Today Google announced on their blog that they’re updating Google Base, and making it a subcategory of their new Google Merchant Center. Apparently the interface will remain largely the same, but there will be more features for promoting products, uploading products, and interaction with their pay server, Google Checkout.
Honestly, though, this is largely non-news, as GB has never achieved the success it was trying for: Being competition for eBay and Craigslist.
Similarly, Google Checkout never became the PayPal killer it was supposed to be.
In my opinion, it’s because the average user, while very aware of the Google brand, doesn’t associate it with shopping. Craigslist and eBay were obviously built on that. Despite the ease of use of the Google system, their commitment to marrying it to the Google brand may be what holds them back.
Take YouTube. Three years ago, Google Video was in fact superior to YouTube in many ways. It had better video compression, titles could be found more easily, (thanks to their search algorithm,) and videos can be downloaded to portable players. Still, YouTube was the winner in on line video. Google purchased YouTube, and perhaps more importantly their brand, and as a result Google now rules on line video.
Yahoo! did the same thing with Flickr and Delicious. Both of these are owned by Yahoo!, but they exist as their own entities. People who never used Yahoo! search are still dedicated users of these other sites. Google has their own version of Flickr in Picasa, but this is still tightly intermeshed with the Google platform itself, so it’s hardly it’s own brand.
I have to wonder why Google doesn’t simply spin off their merchant services into another name. All of us smartypants insiders would know who owns them, but the layman would simply see it as a new tool. While it’s tough to build a brand from scratch, it’s much more difficult to expand an existing brand into unrelated territory.
The Italians really know television advertising. Italian filmmakers somehow manage to both make brilliant, artistic gems, but without abandoning the actual product to do so. Remember Ridley Scott’s now famous (formerly infamous) “1984″ Apple commercial? It was a lot of production, but never showed the product – and only the narration at the end let you know it was even for the computer company. It ran during the Super Bowl, and got millions of viewers to ask, “huh?”
Here, the product isn’t in the way, only mentioned because the filmmaker has to, because the company is flipping the bill for their brilliance. Yet the final product in each case is also artistically unique – they aren’t by-the-numbers advertising done just to make a car payment.
Unfortunately in America, commercials are usually produced by the lowest nadir of creativity, or else by artists who have no sense of promotion. You only get greatness in a commercial when you find someone with both.
Of course, the first two are by “Il Maestro” himself Federico Fellini, so the bar here is set pretty high.
I used to write a lot more about search marketing on this blog and my former employer’s blog. But it hasn’t been a long time since social media became what everyone was talking about, reading about , and proselytizing about. People built entire careers out of their ability to become superstars of this new medium.
Now mobile marketing is starting to realize it’s place, as smart phones slowly take over the cell phone market.
But what ever happened to people’s interest in search marketing? It seems as marketers’ attention shifted to these sexier subjects, the tried-and-true search market has been ignored. I’m basing this both on the reading material I find, and the analytics for my own blog: There is more hard information out there on social media than there is on improved findings and tactics for search marketing.
This wasn’t the case three or four years ago. Back then there were plenty of mainstream articles on the value of a good Google position. Today everything feels like it has stagnated. “Google’s still number 1, Yahoo is gone, Microsoft is still not Google. Film at 11.”
I think this is because the work of natural search is complex, where social media can be about as simply put as, “making friends.” Also, social media lets people blast messages at others, where search marketing is more passive.
I’m really not sure why this shift in attention, but search marketing still offers a far greater opportunity for traffic, leads and sales than social media does. If you are retooling your time and energy into social media at the expense of your SEO campaigns, you are leaving money on the table. Search is a known commodity. It does take more work to gain a superior Google ranking than it does to get 1000 Twitter friends, but anything that is difficult to achieve is usually worth it.
Mobile marketing may well become the king of Interactive sales in the next few years. But when it does, people will still need a way to find things. iPhone and Android may then find themselves the new top search engines. Who knows? But however you slice it, SEO is still incredibly important to your marketing goals, and shouldn’t be ignored because the “latest things” in marketing get so much more ink.
Finding conversations on Facebook is an ordeal. Unlike Twitter, which comes complete with a search engine, Facebook profiles are closed off to anyone who isn’t a friend of that person. (Unless that person turns off that particular privacy filter, which isn’t often.)
