Mobile Marketing & Commerce

            Month ten was a course entitled Mobile Marketing & Commerce.  I was very surprised by the diverse results in our Leadership Portfolio assignment for this class.  Our requirements were to create a mobile survey, which we would ask a number of people from different backgrounds, age groups, gender, lifestyles, geographic location, etc. to participate in.  The objective was to determine what each of the subjects surveyed think about today’s mobile technology and where they see it going in the future.  I surveyed five people with an age range of 23-54 years old.  A few of the questions asked in the survey include “how do you feel about mobile advertising overall”, “what do you primarily use your cell phone for”, “are you comfortable with personal information being shared”, “will increasing mobile functionality harm future generations”, “how many hours in a day do you use your cell phones”, “where do you see cell phones going from here”, etc.  Some questions prompted everyone giving similar if not exactly the same answers.  Others prompted completely dissimilar answers.  Interestingly however, some people seemed to share more consistent similarities with one or two people throughout the survey while remaining consistently dissimilar to the rest.  These relationships go beyond the quantitative data in the survey.

            The most interesting thing I took from exercise was the improvement made in my problem solving skills.  At first, I just saw random answers to my questions on the page.  However, as I continued to review the data over and over again, I was eventually able to use the quantitative results from the survey to decipher certain qualitative similarities and relationships.  Because I personally knew the five subjects surveyed, I know what they do for a living, whether they live in a city or a suburb, their age, what they do for entertainment, how technologically savvy they are, etc.  Since one of my strengths is people, especially in terms of psychology and sociology, I was able to make correlations in the data based on a number of different factors these people either share in common in their life or do not share in common.  In other words, this Leadership Portfolio really helped me to look past what is sitting in front of me and not to always analyze the information at face value, because you may be overlooking a major piece to the puzzle.