Session: Mobile Social Networks/Communities

Session Leader: Paul D. Smith, mPulseMedia

Background:

• mPulse started as mobile marketers, expose a brand and get opt in

• decided to pull away from the service side of it and created an ip instead

targeting the thousands of people into a community or call to action

• first question to drive each client meeting: how can your brand facilitate interaction between people who find you interesting?

• For example, the message from the cute girl is more interesting than a message from the band

• used admob for design purposes - launched something on admob for a few minutes and got immediate feedback (1100 responses), found it to be an effective iterative way to design

• saw community as a resource to road test

• 4,000 new users each day, more new ones are coming from mobile search market

mPulse Communities:

37% of users are from India

10% south Africa

10-15% us

9% - uk

Main Points:

How mobile communities or social networks might or might not be used for marketing

Look to the community to regulate itself when possible, instead of setting up too many controls

What is uniquely mobile about the focus community? 2 ideas around this: "Just In Time" vs "DownTime" The first is about "I need it right now" or "I want to get an alert when someone answers my classified, good time to switch to mobile" and the second one is more about "I'm stuck on the bus . .. I want to see what's out there"

Mobile search engines love mobile community user generated content

Not that much mobile content out there.

people click on everything but don't type anything

your users are telling you what they are using

look for the community to tell us how it wants to organize

community examples - teen girls shopping community, lationo 415 community - hopefully they'll be advertising friendly

objective: harness my space, meets delicious, meets other web2.0 to the mobile screen.

Discussion

nancy:

how do you make the decisions about what you want your community to be

paul:

try not to have premeditated ideas of what we want to happen

if people want to abuse the system, build more features to abuse the system.

if someone wants to use the comment field to send a message to you, make a button to facilitate it.

nancy:

Craiglsit has to provide the tools/infrasturere for the community to police itself

Paul:

because we don't know how people will use the mobile phone in new ways, let me adjust my sense of how people will use the phone

Bill:

how do you actively create social networks

Participants:

Nancy Tubbs

Steve Portigal

Eliel Johnson

Bill Dougherty

Natalie Quizon

Asha Vellaikal