Welcome to PR Vibes(tm), created by Calysto Communications to provide you with key insights into the publications and events in the communications industry. Today, we’re featuring an interview with Justin Springham, managing editor of the GSMA’s portfolio of editorial products, including Mobile Business Briefing. Enjoy!
What is the editorial mission of Mobile Business Briefing?
Our editorial mission is to cover the biggest news developments in the mobile sector on a daily basis.
How has it evolved since its launch in 2008?
Mobile Business Briefing (MBB) has come a long way since launch. Initially set up as an e-newsletter that would primarily service the GSMA’s 1,000+ member companies, the idea was to provide a free, daily snapshot of the five biggest industry news stories every edition, aggregating and sourcing content from a wide variety of online publications (from Reuters and Bloomberg through to trade publications). At the time I was juggling this role with managing the speaker agendas for the GSMA’s two annual Congress events in Barcelona and Asia, and would spend half of my working day creating the Briefing and the other half writing conference sessions.
Today we are a team of five full-time experienced mobile tech journalists, producing MBB (circulated to 36,000 global industry execs) and a variety of other publications. Three years ago Matt Ablott joined us from Informa and we launched a free, online portal (requiring registration) for the product and began marketing the service beyond the GSMA’s membership. We extended the original focus of aggregated “news” coverage of five top daily stories to up to ten news articles a day, using both a combination of aggregated content and our own, exclusively-sourced content. We also widened our scope beyond news, publishing in-depth weekly analytical features on topical issues, as well as opinionated blogs. Although we’ve expanded beyond news, this area of MBB remains our primary focus today and we still aim to provide a concise digest of the biggest daily news developments, encompassing all geographies and all parts of the mobile industry, from devices to network technologies, M&A to regulatory issues.
Last summer Steve Costello joined the reporting team and helped us launch Mobile Apps Briefing, a twice-weekly e-newsletter service dedicated to the booming apps market. Mobile Apps Briefing has a readership of 11,000 app developers, operators and vendors.
Over the last year the editorial team at the GSMA has also managed the content for Mobile World Live, designed to be an online hub for the mobile communications industry with a community of more than 85,000. We’ve been producing weekly videos and features with some of the industry’s highest-profile names and also produced Mobile World Live TV at this year’s Mobile World Congress; a live, 4-day broadcast beamed across the world online and throughout the venue and city of Barcelona on TV. Mobile World Live TV won a major award for our efforts, recently scooping the B2B & Advertising Content category at the ConnectedWorld.TV Awards in Amsterdam. The ConnectedWorld.TV Awards were hosted by BPL Broadcast and ran in conjunction with the IBC2011 event.
Is there anything new on the horizon for Mobile Business Briefing?
With MBB and Mobile World Live being two separate products, each with their own separate website and identity, the logical step for us was to integrate the two editorial services, creating a single, rich multimedia site that aims to provide the best mobile information resource in the industry. We went live with the new integrated site last month.
Integrating the two sites was a huge project, especially as the MBB site (the smaller of the two) had 15,000 registered users alone and thousands of daily visitors. Now, via a single sign-on at www.mobileworldlive.com, our readers can use their original Mobile Business Briefing website registration details to view hundreds of videos on the Mobile World Live site (including access to the GSMA’s Mobile World Congress and Mobile Asia Congress keynote presentations) as well as join the networking community tool. And we’ve ensured that all the 11,000+ archived articles from MBB have been moved across.
As a result of the integration we have launched a new logo for MBB and a new design for the daily e-newsletter, reflecting the look and feel of Mobile World Live. And by combining the two services, MBB readers are also able to gain single sign-on access to the two new additions to our Live series of online products: Mobile Money Live and Mobile Health Live. Mobile Money Live and Mobile Health Live are channels focused on these two booming verticals, delivering news, research, white papers, webinars and video content. Both of these sites also complement the GSMA’s Mobile Money Summit and Mobile Health Summit events, featuring the online post-show broadcast of keynotes, conference sessions and interviews with industry executives.
Will the launch of MBB/Mobile World Live result in any staff changes?
These new launches have led us to add to our reporter team: London-based Richard Handford is editing the two money and health Live websites, while Tim Ferguson has just joined us from Silicon.com to work across all our publications.
What makes the MBB audience unique? Do you have any breakdowns of readership?
Being supported by an organization that has the scale of the GSMA (1,000+ company members and organizers of the Mobile World Congress) enables us to reach an audience that other publishers may not have access to. For example, we have a truly global audience. Europe makes up around 50 percent of our 36,000 reader base, followed by Asia and North/South America (20 percent each) and 10 percent Africa. More than a third of readers also work for operators, a statistic that is attractive to our vendor advertisers. Approximately half of readers are responsible for approving, recommending or influencing the purchase of telecom kit. MBB is also circulated to a wide variety of job functions: e.g. C-level execs (15 percent), Director/Manager (50 percent), Engineer (7 percent) and Analysts (9 percent), among others.
How does MBB differentiate itself from other media covering the mobile market?
Our content is designed to provide a concise overview of the biggest daily stories, delivered in a format that does not require extensive reading or the need to click through to other sites or sources. Our audience can trust us to provide them with only the biggest global news stories of the day, covering the issues that really matter to the mobile industry.
The support of the GSMA gives us interview access to figures in the industry that rival publications may struggle to secure. We are also supported by the analyst team at Wireless Intelligence, enabling us to enrich our analysis reports with commentary and market data.
