MobileWebsiteWatch

ESPN is taking mobile web seriously.  During the 2008 college football season, ESPN saw 59.9 million visits, a 185%. 

Not bad, you say?  How about an average of 7 minutes looking at content? How about the fact that visitors spent 2 more minutes on the mobile website on average than the wired website?

Maybe that’s because the mobile site is made “little” and gives users the info they need without a massive information overload?  I’m speculating here.

Naturally, peak mobile traffic occurred during the SEC Championship game and the Texas vs. Texas Tech rivalry.

Click here to read more.

This great article appeared a few weeks back in the WSJ about retailers making it easier for customers to shop on their mobile devices and also in brick and mortar stores.

“Connecting with busy shoppers through their mobile phones “is even more important right now” for retailers, given the tough economic climate, says Brad Beasley, president of CrossLink Media, a mobile-marketing firm.”

Amazon, Target and Gap have released various iPhone apps of differing capabilities.  Amazon’s is one of the most robust shopping apps for iPhone.  The Gap application lets users mix and match clothing to create an outfit.

Other retailers like Sears have launched mobile e-commerce solutions from multiple devices, while Buy.com is sending out daily specials using Twitter.

Brick and mortar “giants” such as Wal-Mart and Sears and click and mortar stores like Amazon and Zappos are developing their m-commerce sales channels in various ways.

Wal-Mart is focusing on promotions and specials being delivered to handsets, whereas Sears has embraced m-commerce with their launch of Sears2Go.com, where shoppers can shop on their phone in a view optimized for their device and pick up their order without waiting on line.

Amazon has a new iPhone app that allows users to take a photo of a product and Amazon will scan their database of products to try to find a match, an addition to it’s first offering, TextBuyIt.  And, in this article in Retail Industry/About.com, Zappos is said to be embracing m-commerce through socialization, which may or may not be relevant.

This article goes on to say that “m-commerce” is here to stay…I agree.

Papa John’s Pizza, the country’s #3 pizza chain reported that its mobile web pizza ordering service had boosted sales by a staggering $1,000,000 since its launch only a half a year ago!  Considering that its online sales have grown in total 75% over year end 2007, it is not surprising that mobile is such a big boost and that it is growing fast.  Just another example of how mobile web is paramount to contining sales growth in a shrinking economy.  Your customers are already mobile, if you cannot serve them in that space, a competitor will.

This is just a guilty favorite of mine.  Gamefly, the online service that rents video games through the mail, in the same way that Netflix rents DVDs, has launched a full mobile version of its web site.  This is a really great example of best practices for mobile web.  The user has access to almost 100% of the features and functionality available on the regular site and it is presented in a view that is specialized for mobile.  The interface is sleek and easy to use,  Users can add games to their queue, organize the list of games they have coming, look up games and get info an cheats, even purchase games right from their phones.  Another best practice point: no new URL.  All you have to do is go to gamefly.com on any phone and you get the specialized view automatically.  It even detects what kind of device you have and sets it up especially for that.  I have tried it on both a Nokia and an iPhone and got a custom interface.  Pretty slick.

The benefit here is that a service like Gamefly needs to keep it users engaged to keep them paying their subscriptions month after month.  Allowing gamers to add a game to their queue wherver they may be (at a store or on the schoolbus getting a reccomendation from a friend) increases the level of interaction customers have with the service, and makes it personal since the interaction is occuring on their personal device.

According to a study realeased on the 4th by the Kelesy Group, about 19% of cellphone-owning

Smartphones offered by Verizon

Americans now have a smartphone and, shockingly, 49.2% plan on getting one within one year. The study goes on to disect the things people use the mobiel web for which include: searching for products, getting maps and directions, getting info about movies and entertainment and accessing social networking sites.  All of these areas clocked in double digit growth year over year and with half the cell phone owners out there who plan on upgrading to a smartphone in 1 year, that should accellerate more in 2009.

As this surge of mobile users comes online, you can be almost certain that once they are shelling out for new phones with advanced data services, a seamless and successful mobile web experience on any company’s web site will pretty much be a basic customer expectation.  As we’ve posted here, smart companies like Sears, Gamefly, American Airlines, and Victoria’s Secret have already implemented an optimized mobile web view of thier sites and are building up market share.  Getting mobile should be top priority for anyone not yet there as everyday customers who try and interact with you on mobile are frustrated and lost.

