If it seems as if we’ve been pulling from the list of contributors noted on the recent Carnival of the Mobilists, that’s only because these have been items also sitting in our periphery as notes to pay attention to as we derive some knowledge and wisdom about mobile which is applicable to mobile ministry. Sometimes, this just happens to intersect well with other’s views of what is important in mobile.
Another set of insights pulled comes from a report by Mobify’s CEO (Igor Faletski) relayed via GigaOm. These insights are important to us because MMM uses Mobify to transcode and deliver our mobile website (http://m.mobileministrymagazine.com). Where he is taking is platform, we eventually follow in some respect. So, in hearing some of the lessons he learned in a recent excursion with Google’s Mobilizing Mobile event, there just might be something we could gain as a movement going forward.
Here are the individual points (described as numbered lessons:
- Set the agenda
- Make your innovation tangible
- Focus, focus and focus
- Track the micro, decide on the macro
- Bringing it together
Read the details and examples of these ‘lesson points’ at the GigaOm article.
Our Reflections, Actions Forward
Its really easy to read something like this and just take it as another set of perspectives from a leader who’s gotten there and is basically setting the pace. But, we needed to go a bit futher here. How these lessons applied to MMM pushed forward some thoughts and initiatives that were already underway.
For example, one of the motions that we wanted to emphasize this year is that while we are in favor of the app movement many are prescribing towards in reference to going mobile, an app isn’t a strategy, and focusing on an app, or series of apps, would be a losing proposition with the kind of support we could push there (see how we explained about resource constraints with mobile apps/websites in a previous article. We decided therefore to decommission all of our mobile apps to an experimental status, and focus on cleaning up our use of WordPress so that we could be more readily accessible in a mobile format (see the Mobile/Web App Beta). There’s still a significant level of work needing to be done behind the scenes in terms of article categorization and dynamic page templates, but, not to the minute level of needing dedicated attention to each mobile platform out there. Will it take us longer to have a “solution?” You bet. Will we be better as a lighthouse for the extent of audiences we have here? Most definitely. That’s our focus, and the clarity we aim towards here.
Your steps might not be as drastic (then again…). What you need to decide as you are going down this path of being mobile, is that your success will hinge on the amount of planning, focus and execution that you can do or manage. If you are trying to control too much, however, you’ll find that the tentacles of mobile ministry will choke the purposes you initially had for your project, leaving you quite still in a mobile world.