Never mind the Barack, it’s mobiThinking

Birth of a thought leadership website

dotMobi is a mobile Internet services company and the registry for the .mobi domain name. It’s backed by leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and Internet players, including Microsoft and Google. Essentially, .mobi is the only domain name that tells users, ‘This site will work on your phone’.

We needed to get brand marketers and their agencies to start using the mobile web and the .mobi domain name. Marketers didn’t seem to realize that the mobile web is different from the desktop web: users want different things, mobile devices do different things, and the staggering diversity of devices means that you can’t just squash your old content into a mobile-friendly site. It has to be thought of as a mobile experience from the start.

To add to the challenge, there was enormous confusion over the different naming conventions used for mobile websites. dotMobi needed to inject a little clarity.

Clearing some space

Our response to the brief was to differentiate between ‘.com thinking’ and ‘mobi thinking’. We portrayed .com thinking as clumsy and heavy, compared to mobi thinking which is lean and agile. This image appeared first in some of our creative roughs, but the client liked it so it made it all the way through:

What we did next

In order to get the show on the road we designed, wrote, and built a new website for marketers with plenty of the usual Velocity specialities: thought leadership, video, interviews and .mobi site tours. We also did a load of case studies, best practice advice, e-newsletters, eBooks and set up a mobile marketing blog, edited for us by journalist Andy Favell.

Andy’s editorial approach gave the site an independent tone, so users knew they could trust it. He got straight to the heart of the industry in record time, and built links with all the head honchos in the business. He’s got a genuine interest in mobile internet issues and it shows: he’s produced some great stuff.

We also created new identities for all dotMobi brands including mobiThinking, mobiForge, and mobiDomain, designed campaigns for mobiThinking, and created content that drove traffic.

The website is constantly evolving with new content, blog posts, interviews and short pieces. It’s built around key pieces of content that have proved extremely popular including The Best and Worst of the Mobile Web and The 2009 Top Ten MobiThinkers.

And it worked

The results were excellent. The press gave the site masses of coverage, vendors want to be part of it, industry people are queuing up to write for dotMobi for free, they got over 24,000 mentions on Google in the first few months alone, they’re invited to speak at events and they’ve recruited some big names to the .mobi fold: Coca-Cola, Sony, Amazon, and Reuters. The site also achieved the best indicator of success: Barack Obama created one of the most popular .mobi sites ever to track his presidential campaign (and he used the .mobi domain name!).

In a very short time, mobiThinking.com has become one of the leading sources of best practice advice for mobile marketers, with traffic topping 7,500 views a week..From a standing start, that’s not bad.