How can PR better leverage the growing power of the mobile Internet?  That’s the question I had when I attended mobicamp here in Atlanta on Friday evening.   The brainchild of Amro Mousa, mobicamp was a new unconference centered around mobile technology and its impact on the day to day life of average users. More than 150 people registered, and I chance to talk with attendees in the mobile space including Richard Yates at Mobilesect, Kevin Planovsky at Vert Mobile and Sanjoy Malik, founder of Air2Web and a Venture Lab fellow at Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute.

My early verdict about the mobile Internet:  I think PR can do better job . Simply put, while we are great at pushing information, we are not making it easier for mobile users to pull it.

It almost goes without saying the mobile Internet growth is huge.  An estimated 63 million people accessed news and information on their mobile phones at least once during the month.  That figure came from a March 2009 study by ComScore as reported by Erick Shoenfeld.  And the numbers are only growing. BTW, the  second most popular mobile activity was social networking.  With 9.3 million daily users, accessing social networking on mobile devices is rapidly gaining ground.

Those figures are consistent with those of Caroline Dunn, Internap director of product management – mobile and a mobicamp presenter.   In a white paper she submitted, she cited a Cisco Systems report that predicts mobile data traffic will double each year from now through 2012, and mobile video will account for 64 percent of mobile traffic by 2013.

With all these people getting news and information from mobile devices, you would think that companies would seize the opportunity to leverage mobile.  But that’s not the case.  A study last year by Omniture found many companies from retailers to content providers are not taking advantage of the opportunity presented by this increase in mobile Internet use.

In many cases, PR is not considering that the mobile Internet experience involves different screen sizes and different audio and video formats. Most mobile phones are not equipped to handle the Flash applications found on web sites. The net result is that PR is not effectively capitalizing on the mobile web.

Mobile is a PR Opportunity

Recognize m. or .mobi?  They are telltale signs you are a mobile site, and we need to get familiar with them. Look at the difference between mobile and desktop versions of the CNN homepage.  See how the mobile CNN page is more streamlined.

When we work with our web designers and content designers, are we taking into account the mobile web? When we upload video, PDF files and other content, are we configuring them for a mobile audience?

According to Wikipedia, the main advantage of .mobi, from the users’ perspective, is that they are theoretically guaranteed a site optimized for usage on the go. This means hard factors such as smaller screens, device form/size, device input/output options, existence of embedded sensors (acceleration, location, touch, light/darkness, ambient noise), as well as soft factors such as expectations of immediacy of results, context awareness under a shortened attention span (compared to home/desktop use of the Internet).

The reality is that very few .com extensions are optimized for mobile phones.

Ed Schipul discussed in his excellent Slideshare presentation that mobile PR is more than using the trendiest application, text messaging or simply transferring the desktop to a smaller screen; it’s about a whole new way of communicating – one based on simplicity and immediacy. People are grabbing information on the run.  They don’t have the time, inclination or minutes on their plan to download graphic-laden sites that only slow down the experience and make it more difficult to access information.

As Mark Emery wrote:  ”People still behave differently on mobile devices. Let’s face it, it is still relatively arduous to do things on a mobile phone versus a computer. Chances are that if you’re taking the time to type out a URL in a mobile browser, you have an exceedingly good idea what you’re after.”

This is how web and mobile integration specialist Andrew Lunde at Lunde Cognitive Effects explained it to me, “It’s important for PR to keep in mind what information they want to deliver to their audience in a mobile context. They need to work with web designers to create a database that allow users to view and retrieve content over multiple devices and formats.”

This post is long, but it only scratches the surface of the mobile web and its impact on PR.  It doesn’t address strategy, successful campaigns or opportunities to create additional value and extend community. But I hope it starts a discussion on the growing use of the mobile Internet and the technical considerations that PR needs to make when disseminating content.

Let me get back to you.

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