Mobile App Strategy: Two Great Videos for Marketing Technology Leaders

By Dave Wieneke | in | 3 Jun 2011 | No Comments

Today I’m in New York, facilitating a series of three round tables where senior marketers are discussing their mobile strategy playbooks.  This topic is a top priority shared by nearly every corporation I help. The time for preparation is done; user expectations have shifted to demand more application-like experiences online. There’s an mass-market demand for mobile-ready, application-like sites, or apps, and a need to put the right systems and practices in place to do this the right way from the start.

As the Web exploded in the mid-’90s, many firms, universities, and state governments did not develop coherent, adaptive strategies for addressing how to handle Web development. In part, this is because the significance of this change wasn’t fully appreciated at the time. The result of this was large efforts to rework systems and governance. That was the core of my work on creating Mass.gov to unify 70 state agency websites within one coherent system.

Today, the mobile platform shows a similar growth trajectory to the ’90s explosion of the Web. I’ve called this shift Web 3.0, and from a user’s standpoint it heralds the end of the PC era. Having seen the result of strategy trailing Web adoption, digital leaders are perfecting mobile strategy road maps to prevent a similar need for rework and redesign.

The shift from pages to application experiences is a huge change that not all marketers or Web developers will make. Whether these are delivered using HTML5 or native applications, this new era will require dramatic change in how those who make websites retool their planning, systems, and the workflow used to create digital experiences.

Fortunately, there are pioneers we can learn from. Presentations by Bill Allison and Joe Hayashi will likely come up in our “off-record” discussions in New York today. We’ve all agreed not to blog or share what we talk about, but the meeting hasn’t happened yet. So I’ll share them with you here now, and likely later at the Peer Summit.

UC Berkley’s Mobile App Roadmap

Bill Allison, UC Berkley’s Campus IT Architecture Committee Chair, has been thinking about this a lot.  Rather than focusing on what he’s done (adopted an open Web framework created by UCLA), it may be most valuable to hear how he’s worked on this strategy, and why. Having a clear corporate strategy, creating a common tool-set, and evangelizing its use through training and support from industry partners is what it takes to make a workable policy actually work.

Mobile Apps Blur the Product and Marketing Experience

I also recommend watching Joe Hayashi’s great presentation at Stanford on The Business of Mobile Applications. It takes some of the hype around “mobile coolness” for describing the market forces behind the application market, and it starts to classify trends within broad categories of applications. Yes, it’s delivered to an engineering audience (CS96SI), but it’s a great general business view of the apps space.

I’m currently visiting agencies doing exciting work in this space, so naturally I’ll be highlighting great projects and the teams behind them. I’m also looking for trends and best practices to share, to help build your mobile strategy playbook. Are you doing great work in this space, or do you have questions? Comment, or send a note to join the conversation.