Nokia on Apple: "A Fruit Confused"

Staying on the subject of Nokia, I was delighted to read this post by Mark Squires on the Nokia Conversations blog.

Mark is Director of Social Media Communications for the company. He and his colleague Ray are amongst the finest in the industry. They run a disciplined well-oiled machine that was, for quite a while, entirely misunderstood by Nokia’s High Command. I swear some of Nokia’s senior executives thought social media was all about hanging around on Facebook wasting time.

In recent times though, the might that is Nokia has definitely bought the Social Media T-Shirt and recognised that the influence from Mark’s team is, in some quarters, significantly more important than banging out a press release.

I’m absolutely delighted to see Mark’s response to Steve Jobs last week. If you recall, Jobs explained to a fawning audience that since Apple makes quite a lot of Notebooks that are ‘mobil’ (“mobile”), and since Apple makes quite a bit of revenue, well then… that makes Apple the largest ‘mobil’ company on the planet.

Mark was having none of it:

The difference between the two companies [Nokia and Apple] is even larger if you use the more common measure: the number of devices sold. By that comparison, Nokia has been the largest mobile devices company in the world for a dozen consecutive years.

I think it’s about time we saw more of this type of action from Nokia. Sitting hiding behind the parapets isn’t good enough. The company is hugely powerful, hugely capable but generally afraid at getting stuck into the online debate. That’s where it matters though, particularly in the context of influencing the geeks, the opinion-formers and (crucially) the developers considering adopting the Nokia/Symbian/Maemo platform.

You only have to look at the trackbacks on Mark’s post to see the effect his post has had across the marketplace with hundreds of publications picking it up.

Kudos to Mark for getting the post up and out. More please!