Alas, not available on the Kindle yet.

Not too many months ago, I advised my friend to buy up the .mobi equivalent of all the domains he owned.  We were questioning the value of a mobile-version website, and what content to put there.  I still stand by my recommendations for what thrives on a mobile-version website, but the idea of a separate domain name is completely moribund now.

Here are three reasons why: Multichannel, convenience, and branding.

Multichannel – Your customers will want a consistent experience across channels.  My interactions with The Economist or Toyota Motor Corporation should be pretty similar whether I am coming in through a desktop browser, my iphone, the printed paper, or the showroom (yes– I mixed channels there, that was on purpose).  This point doesn’t have anything to do with the .mobi domain specifically, until you see the next point…

Convenience – Iam lazy.  All customers are.  Personally, I blame a service-oriented economy and our advanced democracy: if I can pay a little money and avoid headaches, I’ll pay just about every time.  Companies know this, and are constantly adjusting those services for which they charge money (because the convenience is valuable but not necessary), and those services which simply make money on their own, because the convenience greases the skids on separating me from my cash.  Mobile websites are definitely in the latter category.  Customers can be anywhere and now simply tap into the endless market with a few keystrokes or voice commands.  This is the crunch point: every additional finger tap required costs people to give up.  Each diad of information imposed upon the customer to remember costs lost sales.  There’s no way I am typing in ‘foo.mobi’ instead of just ‘foo’.  You’re lucky I type anything at all– I want to get to the point where I simply speak ‘foo’ into my phone, or just wave ‘foo’ in front of the camera.

Branding – A domain broker has been calling me every week asking if we are interested in buying a common-word domain related to our industry.  They’re asking a huge amount of money.  Every week, the answer is the same: nope.  Not that I don’t think the domain could get some decent traffic (it could, and I actually calculated out a value).  The problem is that the word is not part of our branding. It’s not consistent.  The same thing goes for the .mobi domains: unless you’re an emo musician from New York, the domain has nothing to do with your brand– the ‘.com’ is the runaway default.

So, get that mobile website up and running.  Make sure it’s convenient, but don’t bother with the .mobi domain, just make sure your IT geeks are smart enough to have an automatic redirect that senses the customer’s device and directs them to the native version.

Comign up next: why you don’t need or want a mobile app.