EXERCISES:

Special demonstration of the unique impact of mobile media, courtesy of Will Sullivan (@journerdism)

Then…   How mobile-friendly is your site?

• Check out your site on a mobile phone’s web browser (home page, and specific story). How much zooming, scrolling, etc. is required just to see what’s going on?
• Have your neighbor bring up your site on their phone.
• If you don’t have a web-enabled phone, check out your site on a mobile device or on the Opera Mini simulator. (Note: On a computer, sometimes the simulator doesn’t serve up the mobile site, so checking from a mobile device is more reliable.)
• For comparison, check out CNN.com, the Spokesman Review, MLB.com, West Seattle Blog, MyVeronaNJ.com, MyEverettNews.com on a mobile device. How are these mobile sites different from yours?

Hyperlocal and mobile: the big picture

Brand new report from Pew: Nearly half of American adults get some local news/info via mobile devices. So far they’re mostly getting weather, breaking news, restaurant/business info, traffic updates on their phones. So far they’re not visiting news sites or apps of any kind very much.

Why? My opinion: Most mobile news offerings are shovelware and not action-oriented. Also, they aren’t easy to use or navigate on a mobile browser. In a mobile context that makes them inherently second-rate.

The good news for hyperlocal: Independent community news/info sites may be especially well suited to do mobile news much better than major legacy news brands or centrally operated networks such as Patch or the Huffington Post. More nimble, little/no bureaucracy, not burdened by unwieldy systems they don’t control. Also, they’re closer to the community, where it’s easier to see the local nuances in the mobile market.

PROBLEM: Most people in the news business (any part of it, including hyperlocal) aren’t yet very comfortable/familiar with using the range of mobile media and channels. That limits their ability to see and exploit emerging opportunities. We tend to create the kind of media we’re used to using — going mobile requires expanding your personal media usage skills and tastes.

ACTION STEP 1: Start doing as much as you can with your phone. For everything, not just for news. Use every mobile channel you can. See what you like and don’t. Ask people in your community what they do with their mobile devices — all kinds of phones and other devices, including cheap non-smartphones.

Grab your friend’s phones and play with them. (OK, ask them first…) Walk into mobile stores and demo the hell out of the features on new phones — not just the expensive ones. If you own a smartphone, also buy a cheap feature phone (prepaid or month-to-month) to see how the other half lives.

Your goal: Get a sense of how mobile tech, media, and communication are augmenting people’s lives. Ultimately you want your news/info to be woven into the fabric of their lives, accessible wherever they are. Mobile helps your venue become more like the air your community breathes, not a special place they visit.

Look for revenue options! Sign up for text alerts, esp. fr local businesses. Look for other mobile ad/revenue strategies. Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t suit your personal taste. How do these strategies function, and how do they pay off? Most news sites, are doing a terrible job of mobile ads — and most hyperlocal sites don’t seem to be doing anything w/ mobile ads/revenue streams.

What is mobile good for?

The main problem with most mobile news offerings is that they are shovelware. With the exception of e-reader apps, music players and YouTube, cell phones are not great publishing or media consumption platforms.

Use mobile for what it’s best at: People like to use their phones to DO stuff.

(CAVEAT: Tablets aren’t really “mobile,” since they’re mostly a lean-back experience. In contrast, cell phones are all about activity and entertainment on the go. They’re what you grab when you need something right away, or have a few spare moments.)

The best mobile offerings are services, not content. Don’t expect people to read long articles on their cell phones. So figure out what kinds of services your content can offer or support.

Consider what they could use on the go, what they’d enjoy, what would give them an edge, what they might want to note to check out later, what they might want to share. Then focus on delivering just that much via mobile. And make sure your mobile users know exactly where to turn to find the fuller version of anything that caught their attention.

Mobile is a way to foster ambient awareness and value in your community. Mobile makes it easy for people to encounter your content, benefit from it, and share it — although their cell phone probably won’t be where they settle in for a deep dive on a topic you’ve covered.

Let people use their phones to talk back to you or contribute. Texting, e-mail, sharing photos, and social media are consistently most popular non-voice cell phone activities on any kind of phone. Those are all two-way (at least) communication channels. Consider how your mobile offerings can support or encourage two-way interaction, in ways that are friendly and fun for mobile users.

