Mobile Web: The ‘Do Nothing’ option

From Q2 to Q3 2008, the number of Britons using mobile Internet increased by 25% (from 5.8 to 7.3 million) compared to 3% for PC-based Internet (34.3 to 35.3 million Britons) (Nielsen Online 24/11/08)

Just because the mobile web is booming, that’s not to say that every website needs a mobile version. In some cases it would be a spectacular waste of money to create a separate mobile version when the regular ‘desktop’ website will cater for mobile use just as well.

Before getting into the technicalities of handsets, mobile browsers, markup language and device detection, you need to first determine one key factor: Is anyone really likely to look at your website on their mobile phone?

What type of content are you offering?

Mobile phone users browse the internet in a different way to desktop web users. According to comScore, the fastest-growing categories for daily mobile web access in North America from 2008-2009 were:

• News & information (BBC, TFL, Flight information, weather, Wikipedia)
• Social Networking / Blogs (MySpace, Facebook)
• Stocks and financial information
• Movie information
• Business directories
• Entertainment (YouTube, Shazam, Flickr)

If your website does not fall into one of these categories, the chances are it won’t get much traffic from the mobile web audience.

What type of mobile web users are your audience?

According to Gartner, at the end of Q2 2008, Smartphones held about 11% of the mobile device market share Worldwode. If you already know that your audience are predominantly Smartphone users and your website is built in well-coded HTML with few images, then the browser on the Smartphone will display like a desktop browser and users can zoom in using touchscreen or QWERTY keyboard. This means that the ‘do nothing’ option might be an entirely viable one.

Will your website already render well on a mobile browser?

Every mobile handset is slightly different, but on most of the latest phones you can access the internet in one way or another. For desktop computers, websites might look and function differently on Firefox to Internet Explorer or Safari. Usually, well-written code will iron out these differences, but you may still notice a slightly different typeface, colour or positioning of elements depending on your browser. It’s exactly the same for mobile.

If the website is built in such a way that it will degrade sensibly on a small screen whilst still presenting the user with the relevant content, then it may not require a separate version. Ready.mobi will tell you whether or not your site passes the mobile test: The site will give you a free report and a ‘readiness for mobile’ score. It’ll also show you exactly how the site will look on some of the main mobile devices.

The quick answer

In summary, the ‘Do nothing’ option may be a good option if your website is either:

a) An unlikely type of content to be accessed via the mobile medium

b) Likely to be accessed by predominantly Smartphone users

c) Already rendering well on most handsets.

Watch out for the next Mobile Web blog where I’ll be talking in more detail about different options that are available for catering for the small screen.

Spring clean 2.0

New year, new start, new blog template. Not sure I like it truth be told, but it's feels much like it does to rearrange your bedroom. I might prefer sleeping against the wall, but I'll position the bed in the middle of the room just to feel a little bit more alive for about 30 seconds. So pink is out, crazy notepad in.

As part of the new digital me, I am now a daily twitterer and follower of knowledgable digital gurus. Well, sort of. My main impetus admittedly was the opportunity to stalk Stephen Fry who has possibly the best life on this planet. Apart from the obvious manicness but even that adds interest. The man must never get bored. And when he does he just hops onhis private jet to chase armadillos or has a drunken debate with his old pal Hugh. And now I get to be a part of that every day. Hence why twitter is great.

My only slight grumble I have with Twitter is not that it's addictive, because I haven't reached that stage of neediness yet. It's that it's almost too much - too much pressure to be interesting, and too many tweets to keep up with. Aren't our lives fast-paced enough without having to constantly follow hundreds of people around the virtual planet? Finally I feel like I understand how Jack Bauer feels.

Facebook banner ads a waste of money?

I joined Gyro International more than 6 months ago now, which puts me (still in the digital sense) into the advertising and marketing sector.

So, to stick to the theme I thought I'd write my first blog in a very long time on the pros and cons of banner advertising using social media platforms. I'm a regular user of facebook and I rarely even notice the advertising that is displayed there, but then I'm just one user out of 130million.

Looking at just banner advertising on facebook (not 'fan' pages which is another subject altogether), there are some obvious pro's and con's:

Positives

• Increased brand awareness
• Audience targeting / segmentation by age, sex, likes, dislikes, geographical location etc
• 130 million active facebook users

Negatives

• Difficult to measure ROI (especially when it comes to brand awareness)
• Banner ads are not conversational
• Weak track record
  

Banner ads are enforced, not requested, whereas social networks are about conversations and personal preferences. Therefore perhaps Facebook is not really an appropriate medium for this type of advertising. I've struggled to find a solid Facebook advertising success story that uses solely the cpc advertising as oppose to other more pricey options like the sponsorship of applications. It almost feels as though Facebook knows that they're onto a losing revenue stream as the latest 'voting' strategy seems to me like they are clutching at straws.

I like the theory: using Facebook you can advertise painkillers to students in the UK aged 20-25 on saturday/sunday mornings. How can it fail? Yet where are the results? And why isn't everyone raving about it online?

2009 is the year for brand engagement with social media. But this won't come about through simple display ads. What's needed is an approach that sees brands listening and responding to what is being said on blogs and social networks. A good design and a wad of cash just won't cut it any more.

Mr. Goldstein of SocialMedia Networks describes a self-perpetuating cycle in social networks: “Advertisers distract users; users ignore advertisers; advertisers distract better; users ignore better.”

I'm inclined to agree.