I’ll get right to it. On mobiles, discovery of off-deck (and sometimes even on-deck) content remains tough.
Clearsping is enabling content owners to link their mobile content with Web widgets, creating a unified distribution push giving content greater viral sharing capabilities. Check out the product page.
Users can transition to mobile content directly from Web widgets through SMS. Additionally, Clearspring provides a WAP-based sharing service that lets users send mobile content to a friend, or place associated Web widgets on a number of social networking and aggregation sites right from the phone.
We’ve created a content and platform-agnostic, round-trip syndication platform that shares content from Web-to-mobile, mobile-to-mobile, and mobile-to-Web, with integrated analytics. No matter if you have a mobile application, a WAP site, or a mobile widget written in one or more of the mobile widget platforms coming onto the scene, you can create a unified campaign between your Web widget and all of your mobile content formats with Clearspring’s Mobile Sharing Service.
TRY IT OUT
Check out the (admittedly trivial) widget below. Click “Get & Share”, click on the phone, and send it to your mobile. Once at the mobile content, click “Get & Share” again and use the WAP sharing service to send it to a friend or get the Web widget.
We’re working with some big partners and will have some major web to mobile content soon.
Below I get a little promotey. (Is that a word?) But if you want to learn the space a bit more and see how we fit in, keep reading. Please keep this in mind – beeing in the mobile industry for a while – both developing user-facing apps and infrastructure components – I know the frustration of having some awesome content or service and having ineffective or prohibitively expensive options for getting the word out. I helped Clearspring develop this product because I believe widgets are a powerful way to blend the online world of desktops with connected mobile devices, and I’m excited about it as a mobile enthusiast, and a content owner.
We’re just getting started, so I’d love to hear your suggestions. What mobile pain points can we help solve with widgets, viral syndication, and awesome analytics? I’m all ears, and I’ll be at CTIA next week hoping to have some great conversations around this.
OK. On to the details…
THE WAVE OF WIDGETS
On the desktop, widgets have taken the Web by storm, and suddenly users are bringing content to themselves rather than going to the content. With the rise of social networking and content aggregation sites like Facebook, iGoogle, MySpace, etc. many people are logging on and staying within a single domain for the entire duration.
Whether or not any of the current community sites continue to thrive, the trend is moving towards content aggregation rather than disperse content seeking. Widgets play an enormous role in this, and many companies have adopted widget strategies to set their content free. Widgetized content is able to be virally shared through social networks across all of these aggregation sites, and implant themselves in places where interested users will view it very frequently.
EMPOWERING USERS
Widgetized content is personal, it is bite-sized, it is perfect for phones, and a user should be able to send a widget to their phone as easily as they can move it to another blog, aggregator, or social network page.
EMPOWERING CONTENT OWNERS
Content owners should start thinking about their content pushes as being unified. So frequently, I speak to media companies and other content owners who completely separate mobile from their online content efforts. Many times they even draw upon the same backend for their data, but they segment the teams, and they segment the business decisions and treat them like completely different efforts.
Sure, platforms have differing challenges, and it is important to create the right presentation on mobiles, but the overall efforts of getting content to users should be unified, and mobile shouldn’t be treated as a second-class citizen. We’re hoping that our unified syndication and analytics will help promote that kind of thinking.
That said, I’m very excited by the attitudes of our initial content partners that are going mobile with us. Though I can’t say their names just yet, working with huge media players that have such forward thinking attitudes about digital content on desktop and mobile devices is really refreshing.
WHO SHOULD USE THIS?
If you have content that you are currently considering a mobile push for, consider a Web widget push as well and create a unified syndication and tracking mechanism with Clearspring.
If you are making a new mobile service offering, like one of the many mobile-only social networks popping up recently. You need to link users to your service from where they are online. Use widgets to create a connection to users on the Web, and allow word of your service to spread virally. Sure, you can use mobile ads, and buy a shortcode and put posters up in the subway to get your shortcode out there. But widgets will connect existing users to your service wherever they are, while at the same time promote it. No other mobile discovery mechanism can do that.
Are you making a mobile game? Make a trial version for the Web, turn it into a widget, and syndicate with Clearspring. People will play it online and want to get it for their phone. Plus you can link out to the mobile sharing service from your game and let it spread virally from phone to phone. Beats begging for space on a carrier deck, no?
SHORTCODES, SHORTCODES
To send links to mobile users (Web to mobile and mobile to mobile), we have a dedicated US shortcode and an international SMS service. Don’t want to use our shortcode? You can use your own, as we have a flexible SMS api that can be linked to your SMS provider.
But if you want the geek cred, you might want to consider using our shortcode. We might be biased, but we think it’s the 31337-est shortcode on the planet. Ahem.
No Comments so far
Leave a comment
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>