Trendcatching

Flashmob! - Mobile Clubbing at Liverpool St Station

Life's too short and too fast to waste on weighing the difference between good and bad risks. In poker lingo, the best way to determine what your opponent's hand is is to keep on betting till he lays it down. You win, you win big, you lose, well, at least you had fun. That's exactly the same principle we considered when we decided to join the Flashmob, and boy did we win big.

So as promised, we went to the mobile clubbing flashmob event at Liverpool St station last night. AMAZING.  If you've not been to a flashmob event before it really is quite an experience.  We got there about 7 pm and there was a great buzz of anticipation in the air - the police guarding the station were really freaked out because they could tell something was going to happen but didn't know what.  Anyway by 7.20 you could see people collecting under the clock, some in full raving gear.  At 7.23 people started going through the crowd getting people ready for the countdown and telling them to get their ipods ready and at 7.24 it just went mental - suddenly loads of people were there all dancing. 

What was really surprising is that everyone was really going for it - there were people with signs saying "TUNE" etc and every now and then a massive cheer or "wOOt" would go up.  The flashmobbers had taken over a good half of the station including the stairs and it was great seeing people come out the tube to see a full-on silent rave going on.  There were people breakdancing, ball-room dancing, the lot.

Here's some vids:

Breakdancing

Crowd cheering

here's a cool pic - there's loads more on Dontstayin

Anyway, if you get a chance to go to a well-organised flashmob do it - there's something quite brilliant about the whole concept of gathering a massive group of people together like that. 

Lily Allen Mobile Music on London Underground

Lily Allen is closely associated with using myspace to make friends and influence people but now her record company are using mobile to push her music.  Here's a poster advertising her album taken at St. James' park underground station.

The poster has a mobile call to action telling you to "TEXT LILY CLUB to 84477" to sign up to a free mobile mailing list of some sort.  Unbelievably, this still isn't standard on outdoor advertising for music acts so a good move by the label.

Still not got this to work on my SPV which doesn't seem to like these kind of SMS sign-ups - will report back once this is sorted out. 

Faceparty to relaunch to take on myspace

New Media Age is reporting that the UK social networking/ dating/ chat site Faceparty is spending £2m on a relaunch of the site including:

• a digital music download service aimed at attracting record labels and clubs
• myspace-style profile sections for media companies and brands providing an "Official Group" section on the site with its own forum and networking tools for reaching users
• £1m investment in a new server archicture and a revamp of the backend code base

Apparently Faceparty have already signed up MTV, Vice Magazine, and Capcom to the "Official Groups" service which is pretty good going.  Faceparty has great traction in the UK but the next 6 months are crunch time as myspace ramps up its UK marketing efforts off the back of its new UK-focused front end.  There's definately market space for another major social networking site in the UK - lots of UK users dont feel that comfortable with the emo vibe of myspace, and as Facebook proves people are mostly interested in networking within their own niches. 

If Faceparty are smart they'll also invest in developing mobile extensions - this is the one area myspace will struggle to keep up as their mobile efforts are probably going to be retarded by their US-focus (most of the US carriers still have walled garden portals, which means online and media companies can't offer mobile services directly to users). So where's your mobile portal faceparty? 

The other thing Faceparty need to develop is an ecology of third party plug-ins around the site by allowing people more freedom to customise their profiles.  Myspace benefits from a range of add-ons and widgets like Slide and music video codes being available to paste into your site and from users being able to decide what their profile should look like. Myspace rival Friendster has now given users more freedom to customise and Faceparty needs to look at this too. 

Anyway that's enough free advice for now... let's see what happens

How to promote yourself on myspace pt 4

# 4 Get your myspace profile name on a poster on the outside wall of a trendy bar in Shoreditch

Found this one outside Catch on Kingsland Road at the top of Old Street - the myspace name is on the bottom right of the poster.  Its for someone/ something called Elauan. 