Current U.S. mobile landscape:

1. The web is quickly becoming mostly mobile by default. According to IDC, by 2015, most U.S. internet access will happen from mobile devices. (Gartner predictedthat globally this tipping point will happen in 2013)
2. About 77% of all Americans (all ages, from infants to centenarians) own cell phones. (comScore, US population clock)
3. About 35% of these phones are smartphones (comScore, July 2011 figures).
4. About 65% are “feature phones” — all of which can do text messaging (which requires no data plan), and many of which have e-mail and web access (albeit generally slow and clunky). The only thing feature phones cannot do is run sophisticated apps (but they can run simple apps). So the feature/smartphone line is blurry, and it’s getting blurrier.
5. By late 2012 most U.S. handsets in use will be smartphones (based on comScore data). But the cheaper/simpler end of the mobile market will probably always be the largest part of the market in most communities. So be ready to serve the phones that most people in your community have at any given time.

How Americans use their cell phones:

• Around 92% of smartphone owners (60% of feature phone owners) send/receive text messages (Pew. Nielsen and comScoreoffered different estimates.)
• Mobile users spend far more time doing e-mail than Facebook on their phones (Pew, Nielsen)
• Feature phone web browsers are improving. Opera Mini — which looks pretty nice — now comes preinstalled on (or can be downloaded to) almost any U.S, feature phone. It is currently the #2 mobile browser, behind the iPhone’s mobile Safari, and ahead of the Android stock browser. (NetMarketShare) In a year most feature phones will probably come with web browsers that look more like Opera Mini, so that’s a good target to design for.
• Right now, most web sites suck on most mobile devices. In fact, usability experts at Nielsen Norman Group recommend that sites don’t bother supporting feature phone access. That may may sense for e-commerce — but probably not for hyperlocal news/community sites.

Most hyperlocal and community sites are NOT friendly to mobile users. Seriously, I checked them out from the conference participant list. They’re not even mobile friendly for smartphone users — too much pinching, zooming, scrolling required for easy navigation. Basic reason: their web sites lack:

• A mobile-optimized theme
• Server-side mobile auto-detection, which figures out if a visitor is on a mobile device and routes them accordingly to an appropriate theme.

This can be relatively easy to fix — especially if your site runs on WordPress. (Examples of free, nice looking WordPress mobile themes)

Action step: Implement a mobile-friendly theme for your site (home page and story/other pages).

Yeah, I know I say your mobile presence is not all about your web site. But your mobile web site will be the core of your mobile strategy, because it’s something people can link to and access via search engines. Ultimately it may not be how mobile users encounter you most often, but it absolutely needs to be there to provide value to back up your engagement.

If your site is based on a popular content management system for which many people have created themes (like WordPress), then there are probably already many simple mobile themes to choose from. You can customize these.

Otherwise, it’s worth getting a web designer to develop a simple mobile theme for your site. Here’s some free basic mobile web design advice, and for $300 you can get all the gory details.

Or you can use reformatting services like Mobify.me, as long as they appear under your domain, and you can track the traffic, and you have options to deliver your own ads (or get a really good cut of what they serve up).

Once your site is mobile-friendly, you’ll be better positioned to leverage the power of recommendations to build your brand.

One of the most popular things that people do online is share links — by social media, e-mail, instant messaging, and SMS. New Gallup research shows that most people’s brand preferences are strongly influenced by personal recommendations, and digital media (including mobile) amplifies this effect.

When you get a link from someone you know, that’s a personal recommendation — but if that link doesn’t work on the device you have handy, that won’t help anyone.

Nearly 40% of social media users access social media content from their mobile phone (Nielsen). Many/most of those phones are feature phones — and you want to make sure that if people get a link to your site, they’ll be able to display that page on any mobile device.

EXTRA RESOURCES

These came up in my session, so here they are for your perusal

Mobile Marketing Association mobile advertising guidelines

Our online audience suggested some resources for mobile & Drupal

• Digett: Drupal Mobile: How to create a Drupal mobile site without using Mobile Tools
• Jquery mobile framework
  
• Drupal mobile tools

The Filter Bubble, by Eli Pariser

Further steps in your mobile strategy

OK, there’s no way can I cover all of this stuff in one session. But I’m ready to discuss any of these that interest Block by Block attendees (either in the session, or buy me a drink later):

Do some basic local mobile market research. Don’t guess about what phones people are using: ask.