So seeing as how Facebook is the Myspace for the moment, how do you find people who are talking about you or what you sell?
One way is using Facebook’s own Lexicon tool. This searches through Facebook wall posts looking for terms you select. However, it will only show you how that term is trending, and will only find something that already has high use. For instance, if I do a search for “beer,” you can see that this gets mentioned a lot – with an ungodly spike in use on St. Patrick’s Day. However, if I do a search for “Four Peaks Brewery,” a local micro brewery here in Tempe, there’s nothing. Even if it did turn up something, I wouldn’t be able to find out who is using this term, and how.
You can also use Facebook’s paid ad server to find out how many people use a specific word in their own profile. If you want to find people who list “pizza” somewhere in their profile, it will tell you how many do so to the person. It will also tell you their age group, gender, geographic location… it’s very neat for that.
However, it is also wildly unspecific. It doesn’t tell you what context people use the phrase in, so they could be using the phrase you are looking for in any number of ways that have nothing to do with what you’re looking for. Also, Facebook users aren’t prone to updating their profiles. Once they create an account and enter some information into those “about me” boxes, they usually stay untouched.
And after that, things dry up pretty quickly. Because Facebook walls off the information people post to their immediate friends, there is no easy way for you to penetrate this information.
My advice, frankly, is to monitor everything else. Remember, “brand monitoring” is simply a fancy way of saying, “what people are saying about you.” If the zeitgeist believes something about your business or industry, the frequency with which they say it on Twitter or blogs isn’t going to change dramatically on Facebook. If 60% of Tweets say pizza is delicious but 88% hate anchovies on it, you can bet Facebook posts aren’t going to be dramatically different.
If you are concerned with “what people are saying about you,” there is a wealth of free tools available to you, with more coming on line all the time. It isn’t something that takes a great deal of effort to look into, and can give you a good idea of what people do and don’t want.
Once you have this information, simply apply it to Facebook proactively through your Page, Group, text ads or applications.
What you are not likely to get any time soon is an easy road map to each user according to what they post. This is certainly annoying, given the number of people who use this site. However, it is only a matter of time before the next “big thing” comes along on the Internet. Perhaps the next Myspace will get you better information.
In the past I’ve been pretty harsh on the concept of building iPhone apps to promote businesses. If you can make one inexpensively, then sure, go for it. But given the number of iPhones in service worldwide, it isn’t likely you’re going to see a huge return in traffic and sales if you invest heavily in one.
That having been said, iPhones – as well as G1s, Blackberrys and Treos – are changing the landscape, as they give more people more places to jump on line from. Large social networks are developing their own applications for these. So instead of developing your own applications for mobile devices, it makes more sense to look at the social networks that take better advantage of mobile devices themselves. If you can get a strong foothold on these, you can “be there” for the mobile phone community, without having to invest as heavily in development.
I picked these these three sites because they are specifically Geosocial Networks. (Well, 12seconds.tv doesn’t emphasize the Geosocial aspect as much as they could.) Geosocial networking sites like these rely on a user’s ability to access them anywhere, anytime. Doing the same analysis on giants like Twitter, YouTube and Linkedin wouldn’t show smartphone’s utility as easily. (And three let you post from your phone, but they’re enormous for other reasons.)
As of September 2008, of these three only Brightkite had an iPhone app available.
Brightkite and Utterli both allowed users to post with a more commonly used cell phone with camara. (They still do, actually.)
Since mostnon-smart phones don’t offer video, 12seconds only allowed posting from their site or through an e-mail posting system. The average phone user could not take part.
When 12seconds debuted their iPhone application, their traffic started to increase. Conversely, Utterli, which started out better, dropped as more people started using apps instead of traditional cell phones for posting. On Utterli you can access the site from any phone, smart or not. They built their technology and audience around cheap, average phones. As more advanced phones came into use, their service looked more and more antiquated. Actual audio posts on the site are actually fewer and fewer, with most users leaving text posts. Since there are already enough Twitter clones, they’ve sagged considerably in traffic.
Brightkite has been steadily increasing in traffic with their iPhone and Android applications. These make it easier to post photos, text, and even use the phone’s GPS to post the user’s location.
The point of all this is that networks that use mobile media are smart places to gain a foothold for you and your brand, especially if what you sell is something people “on the go” would want. It’s about understanding how your customers access information. You wouldn’t be posting from your phone necessarily, but if you know the people you want to reach are on the go, this is where you would make your appeal to them.
