Mobile. It’s hot. You’ve seen amazing statistics like how marketers will spend seven billion dollars this year on mobile ads, up 55 percent over last year, or how mobile Internet will take over desktop Internet usage by 2014. My favorite: 75 percent of Americans bring their phones to the bathroom. My second favorite: By the end of this year, there will be more mobile devices on Earth than people (http://www.digby.com/ mobile-statistics/). Yes, mobile is hot. It’s everywhere, it’s growing, and it’s evolving everyday. We’re all connected to it. We understand it. We get it. We use it... and we love it. But most importantly, we need it, especially those of us with franchised businesses that sell products or services to people just like ourselves, who, I’ll dare say, cannot live without our phones. What would you do if you were stranded in a parking lot and didn’t know how to jump start a car? Or if you were out with your friends looking for the nearest pizza joint with the highest customer ratings? My first (and only) instinct would be to look for my iPhone. And if it wasn’t charged, I’d feel hopelessly devastated (seriously). Our phone has become a pandora’s box filled with answers and solutions to life. And if you disagree, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll become a part of this evolutionary reality. Last year, the buzz was all about social media. Facebook went public, Instagram set records, and Pinterest became an addiction. We became obsessed with words like “engagement”, and not having
a presence on Twitter became almost as embarrassing as still having one on MySpace. We loved social media so much that, according to friends of mine who are marriage counselors, over a third of their clients have come in with relationship problems triggered by social media, like flirting with an ex on Facebook. Despite social media’s popularity, 2012 ended with even more buzz about mobile. Nobody could avoid talking about mobile because of the simple fact that everyone on this planet wanted or owned a mobile device. Or two. The debate over whether or not we need mobile device is no longer relevant. People look at you differently if you don’t have a cell phone number. We get super excited about 4G LTE. We panic when we lose cell reception. We exercise with our phones. We expect our phones to wake us up. We look forward to our next upgrade; we get devastated when our favorite apps like Google Maps gets
replaced. And we visit our doctors to treat repetitive stress injuries from spending an unhealthy amount of time typing with our thumbs (or maybe that has happened only to me, on two occasions). Our need for mobile has become so strong that it has made Apple, a computer company, the most popular phone vendor in the United States. Yes, that’s how much we love mobile, and that love is only getting stronger. Mobile has become very important because we no longer use it only for communicating with each other. Mobile technology has evolved into something significantly more important. Mobile devices have become our perfectlycompatible digital personas through which we express our feelings, find information we need, buy gifts for one another, look for people to date, spend hours attacking green-colored pigs with multiples species of birds, and shoot millions of pictures
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