Our daily publication schedule for the e-newsletter also ensures we are the first of our rival publications to break the day’s global stories in an e-newsletter format. We also don’t just report the news, we always aim to tell the readers why any developments are important.
And the integration with Mobile World Live now enables us to offer both premium editorial content combined with CEO video interviews and features.
Does MBB offer any “value-added services”?
Our weekly, free analytical reports give our readers detailed insight into the mobile industry’s most topical issues. These reports are published in partnership with Wireless Intelligence, enabling MBB to offer valuable operator and market data that would usually come with a price tag.
The integration of MBB with Mobile World Live now sees all our content available in app format too; the Mobile World Live app is available across the iOS, BlackBerry, Symbian, Android and Windows Phone 7 platforms.
Via the integration with Mobile World Live, the MBB team (with the help of the GSMA’s Rudolph Moncrieff) is also now offering free regular webinars on hot industry topics.
What are some of the key topics you plan to cover in the future?
There are certain “hot topics” that are grabbing industry attention right now: NFC and TD-LTE being two examples. Last month we produced a webinar focused on whether the mobile device can really become a new form of currency, with Orange and Samsung as speakers. Our September webinar will focus on mobile healthcare, while October is dedicated to the emerging TD-LTE market. Our weekly analysis reports are designed to be topical and focus on “breaking” industry developments, although every quarter we provide a Top 25 Operator Ranking report which is always very popular, reviewing operator performance by metrics such as revenue and subscribers.
What’s one thing about MBB that most people don’t know?
The MBB team produces the official Show Daily publications for the GSMA’s annual events. At Mobile World Congress each year we produce 8 pages of daily news in the 80-page print publication across the course of the event week (as well as reporting live for the MBB website and e-newsletter), while at our smaller events (Mobile Asia Congress, Mobile Money Summit and Mobile Health Summit) we produce eShowDailies that are distributed to a more targeted audience. I’m very proud of both the quality and quantity of content that the MBB team produces across our publications.
What are your thoughts on how new media – blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. — has impacted mobile?
There’s no doubt that the social networking phenomenon has had a huge impact on mobile. Today any form of new media simply has to be available in mobile format, a trend that has helped create a booming applications market across a variety of competing platforms. This in itself has created both opportunities and challenges for our industry. Some networks have struggled to cope with the surge in demand for mobile data consumption, which in turn has opened up opportunities for innovative companies offering ways of helping companies control network congestion, while pushing the industry towards faster and more spectrally-efficient radio access technologies.
To turn the question on its head, social networking wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular as it is today without the influence mobile has had on its reach. Around half of Facebook’s user base access the service via mobile – and this figure will only increase.
What does Mobile Business Briefing do in terms of social media?
Mobile Business Briefing has a strong Twitter following that’s growing fast (4,000+) and also has dedicated Facebook and Linked In pages which are used by our readers as networking tools. We’re keeping a close eye on Google+. The reporter team here is using it personally and feedback so far has been pretty positive. Mobile World Live has an even larger following across its social networks (including 10,000 Twitter followers), so we’ll be looking next at how to better integrate the social networking side of all our products. The new site integration project has also provided our readers with their own social media functionality, enabling them to publish stories to their own Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Has the social media channel changed the way Mobile Business Briefing covers the news?
I don’t think it’s ‘changed’ the way we cover news, as we’ve always aimed to be first-to-market, but it’s certainly helped us boost our following and coverage. Twitter is a great way to promote news stories and drive traffic to our sites before the daily newsletter arrives in readers’ inboxes.
Any comments on if social media has changed editorial coverage for the better or not?
For the better, undoubtedly. Social media has given rise to ‘citizen journalism,’ providing new sources of content. And Twitter especially provides our reporter team with instant access to a wealth of third-party content that was previously so much more difficult to locate.
Do you produce video products?
The three Live sites – Mobile World Live, Mobile Health Live and Mobile Money Live – are supported by weekly video content. This includes regular publication of GSMA event keynotes from the Mobile World Congress, Mobile Asia Congress, Mobile Money Summit and Mobile Health Summit, as well as independent editorial features.
For example, Mobile World Live broadcasts four sets of programmes: Frontline, which is a dedicated channel focused on CxO level interviews with the biggest names shaping the mobile industry; MarketWatch, which offers insights into specific mobile markets, providing a snapshot of the trends and services driving the world’s most dynamic mobile regions; Feature Focus, a dedicated channel for video features on the industry’s most topical issues (from the latest LTE developments to environmental efforts, from application stores to handset launches); and Industry Initiatives, which is home to video content related to the GSMA’s projects and initiatives. These channels are complemented by archive footage from Mobile World Live TV (broadcast at the annual Mobile World Congress).
The two vertically focused Live sites (Money and Health) also publish weekly keynote videos from our Summit events, as well as all conference sessions. And the editorial team produces regular feature videos addressing the hottest topics in these booming sectors.
On a personal note, what do you like best about your job?
When I asked a colleague this question, his response was “when the clock hits 5.30” (I think he was joking). It’s the industry itself that makes this job great. I fell into mobile comms journalism by accident really in 1999 and – despite a couple of redundancies as the bubble burst in the following few years and suggestions from friends that perhaps I should “get out” and follow a more “stable” industry – mobile is booming. The ongoing convergence of the Internet world with mobile is only going to make things even bigger.