#smsldn: How news is responding to the inexorable rise of mobile

In the immortal words of Bachman Turner Overdrive, you ain't seen nothing yet - certainly not in the field of mobile, driven by social. 

That was the theme of the final session the recent Social Media Summit which brought together a panel of four speakers with different perspectives and advice on how to respond to this rapid growth. 



The big numbers came from Vodafone's Matt Peacock: 91% of all mobile traffic is internet data (very little is therefore voice or text SMS, which are both in decline). And while three quarters of all mobile users are already in emerging markets, there's still huge growth to come. "Cheap Chinese phones, combined with 3G and 4G" in India would lead to "an extraordinary revolution”, said Peacock. In India, the world's largest democracy, most adults will soon have a personal computer in their hands which is indistinguishable from what's now seen in London or New York. Social media is becoming the internet for much of the world.



That was a point picked up by Cynara Vetch of CCTV Africa, who said that, in much of Africa, Facebook is, in essence, the internet. Careful to point out that Africa isn't one country, she highlighted that the continent has 700 million subscribers and is the fastest growing region for mobile globally. Currently fewer than 20% of devices in Africa are smartphones - and even those that are internet enabled have small screens and aren't very powerful.

Coupled with relatively low literacy rates, it means audio remains vital. Ghana, for example, has seen a project which let people listen to al-Jazeera news bulletins on the phone. And audio reports could also be submitted by phone. Other African initiatives have led to "citizen reports" submitted by mobile - of content only available on mobile and by contributors paid only via mobile. Vetch spoke of "optimism" in Africa, with excitement about how mobile will connect the continent and how the lower cost of handsets will give more people access to smartphones.

Peacock had predicted the growth of internet data would have "profound implications" for journalists, changing how they write, shoot and edit. Ramaa Sharma from the BBC World Service Group indicated that his message had already got through to the BBC at least.

The BBC is going mobile in a "very aggressive fashion". Of the World Service's 28 languages, half are 'mobile first': in other words, received by their audiences predominantly by mobile phone.

The corporation has responded with "responsive design" sites - websites adapting to the device they’re being viewed on. Since the conference the BBC has published details of a report by one of its non-executive directors, Howard Stringer, which backs this strategy: recommending that for News, “if it is to take advantage of the growth in mobile broadband, the BBC must be quick to spot trends and to understand how social is developing.”

The World Service’s existing initiatives have produced a 20% on average uplift in traffic for the sites which have gone "responsive”, Sharma said. But "product innovation" wouldn't be enough to meet what she called "aggressive targets": editorial changes are also needed.

With 96% of Hausa service users (in Nigeria) coming from mobile, it was “ridiculous” for journalists to be constructing their content according to how it read and displayed on desktops. So August 2013 saw a pilot which transformed the Hausa service: news stories were cut to 150 words; features and analysis to 300-400. As a result, the number of stories more than doubled, from 10 to 25. And their content was deliberately changed to, with an increased number about quirky news, technology and sport. All of this was done to make the output more appropriate for mobile and social usage. 

The result: strong and continued growth, with the Hausa pilot paving the way for a new mobile strategy across other African services as well as Indonesia. 



While shorter content seems the order of the day for Hausa, a different picture was painted by Liam Corcoran of the Irish tech company NewsWhip which analyses social sharing.

NewsWhip's analysis found the average length of the New York Times's top 10 most shared articles in November was 2,000 words, with the longest being 10,000. People still have a voracious appetite for good quality writing, said Corcoran; nothing has changed that just because people are finding their stories through social media.

He presented figures to back up his claim: in October 2013 the top 100 English language publishers had a combined 125.8 million interactions on Facebook, but by March that was up to 347.8 million, with mobile having a "very important part to play" now that Facebook has 1 billion mobile users.

The last word and the last large number went to Matt Peacock: between the dawn of civilisation and 2003 humanity created data equivalent to 5 exabytes (5 billion gigabytes); in 2014 that amount is created every two days. And as more go mobile and as more go social, expect that to rise still further.

Videos of the sessions at #smsldn will appear on our YouTube channel in the near future.

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