Experiment with SMS alerts/services/polls. Twilio is a versatile and affordable tool to start experimenting with on a small scale (services up to a thousand or so subscribers). If you want to grow beyond that, you may need access to a shortcode — which can be cheap (with risks), or rock solid (but costly)

Back-end technology. Some content management systems (especially Drupal) make experimenting with mobile more difficult, unless you’re a skilled developer. When you make CMS choices, favor tools that support mobile experimentation well.

WordPress is a good bet for less-technical site operators. Also consider third-party services — it doesn’t all have to be about your web site, you can have more than one digital presence. But you will need to learn more about several kinds of technology to go mobile, including telephony. Small-scale experiments are great learning tools.

Good skills/tools to learn for mobile: HTML5, CSS (including media queries), Javascript, Twilio,

Tablets and iPod Touch-like devices. Small markets for now, and probably not the best place to focus on, even though they look really cool. Wait a year or two before your seriously focus on them.

But there are some interesting developments to watch with these devices, especially if the new Kindle Fire has a decent web browser and really takes off with consumers.

There’s finally an Android answer to the iPod Touch: The Samsung Galaxy Player, coming out in October. Reasonably priced. Wifi only. Basically an Android phone without the phone. We’ll see more of these devices, especially if U.S. wireless carriers keep insisting on two-year contracts and steep early termination fees for decent smartphones.

Having a good mobile site will position you well for the tablet market — although this device would merit its own theme because it has unique size and interface considerations.

E-readers and e-books. Excellent secondary market for your content, with a proven revenue model. Robert Niles has written a lot about e-books in OJR. Also, check out the Bookbrewer platform for repackaging web or blog content as e-books and getting them into the major markets.

Start geotagging all your content with latitude/longitude info, and make sure this gets included as an element in your RSS feed. This will open opportunities to mashup/integrate your content with locative services, which will be getting more popular on mobile devices in coming years. At that point, if you have an archive of geotagged content, you’ll be ahead of the game.

Mobile web apps are an option to offer interactivity directly through the browser. Or look for mobile web apps to package as features within your site. Apps.USA.gov offers several examples that run on all phones.

Let people phone it in! Capture phoned-in audio for comments, etc. Evoca offers some affordable solutions.

Use print to complement/push mobile. This could involve publishing your own print supplement, distributing stickers/fliers/postcards with QR codes, etc.

Mobile-friendly e-mail newsletter/alerts. Opt-in only, no graphics, short versions of links.

Smartphone apps. Probably not worth the expense/effort for most hyperlocal sites at this point. A good mobile web site will get you farther.

The main problem with smartphone apps is that you have to do a separate software development project for each platform you want to serve, and maintain that platform, and make sure your content gets into the app correctly.

And on the user’s side, in order to get value from a smartphone app they must:

• Already know and like your brand enough to want to get your app
• Have the right kind of phone
• Download and install it your app
• Use it regularly. (The vast majority of apps get opened just a handful of times LINK)

That’s a lot of hurdles, compared to just opening a page on your site in their mobile web browser — especially when someone they know sends them a link to your site.

But I’ve been logging a lot of cool mobile stuff for CNN.com Tech. So here’s a quick list of what I’ve been covering there…

My picks for the most significant posts:

• March 4: Why Amazon would be smart to give away the Kindle. I read some posts advocating this move, so I pulled them together and added my own thoughts. This post attracted a surprising amount of attention — I’ll have to revisit it.
• March 16: Local news, information are going mobile big time, Pew survey says. This post didn’t get a ton of attention or comment, but because I’m a cofounder of Oakland Local, this topic was near and dear to me. This also presented an important opportunity to discuss the local impact of the mobile digital divide.
• April 5: Facebook reaching out to feature-phone users. Facebook’s upgrade and consolidation of its mobile web sites is its second recent major move to improve access and user experience for feature phone users. Smart strategy for this company. I explain why.
• March 28: BlackBerry’s PlayBook tablet may face uphill battle. Oh yeah, this post brought me tremendous grief from BlackBerry fanboys and trolls. To be fair, I should have clarified that with this device, BlackBerry will debut the QNX operating system it just acquired. But this is targeted as a consumer device — and among consumers, the BlackBerry brand has a pretty bad rep for user experience. It’s a great brand for messaging-minded business users, but the consumer market is different. I think BlackBerry will have to do a hell of a lot of expensive marketing to communicate about the new OS and overcome that preconception. Furthermore, I expect that most consumers will misunderstand how the Playbook will really handle Android apps, and may end up feeling misled. We’ll see. I plan to talk to some developers of Android apps to see how eager they are to port to the Playbook.

