“LOFTY AMBITIONS,” you might be thinking, “but it will take a long time to make this happen.” If your organization is already challenged with maintaining and managing its web content, adding mobile into the mix can be daunting. The gap between where you are and where you want to be may feel insurmountable.

That’s why we call it strategy.

This isn’t about describing a vision for where you should be on mobile, and then feeling like a failure because you can’t get there tomorrow. The goal is to clearly articulate where you want to be, and then take meaningful steps in that direction. The only way you’ll get there is if you have a clear picture in mind of where you want to go.

But first, let’s talk about what you can do starting right now.

BABY STEPS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

Maybe you’re totally new to this whole mobile thing, and you’re not sure where to start. Maybe you don’t know enough about mobile to make good decisions about how to write, structure, and encode content. Maybe you understand it’s important to deliver content on mobile, but the rest of your organization hasn’t bought in yet.

Whatever is holding you back from developing your “official” content strategy for mobile shouldn’t stop you from moving forward.

Gather analytics data

Many organizations have been spurred to develop a mobile website or app based on analysis of their log files and search analytics. If you’re developing a mobile site for the first time, or looking to develop a more robust mobile experience that includes more content and features, looking at your analytics data will give you insights you can use to figure out how to proceed.

You might wish to gather data about the following, and evaluate whether it’s time to make changes:

• Percentage of site visits that come from mobile browsers.
• Pages or sections of content being accessed on your desktop site from mobile browsers.
• Common search queries from mobile browsers.
• Search queries on mobile that get redirected to the mobile homepage, because the content doesn’t exist on mobile.
• Exit pages where mobile users abandon your mobile site for the desktop site.

One caveat to keep in mind: many analytics packages are based on JavaScript, which isn’t supported on many low-end mobile phones and older BlackBerry devices, which means the device doesn’t get counted. Make sure you’re getting an accurate picture of your audience by using an analytics approach (like server-side code snippets on Google Analytics) that actually counts all mobile users (http://bkaprt.com/csm/60).

Conduct user research

Don’t think your current mobile analytics and research on today’s mobile websites will give you the whole picture. Today’s crummy, crippled mobile experiences are inadequate environments to evaluate what people really want to do on mobile. To fully understand how people want to interact with your content on mobile, you must talk to them. If you’ve never done any user research or usability studies on how people interact with mobile devices, start now.

If your mobile site shows only a subset of content, and you’re expecting your users to tap a full desktop website link to access your content, then the doctor calls for a usability test. See if people can actually find, read, and make decisions about content that requires them to pinch and zoom their way around a screen designed for a much larger monitor. Your findings may persuade you to invest in developing a full mobile site.

If you’re ready to start putting together your mobile site or app, it’s time to prototype and conduct iterative testing. There are many tools to help you develop quick mockups you can put in front of users. How else are you going to see your content in action?

Developing your mobile strategy will also take some imagination—which might come from looking at what other organizations are doing.

Conduct a competitive review

If you want to educate yourself and your team about the state of mobile content, there’s no better way to see what’s out there than by conducting a competitive review. Doing research on mobile sites or apps from competitors who are doing it right (or wrong) will help your team understand what works and what doesn’t.

A word of warning: today’s mobile experiences can be pretty lousy. Looking only at your competitors may not exactly inspire you to greatness. You’ll also want to go outside your competitive set to look at best-in-class examples of mobile websites and apps, regardless of industry. Look for examples from publishers, retailers, and universities. Look especially at large-scale content sites, such as encyclopedias, how-to sites, medical and healthcare resources, and other reference guides.

