Feel the Mobile Love

The other week, I went to a Google mobile event. – Google loves mobile

Love mobile

I knew mobile was big, but after this event, I knew it was no longer the future, it was happening now. Those that are not using a mobile strategy should be seriously thinking of starting one today.

It may seem daunting, but mobile internet is the same position that the internet was 10 years ago and look how big that has grown. A user should have the same experience on the mobile and on the web. It is interesting to see how much internet on desktops has grown. Check out on the bbc’s website to visually see the growth of the internet.

There are 4.6 billion mobile phones world wide, more than 1,000 customers sign up every minute. You can no longer ignore mobile.

So where do you start?
If you are working agency side, you should start to introduce mobile marketing to your clients. The first step is assessing their website, which should be visible on a regular handset. I do not just mean smart phones such as the iPhone or Android but symbian phones as well such as the Nokia 6303. There are a lot of retail, finance and travel companies that are planning mobile at the moment. If you do not have a site that can be seen on a mobile phone, make sure there is at least a landing page that can be built in line with your advertising campaigns.

To app or not to app?
A lot of people when they want to get into mobile think they should build an app. There are over 50 million iphone and iphone touches and more than 3billion downloads for these apps. I wrote about apps in another post mobile app or mobile site and when I was at the event, Carl Uminski from Somo mentioned that there was a life cycle of apps. If it gets featured in the App store (which is luck) then it can get to top 25 of the Apple app store. This equates to 500 downloads a day. If the app is promoted to the top 10, then it can get 1000 downloads a day. However, there is a sudden decline.

He said people should think ahead of time and have ad campaigns to promote it. There is a lot of competition, 130,000 other apps people can choose from. You need to have a mobile advertising strategy before you build.
Somo have witnessed conversion to download range from 4% to 12%
Advertising click through rates range form 1% to 4.8%
Cost per download can range from 80p to 1.50 for free applications

Mobile search
Another interesting point raised at the event was that people on mobile phones who access the internet have different needs, they are more hunters than researchers. They are out and about and use their phone to look for something specific. Therefore there needs to be different ad copy for the paid adverts. Your digital agency should be able to build creative for you.

2010 is the year for mobile search and I challenge you to start using it with your clients or with your agency.

Photo is from flickr

Orange app store

It was only a matter of time before more network operators jumped on the app bandwagon and Orange is no exception. They will launch an app store in three weeks time. Called “The App Shop”, it will have more than 5000 apps, games and ringtones to download which will only show on compatible handsets. Very clever indeed, so you don’t have to waste time searching for apps that will not work on your mobile phone. Some will apps will be free, others will have to be purchased but will simply be added to the customers bill – no need to register separately. This makes it very easy to download as many applications through the Orange website as the customer wants.

Orange launches the App Store

The Nokia 6700 and the Sony Ericsson W995 will be the first mobile phones to be preloaded with the App Shop and will be available in January. As the year progresses, the list of handsets will increase to include Samsung, LG, HTC, Motorola and RIM handsets. The app shop will be available to around 1 million customers in the UK and France.

Orange does plan to make the App Shop avaialable to other countries including Spain, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, Slovakia, Belgium, Austria, Moldova and Portugal with local content. The apps will be compatible with different operating systems. It will be interesting to see how Orange’s App shop performs in this highly competitive market

Mobile App meet up

Those in seo and mobile seo may know of an event called meetup.com. I am a newbie to the meetup group and have really enjoyed it. I have been to the London Bloggers meet up on two occasions and it was a great set up.

Yesterday, I went to App Jam which was the first meet up and if this one is anything to go by, I will certainly be going to the others. App Jam was set up by Tania and Laurence Adermi and they organised a whole host of entrepreneurs and developers to talk about their apps.

One of the speakers was Remco van den Elzen who founded Distimo and talked about his experience with apps.
What I found interesting about Distimo is that if offers a free analytics tool called Distimo Monitor which they use to monitor their own apps and those of apps in stores.

There was also a panel where there was a discussion on the subject “To App or not to app”. Apps appear to be the way forward despite the fact that not every phone is a smart phone. This was a good topic to discuss as I mentioned in my last post, mobile app or mobile site people are divided between making their website seo friendly and building an app. An app is more expensive and if you do not have the resources, make sure your site is visible on a mobile browser, but the conclusion was that Apps are the future for companies that want visibility on handsets.

No one mentioned anything about mobile seo which I was surprised about. Perhaps they do not think it is as important as mobile apps. Or maybe mobile apps is seo? However there are more app meet ups to come and this topic will be explored further.

Here is an overview of the topics discussed at the meet up:

40 AppJam: App developer demo include
Name: Marko Balabanovic
Company: Lastminute.com
App: Topsee – compiled by an all-star cast of London bloggers, the real experts on the latest greatest places to go and things to see, the top foodie finds, cool bars, shopping spots and quirky sights. http://www.lastminute.com/site/labs/topsee.html

Name: Morgan Davies
Company: Sauce Digital
App: Flick Football 3D – a unique gesture based football game – played in first person

http://www.saucedigital.com/

Name: Michael Breidenbruecker
Company: Reality Jockey
App: RjDj – ses the power of the new generation personal music players like iPhone and iPod Touch to create mind blowing hearing sensations.

http://more.rjdj.me/what/

Name: Doug Chrisholm
Company: Rippill
App: Rippill – iPhone and mobile apps which utilise social and location-based features

http://www.rippll.com/default.aspx

Name: Neil Stanley
Company: Almex
App: iHi – iHi breaks the ice in any situation with eye catching electronic speech bubbles.

http://www.appstorehq.com/ihi-iphone-75206/app

Name: Kavin Bharti Mittal & Namit Chandha
Company: Kodu
App: Movies Now – Movies Now! makes it easy to find cinemas near you and check showtimes. You can browse the latest movies and watch high quality trailers on the go.

http://www.kodu.co.uk/moviesnow/