GUEST COLUMN: Mippin Mobilizes Content For The Masses
In a special contribution from Mippin, a mobile portal providing mobile phone internet users access and enhanced discovery of optimized content for mobile phones, we look at Mippin Mobilizer, the company’s PC-based tool allowing publishers – including MSG – to mobilize and monetize web content to target new and existing internet traffic from mobile phones. Justin Baker, Mippin Marketing Manager, explains the process of mobilizing MSG step-by-step.
When Peggy recounted the main points of her recent – and extremely pragmatic –mobile advertising white paper and hinted that the next step might be to mobilize MSG, we decided the timing was right to provide publishers with a how-to guide to mobilizing their content using MSG as a real-life example.
And what better time that the week of Mobile World Congress (MWC), an event that showcases the best in the mobile space and celebrates an astounding 4 billion connections. According to Wireless Intelligence, the GSMA’s market intelligence unit, this milestone underscores the continued strong growth of the mobile industry and puts the global market on the path to reach a staggering 6 billion connections by 2013.
In addition to this impressive subscriber growth, we’re also seeing a similar upswing in mobile Internet usage. In July 2008 a comScore report counted nearly 13 million mobile internet users in the U.K. alone - translating to approximately 25 percent of the U.K. population. Though this number is less than the 70 percent of the U.K. population using the PC internet, it represents a seismic shift in the absolute number of mobile Internet users compared with 2007.
This increase in interest, coupled with the impact of the iPhone and the introduction of cheaper data tariffs and new off-portal mobile services, positions the mobile Internet for phenomemal growth.
What is the impact on publishers?
While they could continue to focus on the PC Internet rather than tackle the task of creating a mobile site (reasoning that the emerging nature of the mobile market, a set of different technologies and standards, unknown potential set-up costs and lack of certifiable return on investment make this a smart business move), we strongly advise against this inertia.
Waiting is a mistake for two reasons. First, mobile users are already exploring the so-called PC Internet, turning up the pressure on publishers to deliver a good experience. Second, they would be foolish not to take advantage of the opportunity to increase incremental revenue by targeting new users with a mobile-optimized site.
Of course, websites designed for viewing on PCs don’t always render particularly well on tiny mobile phone screens. For this reason, many publishers are pursuing a strategy that requires them to develop a second site, specifically optimized for mobile screens, thus providing the mobile traffic that arrives on their PC websites with a mobile-optimized destination.
It’s too early to tell whether users with smartphones or touchscreen devices (iPhone, G1 and BlackBerry, for example), who can view full PC websites, actually prefer the full PC experience to accessing a mobile-optimized website. But even if they are, these users still do not represent the mass market. As AdMob shows in its monthly metrics report, the vast majority of mobile phone users own low-end and mid-range devices, a large sector that can indeed benefit from being able to view mobile-optimized versions of the websites they know and love from the PC.
To be clear, not all websites require a mobile version to reach their audience. Sites such as Twitter, some text based blogs, and some listings websites for example make the jump from PC to mobile quite easily. However, at the end of the day, there is no easy way to tell whether a specific PC site will make for great viewing (as is) on a mobile phone. This depends on a variety of factors including the choice of mobile browser, the nature of the website content, the actual handset capabilities and latency (amount of data transferred and bandwidth available), each playing a role in determining how well a PC website converts to mobile viewing.
This is where Mippin and other similar services come in. Mippin Mobilizer enables publishers and content owners to build a mobile site for free and customize it in line with the PC equivalent website design. Mippin Mobilizer also provides the ability to promote the site for free, by either creating a custom mobile URL so that traffic can be redirected to the mobile version of the site, or by taking readers through to a PC-based mobile site emulator (more on this in the Mobilizer “how to” section further down in this column).
Finally, Mippin enables publishers to monetize their mobile-optimized destinations through mobile advertising, returning 100 percent of the revenue generated around publishers content in many instances.
Granted Mippin is not the only company offering this sort of service – FeedMate, Wapple, mobiSiteGalore, Mofuse and Wordpress plugins also go a long way toward helping publishers optimize their content for mobile. However, Mippin goes one decisive step further, incorporating sites mobilized with Mippin into the Mippin mobile portal, a top destination that generates significant traffic. This way the burden isn’t entirely on the publisher to boost visibility or discoverability through investing in SEO or paid search schemes; they benefit from being part of a portal – and an ecosystem — that generates traffic for all its members.
