Mobile Priority 2012: Go Beyond the App

By Jim Somers (@AntennaSoftware) Jan 5, 2012

Consumers these days can’t seem to get enough mobile apps, games, videos and other content. Mobile web usage has exploded and mobile search has quadrupled in the past year. Many people search on their smartphone when viewing a TV or print ad, looking for products via a search engine or through a clever speech recognition application such as Siri. And they expect to find the answer at their fingertips. Actionable content, right there, in seconds flat. Mobile has created a monster — and it’s you and me.

How does the enterprise feed the monster? For starters, most businesses have wisely placed mobile at the top of the IT priority list and are beginning to look at mobility holistically across the business to satisfy this ravenous mobile demand from customers, partners and employees alike. But this is not just about building apps on the hottest new device. The challenge many businesses now face is how to get both content and apps to customers and employees on any type of device — which is beyond the capabilities of many traditional Content Management Systems (CMS). So maybe what companies really need is a distribution strategy.

The phenomenal growth of the mobile web is changing the behavior of people in profound ways. How they decide where to eat and shop. How they purchase goods. Where they turn first to access information. Maybe “monsters” is a little dramatic, but this rapid shift in consumer behavior is transforming business and the technology infrastructure that supports it. Now and in the future, it is critical that IT works in concert with marketing departments and other business units to drive new growth through the mobile channel, and indeed, ensure the content and the user experience is amazing and consistent across all channels.

To do this, organizations must look beyond their app development and content strategy, and create a more holistic distribution strategy. For many companies this will mean incorporating Mobile Storefront capabilities to bolster their CMS system and serve as an engine for curated mobile app and content delivery.

Mobile Storefronts Open for Business

Mobile Storefronts won’t replace CMSs — in fact they integrate well with most and provide organizations with a more robust distribution approach. As the arsenal of corporate-branded content grows, the need to create one hub where it can be accessible by multiple audiences will be crucial.

Mobile storefronts make this content available by integrating with all the areas it can be stored across a business — whether in a CMS, in SharePoint or on file servers — and creating a unified interface to help users find what they want, or let them discover something new they will love. This makes it easier for companies to effectively manage how content and apps are distributed across the business, and how they are discovered by customers and prospective customers. Most enterprises likely have already invested in a CMS or other data repository, so a solution that integrates with these systems is a critical component of a smart distribution strategy that maximizes those investments.

Management and Monetization…

Digital content comes in all shapes and sizes, and the need to manage it is becoming an increasingly complex task. While many companies only needed content management for either customers or employees in the past, more and more organizations are now faced with the challenge of getting content to both audiences on a number of form factors, while maintaining control over who can see and access what. Consumers are demanding easier discovery and more immediate access to apps and content that they want and need — from anywhere and at anytime. And employees have an expectation to get this digital content in the same way consumers do.

Mobile Storefront solutions provide flexibility to design multi-channel services for content delivery, and provide features such as category management, role-based access control and scheduling and version control. For maximum ease of use, mobile storefronts should be created and administered via the cloud, so organizations can manage the full lifecycle of apps and content across audiences from one unified interface.