I read Mobile Marketer as much as I can. I find the stories and insights created by the team to be incredibly helpful for staying up to date with how leading marketers are adopting mobile and which technologies are trending. This morning, I was happy to see an article on how Unilever is leveraging mobile as a key part of their sponsorship of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Men’s Division I Championship basketball games, also known as "March Madness."The site they've created looks great. Here are a couple of screen shots:

The site flow is clean, they have a nice use of an expanding menu, there are video and effective links to social media and more.

I will often read Mobile Marketer on my phone, but today I was doing so on my computer. When I clicked on the link for the campaign, to my surprise, I was presented with the following error page:

My first reaction was to think the program was not working. I then proceeded to type the URL for the campaign, http://www.dovemencare.com, in my phone browser and was presented with the site in all its perfect glory as shown above.

This is a perfect example of how it is hard, for even one of the most advanced marketers, to get the simple things right in mobile. For every trigger marketers put out into the world they really don't know where it may end up, like in a press story, or how it will be accessed, e.g. a PC or phone.  There may be any number of technical and/or operational reasons why this error page came up, but a simple re-direct script would have taken care of it.

It is critical for marketers, to the best they can, to think through the customer journey and consider how the customer may be responding to the marketer's triggers. For instance, as in this case, they should have thought through what would happen if someone visits the site from a PC vs. the phone.

I'm pretty sure Unilever’s team will get this taken care of at some point; however, today's mobile-led user has little tolerance for these kind of errors. Most will see the error and move on when the experience does not immediately meet their expectations. Every touch point, every interaction, is a moment of truth for the brand to deliver value or not. These moments are precious and should not be wasted.