Making Mobile Social work for Marketers.

David Berkowitz is senior director of emerging media and innovation for digital marketing agency 360i, where he develops social media and mobile programs for marketers spanning the media and entertainment, retail, travel and CPG industries. Mr. Berkowitz spoke with eMarketer about the importance of creating programs that exploit the unique qualities of the mobile environment.

eMarketer: Depending on your perspective, mobile has taken some significant or incremental steps forward in the past year or two. How has social networking on mobile evolved as part of that process?

“It’s funny how much of the awareness still comes from just the iPhone apps. The mobile social world is obviously much bigger than that.”

David Berkowitz: Consumer usage of a lot of the social components of mobile media keeps picking up at a pretty big pace. I won’t claim to have the numbers, but there is a sizable percentage of consumers using the main social networks on mobile devices. You see phenomenal things like Twitter that were really fueled a lot by mobile usage and especially its early growth, that was central to it. There are some applications like foursquare and Brightkite and Loopt that get some degree of buzz. It’s funny how much of the awareness still comes from just the iPhone apps. The mobile social world is obviously much bigger than that.

eMarketer: To what extent do you see smartphones, and specifically apps, driving this segment? Is there significantly different kinds of behavior between mobile social networkers who use feature phones versus those who use smartphones?

Mr. Berkowitz: As far as the different behaviors go, we’re just starting to learn about that. I was talking to [mobile ad network] AdMob about that question. There is definitely a lot going on in the feature phone world too that goes beyond the nature of social networks. I think MocoSpace, for example, is fascinating partly because for a network with a pretty good user base, they are still very under the radar. They have a really strong urban audience, a much younger student audience. So to their credit, they’ve got a very targeted user base. I think as awareness grows for what they’re doing, marketers that generally just try to target that population are really going to appreciate some of the opportunities like that. I think there is a lot of disconnect between the buzz and what’s really going on.

eMarketer: Where are those opportunities for marketers and brands in particular to connect with mobile consumers?

“A lot of the mobile social fields right now aren’t marketer-friendly.”

Mr. Berkowitz: The opportunities for marketers are definitely further behind what consumers are doing because a lot of the mobile social fields right now aren’t marketer-friendly. Facebook and MySpace in particular are both pretty slow in creating mobile-specific opportunities around their sites and applications. So there are certain mobile social networks that marketers can tap into, like MocoSpace and peperonity.

One of the other tricky things is that it’s hard not to immediately jump to applications because applications, in general, make it easier to be more social. It’s especially true on the iPhone where app developers can allow for social gaming and easy sharing and just quick photo uploads and posting to social networks, Flickr, blogs or Twitter. So I think applications are, at least for the foreseeable future, where most of the attention for mobile-social would be.

The question is whether you consider a lot of these applications mobile-social. Is the air hockey app on the iPhone or iPod touch mobile-social because multiple people can play it? Ralph Lauren has a rugby app you can use to take a picture of yourself and share it with people. That’s just one part of the application. So I think there’s this huge gray area in mobile that’s a much bigger issue than it is on the Web because at least on the Web there’s a number of these social media sites you can go to and figure out what the marketing opportunities are.

eMarketer: What kinds of challenges do marketers face, both internally in their own companies as well as externally facing the market, in getting these kinds of mobile social networking programs going?

Mr. Berkowitz: Some of it, right off the bat, is just figuring out who owns mobile. Mobile itself can be used for just a lot of different goals. For instance, it often works really well as a drive-to-store program. The problem is that those handling drive-to-store programs aren’t necessarily those handling online marketing, which is focused on getting people to your Website. So if you’re not trying to get people to your Website or to a store, then it can often just wind up in limbo. I think those kinds of organizational challenges are just one of the hurdles that mobile overall has been facing.

Courtesy of http://www.emarketer.com