For example, SkyMall reaches a large number of people on Twitter, but they could reach a more targeted collection of travelers on Brightkite, and the reach of that campaign would only increase over time as more people started using that site’s iPhone application.
Of course, SkyMall also has their own iPhone app. This means they need to generate their own traffic for people to use it, rather than piggyback another network’s application and message to its users. I have to wonder how much business SkyMall gets from their application. The purpose of these programs is to allow users easy and frequent access to their site.
Ebay or Yahoo! Shopping certainly have this kind of user base. SkyMall appeals to the impulse buyer. In order to make their app profitable, they need to develop their own traffic for the app, then make sure the application itself converts users repeatedly. With the phone market further splintering, that campaign will eventually need to create similar applications for all the phones coming out.
In the end, this turns into a lot of money spent just to be able to say you have an iPhone app – when it could be spent focusing on areas where you can get more customers.
I have to admit, I’ve become a Mob Wars addict lately. On one page of the game, it offers you points to help you if you, “fill out one of these offers.” It looks like this:
Unfortunately, it is a scam, and I strongly caution you not to fill any of these out. And if you’re advertising a product, don’t pay to be on a list like this. I’ll explain why…
Why you should stay away
I decided to be adventurous and see what would happen if I filled out one of these forms. I have a Yahoo! e-mail address I don’t use, a PO Box address so I don’t have junk mail hitting me at home, and a Google Voice phone number so I can block out telemarketing scum. In short, if I ever need to fill out an online form, I’m Teflon. I hope.
Anyway, once you do fill out one of these surveys, you are then required (though they didn’t tell you this when you began) to complete an “offer from one of our sponsors.” That looks like this:
I sought out the one I figured would be least likely to get back to me – a college loan company that supposedly gives education grands to soldiers. I’m too old for the military and have never served, so this looked like as safe a bet as I was going to find. Once I’d done that, though, I still wasn’t shown my Mob Wars points – there were more offers shown to me. At least I had the option to skip these, until I found one that I couldn’t. And this is where things looked downright insideous:
See the graphics that didn’t load? They meant I could go no further. I had a lot of patience while doing this, figuring if I could just make it through all their offers and surveys I’d eventually get the promised Mob Wars points. This page made sure they I wouldn’t, but that these companies still had my contact information, and, if I had given them real addresses and phone numbers, would be hounding me until long after I am dead.
Now, you may have already seen these forms, and decided on sight they wouldn’t give you what they promise. I’m here to tell you you’re right – stay away from them. They’re a scam, and they’ll see to it they ruin your day.
Why you shouldn’t advertise this way
I am sure the company that provides this advertising model (Super Rewards) tells the people they sell services to that, “You’re getting targeted traffic on Facebook!” That can be enough for very lazy people do sign a contract, as many businesses have.
But each lead isn’t targeted, or high quality – they’re from people playing games on Facebook who are willing to fill out a form or sign up for an offer to get some help. What each of these companies gets is someone who wishes they would go away. I can only imagine how many companies will get the contact information I provided.
Besides not getting quality leads, they become bothersome, and generate negative buzz. If I were to get a call a week from the military education grant company, you can bet I would be telling everyone within earshot of this horrible company and their non-stop calls to get my money. With a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page and a YouTube channel, you can very safely bet your ass that I can make a LOT of people hear my complaining. And I’m nothing special – EVERYONE has access to these loudspeakers!
There’s a reason Don Lapre is universally vilified: His victims have access to universal communications.
This kind of advertising wouldn’t exist if so many companies didn’t pay for these services. It’s easy to blame this Super Rewards company, that will surely have a new name in a couple of years. But they wouldn’t be able to take advantage of people in this way if there was no one paying them to do so. The number of companies that do this are legion, and should certainly be informed that these ads are not helping them.
What is Facebook doing with these people?
If ever there was an argument for charging a subscription fee for Facebook, this is it. Facebook needs money – they offer a free service, and have yet to find a way to monetize it. In fact, each time they try to leverage their user lists or find a new way to sell advertising, they get into trouble for it. Somehow, this kind of advertising has flown under everyone’s radar as something worth complaining about. So they keep doing business with these kinds of companies.
