B2B Needs to Mobilize

Part of my repertoire of standard questions for business information publishers these days is whether they have any plans to invest in mobile presence. The answers are familiar. “Well we are looking into it but that probably is a year or two out.” What they really mean is that they have no idea whether their target audience even wants or needs their business information delivered on handsets. I think this is a terrible misfire. Business users are the target market for the most advanced multimedia phones on the market, smart phones and Blackberrys. Consulting email on a handset has become de rigeur, and I hear from mobile marketers that they see increasing click throughs on email links coming from handsets. In other words, people are not only scanning their email on their smart phones; they are using email as an entryway to the mobile Web. Perhaps publishers should be checking their own server log to see what browser actually hit their sites. They may be surprised.

Publishers might want to check out a smart but very straighforward extension of a B2B brand at Linux Journal’s mobile site, m.linuxjournal.com. While I think the site should have put breaking news on top (why are pub still so inlove with their own features?) the basic layout is simple and effective. You get your headlines, your reviews and blogs — all thr drive by content a user might want to check between flights or over coffee. You can share any content and push article to the social media hubs. There is even a handly link to the brand’s video via the YouTube Mobile site. This is cool and smart. It really doesn’t take much to develop soemthing like this. Given the incredible penetration of WAP-ready phones in the business arena, I still wonder why we don’t see more of it.