2011: The year mobile takes over

http://jeffsonderman.com/2010/06/2011-the-year-mobile-takes-over/

You have less than one year left to talk about mobile devices as the “future” of media.

A lot of people have been talking about the eventual dominance of mobile. Some people have been planning. How many are truly ready?

We’ll know next year.

I spent a couple hours Wednesday in a “Mobile Media is Here” seminar hosted by folks from Pointabout and Brunner Digital as part of Digital Capital Week (#dcweek), uniting the DC tech community. Two stats leapt out from the slides and discussion:

1) Smartphones will be more common than dumbphones (politely called “feature phones”) by late 2011

2) Smartphone sales will exceed PC sales by 2011

Mobile devices are not just growing, they’re booming. And with that comes millions more people every year accessing and sharing information in new ways. Mobile web usage is expected to exceed desktop web usage by 2013.

Over the next few years, iPhones and the like will stop being fancy early-adopter toys. (AT&T already sells past-generation iPhones for $99 or less) They will be cheaper, widely used, and eventually as common and socially invisible as e-mail. As Clay Shirky says so well, “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring… It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.”

If you don’t already have a plan for how your media company, or any other company, will serve mobile consumers and make money in the mobile market — you better get a plan in motion by the end of the year.

Some of the issues to resolve:

• What platforms to develop? Mobile web, iPhone, Android, iPad, Blackberry, Kindle, Symbian, Windows Mobile… where is your community?
• What do your mobile users want? Study the most common use cases for why mobile users seek out your site/app. Finding locations, services, contact info, information, entertainment, etc.
• How to make money. Web ads didn’t work like print ads, and mobile ads don’t work like Web ads. It’s a new, and still quickly evolving marketplace that you need a fresh approach for.
• Redefine relevancy. Desktop content is sorted and targeted in search of topical relevancy. Mobile content adds a new dimension of relevancy — location.
• Many more of course… feel free to add other issues in the comments.