Optism™

We are at the cusp of a worldwide explosion of innovation in mobile payments and commerce. What is unclear right now is how we will use our phones to purchase goods and services next year or five years from now.  Our continued hope is the conversation revolves around consumer convenience, utility and value. Unfortunately, in the U.S. and elsewhere, most of the conversation has been about having the wrong technology, transaction fees, finger-pointing and trying to anoint the mobile payment victor before the mobile payment game has even really started.

How did we get here and how do we go from here?

U.S. Mobile Payment Davids and Goliaths
The mobile payment stakes for America are obviously high. The mobile payment market will grow into a multi-billion dollar business and more importantly, having user attention with their mobile payment app prominently located on the first screen of a consumer's mobile phone. The mobile payment market is currently dominated by Square, Google Wallet, PayPal, LevelUp, ISIS and Starbucks with other emerging players like Apple with their Passbook mobile organizer, and Groupon. Some of these companies are huge while LevelUp is a handful of people in a startup division of mobile gaming company SCVNGR.

U.S. Mobile Buddying Up and Consolidation
ISIS, a joint venture of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile plus financial service companies Amex, Chase and Capital One, launched this week in Austin and Salt Lake City. Google Wallet has 140,000 locations but is not available on phones from the ISIS carriers. Sprint, the other large US mobile carrier is in talks with Softbank and has aligned itself with PayPal which has 3,000 outlets nationwide. Square which has 75,000 locations nationwide has hooked up with Starbucks and their 6,000 coffee outlets. LevelUp, which hasn't aligned itself with anyone yet, is growing in popularity with 6,000 locations due to the fact that it is not charging retailers any transaction fees plus it accepts both NFC and QR Codes for transactions. In response to LevelUp, Square began offering a flat, monthly fee for credit card transactions, versus the steeper 2.75% it had previously charged.

Mobile Payment Wars
The barrage of opinions from all the mobile payment players both in the US and abroad are being shot at a fairly rapid pace.

• Sean Harper, director of product management for payments at Groupon said “Right now, what merchants like the best is the credit card payment. So that's what we're sticking with.”
• A digital wallet leader may emerge later, but “in the short term, there will be a whole bunch of apps,” said PayPal Australia head of mobile business Paul Buchanan. “There isn't one right now that does it all.” Buchanan said he does not view requiring users to flick between multiple digital wallets as an inconvenience.
• “The goal of the digital wallet is to mirror a real wallet,” said Visa Australian country manager Vipin Kalra. “It can hold credit, debit and store loyalty cards and any other payment methods. Kalra disagreed with Buchanan: “At the end of the day, consumers won't want to carry too many wallets.” The winner will be the wallet that is “accepted by all major merchants,” he said. “Open and ubiquitous acceptance are the two key words that will eventually win the battle.”
• Seth Priebatsch of LevelUp realized there was an opportunity in helping merchants devise and run promotional campaigns that show exactly how many people engage with a particular ad, how many are then driven to visit the store and make a purchase, and how many of those return for another visit. “Suddenly the 3% you can save on interchange [transaction fees] is nothing compared to the revenue you can produce by effectively allocating $650 million of ad spend,” he says. “We want to optimize that part of the pie. That’s where we make money, and that's where we want you to make money.”
• According to Dekkers Davidson, head of mobile commerce business at Barclaycard, which offers online credit cards and credit guidance, successful mobile wallet adoption in the U.S. looks like one out four people using such a service in the next five to eight years. Now is the time for experimentation, not red tape or winner-take-all competition. “I liken it to Lewis and Clarke, where we're a 100 miles out of Missouri and looking back over the ridge and saying, 'Ok, where are we going?'” he said. “We're just getting started here.”
• Mike Love, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Mozido, a cloud payment network, said an attitude of “wallet wars” currently prevails.  “Whereas the market is already looking for a mobile wallet victor, the time is ripe now to simply educate consumers on the value of mobile payment systems, not bludgeon the competition.”
• Dodd Roberts, an executive at Merchant Customer Exchange, a confederation of retailers. “To quote [Henry] Ford, 'If I asked consumers what they wanted, they would say a faster horse,'” Roberts said.  “The average consumer doesn't know that their experience engaging in the commerce world could be so much better than it is right now. We are enhancing the experience, not necessarily solving a problem.” 

Mobile Exploration
For a snapshot of what mobile exploration and discovery should look like, listen to The Future of Mobile, a great panel discussion from the World Summit of Innovation and Entrepreneurship hosted by Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe with Michael Phillips, founder of Vlingo (acquired this year by Nuance); Seth Priebatsch, founder of SCVNGR and LevelUp; Walt Doyle, former CEO of Where and now general manager of PayPal Boston; and Doron Reuveni, founder of uTest. The conversation was very collaborative and the panelists polled members of the audience about what they would like to see as part of the evolution of mobile. The topics covered included upcoming improvements in mobile software, mobile transaction via facial recognition, mobile recognition, personalization, augmenting personal interactions, how does the phone connect to my life and how does the phone react to me?

Conclusion
What is our mobile future? Is it a system that relies on legacy payment technology and point of purchase equipment that represents an incremental improvement in convenience? Or is it a system focused on providing consumer value that makes its money on big data that might or might not respect consumer privacy? Will the evolution of mobile payments delight us or depress us? Will the voices of reason win or will the battle be over dollars? Time will tell.

We can only hope we can continue to try to change the mobile payment and mobile wallet conversation.

In August, the United States Federal Trade Commission announced a completed settlement with Facebook regarding privacy violations of its now one billion users. In November of last year, the FTC had issued an eight-count complaint against Facebook saying that it had violated federal law prohibiting unfair and deceptive business practices.

