Going Mobile
Valerie Sellers
At Untech10 last February, Tom McClintock noticed the rapidly increasing interest in mobile applications and advertising. Now, just a few months later, we’re seeing dueling predictions of when – not if – mobile devices will overtake PCs for connecting with the Net. In its April Internet Trends report, Morgan Stanley predicted “mobile will be bigger than desktop internet in 5 years.” Even earlier, the Gartner research company predicted crossover could occur as early as 2013, noting that the base of smartphones and browser-equipped feature phones will probably surpass 1.82 billion by 2013 (eclipsing the total number of PCs).
However, a profound shift in mobile-device usage is occurring at the same time. The Morgan Stanley report notes that mobile devices are increasingly used for data, not voice, communication. This is particularly true of iPhone users, whose phone calls typically comprise less than one-half of their total iPhone interaction.
Mobile Opportunities
Since the mobile web allows Net communication virtually anywhere, advertisers have new opportunities to connect with customers. This is particularly true for industries such as healthcare, where a large percentage of workers already use mobile devices for data collection and communication. Smartphones are expected to achieve 81% penetration of the physician market by 2012, and research shows a high satisfaction with smartphones within the industry. Regardless of industry, however, mobile computing will offer a host of new business opportunities, including location based services, mobile applications, social networking, and more.
Mobile Challenges
Entering the mobile environment presents a new set of challenges, beginning with the website itself. Should you invest first in a mobile version of your site, or in a mobile application (app) targeting a specific platform? When designing a mobile site, how do you determine what to include?
In an interview with eMarketer.com, Sharon Kittner of Cars.com notes that, “taking the newspaper and putting the entire thing onto the Web [is] not a website.” In the same way, she says, “taking our website and dumping it into a mobile environment isn’t very helpful either.“ Instead, Cars.com determined that 40% of their mobile users were accessing the site from a car dealer’s lot, and designed their mobile site to respond to that particular situation. The mobile version offers additional sales listings, truncated reviews, dealer locators, access to trade-in values, and similar sales-related information.
Application development challenges organizations with a different set of decisions. Which platform should you target first? Should the application run off the device, or in the cloud? Should it be free, or offered by subscription or another paid basis? App development may represent a huge mobile profit center, as mobile users (according to another Morgan Stanley report) are far more willing to pay for content than desktop users.
Such decisions, however, will not be made in a vacuum but will be impacted by changes in the mobile environment. For example, increased data use is creating new challenges for mobile network providers and has already led AT&T to introduce tiered pricing for new iPhone and iPad data plans. Removing customers’ unlimited monthly data usage increases the perceived value of downloaded apps and other services that don’t hog network bandwidth.
The Mobile Medium
In Marshall McLuhan’s famous formulation, “The medium is the message.” The mobile environment represents one more step away from printed matter; it’s not just the web writ smaller, as blogger David Hillis noted, but a different medium altogether: one in which content is location-aware, can be easily shared, and assumes its readers are on the move. “Focus on delivering concise content that fits the mobile medium,” he wrote. “Mobile is great for delivering news briefs, events, sports scores, photos, tweets, and useful information like maps, bus routes, directories, fill-in-the-blank. No one wants brochure-ware on a phone.”
Mobile data will be more like poetry than prose – light, free-form and personal. Yet, it will also be ruthlessly practical, solving on-the-go users’ problems and making their lives easier. Get ready for mobile to produce a new burst of creativity in product-development and marketing.