Before the smartphone, back in the days when you had to be plugged into a wall to get the internet and you couldn’t watch cat videos on the way to work, business was a lot more fixed to a single location: the office. With a few mere buttons and a flip up screen, mobile phones were for chatting and texting. That was it.
Then along came the smartphone, looking all bright and shiny, offering constant access to emails and the whole internet on top of the usual call/text capabilities. In fact, the arrival of the internet in our pockets was such a successful move that many teens would prefer to lose their pinky finger than their phone.
So how has this affected business people? And how, in 2017 can you keep up with the digital, smartphone-centric world?
Connectivity
More than anything, the smartphone is about connecting people. This isn’t just about calls and texts though, apps like WhatsApp and Messenger are giving people the ability to chat over wifi (or 4G), social apps like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn provide instant social networking and you can, of course, check your emails wherever you are. As a business person this amount of connectivity is at once amazing and overwhelming. You might find that, especially if you work freelance, you can end up spending a lot of what should be your free time attached to your phone.
The best thing to do is to set yourself business hours and to set a ‘do not disturb’ time. You can also set a do not disturb to appear automatically as you drive when your phone connects automatically to the bluetooth in your car. This is ideal for avoiding those situations where an important client is calling and you are distracted as you search for somewhere safe to pull over.
New Advertising Spaces
Of course, now that so many people are spending so much time looking at their phones, advertisers have soon leapt into their new marketing arena. Now you can places ads almost anywhere from social media feeds to apps. However, as this area of advertising and marketing has grown, consumers have become savvier about advertising and many simply scroll past or scroll immediately. This means that advertisers have to be much more considerate of their audience and really target each ad to a small and highly refined group to maximise clicks.
To see how you could make the most of mobile phone marketing, click here.
Endless Opportunities
The rise of the smartphone has enabled lots of people to leave their office bound jobs and take on more flexible working or even become freelance and work on their own terms. There is certainly a correlation between the sense of freedom that the smartphone provides and the increasing number of people choosing to work from home. As the technology develops and connections improve, the smartphone is certainly shaping our working lives as well as our private lives. And who knows where we are headed?