3 steps to putting mobile first, last and always

If you’re a new mobile convert, what do you need to do right now? Guest columnist Joe Haslam has this advice

Last I week looked at the valuation debate over Uber and how comparisons can be drawn between new categories that have been created along the lines of mobile only companies like Hotel Tonight and Hot Hotels.

We also saw the impact of the close relationship between mobile and social networking, and how brands are more effective on mobile. In fact, we now understand that poor performance of your site is more likely to lose you a sale on mobile than it is on the web. 

So, if you are newly convinced about the need for mobile to be first and last and always, then what steps should your company be taking now?

1. Start with your device. Many like the physical keyboard on the Blackberry or that their Nokia 6310 never fails to pick up a signal at weekends in Chipping Norton. However it’s impossible to get a feel for the possibilities of mobile without using one for your daily tasks. If you have an iPhone for work, then use an Android as your personal phone. There are subtle but important differences with the environments so you should become familiar with both. Also, tablets are not just to keep the children quiet on long journeys. While booking is done more on mobile, much of the pre-booking browsing is done on an iPad or Nexus7. So take the time to see how different your familiar sites look on a touchscreen versus a browser.

2. Consider the platform: Is your platform built for web and then pushed out to mobile? Maybe this will work for now but sooner or later this will lead to lower response times, expensive development cycles for minor changes and complex integrations with social media partners. The big industry players have become successful by building magnificent high performance computing platforms but mobile demands much more flexibility built less around peaks and more around short sharp queries. Location data is almost entirely absent from the schema of much business reporting. Yet in the travel business, it is one of your most important fields.

3. Be realistic about your future: Never nice to say this but mobile will make some business models obsolete and even a focus on changing culture will never restore the glory days to some brands once the slipping starts. Many execs in senior positions know this privately but continue anyway as they can argue to their board that the transition is doable. However, unless your CEO is talking about an obsession to mobile in the way that Mark Zuckerburg did, then consider your options. If the head of mobile is in a separate division, removed from the day-to-day core of what the company prioritises, then that is not a good sign either.

Sounds dramatic? If so, then I can point you to platform shifts from the past and how quickly dumb terminals became client/server became the internet and now become cloud/mobile.

One of the quotes that Bill Gates, who has seen all these changes, is most famous for is this: “We always underestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”

Your business may not change very dramatically in the next two years but look back ten years from now and it will be unrecognisable. The biggest driver of this change is mobile. It is bigger and more dramatic than the PC business ever was. Did you hesitate when you first heard about the internet? Then don’t miss the mobile revolution. Don’t let the urgent drive out the important, start preparing for it today.

Joe Haslam is chairman of Hot Hotels, a same day, mobile only hotel booking App based in Spain. See hot.co.uk or follow on Twitter at @hot_app

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