MEDIA COMPANIES TAKE NOTICE: HOW ARE YOU IMPROVING YOUR MOBILE STRATEGY?

This morning I read a great piece by Inland Press editor, Adolfo Mendez. He interviewed Kerry Oslund, VP of Digital Media at Schurz Communications. Kerry provided great insight and transparency into his groups’ mobile application experiences.

 

We think that every media company – Radio, Television, and Publishers – should read this and take it to heart. Let me highlight a few quotes and points from Kerry Oslund here from the article:

  • “We knew we had to get into the mobile space in a bigger way, and part of the subsector of the mobile space is apps.”
  • Once apps are developed, media companies need to be ready to maintain, repair and upgrade them, he said. “Now we’re in the support business as well because we developed an app,” he said. “If it breaks in the middle of the night, we fix it in the middle of the night.”
  • For Schurz, potential business (app developer) partners are evaluated on the basis of what kind of technical support they can provide, he said. “There is a reason many of us chose vendors sometimes not for the complexity of the technology but for the support that we need,” he said. “When we’re looking at vendors, we try to minimize the technology expense and pay fair value for support.”
  • “The early numbers [of mobile app use] compared to other numbers was small, but the ramp was steep so you couldn’t turn your eyes away from a ramp like that,” he said. “The more you looked at that ramp, the more you realized that this was a trend that didn’t seem to be showing any signs of stopping at all.”
  • For the Herald Times in Bloomington, Ind., the company used its own internal resources to build a mobile presence. “We wouldn’t want to repeat that again and again,” Oslund said. “It would be very expensive to do that.”

Kerry mentioned that last year, 5 percent of their online traffic was mobile traffic, and that he would expect that number has already doubled. From our point of view as a developer of such applications. It is key that our clients be informed of the experiences of their industry colleagues and be able to learn from those experiences to make informed decisions with strategic moves.

 

My call to all media groups is this: Be a fantastic feed-provisioner. Have a great tech team that knows how to format feeds.

 

To read the full article, click here.