Mobile First: most are doing it wrong!

The thing that bothers me, is that so many have not learnt from the web-first approach and doing just as wrong as they did when moving from print to web. Just look at media industry. I see more and more offers that promises to take your content mobile both for Apps and Mobile Web experience that are based on traditional print systems like InDesign. This is wrong in so many ways. InDesign is not a dynamic content solution, it is made for laying out pretty print pages and send them to print. The solutions are not good at handling multi media, time to publish is expensive and time consuming. And the whole Social aspects are not even remotely available in such tools, it is made for paper.

Full Apps Experience

If you want to really go mobile first you need to enable the full Apps experience with a native interface and offline storage. This means a low latency and snappy experience for the consumer while still maintaining an efficient publishing process that makes economical sense. In addition it is crucial that you enable your business model for the mobile world, being it a  traditional subscriptions for premium content, retail purchases or simply booking a test drive of the latest and greatest car model.

You need to talk the language

In order for you to really enable a Mobile-first strategy your infrastructure needs to talk the language. APIs and interfaces needs to be easily available to enable developers to build Apps connected to your content in an efficient way. Pardon the marketing but most systems today are not able to do this as they are purely Web CMS, most often meaning that they store XHTML in the content repository - which is not very much channel neutral as we know.

Mobile Web is not the Web

Handling content for Web is different than Mobile and handling Paper is again very different. For that reason your system needs to be able to differentiate the channels and translate the channel neutral content into channel specific enriched content. And this is only possible if you are truly managing your content in a neutral way. Just make sure you keep that in mind when you build your infrastructure, there are good systems out there and needless to say that I am happy to assist.

eZ Marketing: Solving the multi-challenge

As you know, I am with eZ Systems and our focus has been solving the multi-challenge which of course includes enabling a Mobile-first strategies. But don’t take just my word for it, listen to customers and partners to learn what they have to say.

This post is also featured on our partner EXOVE site. You can check them out here.