The Secret Life of my iPhone and Why All Content Should Be Mobile

Joe Pulizzi of the Junta42 blog published his third annual 2010 Content Marketing Spending Survey. (Registration for this survey is free.)

One question the survey addressed: “Products deemed important to know about in order to execute marketing strategies” — with all of the usual suspects listed: social media, blogs, video, e-newsletters, etc.

What I found interesting is that respondents decreased the importance of all of these tactics from 2009 (e-newsletters, for example, decreased from a whopping 61% to 38%!) with one exception: mobile content. Mobile content increased from 24% to 38%.

Pulizzi doesn’t define “mobile content” in his survey. Hence, my question is, with the advent of smart phones, especially the iPhone and now Google’s Android operating system, isn’t *all* content mobile?

I bought my iPhone in August 2009 after fierce resistance. All I wanted was a phone that did its job — namely, make and receive phone calls.

Now that I have the iPhone, I don’t know how I lived without it and that’s because my iPhone is not just a “phone.” I use it for almost everything *but* a phone:

E-book reader – Thanks to the iPhone Amazon Kindle app, I now read business books using my phone. I love it.

Blog reader — Using Google Reader, I read blogs while waiting in the carpool line or while standing in line at the grocery store.

E-commerce — I particularly like the Fandango app, which lets me order movie tickets.

Social media – With apps for LinkedIn and Twitter, I can keep up with my network and respond to people, too, whether I’m at home, the office, or out and about.

Calendar — I used to struggle with keeping track of events and tasks as my life was tied up in ACT!, a desktop CRM application. Now I use Google Calendar and Google Tasks — and all of the information I need is available at the push of a button. (I ditched ACT! six months ago. What a relief.)

Yellow pages — With the iPhone, I can go to a company or business Website and click on a phone number and the iPhone will automatically call it. It will also map directions. Yet, I can’t tell you how hard companies make finding this important information. Even worse, some company sites don’t show up in the Google search results on my phone — which means they lose my business. (It also means that if your business isn’t optimized for local search, you are hosed.)

Restaurant finder — Thanks to the Urban Spoon app, my son and I found a *real* Mexican food restaurant in Massachusetts. (I mean real, as in California standard real.) Like everyone else, we rated it five stars. We often use Urban Spoon to see what others think of restaurants we’ve seen around town, which means that positive online reviews have become critical to many businesses.

Flashlight — Ok, I admit it. I LOVE the Flashlight app! I often use my iPhone to light my way in dark places.

Suffice to say, smart phones like the iPhone are no longer just for making phone calls. It also means content is no longer consumed by people sitting in a chair in front a desktop computer. It’s consumed by people in bits and chunks while on the go.

You can spend a great deal of time and money creating content for mobile applications. Or, you can take that marketing budget and ensure the content you already have is accessible to people on the go.

If you own an iPhone or other smart phone, how has it changed your content viewing / consumption habits?