Mobile Practice Lead, Mark Emery, delves into mobile solutions for the hospitality industry. Using key examples from the work Definition 6 executed for La Quinta Inns & Suites, Mark explains some best practices brands may utilize for a successful mobile web strategy. 

 

Mobilizing the Hospitality Industry

Mark Emery: The hospitality industry was really quick to develop e-commerce websites back in the late 90’s during the first tech boom if you will. Shortly after, they began to get into mobile as well and they were some of the early investors and adopters of mobile technology. They built lots of mobile websites and applications 10-12 years ago. Unfortunately for many, that’s where the investment stopped. Where we’re at today is we have consumers on faster and faster devices running on faster networks expecting rich experiences that are not delivered by a lot of hospitality websites simply because they were built a long time ago when you had to build for slower networks and devices.

La Quinta’s Mobile Solution

Mark Emery: Whereas most initial investments in mobile websites are really extensions of that is happening on the PC or desktop web, the new La Quinta mobile solution is the result of taking a look at what the mobile audiences want from the ground up and developing mobile content that is optimized specifically for a mobile audience. It’s the question of developing an optimized experience versus porting what’s already happening on the web. To do that effectively it takes looking at your audience form the ground up. 

La Quinta Re-Invents Mobile Booking

Mark Emery:  La Quinta identified the booking process as a uniquely painful experience on most hotel websites and got serious about re-imagining / re-inventing that experience for their mobile audience. What they came away with was the LQ-Instant Hold™. The Instant Hold feature of their mobile website and downloadable applications allows the user to book a hotel room without entering a credit card or filling out a complicated form and simply entering a 10 digit mobile phone number.

La Quinta’s Innovative Mobile Experience

Mark Emery:  The La Quinta Instant Hold is definitely unique. In fact, they’re actually trademarking the instant hold. Another is this website experience we developed for them is contextually aware. It’s predictive in nature so when I go to LQ.com on my mobile device as a new user, I’ll be asked for my permission to use my location and it will immediately show me results of hotels in my area. If I’m a repeat customer or perhaps I am on on-site or even post-stay the mobile website changes its performance and changes its behavior based on where I am at in that whole revenue cycle.

Tips for Brands Entering the Mobile Landscape

Mark Emery:  If you have a website at all, which you probably do, your mobile users are already using your website on mobile. They’re probably not getting what they want (or they are) in which case the first thing I would recommend doing is taking a look at your web analytics and take a look at a few things there. Check out what types of devices are accessing your site currently and where they’re jumping off, how much time they’re spending on the site, what they’re able to get and what they’re not able to get. You’re actually able to glean a lot of useful data about how your website is performing on mobile devices by simply looking at your web logs.

Why is it So Important for Brands to Address Mobile?

Mark Emery:  Really there are two reasons; One, simply because consumers are holding powerful devices and expect really rich experiences on those powerful devices. They’re accessing data on high speed networks. Something like 60% of all smartphone data traffic happens over a Wi-Fi connection here in the United States so they’re expecting demand rich experiences.  The second one is simply the fact that our work, our lives as Americans and as global citizens for that matter is increasingly transient. We’re always on the go, we’re always in movement. Creating a mobile website and a downloadable application for people that are in motion was a smart thing for La Quinta do and it would be a wise thing to do for other organizations in the hospitality industry to take a look at. 

Has this ever happened to you?  The woman next to you in line at the grocery store -- the one with the full cart standing next to an empty conveyor belt, holds everybody up while she chuckles at her iPhone.  Or the guy in the sedan in front of you who missed the light turning green because he is reading responses to a post he made in a gardening forum -- and will check 19 more times today. 

But let's face it -- it's not him. And it isn't her, either. It is you. And it is me. It's cliché to say we are a distracted people. It is cheap to complain about how our digital lives can lay waste to our personal ones. And it is a sine dicendo to say that when we can't get what we want, when we want it, at the price we want, and where we want it, we are prone to hysterics.

I elaborate more on this in a recent Mediapost article "Why Your Friendly Neighborhood Mobile Technologist Needs a Swift Kick in the Ass."

With the proliferation of tablets, smartphones and other connected devices, we are acccessing content more than ever on the go. So why aren't there more innovative mobile apps or mobile sites that "wow" us? Haven't we come so far that we can at least deliver something that won't make us leave the second we get there because of a fail to load or clunky navigation?

This is not a rant - but simply a call out to mobile technologists and developers to get excited. Get innovative. And to deliver something spectacular.

On Monday of last week I had the (mostly) pleasurable experience of speaking on an IAB mobile advertising panel in New York. I say mostly because, technically, 10% of me burst into flames on the subway and never actually made it. 

Panels like these used to be the stuff of software geeks, carrier overlords and some gnarly, unholy combination of the two. The conversations were invariably technology focused as people scrambled to make sense of a fragmented industry growing at a bewildering pace. It took a few years longer than it should have, but at some point walled gardens, WAP decks and SOAP APIs gave way to use cases, ROI and sound design principles. 

