Data is Free

I had coffee with a friend of mine this morning who knows a ton about the ad space and social media.

When I got back to the office I found this note from the ITU announcing that there are 4.1 billion mobile phone subs.

Our conversation, and the link, reminded me of some research I did in grad school where I was working for David Gautschi, now the Dean of the Business School at RPI, then a marketing prof at Washington. He was doing a book on network-effects, and wanted to understand what causes the telephone to turn the curve and gain mass adoption.

The issue that AT&T faced in 1910-1920 was that telephones were strictly used for business, particularly in tall buildings. (People would pick up the phone rather than walk down several flights of stairs in un-airconditioned buildings. Go figure.) AT&T wanted to figure out how to make phones a consumer product.

What turned the corner was they did a test where the wired up farm houses in Iowa. This was in the early 1920s when it was hard to travel. Cars were expensive. Roads were bad. The women in these houses were usually stuck there for weeks at a time with no other women to talk to. You can see where this is going. Usage exploded because the women in these houses were no longer isolated.

This is happening right now with social media. People are going to use their phones as, well, communication tools to maintain contact with their peeps. The only difference is that it is happening at a global scale, not just in Ottumwa.

Someone, maybe Facebook but maybe someone else, is going to do what Coca-Cola did in the 20s and 30s and build a global brand that "teaches the world to sing," or at least teaches the world to harmonize together on the same social mobile platform.