In the Sears Mobile press release (from Women’s Wear Daily here), Sears mobile innovations team leader Thomas Emmons says it best:

“If you’re marketing to people who read 85 percent of their e-mails on a BlackBerry, and you don’t have a good mobile site, you’re losing that customer,”

Sears is a great example of mobile best practices and others will have to either follow suit or get out of the way.

While m-commerce continues to grow in many areas, tickets is probably the fastest moving and the easiest

ProVenueMobile

for people to grasp and adopt.  In the USA, tickets for movies, travel and performances are more and more commonplace on mobile.  On Nov 12th, Tickets.com made a major step that gives it a serious competitive edge over even big competitors like Ticketmaster by offering it new service, ProVenueMobile.

ProVenueMobile is really the mobile version of tickets.com regular site.  It is the 1st full complete mobile web commerce solution of its kind, that allows the user to fully complete the ticket purchase transaction from the mobile web, and does not require any click-to-call or telephone use.  This is not only a major convenience and time saver for the user, but also a big cost saver for tickets.com, relieveing the need for 24/7 phone sales staff.  Tickets.com notes to the press:

“We are excited about this technology, and view it as a major breakthrough for our company and for our clients,” said Larry Witherspoon, CEO, Tickets.com. “Staying ahead of the curve through industry-leading innovation, as well as delivering unparalleled customer support, is our chief mission. Offering this versatile and convenient mobile platform gives Tickets.com the opportunity to reach new milestones in both areas. We are delighted to be able to introduce a green, paperless technology into the marketplace. In early 2009 we look forward to offering website mobilization services to our clients.”

By extending the functionality and services of Tickets.com — including full e-commerce — to the mobile web platform http://mobile.tickets.com, full- circle ticket purchases can be made 24/7 on any handheld mobile device. Missing an on-sale time, waiting in line and being put on hold will be things of the past. The Usablenet Mobile-supported site integrates seamlessly with all web-enabled devices from smart phones (Blackberry, iPhone, Treo, etc.) to basic cell phones with web access. It supports all browsers, file formats, carriers and other technologies, so that Tickets.com customers can shop for and purchase tickets from anywhere, anytime.

The ticketing boom is not only limited to concert and movie tickets.  Most major airlines now not only offer full mobile sites, but are extending mobile boarding pass functionality to thier passengers.  This technology, being implemented at airlines like American Airlines and Northwest Airlines allows mobile users to use their phone as their boarding pass without any special software or hardware and regardless of what carrier they are using.

With mobile on the rise to buy more and more things, any company not allowing its customers to access them on the device they have on them at all times and look at the most for both personal and business purposes is outright loosing ground.

In a fantastic and comprehensive article in the Wall Street Journal today, reporter Nick Wingfield illuminates a very prescient analogy of the mobile world today: in the same way that companies were once eager to deploy laptops to executives and technicians to increase mobility, today smart phones are stepping up to take over that role thanks to the significant advantages they have in power and portability.

This is not to say that the laptop will got eh way of the dodo, but the truth is, more often than not business travelers leave their laptops in hotel rooms and rental cars while going to meetings and about routine business activities armed only with their lighter, and more portable smart phones. These souped-up cousins of ordinary cellphones, with email and other Internet functions, have become much more powerful in the past year.

For years, mobile workers have been ditching their desktop computers for laptops that they can take wherever they go. Now road warriors are starting to realize that they can get even more portability — and lots of computing punch — from smart phones…The result: Many travelers are now using smart phones the way they once used laptops — and laptops the way they once used desktop computers. Mobile workers rely on their laptops to create PowerPoint presentations and do other heavy-duty computing. But then they leave the laptops in their offices, homes or hotel rooms and take their smart phones out into the world.

Many are going even further opting to leave the laptop behind entirely and the demand for mobile devices that can handle more heavy duty business specific applications is huge.  In a report published in January by research firm In-Stat based on a survey of 1,402 technology users, roughly 52% of respondents to the In-Stat survey said they could envision using a smart phone in the future as their sole computing device.

