Six months to get yourself a mobile strategy

Talking of mobile (as I just was…), I’m looking forward to this year’s Mobile Media Strategies event in September (client work allowing). I had a teeny, tiny input into the meat of the content, through the organiser picking my brains some months back, and I really like what I see in the finalised agenda.

I last attended a couple of years ago, and found it a real mix of useful insight and ho-hum statements, including one that must be rather embarrassing to the person who made it. As I put it at the time:

I will confess to a degree of skepticism about Dominic Jacquesson’s predictions about the shape of the mobile market in two years. It’s possible Windows Phone 7 will displace iOS as the second platform behind Android – but I’m far from convinced that it’s as likely as he painted it.

Two years on, I think we can safely say that was seriously off-base.

Still, a lot has changed in those two years, and there’s a lot more practical experience to put up on a stage and debate where we’re going next. This is no longer an academic exercise. Content consumption is shifting from the desktop and print to mobile devices at an astonishing rate – probably the fastest transition we’ve seen yet. Too many companies are still dragging their heels on this – possibly because they’ve been burnt by so many false dawns of mobile in the past. The less said about WAP, the better.

Having seen some cuts of analytics data from several clients in recent weeks, it looks like you have about six months – at best – to get your act sorted on mobile, or risk irrelevance.