It’s a given that you need a mobile version of your website in order to deliver a good user experience on a mobile phone.  But does the content itself need to be tweaked as well? You bet it does.

Assuming you have a mobile version of your site, can’t you just strip out the graphics, images, pdfs and flash and call it a day?  If you want to make your content useful on a mobile device, you’ll need to do more.

Here are 5 factors to consider for publishing to mobile platforms:

1. Easy to use/scan/understand:  Simple wins on the small screen
2. Concise:  Get to the point, fast.  Don’t ramble.  Publish robust summaries with links
3. High value or time-sensitive content:  Data, actionable information, tools and news
4. Search optimized:  It’s how people find content on mobile
5. Easy to move cross-platform:  Adding a prominent “email this” link is one way

Jakob Nielsen summarizes the differences in writing style for print vs. web:

“Particularly on commercial sites — whether they're B2C e-commerce or specialized B-to-B sites — users cherry-pick the information and concentrate narrowly on what they want. If you're smart, you'll write accordingly: make your content actionable and focused on user needs.”

Mobile content should be even more actionable (data, not anecdotes) and focused on user needs (scannable, hyper-concise, fast-loading, and/or entertaining). Some examples:

• Apartment Guide Mobile--a magazine that's a directory is well-suited to mobile
• http://m.paidcontent.org is fast, highly readable, easy to navigate on a phone.
• http://mobile.nytimes.com is an excellent mobile site.  I think it’s actually better than the NY Times iPhone app.

Unfortunately, good mobile versions of magazine websites are scarce.  Car and Driver touts its mobile site, but the usability is terrible.  Variety shows a great approach to modifying its content for mobile in an iPhone app, as Sean Blanda's podcast interview with Abe Burns demonstrates.

Paul Conley had this to say about the potential of mobile content:

"Mobile devices offer the first opportunity in history to create content that is aimed at individual users. With mobile, you're not publishing restaurant reviews for your community -- you're giving the guy at the corner of Main and State three options for health food within a six-block radius. You're not giving the executive at the airport an interface where he can check his flight, you're sending him a text message when the airline changes his gate."

Should all your content be available to mobile users? 

Ideally you’ll think through what users are most likely going to want to access on their mobile devices.  Asking your readers what they want would be a good idea.   News content is well suited to mobile, as is any content that is constantly updated. Fewer mobile users will read a 2,000-word interview all the way through. A summary paragraph with bulleted key points and a link to the full text may get traction.

What about non-editorial content?

You probably publish more than editorial content.  If you have a directory, a data product, a specialty calculator, or anything that lends itself to away-from-the-computer use, you’d do well to focus your initial efforts there.   Some examples:

• The Chemical Touch (iPhone App) is a touch-sensitive periodic table of the elements that brings up a chemistry-textbook’s worth of information for the element selected.
• US Elections (iPhone App) is a database of every U.S. presidential election, with details about candidates, electoral votes, states carried, popular votes, percentages and more.

There’s an app for that

If you have the resources, and your content or data is in demand, you should consider developing dedicated iPhone, Blackberry or Android apps for them.  Well-designed apps like this are often an improvement over the same tool used in a mobile browser.   Wall Street Journal mobile edition (m.wsj.com) is a decent mobile website, but the WSJ Reader for Blackberry automatically pushes updates to your Blackberry that you can access offline.

Deciding which platform to build an app for is a function of your audience.  If you’re trying to reach the financial industry, Blackberry is a good bet, though Bloomberg’s iPhone app is well regarded.  For consumer markets, iPhone or Android platforms deserve a look.  Silicon Alley Insider has some useful tips for those considering whether to build an iPhone app.

Video and podcasts

Video can work on some mobile platforms, but bandwidth limitations are still a barrier.  For iPhones and Android phones, publishing video to YouTube is a good solution.  For other platforms, it’s going to be trial and error.   For example, Verizon V CAST is a service add-on for about 35 Verizon phones, but to publish video to this service, you need to negotiate with Verizon.  Good luck with that.  Other phones seem to support downloading, converting and then playing video, such as video podcasts, but not easy playback of video direct from a website.

Audio podcasts are a lot simpler than video to execute, and are a natural for many mobile devices.  Flash animation is generally a bad idea, as is PDF.

SEO is still critical

If your editorial is well optimized for search with an emphasis on keywords, descriptive (not clever) titles, headlines and headings, then it will be well-positioned for mobile SEO as well.  Mobile users are heavily dependent on search, so SEO is critical.

Staffing issues

Tweaking and trimming content for mobile shouldn’t really need dedicated staff.  It can (and should) be part of the workflow of posting an article in the content management system.  The editor who produced the original piece is best equipped to boil it down for mobile use, if necessary.  Developing mobile apps to expose data products, calculators and the like will probably require hiring an outside developer.  Most media companies don’t yet have iPhone, Android or Blackberry developers on staff, nor should they.

Augmented reality—the future?

The web allows content to be more useful and accessible than print, some in ways that could not be imagined 20 years ago.  Content, in the form of actionable information and tools, is being made even more useful on mobile platforms.  One fascinating development is augmented reality, or the ability to superimpose information in a “layer” over reality.  Typically they use the phone's camera, GPS location data, and some kind of image recognition processing to provide a layer of information on top of the camera view of wherever you are.  There are some AR apps for Android and iPhones now, and they are very cool.  The Economist did a good write-up on AR recently that’s worth reading. The Layar Reality Browser is a good example of an early AR mobile app.

Mobile means more meat, less fat

Small phone screens and keyboards will continue to force publishers to trim all non-essential words, sentences and images. The real power of the mobile phone as a platform is that it knows who you are and where you are.  Using that power effecively will lead to mobile content breakthroughs that will set your brand apart.