July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Forrester released a new report today on mobile marketing. As it turns out, there’s only one group of mobile customers that marketers want to target.

Big shocker: It’s not the 7 percent of American adults who still refuse to use a mobile phone.

Most American adults now do own cell phones — and it seems sometimes that most kids do too. But for the purposes of mobile marketers, Forrester analyst Melissa Parrish segmented adult American phone owners into five categories:

1. Talkers
   Forget these … they only use their phones as — yikes — phones. Twenty-five percent of American adults, only use their phones to talk.
2. Communicators
   Communicators, who make up another 16 percent of American adults, are a little more adventurous than Talkers. They use newfangled technology like SMS to text each other in addition to talking on their phones.
3. Connectors
   Connectors step it up another notch — but only for work. They talk, text, and use “advanced services” like apps at least once a month, but these Jacks and Jills are dull boys and girls, focused almost entirely on their careers. Can we just say right now that these are BlackBerry owners?
4. Entertainers
   Parrish classifies the second biggest chunk of American adults as “entertainers.” A better description might be “entertained.” This 38 percent of adults in the country use their phones to talk and text, but also to listen to music, watch videos, and play games. Neil Postman would be like, terribly amused.
5. SuperConnecteds
   The biggest chunk of all have both feet firmly planted in the modern world of smartphones and LTE, using apps to network, research, and buy products, check the news and weather, and manage their bank accounts. It’s just even conceivable that they might actually talk on their phones once or twice a day.

(There is some overlap between categories — “for example, SuperConnecteds may also play games at least weekly, and thus also qualify as Entertainers,” Forrester’s Lara Cole explains — which is why the percentages don’t add up to 100.)

According to Parrish, just because 93 percent of Americans own mobile phones, that doesn’t mean they are all valid targets for mobile marketing activities. In fact, quite the opposite. Only the SuperConnecteds — 48 percent of Americans — are the consumers you want to reach.

“These are the users you can engage through innovative and advanced mobile marketing programs,” Parrish says in the report.

Also in the report: how to start mobile marketing, methods of strategic planning, and using an addressability framework (a way of conceptualizing customers based on context, needs, and technology).

photo credit: DavidErickson via photopin cc

National Security Agency director General Keith Alexander promised a crowd of hackers Friday that the NSA does not keep a profile on every American. But one former employee is saying that’s not entirely an honest claim.

“His statement about not keeping track of every American is absolutely true. He missed a few,” said Bill Binney, former official in the NSA, at the Def Con conference in Las Vegas. In other words, the NSA does not keep a profile on every American.

“That’s the kind of word game they play,” Binney said. “There’s absolutely no excuse for him even implying that he’s not collecting all this data.”

Alexander, however, called the question of keeping profiles on every American “absolute nonsense,” during his talk at the same conference. He was the first NSA director to visit Def Con, a conference that has traditionally attracted hackers, feds, and press alike. During the speech, the director appeared in jeans and called a pre-teen hacker codenamed Sci-Fi to the stage to underscore the importance of passing hacking knowledge on to the country’s youth. Much of his talk centered around sharing between the private sector and the government, as well as the need for hackers to join the NSA’s team.

“We need great talent. We don’t pay as high as some of the others. We’re fun to be around,” said Alexander. “Sometimes you guys get a bad rap. From my perspective what you are doing to figure out the vulnerabilities in our systems is absolutely needed.”

His slides ended with a link to www.nsa.gov/careers/dc20, a recruiting site.

Don’t expect Binney to be visiting that site looking for another job with the agency. After leaving, he has since written a number of books about the NSA and the technology he created there, saying the agency built a number of facilities just to house the massive amounts of data it is said to collect on American citizens. On the same theme, James Bamford recently wrote an article for Wired Magazine about a new $2 billion Utah facility being erected so that it can serve a a repository for the NSA’s vast records.

“The reason I left the NSA is because they started spying on everybody in the country,” said Binney. “Unfortunately they took those programs that I built and turned them on you, and I’m sorry for that. I didn’t intend that. But they did that.”

Binney accused the NSA of always intending to spy on Americans, not just falling into the job after 9/11. Indeed, he says that “three-star generals” within the organization approached telecommunications companies to “supply customer data” in February of 2001, seven months before 9/11 occurred. He also said the systems the NSA uses to keep that data are able to identify parties within the communications and then build searchable profiles from there.

Alexander, on the other hand, says the NSA is watched by too many people for it to be able to get away with something like that. He mentions that all of the branches of government are privy to its activities and have access to the data it collects. Under the FISA, or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the NSA must with “minimize” the amount of data it receives if a foreign target is speaking with an American citizen. He further defined that this means “nobody can see” that data “unless a crime has been committed.”

Indeed, Alexander says that those who accuse the NSA of keep dossier on the American people “should know better.”

“Think of that 260 million dossiers, or however many you’d come out [with],” he said. “Let’s see, if you’re trying to maintain those dossiers, I’m not a real good mathematician, but let’s say we have 20,000 people working that. How many files would each of us have to work? I’m not that kind of guy who’s going to work all those files.”