EXCLUSIVE: Social Entertainment For the Mobile Masses: Tapatap Cashes In On Contests & Community » mobilegroove

Social networks are big news and big business. We know they are spaces where users can meet and share – but what will members do after the thrill is gone?

Sure, there is the initial excitement of self-expression – of being able to match music tastes with like-minded buddies and check out what the community thinks is hot and not. Some users will never tire of making and sharing cool content and ideas, but not all users belong to this group of hyperactive-contributors (what we used to call the hard-core of regular forum participants in the early days of TheFeature.com, a defunct blog and thinking space many of you might remember was ahead of the curve). Like in real-life, there are doers and watchers. As a rule, the vast majority of members is made up of spectators who may soon vote with their feet unless community destinations can come up with ways to spark their interest and help them pass the time.

Put another way, social communities need stickiness to ensure loyalty and grow their numbers. Social entertainment, in the form of simple activities such as contests and games, may just be the ice-breaker communities need to revitalize their membership and encourage more mingling between members. This is the idea behind Tapatap, a mobile and online social content community funded
by a trio of serial entrepreneurs that broke on the scene last month with a beta launch and a significant funding announcement. (More in this press release.)

Intrigued by the concept of social entertainment that spans online and mobile, I contacted Andy Riedel, Tapatap President & CTO, for a briefing. Andy, who was formerly the VP of Social Networking at InfoSpace, also co-founded Atlas Mobile, the mobile skill-based games firm that was purchased by InfoSpace in July 2004. He knows what makes communities tick and stick together – and graciously shared his insights with me in a guided tour of the service that took well over an hour.

Most coverage focuses on the nuts & bolts, but Tapatap is much more than a social contest community. It is a meeting space chock-full of tools and features that encourage viral distribution and new forms of interaction. More importantly, it is built from the ground up to accommodate ad-funded schemes and branded content. (More about that later in the post.)

Fun and functionality: At its most basic level Tapatap lets users vote on images and compete for prizes. Like the name says, users tap (on their keyboard or keypad) to vote on photos in contests, submit their own photos (direct from the mobile if they’re on the fly) into contests, and create their own photo contests. Tapatap also takes the pain out of participation and automatically resizes the photos for online sites and over 100 mobile device types. Who’s the hottest girl in the dorm? Who’s the biggest dork? Who’s the most out-of-control celebrity? These are the contests that encourage users to express their opinions and themselves. It may not sound like a killer-app activity at first, but Andy tells me traffic exceeds expectation and some contests count upwards of 81,000 votes. Users can also win prizes (such as $25 gift certificates from Amazon). Consumer brands can sponsor contests as well, and slip in some product plugs to get more bang for their buck. (An example is Ed Hardy’s Best Tattoo Artwork contest, which asked users to send in photos of their best attempts and also showcased its line of apparel on the models and celebrities it displayed as part of the contest.) Tapatap, which runs on iPhone, also supports mobile-only contests (a Java download is in the pipeline) and is gearing up to launch video in the Fall.

Access and accessibility: Tapatap is available online and via mobile – and a widget is in the works. When this goes live users can display a Tapatap widget on their sites and blogs to tell others about the service or invite visitors into the community to vote for their photos or contests. As Andy puts it: The focus is on encouraging and growing social networks. “Users have to network to get people to play in the contest or vote for their photo submissions, and that collaboration and communication generates awareness of Tapatap.” This way Tapatap can literally tap its user base to spread the word. To make it easy for users to reach out to their friends Tapatap has teamed up with a technology company in Eastern Europe to scrape users’ web mail and invite their contacts into the contest. Users will soon be able to set up RSS feeds to “broadcast” contest updates to their friends and fans, telling them about new photo submissions and launch private invitation-only contests. Tapatap will also send out alerts to the community, announcing contest winners and pointing the way to their profiles. Moving forward, Tapatap will effectively borrow a page form the likes of Habbo Hotel and allow users to buy accessories for their avatars or give digital gifts to their friends.

Popularity and population: Tapatap has many of the right ingredients to be an online/mobile community on its own. But the goal is to be the social entertainment component of larger social communities. To this end Tapatap has already embraced the Facebook platform in an effort to connect with that community. (In May Facebook opened up its interface to third-party developers to write mini-applications and get access to their user base.) Andy is also exploring options to distribute Tapatap via mobile operators (on-portal/on-deck) as well as via an off-portal/off-deck play. Tapatap also offers the service as part of an ASP model, creating and managing contests on behalf of service providers and advertisers.

The jury is out on whether the service will successfully appeal to the 18-25 year old demographic, but stats show that this is the group that is serious about social networking and eager to interact. M:Metrics, for example, recently revealed that “according to our data, consumers are increasingly embracing user-generated content, with 19.2 percent of mobile subscribers engaging in mobile 2.0 in the month of April. This represents 12 percent growth since January this year.” Will users get hooked on voting and contest participation? Possibly. We know users vote for their faves in TV shows and we’ve seen snap-it-send-it contests skyrocket in popularity. Tapatap builds on this established user behavior.

But the main attraction isn’t the contest; it’s the communication. In a nutshell, Tapatap covers all the important bases. It provides users tools to “broadcast” their message to their handpicked groups of friends and fans – and on their own terms. It also scrapes web mail to take the hassle out of social networking for users who want to connect with their peers, not configure their hardware. This is the mix that elevated Twitter to be a textbook example of mobile Web 2.0 functionality and this is the checklist that is critical to the success of any community-focused service going forward. As Andy put it: We’re not in a Web 2.0 world. We’re in a “Google world” where apps are free, easy to access, and viral “out-of-the-box,” allowing users to invite all their friends to try them out and pass them on.

(This site is open and eager to explore mobile Web 2.0 sites and services. Please contact me directly for a briefing.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Mobile Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.