Community mobile media resources

Traffic from mobile devices is growing at an astounding rate — by some estimates, mobile visits now account for fully 20 percent of Web traffic. Every measure of mobile growth borders on exponential: Cisco estimates that global mobile data traffic will increase 18 times over between 2011 and 2016, the amount of mobile data consumed will go up 17-fold in the same time frame; mobile video will account for 70 percent of mobile traffic by 2016, 25 times more than in 2011. Global mobile data traffic more than doubled in 2011, for the fourth year in a row.

Compared with all that growth, mobile ad spending is still small, and even though it’s projected to more than double in 2012 to $11.6 billion, according to Strategy Analytics, advertisers will still spend nearly four times as much on online advertising.

Simply put: the world is going mobile, it’s hard to make money on mobile, and no one is feeling that more painfully than Facebook.

Updated: Apparently The Boston Globe didn’t get the memo that it’s an app-only world when it comes to mobile. According to VP of digital products Jeff Moriarty,  the Globe’s website, Bostonglobe.com, is doing quite well on mobile with more than 30 percent of visitors coming to the site through a phone or tablet browser. In fact, at a panel at the paidContent 2012 conference, digital publishers challenged the mythos that native apps provide a superior mobile experience than HTML5.

“We’re not building a video game here,” Moriarty said. “It’s news, photos and text.”

Beyond its ubiquity across demographics, mobile is far from a watered-down, off-brand internet experience. Mobile’s convenience and location awareness have led successful startups from Twitter to Foursquare to Instagram to embrace the philosophy of mobile first, desktop second. Of the 42 companies in the latest cohort of leading seed-stage startup fund Y Combinator, a full third of them are mobile-first or mobile-only.

All this points to mobile as a first-class channel for connecting citizens to their local governments and to each other. The digital divide isn’t merely a binary chasm. It’s a divide of convenience, attention span, and logistics. Seen this way, the digital divide is, yes, an ongoing problem — but also an opportunity. By building mobile tools for civic participation, we can not only make government more accessible to those who don’t have internet access at home, we can lower barriers to civic participation for all.

I love this marketing! Yes, mobile doesn’t stand alone, you have to promote it:

I turned my strategy handout from the workshop into an article for KDMC. Expands a bit upon some points in the handout

Example of a free online QR code generator. This allows you to link a QR code (one that you can even print on a t-shirt) to all sorts of digital destinations:

• Website URL
• YouTube Video
• Google Maps Location
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• FourSquare
• App Store Download
• iTunes Link
• Plain Text
• Telephone Number
• Skype Call
• SMS Message
• Email Address
• Email Message
• Contact Details (VCARD)
• Event (VCALENDAR)
• Wifi Login (Android Only)
• Paypal Buy Now Link

There are tons and tons of free QR code generators, just Google for them.

Mobile microsite builder focused on restaurants.

Example of mobile microsite builder tool that accommodates languages other than English or similar alphabetic writing

example advertiser: We’ll be including this in our Tumblr exercise.

Example of people using mobile livestreaming video tools like ustream to document news and events.

Analytics to gain insight into how you’re using Twitter.

People can subscribe to receive updates from individual twitter accounts via SMS text messaging, even if they don’t have a twitter account of their own.

Mobile microsite resource from Cronkite school of journalism: field guide of how to commit journalism

Online publishing tool that can helpyou take a print publication and put it online