Philip Wride – Social Media Marketer and Community Manager

As has become a regular theme on the blog, this post provides my thoughts following a really engaging and insightful #DigitalSurrey event where Jon Bishop (@jonin60seconds), Head of Social Media at Paypal UK, gave a presentation about mobile and how Paypal see the future. I’ve already highlighted mobile in a number of other blog posts here but this one takes a slightly different stance and focuses on commerce.

Jon spat out some really interesting figures last night, like the $3.3 Bn being spent on mobile advertising, the number of devices people tend to carry around with them or how a mobile operator in Africa is actually the largest bank on the continent. As a Community Manager increasing levels of interaction via mobile (as long as your community is usable on a mobile device) will be something to look at but the commerce side is definitely something to be aware of.

If your users can now comment in your community AND purchase products from your business while they are “on the move” what impact will this have? Will your community evolve to be a sales channel in itself? Let users converse, read reviews and then click straight through on their mobile and enter the purchase flow? If this is the case, what impact does it have on user support? Will Customer Support need to ditch the phones and emails and man the community site in order to respond to issues?

Lots of questions are raised by this and with both mobile usage and ad spend set to increase chances are it’s going to become an area of increasing value / concern for Community Managers. Is it time to create mobile only communities and develop a whole new strategy of how to deal with time poor consumers who want to flit between interaction and purchase at a moments notice?