Trilibis Mobile, a company that builds on- and off-deck mobile Web sites for brands, reports in an email press release that WAP sites are paying off for companies that use them to extend their promotions beyond SMS text. Based on its work on 60 such projects the company has named the top features for an effective site. The measure of success: the degreee to which a site encourages user participation and interaction with the brand. (Granted, it’s not a huge sample – but the suggestions nonetheless merit a closer look.)

1. Votes/Polls: Give users a feeling of involvement, and allow them to influence the outcome of things they are passionate about.
2. Blogs: Allowing users to contribute wirelessly enhances the stickiness of the site.
3. Branded storefronts: Offering branded content is a must – but so is ensuring users can navigate the decks.
4. Informational content: Valuable to users – but, again, it must be easy to navigate.
5. Trivia: Let users test their knowledge on something they’re passionate about

The company also reports the results of mobile campaigns that followed this list, with some brands reporting a 200-fold increase in user participation in the form of voting, for example. It’s particularly interesting that two of the five features indirectly confirm the importance of mobile search and content discovery techniques. Navigating destinations packed with content and information will clearly be difficult without them, and users will likely lose their interest or tempers – or both – with every additional click.