Mobile Mobile - where art thou

Mobility today resembles the early days of the Internet, where connectivity was poor and many businesses were contemplating the wisdom of connecting to an unknown network or in today's equivalent much less even contemplating the need for creating a mobile web presence.

Today just as businesses without a website are not even in the customers considerations, very soon it will be considered absurd not to have a mobile web site, extrapolating scenarios a few years down most firms moving forward will have an integrated mobile presence and services that uses customers accessibility on the mobile number(s) as a core consideration to deliver services and information.

The situation as it stands today is one where the mobile is rapidly expanding as a channel for interacting with consumers, and it will continue to be increasingly relevant to businesses as the networks, devices and technology advances to enable richer and a more personalized interaction anywhere anytime.

Realising this both Google with its admob acquisition and Apple with its Quattro acquisition are acknowledging the fact that mobile is going to be the next screen with the most eyeballs and that they need to have a presence in that space.

Likewise technologically advanced businesses who have taken early advantage of this channel are seeing immense ROI returns not to mention benefiting from a business channel with minimal or no clutter and compedition.

Many of my customers, users and professional colleagues ask me about the mobile future and query me on how should they engage with the channel. These conversations have ranged from high-level strategy dialogues to tactical campaign activities.

However what all businesses and organizations need to know is that they need to consider certain fundamental aspects of consumer behavior and channel abilities before they can tackle the challenges they face when interacting with their consumers on their mobile device.

Businesses need to understand fundamentally that the mobile user experience does not follow the PC user experience. The PC experience is a user being (typically) immobile with a full fledged keyboard with a mouse and a relatively large screen, however the mobile space is far more challenging with a variety of input devices and user contexts such as in a que, on the train or walking home or even driving!!! as well as far greater interactivity choices, voice, keypad, trackwheel, trackpad, navigation keys etc and it requires a different and dedicated approach to optimize the delivery to mesh with the user objectives.