Stephen Miller, who manages the photography mobile team in my organization, had a nice surprise for me: he took my blog mobile! I thought I would give him the opportunity to share his thoughts on mobile social marketing.

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As Eric has pointed out, the disproportionately high representation of Japanese language posts in the blogosphere (37% as of the April 2007 Technorati update) can be attributed to mobile micro-blogging. To me, this is an indication of the potential of mobile in social networking once barriers to adoption, such as network speed and ease of use, are adequately addressed.

So how important is mobile for social marketing? In short, very.

• John Hadl, whom Brandweek called "the father of mobile marketing" and a top 10 Next Generation Marketer, predicts that in a couple of years mobile phones will be the "premier consumer connection and medium for insights available for marketers."
• Julie Ask of Jupiter Research makes the case that mobile has already become a natural and increasingly important complement to social marketing campaigns. She provides a list of seven best practices for marketers to keep in mind when creating mobile social marketing campaigns.
• In his keynote at Mplanet 2006, AT&T's COO Randall Stephenson, said that of the three vehicles AT&T has to reach customers in their new Three Screen Initiative (internet/PC, TV, wireless/mobile phone), wireless is the most important.
• Wireless Week's Brad Smith suggests mobile advertising may be poised to explode next year.
• Tomi Ahonen calculated that in 2006 mobile social networking was already worth $3.45 billion. In Ahonen's view, "if you are not on mobile, you won't be relevant soon."
• Mmetric recently reported that 12.3 million consumers in the United States and Western Europe accessed a social networking site with their mobile device in June. And this was prior to the launch of the iPhone.

As a minimum step to stay, as Ahonen put it, "relevant", one might want to consider mobilizing one's blog. Blogs, like other web pages, can be readily accessed via mobile web browsers and text-based rss feed reader applications. However, these can be slow, awkward experiences on a phone.

An alternative is to use services that adapt blogs and other feeds to view on mobile phones. Two such services worth looking at are Kaywa's Feed2Mobile service (in beta) and Winksite. What makes these services interesting is they are examples of mobile web 2.0 mashups, where web content is automatically repurposed for mobile consumption. Such tools make it almost trivial to mobilize one's blog. And they provide nifty mobile hyperlinks to make the mobilized blog easily accessible from camera phones with the right scanner software.

I first learned about Feed2Mobile from this interesting video by Elektrischer Reporter. The service provides a specially adapted version of RSS feeds for viewing on mobile phones. The mobilized feed is browser-based and looks much better on the phone than one would likely experience with a standard text-based reader. Even cooler, though, Feed2Mobile generates a QR code, a mobile hyperlink enabling users to set up the feed on their phone without having to type a URL on the phone's keypad and otherwise navigate the phone's menu system to configure the blog. To use the mobile hyperlink, user's scan the code using their phone's camera. Winksite, like Feed2Mobile, adapts blog feeds for mobile viewing, but also provides a full mobile portal with features such as a guest book, forum, profile, and other social networking tools. In addition to QR Codes, Winksite supports a form of mobile hyperlink called a Shot Code.

For a nice demonstration of mobile hyperlinks used in advertising, watch this DoCoMo ad or this Shot Code demo.

Users who don't have a QR code reader on their phone can still browse to Eric's mobilized blog by entering the URL on the phone, but using the mobile hyperlink is a lot easier, and frankly way cooler. Kaywa's site provides a way to download a QR Code reader if you need one for your phone. You can download a ShotCode reader here.