If anyone at Facebook does read this, I would like a response: Why don’t you quality check these offer sites? If the author of Mob Wars is actually the one responsible for these ads, why aren’t you doing any quality checking of their advertising, since it is on your site, and accessed by your users? Why do you allow them to make claims that, “completing one offer” will result in getting some reward? These claims are false. If you don’t look at what companies like this do, the advertisers aren’t the only ones who won’t be trusted. All Facebook ads could get the reputation for false claims, false promises, and continuous telemarketing calls.
Keep in mind, I went in knowing it was a fool’s errand. There are groups of users all over Facebook just like this one, complaining about not receiving their offer rewards, and finding proof of fraud from Super Rewards. Why is nothing ever done? Why does Facebook continue to do business with these sites?
How much complaining does Facebook require before they decide something is actually wrong?
10 years ago, advertisers ponied up for banner ads in droves. Enough people clicked on to get pop-ups, cookies that invaded their privacy, telemarketers, spam e-mails… and then they stopped clicking on them altogether. It took years for these kinds of ads to come back as a viable marketing tool, mostly because major sites like Yahoo! and MSN quality controlled the ads, and forbade certain companies from buying this space. Today, people still click on an eBay banner with confidence, because eBay hasn’t ever steered someone wrong. They also stay away from any banner that asks about your credit score, because so many of these companies have.
Facebook needs to control who can advertise as well, lest they completely ruin their advertising platform.
In the meantime, be very wary of what you click on and what information you share when someone has a “deal” for you. I’ve never met a single person who got a, “free Xbox just for filling out this form!”
BTW, Coming soon: How to tool your Google Voice account to screen out telemarketers.
So you want your video to go “viral.” Well, who doesn’t? There aren’t many people left who post media to YouTube so only friends and family can see it. More often, people are trying to create a groundswell of interest in their work.
But how do you get a large number of people to see what you’ve shared when there are so many other videos to compete with? YouTube puts the number of videos uploaded at 15 hours of video uploaded each minute.
So even if you video is compelling, funny, well-produced, controversial… people are going to have to dig through scads of other videos first before coming to yours. What do you do?
The easy answer is to simply put it up and let your audience find you. After all, presumably your video will live on YouTube for as long as the site exists. Over time people will come to it, see it, and even share it with people they know. The problem with this is it means giving up on making it viral. Viral means hundreds of thousands of views right now.
You could post something that already has a lot of buzz behind it, either because it is about someone famous, or an event that has been widely publicized. Which is all fine and well, if you happen to have that on hand. Most people are trying to get views of something no one knows about yet. The magical promise of YouTube is the ability to create a widely consumed media event from scratch.
So if you are dedicated to getting this kind of attention to your video, you are going to have to game the system.
I have my own moral compunction to let things rise or fall on their own merit. But sometimes we don’t all have the time or budget to shoot something and hope for the best. If that’s the case, here are the broad strokes on how to get your video seen.
YouTube’s Most Popular
Let’s assume you’ve shot something that people will actually enjoy seeing, you’ve tagged it correctly, and written a decent description of the video. These things help YouTube sort out where to put your video, so the people interested in your kind of content can find it more easily. It will still need to compete with those videos that are getting so many more views in a shorter period of time.
So you will need to get a sizable number of views to get even more. Think of it as stoking a fire: You have to start a small fire that can grow larger by itself. You do this by posting your video to a number of locations on your own.
Facebook: Create a following on Facebook and share the video with all of your friends. Beg them each to share the video with all of their friends as well. If you’re particularly ambitions, or you don’t have a built-in Facebook following, create a Facebook Page. You can set the page up to open on the Facebook version of the video, with a link to the YouTube version for people to follow. Then buy Facebook advertising to promote the page. These ads convert much better than normal PPC ads, and can help you to create your Facebook following as well as funnel traffic into your YouTube posting.
Forums: There are thousands of forums for specific categories you can join and post your video to. If these have enough traffic of their own, you may want to set up several accounts and create artificial conversations about the video. This isn’t exactly white hat, and the forum in question won’t take kindly to it if they find out. However, the worst they can do is kick you off the board. This is a common practice for some link marketing, but using forums to post a video is much more successful than posting SEO links.
StumbleUpon: This bookmarking site has millions of dedicated users who enjoy nothing more than randomly calling up web pages, photography, and, best of all for you, videos. Adding your video to this site can quickly jump start the number of views it gets. These tend to slacken off after a day, so you’ll definitely want to incorporate this into your video launch strategy early.
