The next e-marketing revolution is mobile with the rapidly-growing mobile web expected to be bigger than the desktop Internet by 2015, says Amanda Forsythe, MD of Mobiguides, a South African company that has developed multi-lingual video tour guides that can be downloaded to your mobile phone. “Today, if you don’t have a website, you don’t exist to the consumer. By 2015, if you don’t have a mobisite, you will be invisible,” she says. Forsythe says mobile already accounts for 4% in global retail (20% in Japan). Some 45% of consumers’ time on cell phones is spent making calls, the rest of they spend on social media. Some 69% of mobile data consists of video. She says 3G access and Internet access are the key drivers of success for the mobile Internet. 3G penetration is 21% complete worldwide, 96% in Japan, 54% in Western Europe, 46% in the USA, while Africa and the Middle East are trailing behind in single digit 3G penetration. Mobile phone penetration is the other main driver of mobile web growth. The only thing consumers need are smartphones, which essentially are handheld computers integrated within a mobile telephone.  Mobisites are streamlined versions of websites, tailor-made for mobile access; and all social media applications are available on them. “This means, if you want to reach the modern tourist, the ones with money, you have to have a mobisite,” Forsythe points out. “Mobile has become important because everything nowadays is about immediate gratification. People want information fast and in bite-sized chunks; they don’t want to waste their time. The new consumer is a “pro-sumer”. They are no longer just consuming what we give them, they are doing their own research and booking online; they want instant on-demand information in their mother tongue and they want to share it with their online friends. “ Forsythe says lessons learned from how people use the mobile web include the following:
• Tourists want to see and experience a destination before they get there.
• They want access to destination information when they get there on demand and for free.
• Most users are still prepared to pay a small fee for mobile content, mostly debited off their monthly cell phone account. Some mobile web features available today:
• GPS (Global Positioning Systems): GPS providers are collecting tourism-related information because they need to make their services user-friendlier. Contact them and ask for your business to be included in their maps.
• LBS (Location Based Services): Very much a thing of the future. Just like you need to be on Google Maps so tourists can find you, you now need to ensure your business is geo-located so that people with smartphones can locate you with their LBSses.
• Mobile ticketing:  Consumers can buy anything from plane tickets to bus tickets to theatre tickets via their mobile phones.
• Augmented reality: This refers to a live view of a physical environment through virtual computer-generated graphics or sound. Through object recognition, the information about the surrounding real world becomes interactive and digitally usable. For example, smartphone users can point their phones at a building and up pops all information stored on the Internet about it.
• Apps (software applications): There are thousands of mobile apps available to smartphone users. For example: “foursquare” aims to encourage people to explore their neighbourhoods and then rewards them for doing so by making them the “mayor” of a particular place. As a business owner, you can use foursquare to engage your increasingly mobile customers with foursquare discounts and prizes when they check in on foursquare at your venue.
• Mobile TripAdvisor: The travel community website TripAdvisor has gone mobile. The site is available in 17 countries and 11 different languages. So far it has attracted more than 1m unique monthly visitors. Users with compatible (and GPS equipped) phones can use it to find restaurants, hotels and attractions and post their own reviews about places they have frequented.