This is a guest post written by Dave Sloan, Marketing Director of Avot Media. Avot Media is the innovator behind tipMotion, the high performance video transcoding and near-real-time streaming appliance enabling video delivery to Web-enabled mobile devices.
Social networking is quickly taking hold among mobile users. Juniper Research believes there will be as many as 54 million mobile social networkers worldwide by the end of 2008 and forecasts adoption to rise to 730 million users in 2013. That’s a lot of mobile friendships!
Mobile social networking has gained traction mostly due to well-built mobile applications. The Facebook application for iPhone () and Blackberry, for example, can quickly be found and installed. Once logged in, users can easily stay in touch and communicate with their friends from an intuitive mobile interface. For the rest of us with less sophisticated phones, simple mobile social network sites like m.facebook.com offer a pretty good experience and keep us hooked. We’re mobile, and we’re socializing.
From a mobile device, users can perform a subset of social networking functions like updating their status, sharing pictures, viewing pictures, reading mini-feeds, finding their friends contact information, even instant messaging. Limited functionality in a mobile environment is sufficient to keep us engaged, as long as our favorite features are accessible.
A new advertising medium
Social networking has changed the way we keep in touch, communicate, and share information with friends and acquaintances. Within the social network we can message each other, share photos, and stay up to date without email, without picture sharing Web sites, without instant messaging clients and now, without necessarily using a desktop computer. As we spend more time on social networks, invite our friends to join, and post content, we are increasing the size and value of the network, making the social network more attractive as an engaging advertising medium.
Artists who host fan sites, record companies who want to promote their artists, and the social networks themselves will benefit from making video available via mobile social networks. Artists can post videos and make them available on their Facebook () or MySpace () sites and can expect a healthy portion of these projected millions of users to watch them.
For artists, record companies, and advertisers there is a huge opportunity to sponsor the delivery of the video. There are really two opportunities here; brand impressions and conversion. Simply offering free premium content would promote the brand and encourage users to purchase CDs or merchandise at a later time. Or, there may be a more targeted approach where the user is prompted to buy ringtones, wallpaper, or tracks directly from the mobile social network. A short pre-roll video ad may be a good user experience, as long as the user does not feel over-exposed to ads.
Viral growth and sales
Social networks are inherently built to share and spread content virally. As more users view mobile video, the more likely they are to share content within their network, recommend artists, and promote music. Great experiences will spread brand awareness and lead to sales.
As an example, the new pop artist Colbie Callait posted a couple of her tracks on her MySpace page in 2006. Her songs were streamed over 42 million times, and seen on Youtube () over 25 million times. Her debut album “Coco” has since gone platinum with nearly 2 million albums sold. Social networks spread her music virally, leading to commercial success. The next big unsigned artist could have even greater appeal with mobile video.
The mobile device is incredibly personal and targeted. Content owners will need to experiment with different use case models to see what creates the best user experience, and which has the biggest return on investment. Above all, the social network must extend and enhance its user experience in its mobile context. Any user experience that requires too many steps, infringes privacy, or annoys the user with overcommercialization will turn users away quickly.
User Experience
Posting, tagging, and sharing pictures is a great experience from a mobile social network. On an iPhone, for example, users can scroll through high-res pictures of their friends as easily as they can browse digital pictures on their own mobile phone. The next logical step is to shoot, upload, share, and comment on video. Users will be able to shoot a video from their device and quickly post it to their profile. Youtube already offers this feature, but mobile video playback on the most popular social networks is not yet possible. Video () playback will enhance the richness of user-generated content and drive engagement and lock-in to the network.
Just like picture viewing, the mobile video sharing experience has to be rich and simple. Social networks can ensure a smooth video playback experience by using a robust video formatting and delivery engine on the backend. The right mobile video delivery tool can support various device formats, hundreds of phone types, all network conditions, and the scale and volume of their mobile user base. The user should be able to browse their friends’ videos and their fan page videos without being slowed down by slow download times and image break up.
Mobile video is best streamed directly to the mobile device’s native media player. This means that a social network application would need to pass the video request to the video streaming engine on the backend, have the video stream to the device’s media player, then pass the user back to the social networking app. Embedding the video inside the application won’t work as the native media player needs to take the entire screen, maximizing the quality of the video. However, it will be easy to design an experience that smoothly passes the user back to the application. Obviously, social networks are intent on keeping the user engaged and active on their network.
Best practices: Adding mobile video
Of course, social networks will want to be careful not to simply make video available via one channel, like on the iPhone over a 3G network. The best approach would be to invest in mobile video delivery tools that support all devices on all networks, especially popular lower speed networks like EDGE and popular phones like Motorola RAZR.
The trick to designing to a great mobile experience is to make content easily discoverable. Asking users to click 10 levels down in an on-deck feature phone application is messy. And, asking users to open a mobile browser and use a search engine is equally as painful. Mobile social networks have an opportunity to streamline the discovery of Web content. Content is shared, presented by friends, and presented in a mini-feed. No search required. No clunky WAP site. Users are already accustomed to content feeds on the desktop. Presenting content in the context of a social network via a mobile application is the logical next step. Social networks could, by virtue of presenting a great user experience, be the tipping point of mobile video.
Who benefits?
As data plans get cheaper, network connections get faster, and Web video explodes in popularity, delivering mobile video to social networking applications will benefit everyone.
• End users will benefit by being able to enjoy video content they want on their mobile device
• Social networks will benefit as engagement of their network is extended
• Content owners and advertisers will benefit as they successfully reach millions of highly targeted and engaged mobile users.
• Carriers will benefit by extending the benefit of their data plans
As social networks expand into the mobile arena, they have been careful not to cram too many features into the mobile experience. Naturally, the mobile version should be a “lite” version that is easy to navigate on the go. Some features are best left out of the mobile version, but others, like mobile video, are perfectly appropriate as mobile devices become more media-centric and backend mobile video delivery tools become more robust. As long as the experience is well designed and the delivery tools are scalable and robust, there is a mobile game changer on the horizon.
