The opportunities afforded by the revolution in mobile phones are perhaps the most exciting since the birth of the internet itself.

And yet, for those of us who’ve frequently been sent ‘over the top’ on the digital front, there is a sense of weariness when confronted with agencies and suppliers pitching mobile applications as a ‘must-have’ tool.

So before rushing headlong into taking on Angry Birds,  here are my 5 golden rules for Mobile:

1 – Optimise your website for mobile devices before you do anything else.

There is a world of difference between accessing your website via a 15 inch desktop computer screen and accessing it through a 4.5 inch handheld device. I call this ‘The immutable law of Fat Fingers”.

For evidence of this, ask your team to provide some analytics on how people are accessing your website via mobile devices. Recently I’ve seen ‘un-optimised sites’ with a bounce rate of between 60-80% against a site average of 30%. That’s a lot of lost custom.

2 – You already know more than you may think

Your analytics package will be recording a wealth of information about how visitors from mobile devices are using your website. Ask your web team to create an analytics filter for mobile devices and examine the differences in behaviour between mobile usage and desktop usage.

For example, if you are an eCommerce website you may find that the user accessing by mobile devices use the website more for store locations than browsing product.

3 – Think about what makes an APP great before you decide to create a great app

I recently sat through an agency pitch that highlighted the potential of mobile for retail: Augmented reality, timed sales, ‘bump’ group discounts, barcode scanning, GPS location mapping, push notifications etc etc – all of which were jaw dropping but none of which were relevant to where the client was at this moment in time.

As with your website. Start with something that your customers need now and, crucially, what your company is able to deliver now. Then monitor and iterate – testing and assessing the market as you go.

4 – Re-think you’re email marketing approach

Mobile drop off is especially noticeable for those businesses that rely on email to communicate to customers. More and more of us use mobile devices to access our email – its not just a business tool anymore – so the effectiveness of your carefully crafted creative execution will suffer if users link through to a site that’s not optimised for the device

5 – Understand what the customer needs

Any nascent technology has it’s fair share of hyperbole hanging off it’s coat-tails. Choosing the right partner and correct strategy is as important in this sector as it is in any other.

A recent example of a beauty brand comes to mind. The company put all it’s efforts into creating an app for the iPhone and iPad. Upon launch they found that no-one wanted it. Those who did download it didn’t come back and the few reviews it received on itunes were negative.

Why? Because they didn’t ask the customers whether there was a need for it and they didn’t have a content or engagement strategy to make people want to come back. Result? Delete from home screen.

They’ve now gone back to focusing on the mobile version of their website.

And there we are – back to the beginning of the 5 Golden Rules.

When Jones Lang LaSalle asked me to provide some technological insight for their Retail 2020 research initiative my initial thought was ‘Blimey. I’m not even sure where we’re going to be by the end of 2012 let alone 2020″.

Jones Lang LaSalle are one of the big boys in the financial and professional services sector, specialising in real estate services and investment management. They employ 30,000 people in 60 countries and retail is a significant chunk of their business.

The sessions were held in London and Paris last year with representatives from all areas of the retail landscape, from developers and constructors to marketers and retailers. The objective of the meetings was to pool together collective insight in order to shape some sort of vision for the future of retail.

The output of those meetings has now been published by JLL and is available to view for free on their website (you simply need to register). The findings are presented in 7 parts: Going East, Online Gold Rush, Consumer Cut-Through, A Perfect Storm, The End Of Silent Retailing, Going Beyond Retail and Easy Shopping. The findings are presented by Robert Bonwell, CEO EMEA Retail at JLL.

These document do not pull any punches and point to the challenges facing retail after a decade of credit enthused spending consumer optimism.

My own contribution focused on how the combination of mobile and the social web could have a transformative impact on the offline retail experience as well as online. It’s a theme that I keep coming back to and this new combination has real power to challenge established practices such as fixed prices, ‘brand knows best’ push marketing and customer service.

I keep returning to the conclusion that the passive experience of offline shopping is not rewarding and new online models are succeeding by creating theatre as well as offering value – witness Polyvore and Gilt as two salient examples in fashion and take a look at Naked Wines as a tangible example of real social commerce.

The second theme that I’ll be looking to explore over the coming year is the revival of mutuality in the online sector. Having worked for a mutual, I’m acutely aware of the customer loyalty that is inherent in such a model and in the advantages (and disadvantages) of not having external shareholder pressure. Businesses owned by customers is a logical progression for the social web and may become appealing for an increasing number of people.

