Content sharing is going mobile.
Next to the familiar buttons of Facebook’s Like, Twitter’s Tweet and Google’s +1 comes Mogreet’s moShare.
The idea is that publishers and content owners will add the new moShare button to their websites to facilitate sharing of their content to mobile phones.
When the button is clicked, a small window pups up for the user to enter their phone number and the number of the recipient and then the content is shared as a text message, including a link back to the original content.
Rather than posting to a website or a particular circle of friends, moShare goes as a text message directly to the phone of the friend being shared with.
The expectation is that publishers will increase page views as more people share the links through their personal networks of friends.
“There are 90 billion pieces of content going out online,” says James Citron, CEO of MMS pioneer Mogreet. “What if you could share that by text? Text open rates are 95 percent.”
The strength of the idea is that each piece of content shared is specifically from one person to another, with the sender clearly identified.
In early trials with various companies, Citron says they found 20 to 30 percent of recipients clicking back to the site being referred. One early success was a pilot was with Red Bull with the launch of its film The Art of Flight, which included an early iteration of the moShare feature.
A key to the sharing is that content of any type, whether video, text, pictures and any other rich media, can be shared through the network.
The California company, which has been dealing with mobile video messaging since 2006, built moShare on top of its rich media messaging platform.
In its work over the years delivering hundreds of millions of mobile marketing messages for brands including Fox Broadcasting, Nike, Cox Media Group, Reebok and Steve Madden, Mogreet had to become adept at delivering all content types to thousands of mobile devices on a range of networks.
Essentially, Mogreet is taking its MMS-sausage-making knowledge and capabilities and extending them to another area, which looks like a logical mobile platform extension.
Mike Johnson, co-founder of Next Impulse Media in Palo Alto, has been trying moShare for several weeks on his website CosbySweater.com and closely monitoring the results.
“We’ve seen a 200 percent rise in our mobile traffic without a cannibalization of Facebook or Twitter sharing,” says Johnson. The website, which features content such as sports and technology, is targeted to males 25 to 55 years old.
“You can Tweet stuff and Like all day, but if you want your buddy to see something, you send it directly,” he says. “It’s a different use case since moShare really seeks a target.”
So now starts the chicken and egg of the volume of websites adding the moShare button to achieve critical mass and the associated measurements publishers will monitor as more of their content is moShared.
Chuck Martin is author of The Third Screen; Marketing to Your Customers in a World Gone Mobile, The Smartphone Handbook, CEO of Mobile Future Institute, Director of the Center for Media Research at MediaPost Communications and a highly sought-after mobile marketing speaker.