Here's a close up of the myspace name

The website the poster points you to is www.elauan.com which is a single page with an email link that says "Who are you?".  The myspace site has been removed by the NewsCorp goons, potentially as part of the ongoing cleanup of the site.  "Curiouser and Curiouser" ... have emailed Elauan through the address on the website to find out what its all about - update to follow.   

In terms of promoting a myspace account there's obvious problems with the poster method - namely you'd have to remember the name or write it down and then check it out when you're next sat at a PC.  Again, this highlights the need for some kind of mobile/ SMS myspace functionality for bands, clubs, individuals to plug into.

Check out previous guides to myspace promotion below:

# 3 - Get your myspace name in a magazine distributed in a trendy bar in Shoreditch

#2: Add your myspace name to a flyer distributed in a trendy bar in Shoreditch

#1 Write your profile name on toilet walls in trendy bars in Shoreditch

Mobile Music

Picked up a mini CD sampler the other day (see below) distributed in a flyer pack

Quite a good listen actually (kind of new skool eighties pop) but what was more interesting was the way mobile had been integrated into the package.  On the back of the packaging there's an SMS shortcode which you can text in order to sign up to free updates, info and so on. 

Seems kind of obvious but actually you don't see SMS used in this way very often by record labels.  Short codes have been used on CD packaging for several years now in order to flog ringtones but it's not yet standard to use SMS to build up a database of fan phone numbers in order to send out updates like this.  Maybe it will take a success story like the Arctic Monkeys and myspace to show the potential of mobile to build up a fanbase and audience in this way?

Mobile-only music distribution

Apparently, the Anglo Italian group Planet Funk are going to release their new single exclusively on mobile through the Three Network. Good PR for them but not really that innovative - they are just using mobile as another distribution channel without taking advantage of its unique capabilities. 

Shakira apparently released a single last month exclusively on Verizon.

Robbie Williams has previously provided T-Mobile and Sony Ericsson with exclusive tracks and release windows.

The real innovators in this area are people trying to create music services that are truly "native" to mobile. The obvious leader here is Jamba who scored a number one hit in the mainstream UK charts off the back of the Crazy Frog ringtone.  For a while it looked like Jamster might be able to repeat this success and build a series of character-driven mobile music brands under the "Jamster Stars" portfolio.  However, Jamster have now pulled back from developing their own IP in this way and are focusing on offering top 40 chart music. 

Back in the day (2004) one of the early players to attempt to create a true mobile music play was the German company Go Fresh with a band they created called SuperSmart which released the first ever music album only in a ringtone format.  The band consisted of a bunch of guys in giant panda outfits which has obvious flaws as a music concept but was more exciting than using mobile as "just another channel". 

 

Aside from creating mobile-specific music brands or characters the other major opportunity is to develop mobile music services that leverage the user-generated content capabilities of mobile handsets (camera, microphone, video) and interactivity, social discovery.  Myspace is looking to extend its service onto mobile but there's always a chance that a mobile-focused competitor could emerge in this space. 

So - the record labels should forget about gimmicks like mobile-only releases and focus on trying to develop real innovations that have the potential to create much greater value. 

Mobile Music

Following the recent news that both Jamba and Monstermob are set to offer full track music downloads to subscribers it was interesting to see an alternative mobile music platform in operation just outside Old St tube station.

Elvin Zedo is a house music DJ that promotes himself through posters and a website which offer a free CD when you SMS a short-code (although you pay £1 on the text to cover the postage).

Given that mobile music services outside of operator portals are effectively still-born due to the lack of zero-rated data this method of delivering music via mobile makes a lot of sense. £1 for postage and packaging of a CD is a much cheaper form of delivery than mobile data which still costs up to £1 per MB on Orange in the UK - it would cost you £60 to download the same amount of music over the air!

Flagr launches - first of many?