MySpace: Since MySpace allows the posting of videos into the comment sections of other users’ own profiles, you can place the video in a number of locations. Then it will be viewable by both that user and all of their friends. (Should they choose to play it.)
Flickr: Along the same lines, you can post your video to Flickr and include a link to your YouTube video as well. Videos on Flickr cannot run longer than 90 seconds, so either your product will need to be short or you’ll have to post the best clip of it. But you can include a link in the description. These links are useless for creating SEO links, but are fine for redirecting traffic.
Blog Pitching: This is the tried-and-true method of gaining word of mouth for any on line public relations. Before you ever post your video, create a list of blogs that write about topics similar to what you’ll be sharing. Make sure you have some e-mail address, Twitter handle, or some other means of getting in touch with them. Then, on the day you do launch your video, contact them with a link to your video and a QUICK explanation of why they should post it. Do not write a press release-like tome about how great it is. Bloggers hate being told what they should be thinking or feeling by someone trying to promote something. Instead, let them know how great they are, and offer the content as, “something your readers might be interested in.” Appeal to their ego, get the link in, then get out of there.
In fact, most of these tactics are common in link marketing. The difference is that with link marketing, you need followable, indexable links. Here, you only need a site that has traffic and a willingness to share, and the time put aside to push the video’s link the moment you upload your video.
Lately I’ve been geeking out heavily on Seth Godin’s book, “Free Prize Inside.” (This is a link to an excerpt of it, which I feel is a lot less lame than a link to the book’s Amazon.com listing.) I’ve been very taken with his idea that anyone in an organization is responsible for a company’s marketing – what they do effects the product’s outcome, and it’s benefits are what you sell it on.
What’s caused a bit of controversy among people I know is the logical conclusion of this idea: Anyone can innovate solutions for a product outside of their own mien. That is, if someone in production knows of a way to better design the product, they should propose this innovation – thereby stepping over the heads of the design department.
Now, it makes perfect sense that if someone in a company has an idea for doing the job better, they should try to make it happen. Since doing this sometimes means stepping on other people’s heads, it can also mark that someone as trouble to other departments. It can also mean the wrath of management, who are still accustomed to employees working within their own department’s fiefdom.
I can’t say I agree with the man in this video, that employees who are innovators should want to get fired. Everyone should strive to improve their company and it’s products whenever they can, but remember: Getting fired for innovation really means losing your regular income because you were too smart for your own good.
It makes sense to most anyone that finding a better way to do anything is good. But company culture is a tricky thing – and before any serious innovation starts, the people at the top have to be ready to accept it. Otherwise, innovative employees with good ideas could find themselves fired. This is bad for everyone, because the employee now has to find a job – and the company loses a smart employee, who will likely find work with a more forward-thinking company.
Perhaps the best place to start when you want to find new solutions is to get your managers and directors on board with the idea of innovation first? Or do you think it’s better to put out an idea full steam ahead, consequences me damned?
Last week the girlfriend and I took a trip to Las Vegas. (Hence the slight lull in posts. Sorry ’bout that!) While I was there, much to her chagrin, I posted notes and pictures to my Brightkite account – which cross posted to my Twitter, Flickr and Facebook profiles as well. Not surprisingly, I always get more interaction on these kinds of posts than I ever do putting up links to blog posts. It’s nice to vicariously join someone on their vacation.
If you’re trying to generate more business through social media, this is kind of important. It shows that when you provide something real that is happening, people will respond to it much more than if you’re simply throwing more messaging at them.
You may already know this, if you enjoy using social in your personal life. When you talk about events in your real life, your real friends respond. When you post about offers or products or something company-related, it seems to fade into the rest of the promotional noise.
My experience is that whenever your company has ANY kind of event, you should be sharing it. One great example of this is the Los Angeles Fire Department’s Flickr page. They seem to take photos of everything they do, and share them with the community. These posts don’t say, “Support the LAFD” all over them – they don’t have to. Seeing what these people do for the City inherently sells their importance to the community. They’re far more interesting than my piddly Vegas vacation pics, but they follow the same logic: Showing people an interesting something, rather than asking them to click on something.
