I’ve been reading through a number of my recent collection of blog posts (while also working on some updates to my Human Centered Mobility white paper), looking to come around to a central and common theme concerning today’s me/we-centric highly mobile marketplace, HCM and the overall large worlds of marketing, advertising and publishing. Here is a list of some of the particular blog posts I’m referring to:

• Lady Gaga, Charlie Sheen, SEO, Authority & the Mobile Brand
• Zite, Flipboard, The Daily & Today’s Mobile Publishing Industry
• Marketing, Advertising, Consumers & the NEW Mobility
• Me-centric in We-centric Mobile Social Retail Advertising Worlds
• Enterprise Mobile Apps – Focus First on Your Users
• The Antenna and HP Mobile Visions – Innovation at Work
• Steve Jobs Says Mobile Advertising is all IN the Apps – Is It?

Let me pull out here as well the following excerpt from my Innovation at Work post:

Sure, Apple and Android get all the media coverage, and combined the two have in place half a million mobile apps and…15 billion downloads (whatever the actual number is, it doesn’t matter, that it’s that order of magnitude is what counts). Yet, regardless of that immense number, the questions always come down to:

• How many of those apps are downloaded once and only used once or never used
• How many are immediately deleted
• Does the extremely low cost of most of them (if they aren’t altogether free) change the dynamics for downloading (of course it does – it makea such a huge number a lot more meaningless than it may otherwise appear to be)
• At what point does mobile app innovation at this macro level finally become almost impossible to achieve
• Can a market that becomes so large it begins to significantly stifle innovation possibly continue to foster differentiation

Are the next few years of mobility destined to be  measured by a race to the 1 millionth meaningless mobile app and the 30 billionth download of a meaningless mobile app? I sure hope not! Rather, the time is now upon us to begin thinking about the quality and larger scale meaningfulness of mobile apps that will function in the enterprise and personal cloud environments that Antenna’s and HP’s mobile visions encompass.

Innovation and differentiation are the keys here.

If you lack innovation and differentiation, I can point you to an entirely different solution for your business…

Although it falls under the general heading of ‘unintended consequences,’ failing to add real innovation that leads to differentiation WILL lead to unhappy mobile users.

So what then is the unified underlying theme? Very simple…

Engage Your Mobile Users Long Term

Before I go on, here are a couple of very interesting blog posts from others in the social blogosphere: 

• Engaging Customers on Facebook - A collection of how-to tips
• EdgeRank – What Does It Mean for Brands? - A good intro to Facebook’s new EdgeRank algorithm – where the emphasis is now placed on how well YOUR brand utilizes Facebook for customer ‘engagement’ (rather than customer acquisition)

These offer some good general social ‘engagement’ background.

For those of us living in and having to deal full time with today’s mobile world, how are we to insure that our mobile users are able to effectively live within their own personal mobile worlds? The blog posts I noted above all focus on arriving at a large scale definition of what exactly it means to ‘effectively live’ in our mobile worlds. To sum up everything in those posts, from my own perspective as, say, a brand (a company, a business, etc. etc. etc.) reaching out to my audience of consumers (we can add ‘workforce’ here as well), we come to the following:

You need to constantly and consistently engage with your users (and target users) in a manner that empowers them with highly valuable and context sensitive information they can use to both create immediate actionable events for themselves (me-centric). and feel highly comfortable with to disseminate to their personal social networks (we-centric). 

It is that simple. And extraordinarily hard to pull off!

What is necessary for a successful mobile-based social engagement strategy?

• Well-executed mobile app(s) – either native or hybrid – that offer innovation and differentiation from your competitors
• Easy and consistent access to the Web via any mobile device
• Fully-connected, large-scale (e.g. desktop-based) online experiences that seamlessly dovetail with your mobile app(s) and your mobile Web capabilities

It isn’t about mobile apps. It most certainly isn’t about getting to that 1 millionth mobile app download.

It is about creating that one holistic mobile strategy that drives a deep engagement experience and long term relationship with your user.

Tags: Business Mobility, Enterprise Mobility, Mobile Apps, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Observatory, Mobile Web, Tony Rizzo, User Engagement