In July 2010, the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Center published a report on mobile web use, stating that 38% of adults use their mobile devices to access the internet. The study also found the mobile web to be closing the digital divide sometimes seen between age and race demographics. Long story short: Everyone is going mobile.

Even so, it can be easy to forget to leverage mobile and add value for your customers and their communities — and there are a lot of opportunities.

Creating the Sweet Spot
Springbox recently concluded a social media-based contest for Sweet Leaf Tea, an all-natural and organic beverage company founded here in Austin. The contest asked participants to submit photos of themselves at their favorite Sweet Spots, and included promotions at ACL and Lollapalooza. People then voted by Liking the photos on Facebook or retweeting them via Twitter.

Making it a Hot Spot
The most popular submissions from different regions around the country won prizes that ranged from free tea to concert tickets. Over the course of the contest we received over 250 photo submissions and tallied over 11,000 votes and shares. The Sweet Leaf Sweet Spot microsite also became the top referring site for sweetleaf.com and served as the fourth most common traffic source overall to Sweet Leaf Tea.

The community seemed to really enjoy the contest, and we received some great pics — many of which were submitted and voted on via mobile devices. To be exact, 7.87% of the visits and 4.95% of the pageviews to the contest originated from mobile devices.

Answering the Mobile Call
With this positive response to a mobile-heavy contest, we decided to check if Sweet Leaf Tea’s overall community might appreciate additional mobile experiences. We started by looking at the devices hitting Sweet Leaf Tea’s main site.

Visits from mobile devices to sweetleaftea.com have been increasing over the course of 2010, and in October they peaked at 8.12%.

Is Mobile Right for You?
Sooner or later, mobile will be unavoidable — but knowing what mobile means for your company and when to execute can seem daunting. Isolate your analytics tool to just mobile traffic, and then look up top devices, visit counts and content accessed. These are easy first steps to answering questions like:

• What percent of my community would benefit from a mobile-optimized experience?
• Should I build an app or a site?
• For what devices should I optimize?
• What content/pages should I include in a streamlined online experience?

Leverage data you’re already collecting on standard sites to inform your mobile initiative. This is a great way to ensure your efforts ultimately meet your community’s needs.