Page Nine

The mobile web

It's right around the corner.

We can't wait for the opportunites offered by location-specific push marketing. As long as you can choose to opt out of course. Take the 3G iPhone with GPS - just how far away from what it already offers is live Google satellite mapping? Or ads tempting us from the retailers as we pass them walking down the High Street? Some might see this as a nightmare, or an intrusion. After all who wants some database, or someone, knowing your whereabouts or recording your habitual day-to-day movements? But, the possibilities are immense, and the opportunities for a killer app to make it broadly accepted are right there right now, only waiting for the rapidly growing user-base of smart phones to reach critical mass.

We think there's also a fantastic opportunity for business too. While Safari and other browsers on phones are great, they're still mostly showing web sites designed to be viewed and navigated on a monitor. Even if the content has been repurposed and reduced to suit the smaller screen - the least you should do - it's still not utilising the user interface as well as it could.

So, make your web site, or rather, make your message, into an app. That way you're structuring the content, protecting your brand image, and making it as easy as possible for your user. That has to be good. We can see this working for the simplest brochure sites, as well as those driven by databases. But, the best thing is it will work for you because it works for your audience.

Posted by:
Peter Greatorex, Managing Director, Page Nine Ltd. www.page9.co.uk

"We are better than me"...

We agree. Businesses in the UK are now realising that the tools Generation Y are so used to using; facebook, myspace, YouTube, flickr, all kinds of messaging/messangering, forums, blogs, feeds, casts, tagging etc can be utilised as B2B as well as B2C tools and can bring significant benefits within the organisation itself too.

Now that real, useful Web Services are maturing - TypePad being an excellent example - you're free to think about how all the tools used so broadly as part of Gen Y's every-minute communication can become a valuable part of your Marketing Communications mix. And because they're configurable and properly customisable, you're able to protect your brand too.

Take a look at tripadvisor.co.uk, or what Amazon have been doing for so long now - users rating services and products and so providing really useful, informative, (mostly) genuine feedback - and benefitting commercially. That's Web 2.0 in the Enterprise (B2C) working really well. See how the media and sports teams utilise Social Networking tools in the US - creating fan sites for example - and think about the benefits of Customer Communities, User Groups, and the instant feedback on your product or service, and how that might help you stay in front of the competition. But most importantly think about the cost of not doing it when your competition is.

And how about a Social Networking, FaceBook like, app deployed within an organisation with multiple offices? The benefits derived from every employee creating their own profile, thus generating a really comprehensive knowledge, skills and experience database, constantly updated, could be pretty useful for Pre-Sales and proposal teams and for implementing projects requiring specialist knowledge. You may otherwise have only found out by chance, too late, about the expertise available.

We're involved in these types of project right now - for businesses in a broad range of sectors including Technology, Not-for-profit, Learning/Research and Professional Services. We have some great ideas as to how different parts of the SN toolset can work in the Enterprise, and we're going to use this blog to give you an overview of what we think is possible.

Posted by:
Peter Greatorex, Managing Director, Page Nine Ltd. www.page9.co.uk