I took an undergraduate marketing class years ago where we were assigned to promote a product. My campaign solution was considered “a bit unorthodox” for the time, as I built the campaign around word-of-mouth (WOM) techniques. My professor severely downgraded my recommendation, saying that WOM marketing was not a legitimate form of measured marketing. Well, I wonder what he would say now? WOM is everywhere in the form of social media and instant communications tools.

Today’s WOM is not limited to the water cooler, the “after-hours mixer,” or the outdoor BBQ. Helped by technology, WOM, ala “social media,” is everywhere. You know the sites – Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc., not to mention millions of blogs and podcasts. These are not just the “new” and “hip” networking tools, but the “new” and “hip” WOM tools. And we know they work – at least to keep people connected.

These tools provide instant access and communications to people, issues and companies, but the real questions are from a business perspective. Companies want to know how to use social media to generate leads, increase market share and make money – and how to clearly measure social media’s effectiveness doing those three things. And readers, of course, want to ensure that the post is from the person it says it is, and that the message is accurate.

We have known for years that the recommendations of friends, colleagues and others influence our purchase decisions – you know, the “4 out of 5 dentists recommend ...” – but what is emerging now is the importance of the “accuracy” and “source” of this information. You may hear that “4 out of 5 dentists recommend,” but are they the right dentists? And do you trust their recommendation? That’s where, even though these are “new” and “hip” communications and marketing techniques, the basics of truth and accuracy must still prevail.

So, how do YOU participate in the social media world? Comment on this blog to share how you use social media and measure its effectiveness and accuracy. Oh, and by the way, you can now follow tw telecom on twitter at www.twitter.com/tw_telecom. I will weigh in more on this issue next blog.

Let me know what you think and what you’d like me to blog about. Drop me a line at bob.meldrum@twtelecom.com, or call me at +1 303 566 1354.

Bob Meldrum is vice president of corporate communications at tw telecom (TWTC), formerly Time Warner Telecom. Headquartered in Littleton, Colo., tw telecom is a leading provider of voice, Internet and data networking solutions for businesses across the United States. Meldrum has been in the telecommunications industry for 25 years in a variety of marketing and communications assignments. He has worked as a press aide for a U.S. congressman in Washington, D.C., and as a sportscaster.

In 1963, JFK is credited with having observed that, “A rising tide raises all ships.” The evidence is overwhelming that the mobile Internet tide is unprecedented in scale and that it’s coming in fast. Anyone, or any company trying to resist, inevitably will be washed away.

The launch of the Palm Pre this past week has given the industry an opportunity to debate whether the Pre is an iPhone killer. David Pogue, of the New York Times, has described the Sprint-Nextel/Palm pairing as “a pair of sad sack losers team up to defeat the smug athletic golden boy,” going on the suggest that it’s the “Palm Pre vs. iPhone.”

To its credit, Time presents a much more balanced view, pointing out that “Palm doesn't need to steal any of its competitors' customers to thrive.” This seems to be the view being (wisely) espoused by Jon Rubinstein, executive chairman of Palm Inc. as well, who rightly notes, in the same article, that the smartphone market is “large and expanding.”

Rubinstein is right in suggesting that the smartphone market is not zero-sum. Yes, there is a heightened need for device manufacturers to deliver a compelling user experience. Apple has set the bar extremely high, but the fact remains that there are “4 billion mobile phones in the world today, after all, and Palm says only about 10% of them are smart phones. During the next few years, that number may reach 50%. Morgan Stanley Research even described the migration to Internet-connected mobile devices as ‘one of the biggest opportunities in the history of the technology industry.’"

I would argue that Apple will continue to maintain its market share on the platform and device sides even as this market grows for one simple reason: iTunes. None of the other vendors has delivered a seamless content and application management platform from the desktop to the device, coupled with an accepted micro-transaction platform. Microsoft had an opportunity to do so with Windows Media Player, but was so tied up in antitrust litigation, it missed the window of opportunity and was left in the dust.

Apple’s the poster child; the launch of iPhone 3G S makes it even more so. Palm’s the underdog. But what of the other 800 pound gorillas?

“Google: Expect 18 Android Phones by Year’s End,” “BlackBerry Storm 2 could hit as early as June,” “HTC: Touch Pro 2 coming to North America,” “Samsung Unveils World's First 12 Megapixel Camera Phone,” etc.

