HTC Hero
I am a newcomer to the mobile world. Up until about a month ago, I carried a Nokia bar phone that people made fun of. Then, our local carrier (Golden State Cellular) made me a deal that was too good to refuse on an HTC Hero, running Android, and I haven’t looked back.
Our rural county only got widespread 3G service this year (also thanks to GSC) so, aside from a few early adopters who got iPhones and Blackberries running on AT&T’s edge network, you don’t see many smartphones in the hands of the locals. The same cannot be said for the tourists. They come from the Central Valley and the SF Bay Area, and they expect ubiquitous data coverage for their iPhones and Droids. We aren’t quite there yet but local businesses, chambers of commerce and tourist bureaus would be wise to start thinking about how they can serve the needs of mobile-equipped visitors.
Jeff Jarvis, in his post Mobile=local, suggests the following scenario:
Using my smartphone’s GPS and maps—or using Google Googles to simply take a picture of, say, a club on the corner—I can ask the web what it knows about that place. Are any of my friends there now? (Foursquare or Gowalla or soon Facebook and Twitter and Google Buzz could tell me.) Do my friends like the place? (Facebook and Yelp have the answer.) Show me pictures and video from inside (that’s just geo-tagged content from Flickr and YouTube). Show me government data on the place (any health violations or arrests? Everyblock has that). What band is playing there tonight? Let me hear them. Let me buy their music. What’s on the menu? What’s the most popular dish? Give me coupons and bargains. OK, now I’ll tell my friends (on Twitter and Facebook) that I’m there and they’ll follow.
All of this technology already exists on smartphones. And the type of usage that Jeff describes is not far off. As Becky McCray, of Small Business Survival, points out, there isn’t much need for the locals to have such detailed geo-data about their own stomping grounds.
Except there is one reason that all that local data makes sense for small towns: tourism. Your visitors don’t know every club and restaurant. They want your recommendations. They’d like to see photos before they ever step foot inside. They don’t know how to tell if that little diner is a wonderful dive, or a hideous pit, without some reviews on UrbanSpoon, etc.
So, even though you may not want to play FourSquare because you’d be the only person in your county (like me), it makes sense to add your local data to many local applications for the convenience of your visitors.
A small business’ web presence needs to extend onto mobile devices, especially when they cater to tourists. Services such goMobi provide a framework for building mobile accessible sites. Sites built on the WordPress platform can install a simple plugin that automatically delivers their existing content to mobile devices.
Businesses should also understand the different ways in which information about them can spread through the mobile space. Maps (Google Maps), geo-tagging sites (Foursquare and Gowalla) and customer review sites (Yelp) each contribute their own segment, making up a whole picture of a given locale.
Mobile is a new space in which tourists gather information, taking its place beside guidebooks, kiosks, traditional web sites and word of mouth. What’s different is that they can now get this information standing outside of a shop or restaurant, while making their decision to walk in the door.
