Mobile technology: A clear tool for communicating women’s sports

Photo credit: Kottkegae.appspot.com

This blog post is part of my ongoing weekly series discussing the role of social media and female athletics. My latest reading is  The Politics-To-Go Handbook: A Guide to Using Mobile Technology in Politics, published by the Insitute for Politics, Democracy & The Internet and George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management. In addition, I read through MobileActive.org.

My latest interest in women’s sports has to do with mobile technology (i.e., cell phones) and the opportunity we as athletes and an industry have to communicate with each other using this platform.

First, a recap of my reading. The Politics-To-Go Handbook is a good, quick read for someone who wants to understand the basics of social communication with cell phones – I highly recommend it. Going in, to be honest, I didn’t really know all that much. Now, I feel like I have a solid foundation, at least as far as strategy is concerned. The tactical end of mobile technology education can be adopted with some training, and also regularly reading sites like MobileActive.org.

Although the Politics To-Go packet weighs heavily upon advocacy uses of the technology, it also touches on citizen journalism, the global use/impact of mobile technology, and opportunities for building localized communities of support. I think this is a valuable perspective that needs to be grasped by the women’s sports industry. This posts exposes some of the highlights.

1) Basic premise: mobile technology provides context to conversations.

Photo credit: NDS3.nokia.com

Mobile technology is better than than regular phones because they provide context to conversations, such as “geographical location, mood, presences, status, surroundings and mindset.” (Ch. 10)

2) Mobile technology is HUGE on a global level, and comparitively small in the U.S.

Mobile technology has taken off. Nielsen reports, “Mobile phone penetration is approaching 50% globally, with some mature markets surpassing 100% penetration.”

The Politics To-Go Handbook says that mobile technology is just a small piece of that pie, with the U.S. representing only 12 percent of the worldwide market share of subscribers. (p. 9)

Authors like McKenzie Wark (Ch. 10 of Politics-To-Go) attribute this number to the amount of control that mobile communication companies have upon users and their conversations/use of the phone (very different than the Internet, which isn’t controlled at all). For example, in some countries texting and Internet use is completely free. In other countries, mobile users can make purchases by scanning their cell phone at a check-out counter. (ch. 1)

3) Broadband technology is also getting bigger.

Nielsen also reports that “Mobile broadband subscribership has topped 200 million worldwide.”  The recent growth is astounding, particularly with the coming about of 3G (and now 4G) networks (these networks can handle voice, text, Internet, video and audio simultaneously).  In July 2009, Nielson reported, “Web visitors using a mobile device increased 34 percent year-over-year, from 42.5 million mobile Web visitors in July 2008 to 56.9 million in July 2009.”

4) Cell phones are increasingly used by the youth, women and seniors.

In the same study discussed above, Nielson also reported (July 2009) that “Overall, year-over-year growth among the 13-17 and 65+ age groups outpaced the growth of the total mobile Web audience, with a youth increase of 45 percent and seniors surging upwards 67 percent in July.”

In particular, “the growth of female visitors outpaced the growth of male visitors…,” “with women increasing 43 percent YOY as compared to a 26 percent growth among men.”

This, as you can see, is a huge opportunity to integrate female athletes in to mobile conversations. Because the sale of mobile phones is so popular, I think it’s also a great marketing opportunity for female athletes to become engaged in promoting phones (and further communication about sports) to young girls, in a non-sexualized way (which is important).

Photo credit: Blog.Nielson.com

5)  Mobile technology can build support for causes.

This is where the women’s sports industry can learn a great deal from digital political advocacy. Joichi Ito wrote in Emergent Democracy,

“If information technology could provide tools for citizens in a democracy to participate and interact in a way that facilitates self-organization and emergent understanding, we can evolve to a democracy that would resolve complexity and scalability issues associated iwth democratic governance.”

It’s pretty simple. If you build technology that allows people to get involved in their own way and communicate with others also involved, you’re going to create a community that is successful in resolving many of the issues we in the female in the sports industry currently face (such as lack communication with/between each other).

Klein, the author of chapter 7 and VP of Development at Connected Ventures says, “Technology goes hand in hand with sweeping changes, even revolution.” So if a change in female athletics is really going to occur, it will involve social media and new mobile, broadband technologies. Not because they’re magical, but because that’s simply how we’re communicating as a society right now.

 6) Mobile technology engages people on local levels.

Photo credit: TechCrunch.com

I’m a firm believer that the success of women’s sports in terms of media coverage will depend largely upon the willingness of athletes, and women and men who support female athletes taking the responsibility of covering women’s sports on the local level. Mobile technology can help build that exact community.

Tools such as video blogs, podcasting and moblogging (mobile blogging) will be critical to our success in completing this task. Good news is tools to take advantage of these tactics are readily avialable for free online, such as Utterli, which allows you to do a podcast interview directly from your phone and publish it immediately to the Internet. Similarly, Ustream allows you to broadcast and store video publicly (Candace Parker is taking advantage of this as a way to connect with her fans).

In addition, Flickr (photo sharing platform) allows you to upload and tag pictures based upon geographic location, directly from your phone or computer to the Internet. Also, pictures published on Flickr have an opportunity to get picked up by Getty (in which case you’d make money if your pictures were sold). Think about the potential for localized groups of individuals covering female athletes performances to put pressure on traditional media to cover these events.

In addition, an SMS (text messages) added to a campaign or communications program can help keep users aware and engaged in real-time. SMS is the leading way to provide news in the quickest way. So as we begin to start these localized groups of people covering women’s sports, we need to keep them engaged. This guide to setting up an SMS system on MobileActive.org can help do just that.

In conclusion, the opportunities for the female athletic industry to take advantage of mobile technology are vast. If we watch our digitial political strategists, we can learn a lot about building a community which, quite literally, can change the way the world views female athletes.