Does your business need a mobile makeover? - SmartBrief

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Does your business need a mobile makeover?

3 min read

Marketing

SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social media practices and issues.

This week we asked, Does your social media strategy take mobile into account? The results:

  • No: 50.62%
  • Yes: 49.38%

This week’s poll is a deadlock, which leads me to wonder whether many of you think as I do, that mobile — or better stated, “mobility” — is far less of a question of social media strategy and much more an issue of marketing and business strategy.

There is no doubt that through technology, our behavior has changed in such a way that as human beings, we connect and communicate anytime, anywhere. Text, phone, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter … this trend will not be reversed; it is only a matter of time before this ability reaches everyone on the planet. Consider this data from the Cisco Visual Networking Index.

  • Global mobile-data traffic increased 2.3-fold in 2011, more than doubling for the fourth year in a row.
  • In 2011, average smartphone usage nearly tripled, and the number of mobile-connected tablets tripled, to 34 million.
  • By the end of 2012, the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the number of people on Earth.

Additionally, we know phones are used for a lot more than talking. In fact, according to a survey by OS, a U.K. smartphone retailer and network provider, making calls is the fifth-most-used function of a smartphone.

So, with all of this data, the question becomes what to do about them. Any strategy requires a thoughtful approach and a deep understanding of customers’ behavior and experience. It also requires education; you can’t rush out, create an application and think you are done. This is a different landscape; learn the nuances of mobile versus mobility. From a marketing perspective, consider the paradigm of a world in which consumers have many more opportunities for virtual touch points with your brand than they do physical. These are big questions, but they need answers.

If you are not taking this change into account, then you are ignoring one of the most significant shifts in human behavior in the past quarter century. And failing to prepare your business for it might bring the dreaded Andy Dufresne question, “How can you be so obtuse?”

This poll analysis was written by SmartBlogs contributor Jeremy Victor. He is the president of business-to-business content-marketing agency Make Good Media and editor-in-chief of B2Bbloggers.com. For more of his writing, visit B2Bbloggers.com and follow him on Twitter and Google+.