Last week, I wrote about the “Good for the Brand” criteria that are starting to emerge from our study of gold-standard mobile executions.  The third and final installment of the scorecard is focused on “Speed to Scale”.  Too many marketers are taking a Field of Dreams mentality—“If you build it, they will come.”  Turns out, they won’t.

Thus, the speed to scale category is about driving broader consumer engagement with our mobile executions to improve the chance of driving real business results.

Here are the four Speed to Scale traits:

• Borrows cultural equity—you can accelerate uptake of your mobile execution by hooking into universally appealing aspects of culture—sports, music, cinema, games, celebrity and the like. These are dimensions of culture that we humans get excited about at a deep, psychological level.  Moreover, we like to talk about them – so let your mobile execution borrow some of that equity and social mojo.  Take a look at how Bing tapped into the 100 greatest songs of each year or even how McDonald’s integrated mobile into its Monopoly promotion.
• Orchestrated with paid and earned media—a good rule of thumb is that you ought to spend the equivalent in budget promoting and distributing your mobile execution as what you spend to develop it.  Likely, that means some combination of paid and earned media to drive trial and use of the execution.  Bing did some great work here with its music app, mentioned above.
• Weaves in viral propellants—what mobile execution is worth its salt without some sort of viral or social component?  Table stakes is ensuring your mobile execution is compatible with social media platforms—in other words, it should be easy for consumers to “like” your execution on Facebook or tweet about it. However, the best mobile executions have viral components woven into their very design.  Retailer H&M has done some clever work here.  Their “swarm to get warm” event triggered a 20% discount off any jacket when 50 consumers checked into an H&M location at one time. The initiative made inviting friends via Facebook easy, but the real viral firepower came in its Groupon-like deal tipping at 50 participants.
• Promoted with “talkable teaching” (if applicable)—let’s face it, some consumers are still learning how to use basic functions, like SMS, on their mobile phones.  Many more have yet to figure out applications like Foursquare or Instagram.  If your mobile execution calls on your target audience to learn something new, this criterion applies to you.  The best mobile executions do this teaching in a “talkable” way—they employ surprise or serendipity to get consumers talking about how to engage with the execution, which stokes other consumers to want to participate, as well. For example, the Orange County Transport Authority (OCTA) deployed squads of staff wearing “Text 4 Next” t-shirts to bus stops around the county to draw attention to its “Text4Next” mobile initiative. OCTA posted instructions on Text4Next at its bus stops, and could have stopped there.  But it realized many of its passengers might not immediately get how to input the text for their particular bus, so the on-site staff helped to clear that up, drew attention to the initiative, and got people talking about it.

That rounds out the beta version of the mobile execution criteria.  Again, we welcome feedback and additional ideas.

MLC members, we’ve created specific scoring criteria (and a point system!) that goes with each criteria, so you can grade your mobile executions against a world-class standard. Email me (pspenner@executiveboard.com) if you’d like an advance copy.  For more resources, access our Mobile Marketing Resource Center.

Related posts:

1. Part II: MLC’s Mobile Execution Scorecard (Beta)
2. Building a Mobile Marketing Scorecard
3. Mobile Marketing for Pharma and Health
4. 10 Nuggets from the Pew Report on Mobile Apps
5. Mobile Marketing at the Point of Purchase