*Clarity In Marketing

Phone company Orange revealed how it's 15 million customers are using their mobiles for entertainment reports the Guardian today (15 May 2007). If you think mobiles are just for calling home think again. Orange customers - and yours - are increasingly using them for music, watching videos, browsing the web, sending emails, and much more.

Orange tells us 872m texts are sent a month. Mostly these are sent between 4pm and 8pm as people plan nights out. While picture messaging generates a mere 5.4m messages a month despite being launched 5 years ago.

2.1m Orange customers use their mobiles to access the web each month. On top of that many more download games, ringtones and videos. January to March 2007 alone saw 750,000 games downloaded. However, the profile of players is not what you might expect. Gavin Forth, head of entertainment at Orange says players are evenly split between male and female and their average age is 30.

The profile changes however for downloading wallpaper. 65,000 images are downloaded a month the majority by young men. And yes - scantily cland women dominate sales. Music downloads (including ringtones and music videos) are also more popular with the youth market and rack up 250,000 downloads a month on Orange.

As for video, movie trailers top the charts, followed by sports and what Orange calls "babes". As for mobile TV which is watched live rather than prerecorded, sporting events such as the cricket world cup dominate.

So what does this mean for your marketing? Simply that you ignore mobile at your cost. As a communication and interaction channel it is growing. The mobile phone has evolved into a device Dr Who fans would have thought far fetched 10 years ago. Camera, diary, web, email, instant message - all these applications converge to create new uses and challenges for business.

Research by AOL and the Henley Centre  highlights the importance of reviews and recommendations to consumers and their impact on brand perceptions on and offline. So what happens when poor service or a substandard product is recorded and reviewed on mobile and broadcast to an audience of millions via the web?

Seems far fetched? We now regularly see content recorded on mobiles by the public on TV news. Blogs have been a feature for all sides in the Iraq war with many spawning international book deals. In fact the US Army has just announced new restrictions on soldiers blogging and access to sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

And one last example. This article - it was typed and published to this site via email on my mobile 'phone' as I travel to the airport. At the end of the 1990's the Cluetrain Manifesto said the internet was changing consumer relations. Communication was now about conversations and not just - or even - between the brand and the customer but between customers about the brand. How right they were. What are your customers saying and to whom?

Ask Clarity how mobile marketing can work for your business.