MobileWebsiteWatch

Mobile Marketer put out their “Classic Guide to Mobile Commerce” in November, filled wtih 30 articles from key players in the mobile web and commerce space. The articles range from mobile marketing, mobile payments, and mobile web design.

Too much to sum up here, but there are two articles that I found very pertinent to the importance of mobile web.

The first is on page 9, “Mobile Commerce: Leverage the targed impulse purchase opportunity.” The key to this article is the discussion of how retailers can engage customers more meaningfully, and as a result increase sales. But, more importantly, the graphic in the article shows how all of the various mobile marketing initiatives all point back to your “mobile marketing presence” or your mobile website. Text messages, online advertising, SEM, mobile couponing, store displays, rewards programs all need to be tied together with an enjoyable mobile user experience.

The second is on page 26, “So, you have a mobile site. What’s next?”. I like this article because it assumes you’ve taken the right initiative to develop your mobile site and discusses how to promote that site to maximize it’s effectiveness. I think this is where many organizations get stuck. Let’s not forget that your customers are already going to your existing site, mobile or not, on mobile devices, so it is safe to assume that you will see traffic on mobile with the proper analytics tools, but your traffic will increase once you have optimized the mobile site for mobile. But, once you’ve made the investment in time and money to optimize your site for the mobile device, this article discusses how to promote the site further.

It is already clear that Twitter is a vastly popular “micro-blogging” service, with over 3 million posts daily. What’s not clear is how it will ever turn a profit. In fact, the founder is really rather nonchalant about the matter much a la Jim Clark in the heyday of Netscape and Healtheon creations. Wired Magazine reports in a interview with co-founder Biz Stone:

“At this point, given that we have plenty of money in the bank, it makes a lot more sense not to distract ourselves with trying to put the finishing touches on a revenue plan,” says the 34-year-old Stone, who founded Twitter with Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams in 2006.

Of course, Stone is aware that advertising is the most likely route to immediate commercial viability:

“At this point, given that we have plenty of money in the bank, it makes a lot more sense not to distract ourselves with trying to put the finishing touches on a revenue plan,” says the 34-year-old Stone, who founded Twitter with Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams in 2006.

While generally I’m opposed to a business model that has no idea how it will ever make money, in this case I think Stone may be on the right track. The problem is that Twitter, an inherently on-the-go service , is ahead of its time with respect to the mobile web browsing habits of the population at large. The massive adoption rate of mobile web, however, is quickly correcting this–very quickly. Within a year most mobile phones will come with a data plan bundled in.

In the case of Twitter, companies that offer mobile websites (which has already become a basic customer expectation for many companies) should be more than willing to pay Twitter to harness its real-time data to create valuable information both on the desktop web and mobile web at the same time. If companies pay for traffic driven both directions, from their mobile sites out into tweets and as incoming traffic from other tweets, the annoying cluttered ad environment of the mobile internet as it stands could become obsolete.

The first step is of course, for the remaining web services providers and companies that have somehow not woken up to the times yet to get in gear and make sure that their web sites and services can be accessed from a wide range of mobile devices as soon as possible. The market will be different in less than a year, so there’s no time to waste.