Mobile noodle

No, the title doesn’t refer to FourSquare-enabled bowl of Ramen…rather, I was just noodling on an idea for a mobile strategy…er, a way to prioritize mobile strategy anyway.

Last week I was talking with a few colleagues at IBM about mobile advertising strategies and it occurred to me that if I were making a mobile marketing/communications strategy for IBM I would probably prioritize three areas (below.)  There are so many things you can do with mobile and I see so many companies making strange decisions, one-off experiments etc that I came up with this short list of priorities…what do you think?

1. Mobile enablement for your sales force: basically, the idea here is to untether the salesforce from their PCs.  Give them access to the experts in your organization, accurate product information, a way to be found (for their clients to find them and connect with them personally, that is)

2. Light n’ easy way to declare you connection to your brand: this is essentially the idea of making sure that it’s super easy to connect with your brand (e.g. register for offers, sign up for events, get help etc) on a mobile device

3. Innovate on the go: This one might be more for technology companies…but could be a good one for consumer companies of all stripes.  Lots of great product ideas come from clients/customers/employees etc.  And the ideas don’t necessarily come when your clients/customers/employees are sitting at their laptops.  So design some light-touch way to improve your products by gathering insights from mobile device owners who also interact with your brand.

So why would I prioritize these three over all the other zillions of potential applications for mobile?  Well, for my company anyway, I think these three areas would unlock the most potential energy and investment.  It would be fairly easy to prove returns on investment across these areas (especially #2, which would generate leads etc for sales.)

What do you think?