Other providers – such as Mofuse – also allow publishers a place on their mobile portal. With Mippin, however, the added emphasis is on discovery (through the use of tools and technologies) to further match publisher content to the right user.
To this end Mippin has purposely drawn from a range of web 2.0 principles and added new features including portal auto-personalization, content recommendation and social likeness features (in the form of a “similarity meter” identifying common interests, or lack of) to connect users to relevant publisher content based on preferences and passions. It’s a virtuous cycle: Publishers can connect with new readers and users get the content they want most.
Whether a publisher chooses to use Mippin Mobilizer depends on their business case and objectives. But it’s important to know what is involved if you want to mobilize your content.
At Peggy’s invitation we have mobilized MSearchGroove and documented the steps in this process in a simple how-to guide.
There are four quick steps to launching PC content as a live mobile site: Mobilize, Customize, Publicize and Monetize.
The first step was to re-render content from the msearchgroove.com website. This needs to be in the form of a feed, in an RSS or Atom based format.
The msearchgroove.com feed here is mobilized in a few seconds, where it appears in the emulator on the same page. This takes us through to the second step, customizing the new mobile version with branding that reflects the website. As you can see, the process is pretty straightforward.
It’s easy to spend time trying out design combinations with the adjacent emulator; you might want an individual look for your mobile site, or a design that resembles your website. Either way the colour palette provides a good selection of colours, and can additionally handle any hex or colour value that is currently available. The msearchgroove.com site was completed in a few minutes, with the logo uploaded and colours reflecting the website easy to find and replicate.
Once the msearchgroove.com site was branded, the next step was to get the word out to existing and potential readers. To assist publishers Mippin Mobilizer offers a vriety of tools and feaures such as reader auto-redirection (directing readers to the new mobile-optimzed destination). Mippin Mobilzer also helps publishers promote the new site from their PC website by providing a “Make It Mobile” button (which publishers can add to their site or blog) and the option to create their own mobile URL.
In this case, we chose www.mippin.com/msearchgroove. (If you wish to go one further and automatically redirect PC traffic to a mobile site you must change the DNS settings for the website. Mippin provides step-by-step Information explaining this procedure here.
As I noted, publishes have the option of embedding the “Make It Mobile” button by selecting the relevant blogger platform (Mippin Mobilizer is currently integrated with Blogger & Typepad), or using the html code generated. Embedding this also links the msearchgroove.com website to a PC emulator demonstration of the mobile site. We recommend this highly as it also provides publishers access to QR codes (or 2D-barcodes), which can help users navigate quickly and simply to the new site by just capturing the QR code with their cameraphone.
Another way to get the word out and generate interest in the mobile-optimized website is through tags. With Mippin Mobilizer it’s possible to assign a selection of predefined tags to the mobile site, thus improving the number of times the site is returned within Mippin mobile portal site search results.
It’s possible to create an infinite amount of tags, but it’s important to note that Mippin’s portal search algorithms also rank search results on that basis of other factors such as relevancy (determined by tracking the sites a user has visited previous) and user recommendations (similar sites and content recommended by like-minded peers).
Almost there! The last step is all about monetizing the traffic you get, whether that traffic is direct to consumer (users found you on their own) or acquired through a presence on the Mippin mobile portal. To enable monetization, Mippin authorizes the site feed and provides the publisher with a validation key. In this example, the process requires the publishers to submit a recent blog post to verify that the real owner of the site authorizes the destination to deliver mobile ads.
Once authorized, advertising from AdMob will be inserted in to the site at the top or bottom of the pages, though not within stories. (Note: Mippin doesn’t take a revenue share if the publisher uses their own AdMob ID. Click here for more details.)
And that’s it – the msearchgroove.com mobile site is live! It’s now optimized for any mobile traffic arriving on the site and can be viewed at www.mippin.com/msearchgroove!
Peggy adds: Hope you enjoy the MSG mobile-optimized site. MSG will also be a test case for a cool new product Mippin is slated to launch a little later on this year, so please check back. MSG will also road test a variety of solutions for a new how-to white paper on mobile publishing, so watch this space.
Tags: 2D barcodes, barcode, iPhone, Mippin; AdMob, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Publishing, Mobile Search, smartphone
