(Update 22/07/08 - dotMobi, the company behind the .mobi Internet address designed specifically for mobile phones, and AKQA Mobile, the mobile division of the AKQA agency have launched the results of an extensive consumer study of mobile Internet usage and attitudes.)
With the news that 40 million US mobile subscribers (15.6 percent) actively use the mobile Internet, the mobile web is set to be a sure-fire line item entering many B2B marketers marketing plans in 2008/9.
According to a recent Nielsen Company’s report (with 16 countries tracked) the US is the leader in mobile Internet adoption (by penetration #’s), followed by the UK (12.9 percent) and Italy (11.9 percent).
Whilst I believe there is an element of ‘lies, damn lies and statistics‘ about this report (are US citizens browsing, or simply downloading email / how endemic is sophisticated use in the US compared to Europe or Japan?) the reality is I probably shouldn’t care. The bigger picture is that the mobile web is going to gatecrash the savvy marketers marketing mix quickly. Very quickly. You ignore 1million iPhones sold in a weekend, 4G wireless plans and the EC slashing of roam rates at your peril.
Which brings me neatly onto MoFuse - which allows webmasters& bloggers to launch and manage blog content (providing it is available as an RSS feed) in mobile friendly format. All that you need to do is provide the feed, and in a few simple clicks your blog is viewable on mobile devices at a url like yoursite.mofuse.mobi. Potentially very nice. I’ll certainly be checking it out.
So to recap. Why mobilise your blog? Well MoFuse believe you should for 5 reasons. I can’t argue with these, (even if i instantly take a disliking to the fact that a mobile advertising platform seems to be built in, Yuk!….I should be paying my readers not subjecting them to crappy ads) but the real truism is that people want to read content on the go. Plain and simple.
How are your plans for m. or .mobi coming along? Can you share your thoughts or best practices?
Filed under: Business, Media, Mobile, Online, Planning, Research, Social Media, Strategy, User Generated Content, Web, blogs, marketing, technology | Tagged: .mobi, 4G, AKQA, B2B, commerce, dotMobi, M-commerce, m., Mobile, Mobile Commerce, MoFuse, Nielsen
Yes, the mobile web is definitely here! See it in action for yourself at http://bango.com/live This is a sample of the traffic we see around the world, these guys are browsing to mobile websites!
If you do decide to mobilise your blog or want to find out who is visiting your .mobi then you can use our mobile analytics product for free (up to 100,000 page views a month) - see where you are getting your traffic from, the number of unique visitors, what’s most popular on your site. All sorts of useful things. More at http://bango.com/analytics.
Thanks for nice article!