 

Flagr, the US mobile location based tagging service has now gone live with a pretty slick beta.  Flagr uses SMS to allow people to create a "tag" on a google map to share the places they go and the things they are doing in the real world.  First impressions are pretty impressive - it's obviously early days but the integration with Google maps works really well and there's a lot of potential to build on the social networking and community aspects of the service.  Overall, this is miles ahead of the laughable early US efforts in the MoSoSo space, such as Dodgeball. 

No doubt this will be the first of a long wave of US mobile services as the country starts putting its immense engineering and financial power behind the mobile platform.  The window of opportunity for Europeans to establish a position in this space is beginning to close...

The World's Leading MoSoSo service?

Heres a Web 2.0 compliant, MoSoSo service with real traction that you won't see covered by Mobilecrunch or in fact anywhere at all but here...

Mywap is probably the world's leading mobile social software application with nearly 1.7m users, mainly in the UK, but also from other places around the world, particularly Eastern Europe where they seem to be skipping a generation of technology and moving straight to the mobile web. 

The service is run by 02, a UK mobile operator, based on a third party white label platform.  Mywap allows users to create their own mobile internet site or moblog including pictures, text, links to other sites and components such as guestbooks.  Vitally, the resulting site can be created and updated from a mobile so doesn't require access to a PC to use it, which goes someway to explaining the service's popularity.

People are using this functionality to create sites bigging up their favourite football teams, pop groups or tv shows as well as personal stories and pages.  It's fair to say that there's a fair bit of pirated content on mywap but this clearly doesn't account completely for the popularity of the service, given the range of different sites available.

As the big boys like myspace roll out mobile extensions to their services, they would do well to look at existing mobile social media sites like this to see what lessons can be learned.  The key learning coming out of mywap is that the ability to use mobile as the core access channel for the service, rather than just as a bolt-on is key. 

There's a whole load of other sites like this that simply aren't on the radar of most commentators so hold tight for more coverage here soonish ...

Direct to consumer mobile portals

An edited version of this article first appeared in New Media Age Magazine on June 9th 2005

“Media brands go direct-to-consumer to reach mobile users”

Channel 4 launched Big Brother 6 this year with an important addition to its multi-platform TV format: a direct-to-consumer mobile Internet portal providing access to news, rich-media content downloads and interactive services. The distribution of mobile content off-net (outside the mobile operators' portals) is nothing new, but the launch of the Channel 4 portal marks an important shift in the balance of power towards the off-net market.

Operators' own channels, in many cases, represent an unsatisfactory solution for media players seeking to exploit their content on the mobile platform. In multi- operator markets, such as the UK, a single operator can only provide direct access to a subsection of the potential mobile content userbase. To secure wider distribution, content providers must negotiate carriage with five different operators. Managing a channel on operator portals can be a frustrating process in which content providers can lose control over promotion, branding and editorial decision-making, and can lead to an inconsistent product offering from operator to operator.

As a result, content providers are increasingly choosing to launch their own mobile Internet portals. Major media players such as The Sun, MTV, Emap and Sky are all exploring the same direct-to-consumer route as Channel 4. The dramatic improvements in WAP technology mean that independent portals can now offer the same high-quality experience as, for example, Vodafone Live!. When combined with the promotional power of existing mass-market channels, independent portals offer media brands a compelling alternative to complex carriage arrangements with multiple operators.

While operators may mourn the decline of their 'portal power', they stand to benefit in the long run from the shift back to off-net content provision. There's little commercial logic to operator walled gardens, which prevent operators benefiting from off-net billing and reduce the choice of content available to users - a fact recognised by 3 with the opening of its UK network to third-party multimedia content. Ultimately, the rise of non-operator portals will grow the overall market and allow operators to benefit from the 'long tail' effect, creating space for the exploitation of a wider range of services.

Operator portals will continue to act as a discovery channel and the first port of call for many users. Their focus, however, will shift towards facilitating access to externally managed sites rather than offering services created in-house.