The Formidable Fourth Screen (Mobile)

Chapter 21

Safko, The Social Media Bible

Movie, television, computer and mobile phone: four kinds of screens that have transfixed uncounted people over the years. The many types of social media described in Safko’s book all have the power to transform relationships or give people communications capabilities that they never had before. But mobile phones, because of their ubiquity, portability, and ever-expanding capabilities, may have the most potential of all.

Safko walks through the history of the technology and provides a laundry list of applications and providers. His conclusion: “The mobile telephone is truly social media in a box that includes nearly every social media tool in one device. Today’s smart phone lets you take pictures; upload them to your blog or photo sharing site; send them to friends, colleagues, and customers; or view others’ photographs. And you can do the same with audio, music and video. You can surf a web site, get tweets, and send and receive text messages. You can receive up-to-the-minute news and stock quotes, traffic reports, and weather. You can listen to music, watch a full-length video, have it wake you on time in the morning, give you turn-by-turn directions, let you know the best pasta restaurant closest to you … and even make a call.”

Of all the mobile phone’s capabilities, those that seem (to me) to have the most potential for commercial firms to exploit for marketing include game playing, partly because of the sheer numbers of people who play, and also advertising that takes advantage of the mobile phone user’s location in real time, instantly. Apps that tell you where the nearest and best restaurant, or promise to connect you with single people nearby, hold a lot of promise. That goes for any similar app or ad that provides immediate information to people base on their location.

But my work is not about selling. It is about providing information to people, many of whom are farmers. So for Extension, mobile devices may not have significant potential for marketing. But they DO promise to be revolutionary in sharing important information. Farmers, like young people and several other classes of users, have embraced the mobile phone. For farmers, its mobility is key. They can take their phones to the field (assuming there is service available; and increasingly, mobile providers are filling in the blanks in the coverage maps).

Farmers already use cell phones for tasks such as checking markets and controlling center-pivot irrigation systems. There is much potential for Extension to provide research-based information when and where farmers need it, including some interactive tools to improve their decision-making. One example is a project that I’ve been involved in, along with a faculty member (farm machinery engineer) and a programmer. This project will produce a web-based calculator that sugarbeet farmers can use to help determine the correct settings for their planters. The grower enters information such as the spacing between rows in his field and the plant population he desires at harvest time, and the calculator generates information on seed spacing setting. This simple Java-based calculator will be deployed on several web sites. But it could easily be adapted for mobile devices.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar apps that could greatly enhance farmers’ abilities to make decisions in the field. Could information like this eventually replace workshops that require farmers to spend several days in meeting rooms watching Powerpoint presentations? Time will tell.