The conversation has shifted again, and now people are beginning to contextualize mobile as part of a branding continuum, where digital, traditional and emerging media converge to tell a story that engages people in motion. Simon Bond, CMO of BBDO, pointed to a study his firm had done which found people are more likely to wake up and reach for their mobile device rather than their lover (or themselves, for that matter). Razorfish is doing really ground-breaking stuff in mobile advertising, working with publishers and networks to create dyanmic new ad models. Michael Collins of Joule talked about how the metrics mobile provide are on par with - even exceeding in many cases - the analytics available on the desktop web. 

At Definition 6 we are bringing serious innovation to our mobile clients. From mobile websites that predict behavior and present contextualized experiences, to mobile marketing applications that leverage unique combinations of variables like speed, distance, orientation and time of day, we are helping our clients deploy mobile marketing strategies that transform their businesses.

Check it out:
 


It begs the question - how is your firm using mobile marketing and advertising to build your brand? If you aren't, somebody else is. 

Looking for another lengthy blog post on the state of mobile technology in 2011?

Me neither. 

Here's what the graphic says for those who prefer to read than scroll through an egregiously long infographic:

1) There are a lot of people in the world;
2) Many, many of them have mobile devices;
3) Many, many of them have smartphones;
4) Many, many of them have iPhones;
5) But not as many as you might think
6) SMS is huge;
7) Advertising is huge;
8) Apps are still growing;
9) The U.S. is behind in smartphone adoption and mobile broadband;
10) Most mobile websites still suck*

*This is not actually on the infographic, but still true. Call us, we can help. 

 

Background: It’s almost impossible to describe the smartphone market accurately without sounding overly prone to hyperbole. Worldwide, nearly half a billion smartphones will be shipped in 2011. By Christmas of 2011, one in two Americans will have one. Gartner predicts that in 2011, 85% of all handsets shipped globally will be able to access the mobile Internet.

In Q1 of 2011, Android supplanted Apple as the #1 smartphone OS in the U.S. While smartphone manufacturers jockey back and forth with one another for frontrunner status, swapping places with every latest hardware entrant, only feature phones (where the OS is proprietary firmware, and NOT a third-party development environment) are left in the starting blocks; there is little churn in the segment. In fact 2011, according to Nielsen, will be the year smartphones overtake feature phones in global mobile shipments.

For brands looking to build or maintain a mobile presence, the smartphone onslaught simply cannot be ignored. Nor can it be oversimplified. Too many American marketers think mobile is merely a stripped-down digital experience, a checkbox extension of their digital initiatives created automatically through the advent of rich smartphone browsers. The reality is that, worldwide, more people access the Internet through mobile devices than personal computers. It is the first screen, not the third. That over 95% of domestic digital marketing budgets are earmarked for non-mobile initiatives is an unpardonable lack of imagination, courage and good sense.

Smart brands and advertising agencies must consider several factors when evaluating how to create a mobile presence for smartphones. First the upside of browser-based mobile applications:  

• Write once, run anywhere: This is the siren’s call of mobile that promises cost efficiencies by keeping the time spent creating, maintaining and updating applications to a minimum through the utilization of a tool-based multi-platform design paradigm.

• Universal browser availability: A rich browsing experience is all but universal in the smartphone market. If a brand presence can be defined and made accessible through a mobile web browser, it reduces the number of headaches to resolve for platform-specific nuances as long as you stick to the lowest common denominator.

 

• Support of advanced features available in HTML5: There are some components of HTML5 that will be a boon to mobile devices. Unlike mobile browsers of old, HTML5 promises offline support. Also, video in HTML5 is standardized, which will make adding video content to websites much easier. HTML5 also supports a GeoLocation API, allowing web developers to capture critical location data.

• Layout standardization: Web browsers depend on a layout engine at the presentation layer. While there are myriad mobile browsers available, WebKit and Gecko are the layout engines used by most, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.

Unfortunately, there are also downsides to a browser-only approach, including:  

• Browser diversity: The most prevalent smartphone browser in existence is the Blackberry, which has its own layout engine used by precisely nobody other than RIM. At the very minimum, creating a browser-based smartphone application that works on a majority of devices will require at least two completely separate development efforts.  

• Limited HTML5 support: When Steve Jobs lambasted Adobe’s Flash in 2010, he pointed to HTML5 as the author of its death spiral. Somebody forgot to tell RIM, who supports the Opera browser while remaining ambiguous about HTML5.  

• Hardware-specific amenities: Downloadable applications are typically able to access many features baked into the hardware that a browser-based application simply cannot. From the iPhone’s popular “shake” feature to other phones cameras and GPS chips, in order to unlock the richest of features from a mobile device, you have to think thick-client.

While the debate continues, what is certain for brands is to contemplate the merits of downloads vs. browser-based applications on a case-by-case basis. Mark Donovan, comScore SVP of Mobile concludes, “with mobile media consumption on the rise, the discussion of how consumers are accessing content -- whether it is via application, browser or both -- continues to be an important factor for companies looking to invest further in their mobile brands.” In every scenario, however, it is important to consider what will not work, and that, specifically, is to think that just because an HTML-based application works on a personal computer, it is sufficient for a mobile device. Mobile users have limited and hugely variable display capabilities, awkward and difficult input mechanisms, and the mobile mindset differs vastly from the PC user’s mindset.

In future posts, I’ll talk about mobile application design principles and dissect smartphone platforms in an effort to provide color for brands contemplating including them in mobile marketing strategies.