach. It means that if you want to view the content someone is trying to share, you need to do it through Twitter and without leaving Twitter. So you stay on Twitter, it acts as the hub for your mobile browsing.

When you couple this change with Twitter’s new discover tab (an amalgamation search and trends with a new stories service), it’s clear that Twitter is making a serious play to challenge Facebook and Google as people’s starting point when exploring the mobile web.

Nudging people away from anonymity

Names now take precedence over Twitter handles. Is this a way to make online relationships more personal? Is it a small change in the larger push to make Twitter big in China and other countries where the government has a preference against anonymity? Or is it a move to placate Western governments who, now feeling some pressure of movements organised through social media, are less enamoured with free speech when it’s coupled with anonymity?

Regardless, one thing it will definitely do is make users associate people by their names instead of their Twitter handles. This means that, unless you’re writing under a pseudonym, people will associate you with your tweets. It won’t be @quirkytwitterhandle said something, it will be Trevor said something.

Obviously, there are easy workarounds to this change, for example you can change your name in the settings to your quirky Twitter handle. Most people won’t do this though and, over time, this will change behaviour. I suspect people will moderate their tweets because they will recognise that those tweets are directly associated with them instead of their chosen online identity.

So, two very different changes, but both designed to change behaviour and both more significant than they initially seem.

This post also appeared on the Huffington Post.