MobileWebsiteWatch

Its no secret that American’s increasingly rely on their mobile devices for web access, and a new study by M:Metrics shows that they browse the web a lot, and the number is growing fast.  Highlights of the report include:

• American smartphone owners browse mobile web an average of 4 hours 39 minutes per month.  That’s a half a workday!
• About 11% of smartphone users have an unlimited data plan
• 9 out of the top 10 most popular smartphones in the USA offer a QWERTY keyboard, allowing robust interaction with all types of web functionalities on mobile.
• Sizable data pool used for highly accurate results, n=3500.

In a similar non-shocker, top domains included mostly web sites that offer sophisicated mobile optimized views, such as eBay and Facebook.  This shoudl serve as a pretty strong indicator that mobile web optimization a must for getting in front of your customers when and where it counts most–connecting with them on a more intimate level via their mobile device whcih they use for business, shopping, and organizing their social lives.

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

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.

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 a study released this May by design agency AKQA and dotMobi, a lot of illuminating data is brought to light. While the overall tenor of the “study” is slightly muddied by the blatant commercial interests of its sponsors, there are nonetheless, over 2,000 respondents, fairly selected by independent third party research agency, Research Now. The study, which focuses on the US and UK, and is notable for highlighting the similarities and contrasting trends in the two nations, has its data broken down in many many ways. The free PDF download contains over 80 pages, most of which are charts or graphs about niched subject matter surrounding mobile web use. Below are few of the more enlightening points:

• Approximately 90% of the 2,000 respondents are interested in learning about the mobile Web, demonstrating a need for brands to make their mobile properties findable via mobile search, marketing and advertising campaigns.

• 50% of respondents were unaware that there are mobile sites optimized for use on mobile phones and;

• The vast majority - 86% of participants - said they were interested in knowing which sites are easily accessible on a mobile phone.

• Nearly 50% of respondents said that a poor experience on their initial use of the mobile Web made them “reluctant to access” either the site - or the Internet in general - on their mobile phones again.

• Only 2% of participants in the survey who have purchased a phone in the past six months chose an iPhone. This indicates that brands that don’t optimize their mobile services for a variety of mobile phones will provide a substandard mobile Internet experiences for a vast majority of consumers.

• Poor site display and layout remain top reasons for mobile Web dissatisfaction among consumers.

• Almost two-thirds of participants stated that they would consider purchasing theater tickets, take-out food and travel tickets via a mobile phone.

• Finally, 63% of survey respondents said they would be more likely to give up their money than their mobile “smart phone” if they were mugged.

This study really showed a lot of things that are common misconceptions about the size and reach of the mobile internet today. For example, it is commonly though that the only people using the Internet on their phones are teens and young adults and an optimized mobile web experience will appeal most to them alone, yet this study finds that even in the higher age range brackets, the desire to know what is accessible from the user’s phone is remarkably high:

The take-away from survey graph like this is perhaps not immediately clear. While it is easy to see that interest in mobile web accessibility tilts more (although less than one might expect) toward the younger generations, the strong interest in accessing optimized content across all age groups really rives home an underlying, but indisputable and often overlooked fact: mobile users are a much more devoted and committed audience than desktop users.

Mobile users are purposeful internet users. They are not likely to be browsing idly and are by definition: on the go, needing information right away and, expecting to get it on their phone. Furthermore, there numbers are much higher than many think. This study concludes that, already, about 1 in 5 people access the Web on their mobile devices daily. However, if you add in all those who report using the mobile web at least weekly, you’re looking at more than 50% or users who access the internertt on their phones at least once a week!

If you’ve been reading avidly you’ll recall that in our previous post on Neilsen’s mobile web market report, it was revealed that there were 95 million mobile web subscribers in May 2008 in USA.  So lets do some quick math here:

OK, so if AT LEAST this many users are browsing on their phones today and want optimized content, how many are your customers? More importantly, how many do you stand to lose to a competitor that does offer a mobile Web site.

Or best of all, how many do you stand to gain at your competitor’s expense by providing an optimized view of your Web site? Couple that with the year over year growth rate of mobile web use and the answers require less than back of the envelope arithmetic to become apparent.