By Christopher Carfi

"Marshall McLuhan pointed out that whenever we get our hands on a new medium we tend to use it like older ones. Early TV broadcasts consisted of guys sitting around reading radio scripts because nobody had realized yet that TV could tell stories differently," noted writer Clive Thompson in a recent Wired Magazine article.

In a similar vein, the earliest Web sites were, in many cases, "brochureware" that had been merely ported to the Web. (For example, check out the Wells Fargo Web site, ca. 1997, courtesy of Archive.org.)

This pattern is repeating itself with the new medium of mobile, where ideas that had worked in the past such as coupons and push advertising are in many cases simply being moved over to a new communication channel.

But are we selling ourselves, our companies, and our customers short with this approach?

With mobile, there is a nearly green-field opportunity to empower customers in ways that have never been done before. Think about it. What a lot of organizations are doing today is grafting mobile on the same old types of campaigns that were done in other channels.

In the traditional view of business, we look at the customer through the lenses of marketing, sales and support. However, these are all things that we do to customers, not with them.

If we look at business relationships from the customer's point of view, instead of our own, each of the above-mentioned activities has a parallel.

Instead of marketing, a customer does research to determine what she might want to buy.
When we are selling, the customer is buying.

And where we have a support function, the customer merely wants to get support for a problem.

In addition to the customer-centric "research, shop, get support" parallels, the advent of blogging and social networking has enabled two additional activities from the customer's point of view -- connection and conversation.

"Connection" is the identification of the other individuals who are in your community. These people are referred to as your "friends" in many cases.

"Conversation" is the set of interactions between those connections. Conversation can be as simple as commenting on a review site such as Yelp.com or as complex as setting up a global push to support nonprofits.

Thinking of these five customer-driven components -- research, shop, support, connection and conversation -- from a mobile point-of-view opens up a number of new horizons for us.

They help us to create something new and valuable, instead of repaving the well-worn traditional marketing cowpaths.

Organizations such as Heavenly Mountain, Network Solutions, Comcast and BlogHer are all exploring new territory in enabling mobile capabilities for their customers and community members around these five pillars.

Examples
Lake Tahoe's Heavenly Mountain resort is using mobile to provide its customers research information with up-to-the-minute webcams and video from the mountain, as well as condition, traffic, and pricing information (http://www.skiheavenly.com/mobile).

Domain registrar Network Solutions created a mobile shopping guide for holiday season "Black Friday" sales (http://www.bffeed.com).

Cable giant Comcast is using services such as Twitter, which has an inherent mobile component, to support customers using its " presence (http://twitter.com/comcastcares).

Online community giant BlogHer has created mobile pocket guides for both connection and conversation for everything from politics to parenting to personal finance (http://tinyurl.com/bhpolitics).

We need to remember that mobile is an entirely new medium.

While we may be tempted to do the same thing that we always have as marketers, there are entirely new opportunities in the space.

By looking at things from the customer's point of view, instead of our own, and concentrating on the customer's needs for research, shopping, support, connection and conversation, we will have the opportunity to move this medium beyond "reading radio shows in front of a camera" and enable it to achieve its true potential.

Full disclosure: Cerado was involved in the development of some of the mobile applications mentioned above.

Christopher Carfi is founder/CEO of Cerado, Half Moon Bay, CA. Reach him at .