The overall result of this shift toward mobile has obvious implications on the need for mobile web optimization.  For many Software as a Service (SaaS) companies such as Salesforce.com and Netsuite, mobile optimization has become a pressing and urgent need as well as a massive revenue driver.  Salesforce.com offers business people access to its cloud CRM software from their mobile devices with a hefty price tag, starting at about $600 per user/year–almost twice the price of a copy of Micrsoft Office.

When deployed effectively (note keyword “when”), many companies are discovering that these costs are actually a real bargain price for the massive boost in efficiency and employee accessibility to work data.  A study released by the Aberdeen Group highlights some of the advantages and audit-able improvements in efficiency and cost realized by the Salesforce solution. The supporting factor that makes mobile web optimization from both the customer and company standpoint is the explosive growth and demand for services in the mobile market.  THis growth is occurring at a breakneck pace and both has not only executives and emplyee clamouring for more and more services they can access right from their phone but from customers, investors, and interested parties of all types the world throughout.  After all, isn’t each road warrior exec who depends on their Blackberry for everything just another human who also wants: to order food, buy gifts online, book hotels and travel deals, check in on investor relations areas of compaines in their porfolios, get movie/concert tickets, or any of the million other things we all do on the Internet everyday?
Today, smartphone sales well outpace laptops, and that trend is rising faster than the switch from desktop to laptop occurred.  See graph.

With this kind of growth coupled with the rapidly increasing adoption or inclusion of data plans in most mobile contracts (many smartphones like the iPhone and the G1 cannot be used without an unlimited data plan) companies of all sizes can no longer afford not to embrace mobile both internally and externally if they hope to be competitive and in touch with their customer, consumers, employees most importantly, their competitors.

In another of their many informative and wide based market studies, Juniper Research released a paper yesterday that declares that ad-funded social networks will provide the bulk of the revenue in the mobile user generated content space, and that that number is likely to be as large as $7,300,000,000 in only 5 years.According to report author Dr Windsor Holden,

“It’s clear that we have seen an industry wide shift regarding the implementation of business models in this area. Whereas initially there was a perception that users would pay a small mobility premium to access social networks on their handsets, it rapidly became clear that to achieve truly mass adoption, it would be necessary to offer free membership and then to augment that with advertising and the sale of premium content.”

This release was well times with the news from Reuters this week a that social networking has toppled porn, the longstanding champ, as the most visited sites on the internet.  The fact that more and more people expect to be able to access social networking services on their phones should be a loud and clear call that mobile web content and functionality is in high demand.  The availability of mobile optimized content on sites of all types is increasingly the users expectation.

The ads on social networking sites can be very targeted, and they will have little value if they don’t point the mobile user to an optimized Web site that can fully engage them and actually sell them, not just some little tent of a WAP site that is not up to date or dynamic.

Below is the graph of the expected growth of the market. (Note: PCD = Personal Content Delivery)

In a press release from comScore today, the boom in the everyday use of mobile web to get things done was confirmed and reinforced. According to the report, in June 2008, more then 20.8 million U.S. mobile subscribers accessed search during the month, an increase of 68% over same month year prior.

“It is interesting to note that as we see the number of mobile search users increase, the frequency of activity is also growing,” observed Alistair Hill, analyst, comScore. “The number of U.S. users accessing mobile search has more than doubled as a result of expanded 3G penetration and smartphone adoption, as well as the proliferation of flat-rate data plans. We have also seen a substantial improvement to the mobile search offerings in the U.S. market.”

As more and more people search for things on thier mobile devices, the more important it becomes to offer a mobile Web site for them to interact with.  What good is your store or office if your customers can’t even walk in the door.  The expectation of mobile optimized Web sites is now basic for most customers.

Furthermore, customers who arrive at your site via mobile search are likely your best customers.  If they search for you on their phone, and then go to your site, this means that they are on the go, away from their computers, and most likly to be seeking specfic information on how to interact with you: such as finding contact information, store locations, buying a ticket or a specific product, or reviewing information about your products and pricing while shopping.