My other recent CNN.com Tech posts:

• April 5: Boost Mobile scores highest among no-contract phone owners. I pay a fortune for my Verizon Droid Incredible plan, but when I bought it last summer there weren’t any good Android options on month-to-month no-contract plans. That’s starting to change, and when I upgrade my phone when this contract runs out, I’ll probably go this route. Useful to see how customers are rating these carriers.
• March 30: Android is the Windows of mobile platforms. I wrote this soon after my controversial BlackBerry Playbook post, so I was a bit fed up with tech fanboys and trolls. I’d been meaning to write this post for awhile, but I’ve gotta admit — I decided to go for it in part as a “bring it on!” to the tech trolls. But it attracted relatively civil comments and little criticism. The best laid plans…
• March 29: Mobile banking is booming, survey shows. I was especially intrigued by this finding: a quarter of smartphone users reported, “Accessing my account through my cell phone is too slow.” Yet only 9% of feature phone users had the same complaint! Really different expectations among these two user groups. I think that’s worth further research.
• March 21: Only one in four mobile apps engages user, study says. The results of this research didn’t surprise me — but it’s yet another reason why you should only build a native app when that’s the best way to offer a compelling experience. For the vast majority of content offerings, the mobile web is a better strategy.
• March 21: More apps may be coming for feature phones, too. Facebook bought Snaptu, a major platform for Java-based apps that run on most feature phones. I think this has wider implications — including that in the long run, as smartphone browsers improve, apps might become more of a feature phone phenomenon. Will keep an eye on this.
• March 18: What a Sprint-T-Mobile merger could mean for wireless users. Yeah, like a lot of tech reporters, I was on the wrong track here. While I was researching it, I remember thinking “Why the hell would a CDMA-based carrier buy a GSM network? That’d be a tech nightmare!” Wish I’d followed that thought further. A couple of weeks later, news broke that AT&T is trying to buy T-Mobile. Oh well.
• March 18: Google Maps’ Android app now routes drivers around traffic. As a car-free person, living in an urban area, I want this for biking directions. Maybe later…
• March 14: Adobe caves in to Apple: fewer blank spots on i-devices?. Yes, anytime I mention Apple, it gets a ton of attention and criticism. Couple that with a mention of a long-standing and confusing tech industry controversy, and it’s a flamefest. Despite the high troll potential, I’ll probably revisit this at some point. I will say that Adobe’s PR has been very constructive in how they’ve been reaching out to me on this.
• March 4: More U.S. consumers buying Android phones than iPhones, BlackBerrys. New data from Nielsen showed that slightly more U.S. consumers are buying Android phones than any other type of smartphone. Yeah, this post brought out lots of tech fanboys and trolls.
• Feb 28: Immigrants more inclined to use tablet computers, study shows. This was a small study, but an interesting one. Possible explanation suggested by a commenter: “The reason for the disparity is because a tablet can boot up a keyboard in any language you want — while on a laptop you’re stuck with a QWERTY keyboard.”
• Feb 25: Android users wait and wait for OS updates. At the time, owners of the Samsung Captivate (AT&T’s flavor of the Galaxy S series) were still waiting to get updated to Android 2.2 (Froyo). They’ve since gotten that update — but I learned that Samsung has a pretty bad repuation regarding firmware updates. Bear that in mind if you’re shopping for a smartphone
• Feb 18: One-third of U.S. households lack broadband Web access. About the newNational Broadband Map, and a major year-end roundup report on the wireless industry, both from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

My key takeaways…

In my CNN.com Tech story, ComScore on the Future of Mobile, I noted that the big context is that as of December 2010, feature phones still comprise the vast majority (73%) of current US cell phone handsets in use.

