Speaking as a CES panelist, NewsGator Media & Consumer Products GM Walker Fenton told the audience, “You???ve got to be on the iPhone; same as you???ve got to be on the Web.” Not having an iPhone app today, he suggested, is like not having a website 10 years ago. Without an iPhone app, you don’t exist.

It’s a sentiment I’m seeing echoed by a lot of observers and analysts. I appreciate the enthusiasm and understand where it’s coming from. And while your organization may well benefit from an iPhone app, it’s not a requirement. What is required is developing a strategy for smart phones.

Marketers and communicators should look at two issues when making plans for their presence in the mobile phone space.

First, is an app the answer at all?

Claiming that apps are a requirement is putting tactics before strategy. Whether to release a smartphone app should be the answer to the question: “What tactics can we employ to achieve the objectives that drive our strategy?” I imagine “We need an iPhone app” is as common an assertion today as “We need a brochure” was 20 years ago. Those who “needed” a brochure had rarely performed the due diligence to determine that a brochure was the most effective means of accomplishing their goals.

As one commenter noted in response to Fenton’s assertion, “If you have a website, you???re already on every smartphone.” If there’s a requirement for every organization regarding smartphones, it’s to bring their websites up to snuff for viewing on phones.

Having the mobile-ready site is a first step; the next is making sure people can find it. “Make sure that the redirects are in place so that most mobile browsers will end up (at your mobile-ready site),” writes Steve Smith at Mobile Insider. While Smith recognizes that 2010 will be the year of mobile-ready content that employs a lot of creativity,

It is going to have to be creativity with a purpose. I did a quick review of brands’ mobile sites the other day and found that there is a substantial difference between merely having a mobile “presence” and having a mobile purpose.

This is a no-brainer, given the shift of web consumption from the computer to the mobile phone. Morgan Stanley, in "

The Mobile Internet Report” released last month, proclaimed that “More users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years.” Yet I’m routinely surprised at the number of companies that haven’t taken even the first tentative steps to address this trend.

Adam Cahill, writing for ClickZ News, suggests a three-phase approach to strategizing your adoption of mobile technology as a marketing/communications channel:

1. Assess the impact of the persistently connected consumer is on your your industry and your business. “How, when, and where do consumers use mobile to make buying decisions about what you sell?”
2. Commit a “predictable and sizable” part of your budget to developing the right channels for bringing your brand to the mobile space.
3. Figure out how you’re going to measure the effectiveness of your mobile efforts.

I have no doubt the m-dot and mobile app space will be littered with a lot of useless crap that satisfies somebody’s insistenhce that “we have a mobile presence.” Those who adopt strategies that satisfy customers’ real needs and desires, solve their problems, simplify their lives or allow them to do something they could never do before (for instance, with location-based phone tools) will actually produce measurable results.

I have to wonder if NewsGator’s Fenton remembers all the terrible, useless websites that sprung up like weeds in response to the mandate, “You’ve got to have a website.”

If an app is an answer, what platforms should you consider?

When the iPhone was released, it was (as Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted) a game-changer. My reaction to the iPhone’s introduction turns out to have been correct: It will force other mobile phone companies to step up their game in order to compete. Initially, in one corner stood the iPhone, simple to use and adaptable to its owners needs. In the other corner were a host of crappy phones everyone hate because they were hard to use and didn’t do what their owners needed them to do.

Today, the marketplace hosts a number of viable competitors to the iPhone, many of which sport features with which the iPhone can’t compete (like multitasking). Even in the rare air of celebrity geek circles, iPhones have been abandoned in favor of the Motorola’s Droid and some other contenders. (Sometimes this is because of the Droid’s features, including a real keyboard; sometimes it’s conceding the iPhone just isn’t worth the problems associated with AT&T’s service.)

In fact, 28% of those who plan to buy a smartphone plan to get Apple’s product, but 21% will buy an Android and 18% a Blackberry. Add the 9% who will opt for a Windows phone or one sporting WebOS (Palm’s platform, currently available on the Pre and the Pixi), nearly half of the smartphones being sold will not be iPhones. It seems to me, then, that if you build only an iPhone app, you’ll be invisible to half your target market.

Gartner expects Android to surpass the iPhone by 2012, while Nokia’s Symbian—currently the market leader—will own 37.4% of the market. The iPhone will be in third place.(As of last August, Symbian commanded about half the market. The BlackBerry had about 20% and the iPhone wasin third place with 13%.)

The analogy of an iPhone app to a website isn’t an apt one because of competing platforms. HTML is an open platform—pages rendered (to varying degrees) on any browser whether it was installed on a Mac, a PC, or a Linux/UNIX box. Smartphone apps, conversely, need to be developed separately for each platform.

If your strategy leads you to conclude that apps are necessary, you’ll need to produce them for each of the key platforms, the cost of which—both time and money—will need to be factored into your planning. That’s part of the serious budgeting Cahill recommends in his three-step planning process.

You’ll also need to figure out how your effort integrates with your communication through all the other channels you’re already using.

The fundamentals apply

Ultimately, communicators should apply the same strategic planning that works for any communication effort:

• Identify the need or opportunity
• Identify the audiences to reach in order to take advantage of the opportunity or satisfy the need
• Articulate the goals and objectives you will have to achieve in order to succeed at the effort
• Determine the tactics you’ll implement in support of the goals and objectives. (These would include smartphone apps.)
• Measure and evaluate the project outcomes.

While it’s easier to jump up and down like a five-year-old in a toy store shouting, “I want an iPhone app! I want an iPhone app!” it’s smarter to strategize your inevitable adoption of the smartphone as a key communication channel.