The Retail 2020 report is a good read. It outlines what we already know: That power will continue to go to the east; that it will be a long slow climb out of recession; that technology will afford significant opportunities for those that innovate; and

Take a look at the findings here.

And yet when it comes to eCommerce there are still some hang-ups and foibles that prevent brands from maximising the sales opportunity, and a recent dilemma posed to me by an SME specialising in luxury fragrance illustrates this issue succinctly.

The Problem
The problem was clear. A substantial investment in SEO had paid apparent dividends with the website doubling it’s natural search traffic over a 12 month period. However, during the same period the conversion rate had dropped by half. So despite a big increase in visits, the sales were flat year on year.

The bricks and mortar side of the business was experiencing double digit growth. Online something was clearly wrong.

All other factors were equal. The brand had not opened up any new marketing channels and the site was running off the same eCommerce platform that had previously yielded the higher rate of conversion.

In these types of situations, the analytics package is always the starting point. By simply looking at the user journeys by traffic source it was clear that the website was hemorrhaging visitors from natural search links. Bounce rates were upwards of 70% compared with an average of 30% site wide.

Brand specific terms were accounting for 80% of the search volume, all of which pointed to an old fashioned ‘gateway’ homepage who’s only function was to ask you what country you originated from.

And there’s the rub. The brand owners saw the gateway page as a useful departure page to their country of origin. The customers? Well, they saw it a reason to depart the site altogether.

Rather than ensuring that search results linked directly to the shop and the carefully planned promotions, the brand has assumed that all traffic was equal.

The Solution:
With peak trading approaching, there was no time to re-engineer the website so the solution was to be found in paid search. The advice was to set up sponsored search listings on Google on those same keywords that were causing a problem in natural search. The paid search ads would be directed to the shop page for each country thus by-passing the poorly designed homepage.

In some ways this was a damage limitation exercise. Paid search results do not perform as well as natural search listings where listings are present for both, but they can account for up to 30% of clicks from the page.

The Result:
In 6 weeks the site saw sales increase by 65% year on year of which 55% could be directly attributed to the new paid search links.  From flat trading in the previous 46 weeks, the end of year figure jumped to 15% up.

For me this was a striking example of how insight can give you as much uplift as marketing. And if the brand had got it’s SEO strategy correct in the first place? Well what a year they could have had!

Conclusions:
- Use your analytics package more and use it better. A simple weekly reporting of sales and conversion by traffic source would have red-flagged this problem and sales would have improved in line with traffic growth
- TEST, TEST, TEST your landing pages. A/B or multivariate testing is not being deployed enough at the SME level. Partly this is down to resource and partly this is down to inflexible eCommerce platforms that do not easily allow for split testing.
- Incentivise your agency relationships. The job of you’re digital marketing agency is to generate valuable leads. In the example above the SEO company could point to a substantial increase in traffic as a result of it’s work.
- Ask questions of your eCommerce package. If your operating international pricing and delivery then at the very list ensure that the platform can identify location of origin from IP addresses

Geting a distribution deal for a special interest film is a tough challenge and that’s why Semi-Rebellious Films (the producers of the film) decided to approach distribution differently. From the start they saw this as a social sell. Word of mouth promotion to like minded individuals was the order of the day and they encouraged fans of both wine and of music to host private screenings at any venue that fitted – be at bar, restaurant or, in my case, at a private cinema.

The message was simple. ‘Organise an event and we’ll send you a DVD of the movie to show. When you’ve watched it, tell us what you think, tell your friends what you think and tell your social networks what you think.’

Fans were encouraged to post on the official Facebook page, via twitter and on blogs. For the producers, everything was geared towards the DVD release a few months out from the start of their marketing. The alternative distribution of the movie was designed to generate a buzz for the compact format of the feature. Their calculations clearly led them to believe that this is where their money would be made.

I liked this idea an awful lot and wanted to to test out my own wine social network so I contacted the producers directly and organised a screening to coincide with their visit to London. This afforded me a great opportunity to run a Q&A session after the screening and within 2 weeks of reaching out to my network I’d filled out the RSA’s private screening room with wine bloggers, distributors, merchants, tweeters, and a few Tool fans for good measure.

The story of the event is told here but the learning of this alternative model of distribution was clear.

If you can’t get the theatres to put on your show then hand the show over to the people.