Ring, Ring: Is Anyone Home?

With the advent of having a cell phone in not every household, but seemingly in every hand in every household in the U.S., the accompanying ringtones and wildfire of personalizations that come with such a viral spread of communication really speak for themselves.

Nielsen Ringscan broke out some US ringtone figures. There were 220 million ringtone purchases in 2007 resulting in sales of $567 million, and ringtone sales spiked 22 percent in the last week of the year (mocoNews.net, January 2008).

In corporate culture even, ringtones seem to say something about a person and evoke immediate reactions from not only the people around you but the owner of the phone himself or herself. For instance, I knew someone who set a personal ringtone to play the Darth Vader introduction every time their boss called in. Now what emotion do you think that evoked?

Being in the “IT” field, we often run the middle line between managing growing fleets of disparate mobile devices but offering some level of flexibility to our customer. In larger organizations this can indeed be tough, but are the small things life like ringtones important morale boosters that help deliver on your bottom line?

That’s hard to say, but I have a BlackBerry and I would share with you that I relish the feeling of connectedness that a mobile PDA device gives me. It allows me to the flexibility to know when I need to react and when I can sit back and let someone else handle the ‘heat’ for awhile.

Due to a recent hardware failure, I had to replace my BlackBerry. First, Verizon Wireless was quite nice about that portion of things and even apologized for the inconvenience. Of course, what we are paying a month for our corporate account, they should bend over backwards – but I digress…

Needless to say, I had to go through and set up my calling profiles again, how the phone behaves when in vibrate mode, when in my holster, etc. I must say this is a rather nice feature I have not seen on other devices. I decided to try this little e-mail notification file called “sonar”.

It sounded just like the name, like a submarine pinging something underwater. After awhile, the tone began to really grate on me. I don’t really know why, but I began to detest getting e-mails on my BlackBerry. Last night I switched to a much more upbeat sound – and now… I smile a little smirk when an e-mail comes in.

Does someone love me that much to send me an e-mail? Well, I wouldn’t go that far – I’m not that desperate! It’s just another blanket invitation to another seminar on virtualization or disaster recovery, or the bestest (yes that’s right – I said best-est) MPS program just launched to help make my company a ton of money!

Oh well, I can’t tell you my ring tone will help make the company more profitable or me more excited than I already am to check an e-mail, but there is some truth in “wanting” to be there in mind and body.

Someone’s calling, are you there?

So what gets you excited? What small thing, be it a ringtone or something else, gets you motivated to do what you do?

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.