Which devices to review

Given the state of the industry, it’s likely that the primary form factor you’ll want to review will be a smartphone, but it will be instructive to look at other devices as well. Some guidelines to help you prioritize which devices to review:

• If you’re looking only at mobile websites, you can get away with reviewing either iPhone or Android but you don’t need both. (This guidance applies because you’ll be focused on the content, and not on features or interactions. If you were looking at interactive applications with lots of functionality, you might need to look at both.)
• If you’re looking at mobile apps on smartphones then you should look at both iPhone and Android.
• Given the dominance of the Apple iPad in the tablet market, you should review content on this platform. One study reports that the iPad is responsible for 94.64 percent of all tablet web traffic (http://bkaprt.com/csm/61). Take special note of content that appears in apps optimized for the iPad; many of your competitors will likely rely on their desktop websites to support this form factor and may not have iPad-optimized mobile websites.
• If you have access to a Kindle Fire or Nexus 7, you should also look at content on a 7″ tablet, as this form factor is distinct from both smaller smartphones and larger tablets. As of February 2012 , the Kindle Fire had a 54.4 percent share of the Android market, making it the most popular Android tablet by a substantial margin (http://bkaprt.com/csm/62).
• Always cross-reference your review of the mobile sites and apps with the desktop site, so you can get a sense of how content is treated on each version.

How to evaluate

Develop a list of heuristics against which you’ll evaluate each site. Potential dimensions on which you might evaluate competitors include:

• Availability: how many of your competitors even have a mobile website or app? If they do, are they offering a bare minimum of content and features, or do they go beyond that? What content and features do they offer, if they only show a subset?
• Global navigation: how do they handle global navigation? Does it include the same major categories as the desktop site, or just a subset? Are navigation categories prioritized differently for mobile? How does the user access the global navigation from the homepage and other site pages?
• Wayfinding: how easily can users get to their content destination? Do landing pages along the way offer meaningful navigation labels and useful teasers? Is the path to content quick and direct or does the user have to pogo-stick back and forth? How is section navigation presented in addition to global navigation?
• Reading experience: is the content easy to read on mobile? Is it written clearly? Is content that might appear on one page on the desktop split into multiple pages on mobile screens? If so, does that additional navigation make it easier or harder to read?
• Content formatting: is the content designed and formatted for mobile reading? Are content elements like tables, lists, and multi-column layouts appropriately transformed for a differently-sized screen?
• Media: how are large images or infographics treated? What about video or other interactive features?
• Search: is there a search function available on mobile devices? Do search results help or hinder the user in finding content? Can the user find content from an external search engine like Google, or does the search query just redirect to the mobile homepage?

Convince your CEO

Aim all your initial strategy and planning at one goal: convincing your CEO and executive team to invest more in content strategy for mobile (assuming they’re not already on board). How you do that depends on your organization’s personality. Consider the following:

• Are they motivated by data? Make sure you have analytics reports from your organization—and statistics from outside your company too. Mobile might seem small right now as a percentage of total traffic, but those numbers aren’t going down. Demonstrate how mobile is poised to grow in the future.
• Are they motivated by growth? What company isn’t? Focus on showing the size of the opportunity—and the opportunities that may be missed by not developing a strategy now.
• Are they motivated by shame? Teach them what makes a great experience on mobile, and how your organization isn’t measuring up. In particular, if your competitor is doing things right, you’ll likely be able to push all their buttons.
• Are they motivated by usability? (Lucky you.) Ask the executive team to give up their computers for a day or two and use only the mobile web. You might even direct them to try some common tasks using your website on mobile.

Don’t forget: mobile is new to most people. Even seasoned digital executives can feel like neophytes when asked to make decisions about this new medium. Other executives often feel “digital fatigue” at the pace of change in our space. Part of your role is to help them feel comfortable and confident making decisions—don’t make them feel like idiots who don’t get it.

GIANT STEPS IN THE WRONG DIRECTION?

There’s a difference between deciding to do something imperfectly in the short term, and believing that it’s a good long-term solution. Design is often about making tradeoffs, and sometimes you make the wrong choices for the right reasons. As long as those decisions are conscious choices—made because of an immediate, short-term need to serve user expectations or meet business goals—there’s nothing inherently wrong with taking a little detour on your way to the end goal.

