Jen's ringtone summary for book:
Ringtone Summary
What is it?
Ringtones are customizable rings for your cell phone.
Ringtones especially play to youth’s sense of identity, sensibility, and the mediums that they use.
Ringtones have become one of the newer mediums for delivering political messages. They have been referred to as the new political bumper stickers.
In other countries, political ringtones have been an “explosively viral phenomenon,” but because of restrictions by cell phone service providers, they have not caught on as readily in the U.S. U.S. cell-phone carriers make it difficult to create, swap, or distribute ringtones and an open source technology is not currently pervasive or particularly user friendly (see technical notes). Carriers are territorial and some phones can’t house ringtones from anywhere other than their carrier’s site.
Ringtones cross the digital/ non-digital divide in that they can be heard anywhere - the supermarket, bus stop, etc.
Ringtones can serve as a beacon to similarly minded citizens.
Strategic approaches
From what I read, it seems that ringtones are not yet being used strategically for political campaigns, but Jo Lee feels that they are on the brink of being really effective. This fledgling political medium will come into play in the election 2008. If a ‘gem’ comes out of a candidate’s mouth, it could be turned into a ringtone, just as any gaffs are immediately broadcast on YouTube and the like. Political ringtones are likely to be more popular if they are generated by people, rather than by the campaigns themselves.
Jo Lee believes it will be “one of those mediums that will come up from the bottom.”
Use cases
Hello Garci
· Most downloaded ringtone of 2005 (more than 500,000 downloads in one month)
· A poll that year showed that nearly 60% of the people felt that Arroyo should resign
· A consumer advocacy group called TxtPower hosted the ringtone
Barak Obama
· Began offering free ringtones in July 2007
· Ringtones feature clips of Obama’s speeches
· The ringtones were formatted and are distributed by MStyle
· Obama’s official website features an easy to access ‘join obama mobile’ button
Rintones08.com
· Launched May 07
· Offers free political ringtones or a mechanism to create your own
· Myxer developed an interface specifically for the website, so that users can create their ringtones in a one-step process
· Ringtones are part of a personal democracy forum
· Jo Lee: “Ringtones08 is the first foray into popular political oriented user
· Based on the ‘Hello Garci’ phenomenon
· No ads, no corporate sponsorship on site – all volunteer managed
· ability to monitoring ringtone download rates
· easy direct linkable page for each ringtone
· no need to register with the ringtone provider
· Voter registration available on the website
Center for Biological Diversity
· CBD created ringtones to raise awareness about particular endangered species
· Their orca whale tone is the most popular
· Users have downloaded more than 15,000 ringtones since their launch
· The ringtones increased users to 60,000 in about 5 months (according to Jo Lee – can not prove this number!)
· The wildlife ringtones are recorded in their natural environments
· The hope is that the ringtones will increase awareness of conservation issues by younger generations
· The free Web site allows users to listen to the wildlife ringtones, send ringtones directly to their phones with one easy click after entering an e-mail address, and download photos and fact sheets for each of the featured wildlife species
Technical overview – excerpted from http://www.personaldemocracy.com/node/750
The problem begins with creating the ring-tone in the first place. While its relatively simple to create a 30 second MP3 or WAV ring-tone, not all phones can play those formats or may require additional software to do so. Luckily, there are software applications that will help any ring-tone maestro convert his or her MP3 or WAV recording to other standard mobile device formats such as AMR, QCP and WMA. Most of these are for Windows (Mac users can use Sound Grinder). But even these files won't play in all phones, especially older phones which may only be able to play MIDI (.MID) like Polyphonic ring-tones.
Getting started
There are sites like Mixxer.com that allow you to create your own ringtones
Link to creating and downloading your own ringtone: http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/commentary/listeningpost/2006/02/70150?currentPage=all
Excerpt from website, but can’t find updated data to contradict these methods:
For the political campaign, non-for profit or individual activist, therefore, distribution of self made ring-tones is burdensome let alone costly and time consuming. But there are some alternatives
Here are four do-it-yourself solutions.
The first way is the most basic way but also requires a bit of mobile tech-savyness. One can simply download the ring-tone, email it to his or her self, open the email on their mobile device and download the attachment. This of course assumes that the mobile user has an email enabled phone and knows how to use it. And of course data charges do apply.
A second option is to use MMS (Multimedia Messaging System). Thats right, the same 3G enabled technology that allows you to send pictures and video from one cellphone to another also allows you to send sound files, that is, ring-tones. While this is not an option for political marketers in the sense that it would cost a fortune to send multiple MMS messages to those who wanted it, it does lend itself nicely to the concept of viral campaigning. And of course, data charges apply.
A third option would be to upload the ring-tone to a website and instruct users with mobile web browsers on their phone to visit the link. One should be able to install a ring-tone this way but mobile browser capabilities do vary. One could also send the link as an SMS message as some phones will allow you to access the link directly from a text-message (that's the SS technology being utilized by the commercial industry mentioned above).
Finally, some phones allow a user to connect their mobile device directly to a computer by means of a cable cord or bluetooth for the purposes of file transfer. It may be possible to install a ring-tone that way. I have had some success installing ring-tones on my Treo 650 and Nokia this way.
Looking forward
· More user friendly and open source technology to make personal ringtone sharing easy
· Promotion of political causes via snappy jingles heard out in the world
Hi, Jen.
Excellent writeup on ringtones in political campaigns in the US. As Founder & CTO of Myxer, I'm really interested in this topic and actively working to solve a lot of the technical and institutional issues that make user-generated ringtones difficult in the US.
A couple of things I'd love to add:
- In addition to powering the Ringtones08.com site, Myxer.com also powers the Center for Biological Diversity's offerings.
- There is some name confusion with another company mentioned in your article. The company briefly known as MIXXER has been renamed to 3GUPPIES. This should not be confused with my company, which has run operated MYXER.COM (as well as MYXERTONES.COM) since 2005. MYXER is responsible for powering Ringtones08.com and CfBD, and MYXER provides a user generated content site (http://www.myxertones.com) that makes it easy to make and share ringtones and other mobile content with others.
I agree with Jo Lee that it's just going to take one really good sound clip from a candidate to bring a lot of attention on ringtones in the 08 election. I'm looking forward to finding out what that will be!
Myk
Founder / Myxer
Posted by: Myk | August 09, 2007 at 05:17 AM