Most other tech news outlets are crying triumphantly about how smartphones have passed the 25% penetration mark, and that is indeed siginificant — but in terms of what’s out in the field right now, feature phones still dominate the field.

I think that’s likely to remain the case for a few years yet, unless carriers quickly find ways to make the cost of smartphones and their data plans more attractive to the majority of cell users — and carriers don’t have much incentive to do that, especially since they need lots of money to build out their LTE networks to keep pace with the devices already sold.

Also, if and when smartphones do become the majority, I expect that for a long time a big part of the market will still simply prefer less complicated phones. So the low end of the mobile market will always be huge, and important.

Over on KDMC, I wrote: Mobile ads poised to hit big—are you ready? One interesting prediction for 2011 in ComScore’s report was that mobile ads will really take off in 2011. This means that right now is a key time for news organizations and other publishers to get a jump on the mobile market. And (due to the point I just mentioned above about current smartphone v. feature phone market penetration), this means including feature phones in your mobile ad strategy.

I offer five tips for news publishers about how to get a mobile strategy together, and prepare their site and ad delivery systems and sales.

See: Three generational gadget trends for news orgs to watch

The trends & implications I saw are:

1. Picture-taking is the most popular non-voice cell activity, even more than texting! So why not do more with community-contributed pictures?
2. Tablets are still a niche market. Right now, there are much bigger mobile fish to fry in terms of potential market size. Consider where your business interest really lie.
3. MP3 players are especially popular with young adults, so consider doing more with podcasts and other audio content.

I discuss the details more over at my article on KDMC.

“While we had a hunch that the skills of today’s 2-5 year olds would be very different to those of kids 20 to 30 years ago, we were surprised to find out just how much the childhood experience has evolved. According to our survey, while most small children can’t yet swim, tie their shoelaces or make breakfast on their own, they do know how to turn on a computer, point and click with a mouse, and play a computer game.

Take a look at some of the findings:

• More young children know how to play a computer game (58%) than swim (20%) or ride a bike (52%)

• 28% of young children can make a mobile phone call, but only 20% know to dial 911 in case of an emergency
• 69% of children aged 2-5 can operate a computer mouse, but only 11% can tie their own shoelaces
• Perhaps the most important piece of data to come out of this survey: the fact that 69% of children aged 2-5 are using a computer in the first place.

It’s exciting and commendable that so many parents are teaching their children such valuable computer skills so early on—they will need these skills to succeed later in life, and perhaps increasingly, not so later in life.

Got accessibility? Mobile-friendly sites also help disabled users

It was sparked by a new Pew report on problems that people with disabilities have with accessing the net. I found a couple of interesting twists.

1st: US DOJ has proposed new ADA regs for web sites, including “public accommodations” (hm, could include news sites?)

2nd: Making a site mobile-friendly goes a long way toward making it more accessible.

This subject is near and dear to my heart since one of my best friends, who is mostly blind, has faced significant struggles in getting access to services, information, education, and opportunities online and elsewhere. That has definitely hurt not only his quality of life, but his health. And he’s fairly tech-savvy! This is a problem that needs to be solved, and going mobile-friendly is one main way to start.

At the end, I noted:

Given that groups often have considerable reach and influence, it makes sense for news organizations to actively engage local or relevant groups, especially via social media.

The online activities of groups are now a key channel for news, information, communication, and engagement for most Americans. It makes sense to build bridges with these channels in order to reach wider audiences and listen more effectively to community issues and concerns.

Which is yet another reason for the news business to get over its traditional stance of aloofness/separation from the community under the fig leaf of objectivity.

This has a lot of implications for any mobile strategy — and it means that both your e-mail alerts and the links included in them need to be mobile friendly.

I wrote more about this for the Knight Digital Media Center at USC site: US Census upgrades American FactFinder tool, new data coming soon | Knight Digital Media Center.

trim x

RIP, Tr.im

UPDATE AUG 12: Tr.im reports that they’re not dead yet. Hey, congrats to them for working something out, at least for now. But still: As Aron Pilhofer notes in the comments below, relying on any third-party for a core functionality represents a significant risk, so I still stand by my advice in this post.