Just try not to get stuck at any of these way stations, okay?

Serve up a small subset of content and features

You might call this the “interim” mobile site. Or the “holy cats, we better get something up there quick!” mobile site. If looking at your analytics data and your competitive set makes you realize that you’re way behind the curve, then by all means, don’t delay. Build a mobile landing page today!

Remember the early days of the web, where “coming soon” pages were speckled through everyone’s site navigation? Don’t do that. You should especially avoid including animated GIFs of construction workers digging.

Instead, a dead-simple site, with the bare minimum of content and features, may suffice while you plan the rest of your mobile strategy. But do it with an eye to the future! This might be a good time to start your content inventory, and begin stakeholder discussions on how you’ll evaluate your content. Perhaps you can start with an audit and analysis process in which you jointly discuss the merits of which content deserves to be included in the interim site. This exercise arms you for future prioritization exercises, and should give you a sense of whether reviewing and deleting content will go smoothly or painfully.

Fork your content

Yes, yes, the whole first section of this book was devoted to explaining why forking your content is a disaster. And now you find out it’s okay!

It can be okay… as a temporary solution.

Developing a separate mobile experience—one that forks your content because it’s not hooked up to your CMS—would be a maintenance nightmare in the long run. In the short-term, however, it may be the least bad option. If your mobile traffic is spiking and you realize you’re losing business as a result, the cost of not developing a mobile website or app may be higher than the cost of building something with the intent of throwing it away.

But like a temporary dental crown or a spare automobile tire, don’t expect to depend on your throwaway site forever. Building an interim site while you’re working on a more robust solution is good! Forking your content and then thinking you’ve solved your mobile content strategy problem is bad. Got it?

Gerard Gober, Senior Director, Digital Experience at Comcast, explained to me in an interview why they developed a static mobile website to meet the immediate and growing demands users were making for content on mobile devices. They worked in parallel on a larger-scale solution that required changes to their CMS, knowing that they would replace the static site in the future:

We implemented a point solution knowing full well it was throwaway. In partnership with our leadership team, we had to make uncomfortable and difficult decisions that required quite a bit of courage. Ultimately, we’re in business to add value for shareholders.

Design a responsive site that doesn’t serve the desktop

Your future vision might include a single responsive website that will work across phones, tablets, and the desktop web. Designing and coding a responsive site might take a bit of time—even more time than it would take to develop a site for a single platform.

You know what might take even longer than that? Wrangling dozens of stakeholders to agree to make changes to the desktop site.

For better or for worse, within many organizations today, the desktop is still the “real” website, and mobile is a few people’s hobby. The downside is that many still struggle to convince stakeholders and executives that investing in mobile is worth it. But the upside is that decisions about how to handle the mobile website aren’t so fraught.

Organizations that want to provide an adaptive, sustainable solution for smartphone and tablet users—but who know that proposing a redesign of the desktop website will be a non-starter—might consider a responsive site for everything but the desktop. Who knows? The argument for extending the responsive design onto the desktop might come from users who say they prefer the cleaner, simpler, mobile experience.

Send people to the desktop site

Expecting mobile users to navigate your desktop site from their smartphone browser is not a long-term solution. It’s not always a great experience for tablet users either, especially 7″ tablets. It’s a total cop out to ask users to hunt around for the right content by pinching and zooming, and it’s ergonomic lunacy to expect users to accurately hit tap targets sized for a 1024 pixel width screen. Just because we’re used to it doesn’t mean we should settle for it.

A link to the full desktop site on the mobile phone is acceptable only when it’s the least bad option—if your choice is displaying the content formatted for the desktop, or not displaying the content at all, then use the desktop as a temporary fallback.

