Mobile Hit or Miss is a regular column at Mobile Marketing Profits. In it, I discuss a mobile marketing hit or a mobile marketing miss (sometimes both). Of course I applaud every company who does anything with mobile so some of the misses are actually hits too. You’ll see what I mean…

MOBILE HIT

Last night I was watching the US Ice Skating National Exhibition and caught just the end of Johnny Weir’s Poker Face routine. It looked so good I wanted to see the whole thing so I did a quick Google search and discovered the NBC Olympics site. Not only did I find the video I was looking for, I found *so*much more.

This site is an amazing display of what the Internet should be. Truly it is the BEST site overall I have seen in a long while. It has everything – the schedule, athlete bios (and their Twitter streams), videos, medal counts, inspiring stories, interviews, information customized to my local area and a strong mobile component featured prominently in the top navigation.

Their mobile-friendly website (m.nbcolympics.com) is available on any mobile browser and has content modified for mobile consumption. As great as the full website is, I have no intention of being able to consume as much of it when I check in on the Olympic action via mobile. Bravo to them for modifying the content on the mobile version of the site. The design of the mobile site is not completely wonderful but it is hard to achieve perfection in mobile.

Next up in the mobile department is mobile Olympic alerts. Actually, they offer email and mobile alerts and anyone can sign up for a combination of the alerts based on their preferences. You can sign up on their comprehensive alert sign up page or you can simply text OLYMPICS to 51515. (Message and data rates may apply.)

While NBC may not have their act together in the late night show area, they surely do in their Olympic coverage via mobile. NBC Olympics is a HUGE mobile hit.

MOBILE MISS

This weekend I saw a commercial for QuickBooks and one of the points in the commercial was that now you can access your financial data anywhere. Thinking I would be thrilled by this, I decided to look into whether or not QuickBooks Online was something I couldn’t live without.

Unfortunately, upon reviewing their site, I see that QuickBooks Online via mobile is only available for BlackBerry and iPhone users. While I am happy to see they didn’t stick only with the iPhone, I am very disappointed that they are making web based software available via mobile apps and not the mobile web.

It is possible that the service actually is available on the mobile web on more than just these two devices, but they do not promote that fact.

So, while I do applaud Intuit for doing something with mobile, I give QuickBooks Online a mobile miss for giving only BlackBerry and iPhone users access to their financial data via mobile. Or for not telling everyone with decent mobile browsing capability that they can access it too.