The Mobile Difference: Social Mobile Innovators

Did you think mobile marketing and innovation was purely for commercial benefit and feeding our text addiction? The presenters at Mobile Monday, this month in conjunction with MoMIT (MIT’s Mobile Club), shared inspiring applications for mobile technology that is literally changing lives.

Ruma is bringing micro-franchising to Indonesia. The founder believes franchising is the next evolution after micro-finance to self-empower developing nations and Ruma provides a ‘business in a box’ to allow villagers to sell pre-paid airtime minutes to their community.

 The box includes 1) a mobile phone, 2) a poster to advertise their business, and 3) a getting started manual. These boxes are distributed through the micro-financing banks with connections to villagers and the profits made by the franchisees selling the mobile air time help them pay back the bank loans.

 Local Customer Insight: Women are usually better at running these businesses due to their proclivity to talk on the phone and exchange local gossip!

 Mobile Marketing Thought Starter: How can your company provide value to customers & their community through the mobile channel? (‘classes have been cancelled due to snow’ texts for schools, ‘your room has been cleaned and is ready to check in’ texts for hotels, etc.)

Txteagle is empowering millions of people in Africa who would like to earn an extra $1/day by giving them work to do on their mobile phones.

 Txteagle outsources discrete tasks that take little skill (like tagging images, mini-translations, checking surveys) for which companies such as Google pay under $0.01 per activity. Corporations have literally billions of these activities that need to be managed and txteagle allows them to be done on mobile phones by people who have the time and truly value the opportunity to make a couple dollars a day.  

 Accomplishment: Very impressively, txteagle is on track to be East Africa’s largest employer.

Mobile Marketing Thought Starter: People use their mobiles to save time and entertain themselves during downtime. How can your brand entertain, educate or employ people via their mobile?

 Mobile Giving Foundation makes it easier for people to donate to non-profit organizations by facilitating text-based giving.

 They allow non-profits (NPOs) to leverage an SMS platform to receive small donations from target audiences (e.g., text GIVE to 123-45 in order to donate $5 to the Red Cross). They have found that there is less of a barrier to making small donations through sending a text message than pulling out a checkbook or handing over cash.

 The mobile carriers are giving 100% of donations back to the organization – the carriers do not take any cut of the profit (great negotiating!). 

 Response rates are over 30% for campaigns and over 200 NPOs are using this system. One organization generated $4,000 in donations in only 8 minutes!

Mobile Marketing Thought Starter: How can your company use SMS to generate real revenue?

And – another great use of mobile tech was the instant mobile polling system used for everyone to vote on their favorite presentation. Poll Everywhere allowed us all to vote via SMS and see instant results within the powerpoint presentation.  A very engaging way to end the event!