It is predicted that mobile video will account for 64 percent of mobile Web traffic by 2013. As on-the-go advancements and growth in smartphones and other Web-enabled mobile devices bring new challenges to content producers, here are steps to assist media relations pros in producing/managing content for these mobile platforms.
Here are two perspectives on mobile video/information trends and how they impact media relations professionals.
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Making a big impression on a tiny screen, by Jay Krall, Global Product Management manager at CisionLast month, research firm Gartner turned some heads when it predicted that by 2013,
smartphones and other Web-enabled mobile devices will outnumber PCs globally. In three years, 1.82 billion people will access the Web on their phones, Gartner says.
Of course, that has major implications for news organizations looking to deliver content to those devices (and hopefully get paid for it).
What it means for public relations professionals seeking brand impressions in that news coverage is less clear.This much we know: the move toward mobile platforms will probably expedite the trend in news coverage toward shorter stories. I find it hard to imagine myself reading a 5,000-word magazine feature on a 3-inch screen. After all, long form writing on the Web struggles to hold our attention even on desktop machines. If only we had a roadmap for the steps the news industry will take to adapt to the mobile Web, perhaps it would be easier to see how our news might fit in.
Clyde Bentley, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, recently took a stab at that kind of roadmap in a blog post. Expanding on the Gartner predictions, he
created a timeline of how news outlets might make the leap to mobile.
One theme in the steps Bentley outlines is
the importance of multimedia content in this shift. To compete for attention on those tiny mobile screens, reporters and editors will perhaps need to offer more video. Could that usher in a new era of the video news release? VNRs arguably had their heyday in the 90s but have found a new venue on YouTube and other video sites. Now they could be poised for an even bigger comeback.
Early last year,
Cisco predicted that mobile video will account for 64 percent of mobile Web traffic by 2013, and that by 2015 mobile Web users could be averaging a “mobile data footprint” that will have grown 10-fold in the preceding decade, thanks in large part to the predicted growth in mobile video.
Read online:
5 easy ways to manage mobile media relations: On-the-go advancements and growth bring new challenges to content producers, by Heidi Sullivan, Cision VP of Media Research
Why this growth in mobile media? Quite simple, really: market demands.
How can content-producing media relations pros go mobile? Well, if you want to make mobile-ready a large corporate site, lots of video/audio content or anything else that’s really complicated, you should consult a developer with experience in mobile readiness. However, there are a few easy things you can do to keep the on-the-go reader/viewer in mind. Here are 5 ways to manage your mobile media relations:
1. Ask your friends! Check out your site on an iPhone, a Blackberry, a G1, a Palm, etc. The best way to see where your site is lacking in mobile-readiness is to actually try to navigate through the site on devices that people use every day. See what comes easily and what is muddled or won’t load.
2. Make your shortcut menu friendly to small screens. One of the most frustrating things for mobile users is difficult navigation. Take a look at your page and see how easy it is to move from page to page. Add a link at the bottom of the page to hop to the top. Make sure the site map is easy to locate on each page. Put a search bar near the top of the page to make finding contest simple.
3. Keep page sizes small for blogs and smaller sites! Developers know all the tricks to ensure that your page isn’t too large to load on an iPhone or Blackberry, but if you are personally maintaining a blog or smaller site, you can probably do this yourself. Keep the site size under 16K. This is really small, but if you don’t have tons of graphics and ads to load, pretty easy to do.
4. Create a mobile version of your site with a subdomain. Again, developers can do this for you, but if you’re a one-woman shop with your own blog, a developer may not be in your financial plan. Just
Google “Create a free mobile subdomain” and you’ll find lots of options – from as complicated to writing your own code to as easy as plugging in your URL. For a basic mobile site, I really like MoFuse - you just enter the URL and in a few simple steps, MoFuse creates your mobile subsite, adds your blog to their mobile directory and automatically detects mobile users to redirect them to your mobile site.
5. Go easy on the eyes. While desktop monitors are generally getting bigger and wider, mobile Web devices are getting smaller. Keep in mind that long paragraphs and words are tough to view on many mobile devices. For example, a paragraph of the blog post I wrote yesterday is 72 words long. In my desktop browser, this paragraph takes up 5 lines. On my Blackberry Pearl, it takes up 17 lines! By creating shorter paragraphs, you add more white space, thus making the content more pleasurable to the eye. Use shorter words because longer words will take up a whole line on their own, or, on some devices, force the reader to scroll to the right.