Keep in mind, however, that if you’re delivering only a subset of your content optimized for mobile, and relying on a link to the full desktop website to show the remaining content, you’re likely going to break search. If the search engine can see the content on the desktop site, but the content isn’t available on the mobile site, the user gets unceremoniously dumped on the mobile homepage. Sure, that link to the desktop site is available, but you’re forcing the user to start from the desktop homepage and swim around in your site navigation, trying to find content she should be able to access with one click from the search results. So don’t redirect searches to your mobile site unless you provide all your content on mobile.

Short-term tactics, long-term planning

Just because you know you’re building a temporary solution doesn’t mean it can’t have value for your long-term plans too. It may be that prioritizing and filtering your content for an “interim” site will help you plan for and focus on what you need to do for your “real” mobile content. Or it may be that the decisions you make for a responsive mobile version eventually carry over to the desktop site.

The way you get the most value from a short-term solution —even one that you know you’re going to throw away—is if you have articulated your overall content strategy and you know where you’re headed. That way, even if what you’re doing in the immediate term isn’t the ideal, you can plan to make it a stepping stone along the way.

Gerard Gober of Comcast explains:

The biggest thing is, you have to have a content strategy in place. You have to know the end state you want.

THE DESIRED STATE

If you’re ready to start developing your content strategy for mobile, then your first job is to define where you want to go.

I like to call this “putting a flag in the sand.” As you move forward in the months and years to come, you’ll have many decisions to make that will affect your mobile strategy and your content strategy. If your team can see the flag in the sand—even if it’s way off in the distance—they’ll at least know if their choices are moving them closer to or further away from the flag.

Your desired end state will be unique to your organization, but it might look something like the following:

• All of your content is available to users regardless of the platform they want to consume it on. You’ve achieved content parity: you provide the same content where it’s feasible, and equivalent content where it’s not.
• Your content is well-written and it all provides value to your reader. Mobile might provide a useful lens for doing the audit and analysis, but your goal isn’t just better content for the mobile site. Instead, you have a process in place to evaluate and remove content that’s not working—wherever it might appear.
• Your content is written and structured for maximum reuse. You’ve identified a system of reusable text elements written for reading and navigation. You’ve also figured out how your images, tables, charts, videos, etc., will scale across different device resolutions.
• Your content management system has been tweaked—or completely overhauled—to support multi-channel publishing. You’ve got a tool that provides a good user experience for your content authors, and supports them in developing the content structures needed. If you need to prioritize your content differently for mobile, or serve up alternative content for elements that won’t work on mobile, your CMS is technically robust enough to allow you to target content according to metadata and business rules.
• You’ve put a plan in place for doing qualitative and quantitative research to help you understand how people are using your mobile content, and how that might differ from the desktop. You’re analyzing data provided by your analytics package and search queries, and using it to make informed choices about how to prioritize. When there are questions you can’t answer just by looking at data, you talk to actual people.
• You recognize that a successful content strategy for mobile comes from deep inside. You have internal processes and an editorial workflow in place to make sure that your content is updated when necessary, evaluated regularly to make sure it’s doing its job, and retired when its time is up. You have an organizational structure and incentive system that supports—even rewards—people for working together to develop an integrated and holistic approach to content across channels.

Sound like content paradise? A totally unrealistic, Fantasy Island content nirvana? It’s not an unattainable dream. In the upcoming sections of this book, we’ll talk through each of these in more detail, describing what you need to do to get there.

WHAT’S NEXT

We’ve discussed how to start planning your content strategy for mobile—even if you’re just getting started and need to take baby steps. If you’re ready to plant your flag and start off on the path to creating better mobile content, here’s what’s in store for you next:

• Writing and editing: your mobile content strategy can be a catalyst to help you improve the quality of all your content.
• Information architecture: you don’t want to publish totally different content to mobile, but you may need to structure it or prioritize it differently. We’ll talk about how to make that happen without wasted effort.
• People and process: successful multi-channel publishing will require changes to the way you work. We’ll discuss how your leadership and workflow will need to evolve.

Let’s take a look at how mobile can help you pare down your content and write more effectively—wherever your content might appear.