The Imminent World Of Mobile Internet

There are over three and a half billion mobile phone users in the world, vastly more than all the computer users combined. Over 25% of these people access the internet on their phones. These figures suggest mobile internet capability is fast becoming a reality for online marketers.

Mobile Marketing

In April ActiveMedia launched ActiveFRONT, a mobile marketing program designed to integrate SMS and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). The initiative was designed to give marketers better access to people who use online communities, which in this day in age means practically everyone.

However this type of media doesn’t apply to the majority of mobile net users. The Blackberry and now the iPhone are becoming tremendously popular and can support nearly as much content as a computer; but most people don’t own these high end devices.

Mobile Internet Today

The regular mobile user has a handset which can’t support CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) presentation. CSS is designed to help web crawlers read document presentation in terms of font, colour and layout. Therefore if you are a mobile marketer aiming at the average mobile net user your advertising content needs to be outlined in clean semantic mark-up.

In other words marketers should write their material in plain old HTML to create simple text-only advertisements. Eliminate any unnecessary frames and decorative images that would slow the loading process for a screen measuring between 100 and 640 pixels. Tabulated data is also a big no. The standard mobile mostly supports only one column of information.

Further guidelines to consider revolve around the physical size of a phone. Condense the entire presentation to fit within a smaller viewing space. The font size for all text needs to be reduced. As does the information contained in the brief because without a mouse or keyboard the user won’t feel like clicking through a large amount of material. The average screen will allow for 20 to 40 characters in 12 to 15 lines.

URL addresses also need to be as short as possible where applicable.

Looking Forward to .mobi

Mobile phones are no longer being used for marketing in terms of just smsing. With the expansion of mobile net use, campaigns can now be better targeted to reach the ideal audience.

.mobi is a domain extension that was approved by ICANN in 2005 and is specifically aimed at increasing mobile net use. To purchase your .mobi today visit Planet Domain.

By Stacey Manson

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