As part of the settlement, Facebook is now barred from making any misrepresentations about the privacy or security of consumers' personal information. Additionally, Facebook to submit to third party audits for the next 20 years and future violations could result in daily fines of up to $16,000. Facebook must provide their users of “clear and prominent notice” and “obtain their express consent before sharing their information beyond their privacy settings.”

According to the FTC, Facebook knowingly made the following privacy violations.

• Facebook promised users that it would not share their personal information with advertisers. It did.
• Facebook changed its website so certain information that users may have designated as private – such as their Friends List – was made public. They didn't warn users that this change was coming, or get their approval in advance.
• Facebook told users they could restrict sharing of data to limited audiences – for example with “Friends Only.” In fact, selecting “Friends Only” did not prevent their information from being shared with third-party applications their friends used.
• Facebook represented that third-party apps that users' installed would have access only to user information that they needed to operate. In fact, the apps could access nearly all of users' personal data – data the apps didn't need.
• Facebook had a “Verified Apps” program & claimed it certified the security of participating apps. It didn't.
• Facebook claimed that when users deleted their accounts, their photos and videos would be inaccessible. But Facebook continued to allow access to the content.

Facebook has stayed completely mum on this topic except for Mark Zuckerberg's blog post from last November where he addressed Facebook's shortcomings in regards to privacy. He acknowledged the mistakes made by Facebook when he stated, “I'm the first to admit that we've made a bunch of mistakes. In particular, I think that a small number of high profile mistakes, like Beacon four years ago and poor execution as we transitioned our privacy model two years ago, have often overshadowed much of the good work we've done.” He does point out that Facebook had already fixed many of the FTC complaints and introduced a number of privacy enhancements including;

• An easier way to select your audience when making a new post or to edit existing posts
• Friend lists that are easier to create and that maintain themselves automatically
• A tool to view your profile as someone else would see it
• An easy way to download all your Facebook data
• A new apps dashboard to control what your apps can access

Certainly, Facebook growth has not suffered from these privacy missteps. But have they sacrificed the trust of their users for big data? We recently wrote about how trust can be a competitive advantage for companies and how honesty and transparency equates to smarter business practices. Users have a right to be suspicious of Facebook based on its actions and all the news about these complaints has certainly raised awareness about how companies are using your data. Facebook created two privacy officer positions, one for products and one for policy. This is certainly a positive step and acknowledges the business importance of respecting the wishes of users.

The settlement does not amount to much of a penalty, as Facebook probably benefited from quickly changing its policy once these privacy violations were discovered. We will see what the future holds for Facebook. Will future privacy violations by Facebook result in a diminishing level of trust leading to a reduction in loyal users? Or will Facebook users be unfazed by these violations and continue to blissfully post away with little regard to where their content and personal information ends up.

One thing is probably certain — next time, the FTC will not be so lenient.

In a fantastic post Mobile Marketing 2015: Rethink Customer Acquisition, Intent Targeting about how brands can either delight or disappoint their customers, Avinash Kaushik outlines his mobile experiences with a few of his favorite brands. Mr. Kaushik outlines 4 mobile success factors that determine whether a brand will continue to grab the “attention of the consumer” in this increasingly on the move world.

Customer Acquisition
With mobile web traffic providing about 20% of all the web traffic, it is criminal that many brands lack a mobile-optimized website. Mr. Kaushik shows how hard it is to book a flight on his mobile using an un-optimized mobile website from Travelocity, Kayak and Hotwire. Meanwhile, he shows how an elegant, mobile-friendly site from Cheap Tickets makes it easy to read the flight information and simple to book his travel. Additionally, once consumers get comfortable with competitor’s mobile-optimized site, a brand could lose their non-mobile traffic too.

Providing Value
As a surfer, Mr. Kaushik was looking for a mobile app that would provide him with surf reports and he came across the SkullCandy surf report app. He downloaded the app and was pleasantly delighted that the app did two things very well; delivered incredible amount of value to the audience and did so with a beautiful design experience. The result was that “SkullCandy gets the greatest gift any company can get from me: Attention.” The SkullCandy app didn’t push its products; it pushed value — what Mr. Kaushik dubs utility marketing. Eventually, he did purchase 6 pairs of SkullCandy headphones, so the utility of the app resulted in sales for SkullCandy.

Customer Data
By providing a rich, mobile experience – brands can learn valuable information about their customers. Where they are and what they like to do? By analyzing their behavior, company can continue to make their apps smarter and provide even more value. More value will drive more attention and ultimately more revenue.

Behavior Targeting
In an example of company that has combined customer acquisition, value provisioning and customer data analysis, Mr. Kaushik recounts how he imported his trip itinerary to New York into his TripIt mobile app. He hadn’t booked his hotel yet, so TripIt sent him an email the next day with a hotel recommendation near his New York office. Just one. Not a list of 30 or 40 hotels. TripIt knew from past itineraries that he typical stayed in the Hilton and they knew his Reward number. So when Mr. Kaushik clicked the link it took him right to the booking site with his reward number already typed in. As he exclaims, OMG! By reducing the friction to make a purchase, TripIt had made Mr. Kaushik’s life easier.

Brands are becoming aware of the power of mobile, but the execution leaves much to be desired. Mobile implementations can just as easily turn away an existing customer as it can bring in a new one. Brands need to be on mobile, since people are using their phones and tablets everywhere with increasing frequency. Whether it’s an app or a mobile-optimized site, companies should be focused on providing value, gaining more insights and then providing consumers even more value.

Just call it a mobile cycle.