Mobile Media Toolkit

For news and media organizations, the Delivering Content sections of the Mobile Media Toolkit will answer your questions about how to reach audiences on their mobile phones. With 5 billion mobile phones predicted to be in service by the end of 2011, reaching an increasingly mobile audience is key for news and media organizations. This section aims to get publishers up to speed on getting the audience to read, view, or listen to mobile content.

The Deliver Content section shows you how to send content to users’ mobile phones and how to make content accessible from mobile devices. It covers mediums ranging from short messages to web sites to mobile apps, and content ranging from text to audio to photos and videos.

In addition to delivering content to a mobile audience, news outlets and content publishers may want to engage with audiences. The Engage Your Mobile Audience section covers the topic of engaging with audiences on their mobile phones. Since social media has become an important avenue for engagement, one of the articles in this section will help you understand mobile social media. Another article will show you how to "listen" to what your audiences are saying on mobile (and online) social media, while the last one focuses on thinking about audiences as participants and content creators rather than passive recipients of content. The section focuses on helping media organizations see their mobile-using audiences as participants in the media process, and not just passive consumers of content.

So how can editors and news outlets get the most of the Mobile Media Toolkit? Within these pages, we highlight examples of news outlets around the world and how they have adopted mobile services. We also share tools and techniques meant primarily for content publishers.

The following articles are relevant to news organizations and content publishers who want to reach an audience by delivering content on mobile devices.

Deliver Content Using SMS: Delivering content using technologies that deliver short messages to mobile phones (like SMS text messages, MMS multimedia messages, USSD, IM, and/or Cell Broadcast) using both broadcast-only and interactive methods.

Deliver Content on Mobile Apps: Using mobile apps (both native, web- and java-based) to deliver content to audiences, analyzing the limitations and advantages of building mobile apps, third-party and native tools for easy app production.

Disseminating Location Information on Mobile Phones: Delivering location-tagged content to mobile phones using location-based social networks and services, location-based alerts, websites and apps.

Deliver Audio Content to Mobile Phones: Delivering audio content to mobile phones using the voice channel (IVR and content-management systems), making the most of radios on mobile phones, using web and app-based audio delivery services.

Deliver Video Content to Mobile Phones: Making video content accessible to audiences using mobile phones by using appropriate online video broadcasting tools and/or digital mobile television broadcasting technology.

In addition, news outlets and content publishers may want to engage with audiences via mobile devices. These articles are about understanding mobile social media and enabling audiences to participate and engage with your content.

Understanding Mobile Social Media: Understanding social media usage on mobile phones means understanding how people around the world interact with each other on their mobile phones using social media.

Enabling Citizens to Create Mobile Content: We define integrating citizen-generated mobile content as letting users comment from mobile phones to a website, aggregating information users publish on social media, and creating new platforms where users can call, send SMS, send MMS, use a mobile website, or use an application to submit content.

Listening to Your Audience on Mobile Social Media: Listening to audiences on mobile social media refers to setting up systems such that audiences using mobile social media can offer feedback to content producers--media organizations and journalists.