No. No. No. No. No! I cringe every time I see someone talk about how we need to put mobile to the forefront of our business. Don’t get me wrong, having the ability to provided targeted content (ads included) based upon a users location is going to be necessary. With that said, if your focus is on the devices rather than they way content can be searched then you have foolishly missed the mark.

When you really think about it, the only difference between a PC and a smartphone is the presence of a GPS unit inside most phones. A smartphone is really a mini-computer with a GPS. Yes, its just a computer. Stop thinking of it as some brand new platform that we need to start tapping our resources into. What you really need to be focusing on his how we can search our content based upon location regardless of device.

It’s really not about the searching of location either. Its about setting up content in a way that many different attributes about the content can be filtered. Thats really what a search is. Its a filter. When people talk about separating brand from content, what they are really saying is removing the “brand” filter. Content is just content. Its the people that meddle with providing specific silos of content have already neglected the possibility for the user to create their own brand.

Ive already talked about this in one of my first posts on this blog about Malcom Gladwells speech on spaghetti sauces. The whole point was that there is no perfect sauce but perfect sauces. I think this rings true when talking about brands as well. There may be no perfect brand but perfect brands. People are interested in different things at various levels. We should be in a mindset of creating a culture where we focus on the creating content, classifying the content,  and providing an interface (multi-device) that works with the content. The main key is that, at the lowest level, users control what they want.

I still think its OK to have specific brands, but that should be one of the classifications of the content. Same as category, location, sentiment, mood, writing style, local/region/state/national/world, etc, etc, etc,… Why are we limiting ourselves to location? Until you can provide a platform in which you can build specific filters for this data, you shouldn’t be focusing on the devices. Lets fix how we publish data so that we have one big fire hose of content that can be filtered later down the line.