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Create a Free Mobile Website with Winksite and Keep All The Revenue Too

winksiteIf you’re in the market for a quick and easy mobile website, Winksite is worth a look. A free account allows you to create up to 5 different mobile sites, which can each be customized from Winksite’s library of functionality (which they call channels).  Creating a site is as easy as giving it a name and a unique url (all linked off of winksite.com), and choosing what types of content you want to offer on your site.  The creation process starts with up to 3 pages of text, an option to mobilize your blog (via RSS), and choices from the community & collaboration channels (such as events, feeds, notes, chat, forum, surveys, guestbooks, and links).  You have the option of whether your site appears in Winksite’s directory and under what category and location (and content rating).

The interesting part of a Winksite mobile site is all the community functions (channels) you can include to increase return engagement.  Such channels include a journal, feeds, links, events, reports, notes, chat, forum, surveys, zine, and guestbook to create an almost Facebook-like social site around your mobile site.  You can also invite people to become members of your site, send broadcasts to members and send messages to other winksite’s.

Winksite currently does not offer any statistics other than basics (visits, members), but David Harper, Founder of Winksite, mentioned that may be a revenue model they’ll pursue in the near future.  Winksite integrates with several different mobile advertising platforms, including Google AdSense, admob, admoda and others.  You can control which channels ads showup on, as well as ad frequency and placement (top, botton, random, or top & bottom).  100% of the revenue collected from advertising is retained by the site owner, who can also create what are called self-service ads to advertise sponsors or self-promotions.

While their terms of service clearly says the Winksite’s service is for non-commercial use only, Harper says that they have many commercial sites using the service and have no problem with other commercial organizations using the site.  Harper’s long term goal is to get as many eyeballs on their mobilized sites as possible and build value eventually (he compared their business plan to Google’s).  Winksite has allowed Harper and parent company, Wireless Ink Corporation, to gather deep consumer insights into the mobile market, which they use for other paid services they offer and are developing (mobile sharing/consulting, etc.).  With over 60,000 publishers, including large companies such as Warner, Nokia, and Atlantic records, Winksite’s services are probably “safe” for use for other companies.

Give Winksite a try and let me know what you think.

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Book Review – Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

groundswellcover
Ever wonder how to effectively use social media for your business?  Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, of Forrester Research, provide real-world information and data on how to make it social media work for your business in their book, groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies (Amazon affiliate link).  The book is packed with data and experience from twenty-five cases, spanning different types of industries, companies and organizations.

If you’re not sure exactly why social media is important to business, Li and Bernoff start off explaining why it is – they term the emergence of social media technologies into the mainstream as the “groundswell.”  Once you understand exactly what the groundswell is, they explain how it can be tapped to help your organization.  The last part of the book focuses on how using the groundswell will change your company and what the future looks like.

One of the strengths of this book is that it doesn’t have a one-size-fits all social media strategy that works for all organizations and companies.  Instead, it examines the use of social media on a behavorial level – different types of people interact with social media in different ways.  Some types will login to a social site every day but never actually interact.  Others post regularly.  Understanding what types of people you have in your particular target audience is key for crafting a social media strategy that will actually work.  The book runs through the different types of people and their typical interactions with social media and how to use this information to craft a winning strategy.

While this book is a year old, the underlying information is still extremely valuable to anyone looking to tie social media in with business measurements, such as ROI.  There’s also a website which provides updated information via a blog and some tools for understanding the possible makeup of your target audience, based on industry and age groups.  I highly recommend this book to anyone considering using social media for their business – it will give you a good idea of what needs to be done to be successful and the twenty-five cases provide good real-world examples of possible ways to use social media for your business.

If you’ve read this book, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Amazon affiliate link)

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Do You Have the Requirements for Innovation?

innovatelepiafgeoI tried to ping Twitter for some ideas, but it seems like no one ever works on Fridays.  I did, however, get a bit of brilliant input which really summarized my thoughts as well:

@johnyeng: willing to ask crazy or even stupid questions, as well as open to crazy ideas….

@chad_oliver: requirements for innovation – at least three failures

You’ve heard all the cliches before – thinking outside of the box – willing to take risks – blah, blah, blah.  But looking around The National Summit at all the CEO suits on one side, small business people on another, and students at the back, you start to think that there really is something to all those cliches.  What if everyone started to mingle?  And CEOs were talking to students and small business people?  I think that’s what The National Summit was striving for, but the forum for true conversation within the audience just didn’t materialize.

Companies like to talk the talk, but just how many of them actually foster an environment that allows innovation to happen?  If someone has an idea, does anyone listen to them?  Or do the only good ideas come from the C-suite?

A creative environment doesn’t mean chaos or a lack of hierarchy – it still needs to be clear who is making the final decision.  But I think a lot of companies say they’re innovative (As Dr. John Mao said, “innovation is in danger of becoming the new buzzword of the century”), but don’t actually allow their employees to innovate.

What do you think?

(photo by lepiaf.geo @ Flickr CC)

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