Throw in Netbooks, gaming devices, cameras and you’ve got a rising tide of mobile data that is unprecedented. Dare I say, it is even Fundy-esque*!

That’s my .02!

Martin Suter

(*Canada’s Bay of Fundy purportedly has the highest tides in the world.)

Martin Suter is vice president of business development at BelAir Networks, the global market share leader in service provider Wi-Fi, enabling 3G data offload for wireless carriers, quad-play for cable operators, and managed WLAN business services. Previously, Martin was the CEO at Cohda Wireless, where he raised the company’s profile and negotiated a licensing deal with a Fortune 100 vendor in its core franchise. Prior to Cohda, he was vice president of business development at MeshNetworks Inc., a classic tech transfer/disruptive technology success story that achieved a major liquidity event for its investors in Q4/2004 with its acquisition by Motorola. Martin also was responsible for building several high profile alliances with and for leading technology companies, including Fujitsu, Microsoft, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, and Teradata. Additionally, Martin has successfully negotiated technology transfer, distribution and/or licensing deals with companies like 3Com, BioChem Pharma, Dow Chemical, Exodus, Fujitsu, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Netscape and Sun.

Dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) has been touted by CLECs for years as a superior bandwidth management tool enabled by packet-based voice services, originally VoATM, and currently VoIP. DBA certainly provides an advantage over the historical channelized voice/data T1 by allowing customers to adjust the amount of bandwidth allocated to voice and data depending on how many simultaneous phone calls are occurring at any point in time. When phones are idle, the entire pipe can be allocated to data services. This “liquid bandwidth” concept is certainly superior to the legacy fixed channels associated with previous technologies using channel banks.

Even an “over the top” or unmanaged VoIP provider such as Vonage offers a somewhat similar customer experience, in that the voice service shares the same fat pipe as the data service. The key difference is a managed voice provider will protect and prioritize the voice traffic end-to-end, while an over the top voice provider offers strictly best effort service and cannot control voice quality for calls passing over another provider’s IP network.

Enter cable telephony, which is rooted in DOCSIS (data over cable system interface specification). Within the DOCSIS specification lies the concept of “service flows” that utilize a set of quality of service parameters that enable the cable network to provide reliable end-to-end voice solutions. Cable telephony uses a concept called DQOS (dynamic quality of service), which reserves network resources upon initiation of a phone call. Each active call resides on its own service flow with resources reserved on a per call basis. Once the call is complete, the service flow is dynamically torn down.

It’s important to note that data and Internet traffic reside on their own service flows with different quality of service parameters that are completely separate from voice. The key point here is that since voice and data populate separate service flows, voice utilization has absolutely no impact on the data speeds. Bandwidth and quality of service needs are determined on a per service flow basis.

So what does this mean to a customer? Consider again how DBA works. Assume that a customer has a fixed pipe size, say a T1. If 12 voice lines are off hook at the same time, in theory, the customer’s data speed is reduced by more than 50 percent. With cable technology, the 12 simultaneous voice conversations have no bearing on data throughput, since each voice call resides on its own service flow completely independent of the data service flow. Some CLECs are forced to implement voice compression to squeeze all the voice lines into a fixed amount of bandwidth shared with data services. Oftentimes this comes at a cost to voice quality. Voice compression to solve the bandwidth problem is not needed in a cable architecture since, again, bandwidth for voice can be brought up and torn down on an as-needed basis without affecting the data transmission speeds.

Fast forward with this thought process and consider the additional advantages of emerging technologies. First, DOCSIS 3.0 has already begun to provide a meteoric increase in bandwidth available to customers. Who cares about bonding a few T1s when the cablecos have already begun offering 50 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream? Second, how well will the CLECs support video telephony? In a cable network, this will typically require a service flow for the audio and another service flow for video. Again, the bandwidth is brought up and torn down as needed.

I have been asked numerous times by sales executives why we don’t support an integrated T1 on our cable network. My answer is simple: understand the technology advantages cable telephony provides, explain those advantages to the customer and we will win the deal every time.

Charles Scarborough is director of product development for Cox Business Services. His team is responsible for leading the definition, development, and implementation of products for Cox’s commercial customers. Since joining Cox in 2001, he has helped launch a full commercial product portfolio including offerings such as: Cox Optical Internet; VPN Services; Ethernet Services, and Voice services to new markets via circuit switched platforms and VoIP technologies. Prior to joining Cox, he served for seven years in a variety of management roles with MCI Communications.