Quirk’s Breakfast Briefing in Cape Town yesterday, and in JHB this morning, featured two exceptional guest speakers. First up was Allan Kent, who spoke on Mobile Marketing. He’s the head of AtPlay, the interactive division of Saatchi & Saatchi SA. The second speaker was Paul Jacobson, who enlightened us on online legal matters.
The Breakfast Briefings comprise of six lectures which Quirk has been running in each of our key operating areas – namely Cape Town, Johannesburg and London. The course looks to provide corporate with a fundamental understanding of the elements needed to successfully strategise within the online space.
In introducing the two speakers, Rob described Allen as a creative genius, and Paul as the go to guy for any New Media legal questions. Suffice to say I felt myself in great company.
The Mobile Web
Allan covered the range of current possibilities on mobile and dropped some pretty impressive statistics.
- There are 3.1 billion mobile subscribers worldwide, with the Far East being an area of great growth.
- In China and India 400 million people use their phones to access the internet.
- In South Africa we have 4 million internet users, with 42 million mobile subscriptions.
Allan went on to discuss what this means for brands, given that mobiles play such a personal role in people’s lives, and chatted through the different ways you can reach people through their mobiles.
He discussed the use of SMS, MMS, IVR (interactive voice response), WAP, Mobile Applications, MXIT and BlueTooth.
Two really interesting initiatives he discussed were Semacode and Location based services. Semacodes (if I understood correctly) are basically encoded images that can easily be recognised by a images processor (sort of a barcode on steroids). Through your cellphone camera a semacode can then display a website URL for example.
Location based services can be used to create Position Art, not a new idea but something that is being used in quite a cool way by Nokia in the campaign for their N82.
In closing off his presentation he made some great points, the most insightful of which being that we need to “stop thinking of [the mobile web] as technology but rather as how it enables engagement and communication” – something that’s relevant for all technology I think.
Social Media Law
The second speaker Paul Jacobson specialises in new media and law, an area that’s evolving as we speak and I dare say many online practitioners are a little unsure about.
Paul brought up 4 areas that are relevant to a discussion on new media & the law.
- Freedom of expression
- Content licensing
- Privacy
- Unlawful competition
In terms of freedom of expression, he pointed out that while freedom of speech is a very broad right, it isn’t absolute. Freedom of expression has to be taken into account with competing rights, like someone’s right to privacy or laws against hate speech (think Bullard).
He then went on to discuss the very exciting Creative Commons legislation that is much more flexible than traditional copyright law. It allows you to set less rigid restrictions on how your work will be altered or used by others, so that you can legally share it online.
What I hadn’t realised is that there are 6 different Creative Commons licenses you can choose from. While they all require that the source of the work is accredited, some allow you to specify that your work can or cannot be used for commercial gain, or can be altered as long as the new work is published under the same license.
The flipside of all this great information sharing online is of course that our privacy can be compromised, especially in online social networks. Paul’s advice is that we should be really careful about what we put online, always read the terms of use (how many of us have read Facebook’s terms of use?) and the privacy policy of any site we engage with.
There was tons of useful info that I just can’t fit into one post. (Plus I’m a little scared Paul will sue me if I write too much of his presentation down). You can check out Paul’s blog here. He's also made his presentation notes available via slideshare, so have a look at them below.
By all accounts the talks were really well received, and we have to send out a massive thank you to Paul and Allen for spending their time with us. If you missed the talks this month, don’t despair, click here to sign up for the upcoming eMarketing over Breakfast's.
If you were at the breakfast brief it'd be great to know your thoughts about the talk, so feel free to post any comments below.
Muti