Of course, reaching out to the community isn’t the same as selling a product. A better example of that is the University of Phoenix’s YouTube channel. Do you see something different about this page, compared to other YouTube channels you may have seen? Besides the branding and the layout, they are not drawing attention to their own videos, or their own recent activity. They are instead turning the focus to their fans – highlighting the commentary section. Rather than making this channel solely promotional, they invite others to leave comments publicly about them. So instead of making the channel entirely promotional, it becomes a place where others can take part in conversations with University of Phoenix directly – which is what social networking is supposed to be all about.
Don’t think of social media as the last step people take before deciding to take the plunge and buy something. Instead, think of it as a way to make friends and get them on your side. Once you’ve done that, think about what people would want to see and do when they get to your page, profile, channel, or whatever it is you’ve set up. Video, photography and Flash games are all great ways to get people to interact with your brand, if you can make it interesting.
Speed Racing is a game on Facebook application that is very popular. And while eBay Motors did not write the application, they were instrumental in getting products placed there. So as people play the game, buying new cars and upgrading them with parts, the eBay Motors brand is ever present. The game gives them the idea to pimp out their own cars, and gives them one name to associate with finding the right parts for the job. They may not be engaging users directly, but they are giving users something they want to do.
So there are ways to use social to get people to learn more about your company and product, but the ones that work do not force users to do anything. I believe the reason is that people are not coming to social because they have a problem to solve or are looking to buy something to fill a need. You find more people like that on search engines. Instead, people are looking for new experiences, and you can give them that while also familiarizing them with what you do.
It isn’t as simple as saying, “x number of people are on Facebook, so all I need to do is be there, and I can expect y number of customers.” The expression probably reads more like, “x number of people are on Facebook, so if I engage as many people as I can with something interesting and entertaining that’s relevant to what I do, I can expect y number of customers from search, e-mail sign-ups, direct site traffic, walk-ins to my stores…”
I’m always finding new sites for getting things done, or communicating with others, or simply for screwing around. Wakoopa is a bit of a mix of all of them.
What is Wakoopa? Simply put, it’s a collection of programs that people can review – think of it as Yelp for software. There is a tracker you can download, which I would like to point out is not required to use the site. If you want to keep them from monitoring you, you just leave it off. However, if you do install it, it keeps tabs on which programs you use and for how long. You can then look over reports on how much time you spend on the Internet, how much you spend gaming, doing office work… the programs are grouped into large segments to tell you what you tend to do, and for how many hours in the day.
Breaking it down, you can also see which specific programs and sites you use (Google, Office, Photoshop, Twitter,) and how many hours and minutes you spend specifically on each. If you think you’re not an Internet addict, Wakoopa can be a cold dose of reality for you.
Best of all, you can review products and sites, and get similar information from other users. (Hence the Yelp comparison.) I’ve found more than a few freeware and cloud programs from Wakoopa that I am really thankful for.
Even better, you get to write negative reviews. No, scratch that….
Even better, I GET TO WRITE VICIOUS REVIEWS. Like all people who used computers in the late 90s early 00s, I despise RealPlayer. If you haven’t experienced the joys of RealPlayer yourself, imagine a leech that not only drinks your blood, but also installs itself in place of all your other media-playing programs, the ones you actually do like. Then picture continuous pop-up ads, getting your browser hijacked, your system being slowed WAAAAAY down… I’m sure you’ve run into little gems like this yourself.
Well rather than hunt down the development team that ruined your day and cutting them into cubes with a meat saw, you can instead avoid prosecution and tell the world just how horrible their program is! Warn people off, make them aware of the skulduggery at work! (If you look at my review of RealPlayer on Wakoopa, you can see my handiwork. It was so satisfying.)
Finally, Wakoopa is technically a social network, you can meet people interested in the same areas as yourself and friend them. Let’s say you’re really getting into SlideShare. You can peruse the users, friend them, or even create a group of SlideShare users and pick their brains.
The networking aspect of Wakoopa, frankly, isn’t the greatest. It feels more like an afterthought, something else to do while looking at your own usage stats. Still, it is nice to be able to see what your followers are using. Usually it’s the best way to find out what’s new. Like I’ve said, I’ve found a LOT of new sites and programs and networks using Wakoopa, and this is how.
If you’re on FriendFeed, it’s one of the hallowed few networks you can hook up there as well. There isn’t a mobile app for it yet, but there are whispers in the wind about one in the near future.
If you give it a try, or you’re already on it, I’d love to hear your opinions as well!
