Crisp Voices Blog

A Review of Mobile @ SXSW 2009

23 Mar 2009 - Tom Limongello

Everyone heard that AT&T was slow during SXSW, but what was working with mobile? Well there is no consensus, but I can tell you what I used. Sched.org's mobile website for calendar, shortn.me for sharing news, and Foursquare for managing the parties. Using Sched

Sched.org's site redirects to an optimized iPhone experience which leverages Javascript popups of event descriptions and lets you save events to you calendar. With three types of panels at SXSW, no time staggering (most panels were at 10, 11:30, 3:30 or 5pm), screenings all over Austin, and 1600 bands--Sched.org's interface is a calendar lover's miracle. You can share your calendar with friends with a static URL based on your username and you can use advanced settings to search and browse by popularity. The fight against paper schedules continues, of course with battery troubles (I'm now keenly aware of each outlet available in Austin, and even found the secret outlet near the stage at Stubbs!) When you start offering sorting features and bookmarking, sched.org starts to beat the pocket guides. It's much more fun to share your shedule with @philton, whose favorite band name is 'Natalie Portman's Shaved Head,' and show him that you're going to their show instead of his party. To indulge, my favorite SXSW artist names were McFrontalot, Beans on Toast, Biscuit Brothers, Doctor Krapula, Flosstradamus, Japanther, Abe Vigoda, Scissors for Lefty, Dear and the Headlights, Venice is Sinking, We Were Promised Jetpacks, Whole Wheat Bread, and of course, Yak Ballz. Foursquare

There's no paper offering that can prepare you for the official and unofficial parties each night at SXSW. So, if for some reason you forget what your plans are while you're listening to the 5pm Suxorz panel that chronicled the worst social media ads that featured Sara Smith from Wonkette talking about Truck Nutz, you were not alone. It used to be that Twitter was the crib sheet for where to go at events, but this year there's a new interactive mayor in town and SXSW saw the introduction of Foursquare. If Twitter tells you what people are doing, Foursquare tells you where people are partying. Just like its SMS predecessor Dodgeball, the Foursquare's iPhone app tells you where everyone is. Let me clarify...not where they think they might like to go, but where they are at a point in time. Foursquare adds a new dimension to Dodgeball by awarding badges for behavior related to your own personal navigation of the city. As Dennis Crowley put it at the New York Tech Meetup--going out using Foursquare is like playing The Legend of Zelda in that you get points and unlock secrets based on your check-ins. This is simple design for irrational behavior in NYC, but of course, using it in Austin added a dimension of weirdness - have a look at the Smule Fool at the Belmont during SXSWi playing his Ocarina:

There were more panels dedicated to talking mobile at SXSW than ever before and even this year's t-shirt symbol was a hand holding a mobile phone, but there was too much to cover in these panels and I think people went home more confused than when they left. Marc Curtis of Flirtomatic found it necessary to make a distinction that not everything in mobile is a downloadable application. There are channels for mobile data such as mobile sites, widgets and apps; and that mobile sites like BBC have scale at 100MM page views per month. Marc also made a poignant comparison between the EU and US in terms of interactive behavior. Austin was different from Barcelona in that in Barcelona attendees had ditched their laptops for mobile browsing, but at SXSW we were all tied to our laptops. I had my own laptop failure, which made me use my iPhone a lot more than I would have, I got so attached I started to make my own games. And I have to note that laptops are not the only devices that need to be charged. Why Mophie didn't have a 'mobile' salesman or even a mobile RV like those that sell pizza, kebabs, tacos and BBQ is the biggest mystery of all this SXSW. The mobile service that I'd like to see next after SXSW? GPS enabled electrical outlet locator for the city of Austin and suggested tip amount!

iPhone App or iPhone Mobile Website or Both?

16 Mar 2009 - Tom Limongello

The following also recently appeared on Mobile Marketer... When the iPhone came out, it quickly became the greatest force in creating a mobile media market. The progression was that first Apple advertised the full web on your phone; then it introduced the first scalable applications platform through the iTunes app store. The progression of mobile content usage on the iPhone does not have an as well-written history. What we have are good stats from AdMob about ad requests from the mobile web, and now a great study by Pinch Media about the downloading and usage of iPhone applications.

iPhone AppStore Secrets - Pinch Media

View more presentations from pinchmedia.

First Came iPhone Sites Once publishers realized that the full web on your phone wasn’t an ideal experience, they began searching for a better solution. First, there were iPhone optimized sites – Fandango, CNN, ESPN, USA Today and others. Some use Apple’s framework, some have strayed, but all offer a level of optimization for the WebKit browser that blows away what could be done on Blackberries, Windows Mobile phones, and other smartphones. Now, we have new developments in mobile web, like HTML 5, which will enable location in the browser, picture uploads, offline content caching and more. However, with the market’s focus on iPhone apps and the downturn in the economy, it is unlikely that the pendulum will swing back to the mobile web in the foreseeable future without a big TV spend from Apple. So those developments will go largely unnoticed until people start seeing stats again that show the mobile web surging ahead in usage. What people forget is that while iPhone apps are sexy, mobile sites are ultimately more discoverable through site redirects and ultimately, mobile search.