Yesterday the popular URL shortening service Tr.im abruptly bit the dust — begging the question of whether existing Tr.im shortlinks would suddenly break. (Tr.im says its existing links will continue to function at least through Dec. 31, 2009.)

This doesn’t affect me much, since I rarely used Tr.im — but others relied heavily on Tr.im and its statistics for how its shortlinks were used. Bit.ly, which also tracks shortlink statistics, is now Twitter’s default link shortener. PaidContent recently covered how difficult link shortener service business is. Which means that other link shorteners could fall down and go boom at any time.

So if you really must rely on shortlinks for any reason, it probably makes more sense than ever to create or control your own link shortener…

Despite their difficulties, shortlinks continue to grow more important to how people communicate online — not just because of Twitter’s 140-character-per-post limit, but because of the continuing popularity of e-mail, forums, and print media.

Long, unwieldy URLs still break or truncate surprisingly often in e-mail software — especially when people read their e-mail on mobile devices. They simply suck for sharing links via SMS text messaging. They also can screw up the layout of online forums and blog comments. And some print publishers include shortlinks in their content or ads to make it easier for people to type in URLs that they encounter in print. (Shortlinks don’t matter as much for links from web pages, blog posts, or HTML e-mail where you can specify a complete destination URL without displaying it in all its convoluted ugliness.)

As I wrote earlier in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, hosted URL shortening services present several challenges of their own:

• Reliability. If a shortening service you use goes down or dies, your links to your content would cease to function.
• Security. If the shortener you use gets hacked, your existing links could end up pointing to different destinations — even to perpetrate phishing attacks on would-be visitors to your site.
• Branding. When you use a hosted shortener service, the links you create visually promote their brand — not yours.
• Breaking the web Tech bloggers such as Joshua Schacter have written about how redirects such as shortlinks can impair how well the web works.

In theory you’d like your shortlinks to continue working forever. But judging by how they get used, the vast majority of shortlinks attract the vast majority of their traffic within a few days or weeks of distribution. Still, you never know when something you published, tweeted, or e-mailed in months or years past will suddenly regain popularity or relevance. That’s why shortlink tracking is handy.

For all these reasons, if you routinely publish shortlinks to your content (via social media, forums, e-mail, SMS, and other means), it might make sense to build your own URL shortener, rather than rely on a hosted service.

Amazon.com recently did this. It’s apparently a fairly straightforward technical task — perhaps not always trivial, but very doable for any news site. It doesn’t necessarily involve changing your existing URL regime for published pages. Rather, it’s about generating short redirect URLs that point to your pages.

But if you’re using an open-source CMS like WordPress, shortener modules probably already exist. If your CMS uses a MySQL database, you might be able to use the open-source software Kissa.be to roll your own link shortener. (NetHakz explains how.)

Gary Love, director of product development for the Houston Chronicle, noted in a comment to my Tidbits post:

“For many [sites], the work of creating a URL shortener might have already been done as a side effect of creating canonical user- and SEO-friendly URLs. For instance, Drupal sites allow clean URLs to be created, but it all falls back on IDs in the background. A module like Global Redirect makes sure all content goes to the canonical URL.”

Also, consider buying a short version of your domain. This helps you promote brand while preserving brevity, and also makes tracking proliferation of your redirects easier. Look especially for non-U.S. top-level domains that might work. For instance, the Roanoke Times might secure this domain from Spain for its shortlinks: rtim.es

Once your custom shortener is in place, you could use it in a couple of ways:

• When publishing shortlinks to your own content, make sure you include the shortlinks generated by YOUR system, not the shortlinks generated by a Twitter client application like Tweetdeck. This way, it’s likely that the shortlink with your domain would get copied in any retweets — and thus propagate not just your content, but your brand.
• If your site offers link sharing tie-ins like “e-mail this”, “tweet this”, or “share this” with each content item, make sure your own shortlinks (not the original long URL) gets copied into those recommendations. That will make it even easier for the people who encounter those shared links to re-share them via their own preferred channels.

…Of course, this strategy won’t prevent site visitors from creating their own shortlinks to your content via their preferred services. But that’s okay. You’ll at least retain some control over the reliability, security, and branding of links to your content from social media and e-mail.