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Confab presenter and Brain Traffic staffer Erin Kissane wrote today's guest blog post. Her book, Elements of Content Strategy, is out now!

-Clinton Forry

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Web content is publishing: we've been saying it for awhile now, and it's starting to sink in. And if everyone is a publisher, then we—content strategists and other people who specialize in content work—should be able to advise our clients on their publishing plans, or at least those that cross into the online world. We’ve done so before, in the long push to demonstrate that the web isn’t the same as print, and that dumping print content into a web page serves neither user nor publisher. But in the last two years, the online publishing landscape has undergone a major change, both in perception and reality.

A couple of weeks ago, Google's Eric Schmidt shared a few numbers that characterize the mobile content revolution underway in 2011. Back in February, before Q4 sales 2010 results were available, Google and others were predicting that smartphone sales would overtake PC sales by 2013.

Turns out, that's already happened, as of last quarter. The use of the mobile internet is growing so much faster than we've expected that the best data nerds in the world were off by three years.

Here's a content-specific example. After its Super Bowl commercial aired, Chrysler saw mobile searches for its brand increase by 102%, compared to a desktop search bump of 48%. Granted, that's probably true in part because Super Bowl viewers had their phones with them on the couch as they watched the game—but that very scenario is an increasingly familiar and important one.

App Madness
Mobile is obviously a big deal for content people. And we know that. Tech media sources have amply covered the rush by content publishers—traditional and otherwise—to develop apps for Apple's iPhone and iPad operating system (iOS), and to a much lesser extent, for Android devices.

But the early news on these attempts should sound alarms:

• Nearly one in three smartphone (not just iOS) apps are never used after the first time they’re opened. For companies producing branded apps, that should be worrying.
• Sales of iPad magazines, never stellar at their best, have plummeted. (And in a classic death-spiral response, one publisher has elected to…raise prices.)
• Apple announced that all subscription-based iOS apps that deliver content must use Apple’s payment system and surrender 30% of the take to Apple.

Such early results are necessarily tentative, but when combined with the thundering herd of mobile users descending on the internet—not in three years, but now, months ago already—they should make content publishers a bit wary of those advising them to abandon the web in favor of the “app internet.”

So when our clients or leadership teams ask us for advice on publishing strategies that acknowledge these shifts and uncertainties in digital communication, what can we tell them? And on what evidence may we base our advice?

The answer—or one of them, anyway—lies in the fact that we've seen this play out before. Not with web content, but in the browser wars and development controversies that finally resulted in the birth of web standards and modern browsers.

New Shoes for Old Ponies
In a nutshell, web development in the mid-to-late 1990s sucked. Each web browser came with its own proprietary quirks and limits, and none of them interpreted the languages underlying the web in quite the same way. Web developers were forced to choose between locking out users of some browsers or creating (and maintaining) many versions of their sites for every version of every browser.

The web standards movement changed all that.

The situations aren't identical, but the same arguments that characterized the web standards movement—and eventually led it to victory—can guide us and our clients through the maze of the modern publishing landscape.

• Cost: A good publishing strategy includes realistic assessments not only of development costs, but also of long-term platform support.
• Future-proofing: Many strategies work just fine in the short term. Good ones are sound well into the future.
• Reach: Publishing plans should be designed to provide access to the largest slice of the target audience, no matter their context.
• Vulnerability: A responsible publishing strategy considers the potential effects on your business plan of a policy change or implementation shift on the part of third-party companies like browser makers, web service providers like Google and Facebook, and device makers like Apple.
• Accessibility: Sound publishing strategies don't lock out content users with disabilities, older devices, or slower connections. Not only because it's the right thing to do, which it manifestly is, but also because it's very easy to underestimate the number of "edge case" users who don't have the shiniest tech and the ability to twiddle, tab, and tilt every interface element.

So where do these principles lead us? I'll be talking about that very thing at Confab, but here's a spoiler: for most companies, it doesn't mean a rush to the "app internet" at the expense of developing for the open web.

For the full story, including case studies, a lot more numbers, and a call to arms for content specialists of all kinds, come hang out with us at Confab or check back after the conference to see slides, posts, and conversation recaps.

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