Viral multimedia for development (part 1)
Everywhere I go in Mozambique these days, I see young people with earphones hanging out of their ears attached to their mobile phone. Where did they get the music that they’re listening to? Hardly anyone is hooked up to the Internet. There are no music stores. Another common sight is one guy staring at his cell phone while three or four friends look over his shoulder. The impact of mobile media extends beyond the owner of the handset.
There is a phantom step that is taking place that I don’t understand. My conjecture is that music sharing is mostly person to person. It is fairly easy to send an mp3 from one phone to another by Bluetooth or infrared. Another possibility is Internet cafes. A friend of mine needed to send me an email but there was a huge line at the Internet cafe. Apparently everyone was waiting to hook up to the Internet and download music.
If I wanted to spread my message virally, I think I would attach it to music or video. Of course, tracking results on such a campaign would be next to impossible without some sort of response mechanism. The Pocket Tunes mp3 player on my Palm T|X has an Unlock Bonus Feature under the Help menu. You have to visit an Internet address to get a bonus feature code. The result for Pocket Tunes is that they get a chance to promote paid features and also see how many people are using their product.
With MMS it is really easy to offer tempting feedback options. These might include photos, ringtones, or mp3 downloads. The promise of free anything is of course a powerful motivator to people. And once they’ve responded, how a content provider chooses to use their mobile number is up to them. This could include simply spamming them with whatever information you want to show them or you could be more ethical (and hopefully will be) and invite people to “subscribe” to an information channel which regularly delivers content to users.
A system like the Wattpad reader or cellphoto.net that has a mix of free and paid content is guaranteed to be popular.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about targeting the middle man for content distribution as well as an example of a multimedia slideshow for churches.
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Hm, I wonder if attaching Bible to music is the whole answer
though one could perhaps try attaching the passage that the words of some worship song cites, at least if you can get performance rights for the worship song in the first place… This though is really an exercise in psychology and in localising, you might want different hooks for different folks… for some a touch of humour would be enough – like when our DOs sometimes are for PodBible, but for someone else humour about the Bible would be off-putting… what’s needed is different hooks, shareable with a link to subscribe…
There is a novelty factor. If you can make something with a little bit of music and animation people will look at it over and over again and share it with their friends. I used the Ulead Video Toolbox that came bundled with my Nokia to make some short videos. They are “stop everything” cool and easy to put together (and share).
[...] It shows off the abilities of Ulead Toolbox mentioned in the comment thread of this post http://lingalinga.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/viral-multimedia-for-development-part-1. The advantage of mpeg and mp3 is that it can be traded between phones quite easily. Java apps J2ME [...]
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