Then Came iPhone Apps Greg Yardley, CEO of Pinch Media, did a great service to both the application development and mobile web industry by putting out this honest look at the state of uptake and usage for iPhone applications. Here’s what Greg said based on the 30 million downloads using their analytics:

There’s a 24 hour downloading window, so you’d better make a top 100, 25, or 10 list in that time
Over time it has gotten more difficult to get noticed – 2x as hard as 6 months ago to get in the top 25, and 5x as hard to get in the top 100 as 6 months ago
The app store is designed to maximize turnover, remember the problem with getting good placement on carrier decks? This is worse, because you don’t stay in the top lists for long

Can you Have the Best of Both Worlds? The fact is, apps offer speed and navigation that mobile web currently cannot. Not to mention the sex appeal that gets your bosses excited. But if they are hard to monetize, hard to find, and have a limited shelf life, are they good enough by themselves? A mobile site offers infinitely more in terms of discoverability, monetization, and current content that doesn’t depend on app upgrades, so why not have both? The cost of deploying a mobile website is also much less than an iPhone application and it will immediately work on all phones. Having the best of both worlds is not difficult. If you don’t have a mobile site – get one!

Publishers - Not to worry, if you have RSS, XML, or ATOM feeds Crisp Wireless and others can get your content up quickly
Brands – Not to worry, Crisp can also help you mobilize your content so you can advertise on mobile effectively
Retailers – If you’re looking to enable commerce, companies like Usablenet can build mobile storefronts so that you can drive people within apps or in the mobile browser to locate your store or even buy your products – no API or RSS integration necessary
Make sure you work with your app developer to insert links to your mobile site from within your app

Have a mobile site – promote it!

Enable sharing features – email to a friend, SMS to a friend, save to a social network to direct to mobile web links
Make sure that sharing from your iPhone app uses mobile web links, not desktop links
Put a link on your mobile website to advertise that you have an iPhone application
Put mobile links everywhere – print, online, Twitter feeds, emails

[Note: Why would a brand or publisher need to put mobile web links into Apps, on social networks and emails? It's called SEO. Did you realize that the content from your iPhone application does not show up in the major search engines for mobile?] Here’s more of what Greg from Pinch Media revealed about the nature of iPhone app usage:

Of those apps with 1-3MM unique users their repeat usage went from 30% down 5% in the first 30 days, and down to 1% in 90 days
Sports does the best at keeping users during the first 30 days, but Entertainment keeps users best over time
Overall, most apps should be paid rather than free because it is hard to make back your development costs through advertising when you only have an average of 80 sessions to recoup your investment

Can you have the best of both worlds? Sure. It doesn't matter if you charge for your apps or give them away for free, the trend in apps without promotion is to decrease over time, but mobile web usage is increasing over time. What's the best way to monetize your investment over time? How will you improve your discoverability? Keep your content fresh? Drive traffic to your app? If you're going to have a successful iPhone app, you might as well have mobile web in place to promote it. Publishers who ignore their mobile web sites and continue to merely play with shiny apps will soon realize that if they don't leverage the power of the mobile web, they'll only be playing with themselves.

Marketers Flock to DMA Mobile Marketing Day to Learn About Mobile Advertising

2 Mar 2009 - Boris Fridman

I really enjoyed participating on a panel about mobile advertising at DMA Mobile Marketing Day last week. Congratulations to Mickey Alam Khan from Mobile Marketerfor organizing a terrific event for the Direct Marketing Association. Having recently attended a few digital and mobile media events with a visibly thinning audience-- due economy not diet-- I was pleased to see a large conference room full of participants from Fortune 500 and midsize companies. I was glad to find many familiar faces of mobile execs from Jumptap, Quattro, Millennial, ChaCha, Bango, Nielsen, iLoop, and other players of the mobile advertising value chain. While some in the audience were new to mobile, most were direct response marketers who have already implemented successful mobile campaigns and came to network with their colleagues and learn some new tricks of trade. My panel was about driving consumer engagement through mobile advertising. For me, it was interesting to see how the questions betrayed the direct response nature of the audience: How does one measure engagement in mobile? How do you get a mobile user to buy things? How do I track users across online and mobile? How does one integrate Click-to-Call into a mobile Web campaign? The panelists agreed that relevance and creative were the key to driving consumer engagement. In this, mobile offers some unique benefits that allow ads to be more compelling than traditional advertising: location awareness (maybe not now but eventually), built-in payment mechanism, high level of measurability, and “always-with-you” characteristics. Let’s not forget it’s also a phone. You can make phone calls. Clicking on a banner to call a car dealer to schedule an appointment, isn’t it the ultimate goal of engagement marketing? Users calling ChaCha to ask tax questions receive highly relevant H&R Block ads. As for creative implementation, taking advantage of opportunities to fill “dead time” allows marketers to engage consumers into interacting with a brand more often and in more compelling ways than in traditional media: interactive quizzes, timely polls, and multi-player advergames. AdMob and Crisp Wireless take advantage the iPhone ‘s dazzling screen and touch capabilities to deliver rich media ad units that integrate video into advertising banner and allow consumers to truly interact with the brand. 2009 may or may not be the "year of mobile advertising," but if this audience was any measure, it will surely be the year when mobile becomes an integral and necessary part of nearly every advertising spend. See more buzz from DMA Mobile Marketing Day on Twitter.