You're Going to Use WHAT?

LinkedIn Questions is always a great source of information and discussions.

Nicolaas Pereboom recently asked about the use of mobile devices to conduct Audience Response. As you would expect, we've gone through all of the available research re: mobile device use in the events industry. From the technical to device market penetration, to audience receptivity/resisdence to the idea and so forth.

ALL of our research indicates that real penetration and real ARS uses on ubiquitous devices, such as mobile phones, just isn't there yet.

In response to Nicolaas' question, David shared a bit of our expertise.

Nicolaas: If you do business in convention centers you'll appreciate many of them are underground and often have spotty coverage for cellphones even when the hotel has installed cellular repeaters.

If you can get past the possible coverage issues, next up are people that scoff at the fees if they don't own an all you can eat text plan. We think this will become less and less of an issue but it might be another few years before we see the convergence of fees not being an issue and coverage being acceptable.

So covering costs and coverage are easy enough to monitor... next consider the demographics of your audience. If you are supporting a wired group of techno-wizards - then you are good to go. But if your audience is a mixed bag of the savvy and not, then your changes of success start to slide.

This is why we like a hybrid model that can accept data from both cellphones and ARS devices at the same time. You choose your flavor and everyone can be satisfied.