Euro RSCG

What does your e-mail, website or other digital communication look like on a small screen? Is your clairvoyant, precise message buried under indecipherable HTML text that didn’t translate on a BlackBerry, iPhone or Google Nexus One as you’d hoped?

These questions are more important than ever for today’s digital communication strategies. By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide with more than 1.82 billion units, according to Gartner.

And your audience will increasingly read your messages on a touch-screen mobile device. This year alone, Gartner estimates, there will be worldwide sales of 362 million such devices, a 96.8 percent increase from 2009.

Touch-screen technology is a compelling user interface for applications and services, the Gartner report says. Yet these devices will be just “empty vessels” without news and information applications and services designed for them, as Damon Kiesow of Poynter Online highlights here. “As touch-screen and mobile devices grow in popularity,” he writes, “media companies need to adapt their digital offerings to fit the way consumers want to interact with these devices.”

As media and consumers adapt, so too must those of us in the communications business. So consider thinking about the small screen when planning your next digital communication. That’s likely the way your audience will experience it.