You have to be of ‘a certain age’ or a classic rock fan to remember The Who’s song Going Mobile. But it’s very relevant today. Forester predicts that by 2012 more Internet access will occur throughout mobile devices than PCs. Sometime it seems it’s coming quicker than that. If you look around you on the train platform and see the folks nearby crouched like preying mantises over their mobile devices, it’s here today.
In the past few months there have been some excellent articles about the fragmentation of the web into various ‘walled gardens’ such as Facebook. One of my favorites is Forrester’s article and term, The Splinternet. Wired Magazine had a September cover article called The Web is Dead along the same theme.
So what’s a marketer to do? Get mobile fast. You don’t have to redo your whole website for mobile, just the essential pages a person would need on the go. And you don’t have to cover every mobile device, just the main ones your audience uses.
It turns out it’s not necessarily that difficult. A structured blog like this, running on WordPress, is a natural. For instance, WPTouch is a free WordPress plugin that shows a powerful, well-designed mobile theme version of your site to the most popular touch-based smartphones like the iPhone, Google Android phones, and Blackberry. Over 90% of mobile web traffic originates from these devices. Pretty amazing, and it only takes minutes to set up. A paid version is only $39 and offers many more features. So, Goin’ Mobile may not be so hard – “keep me movin’,” like the song says.
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