Big brands trying mobile marketing need to be aware of that they are about to invade the most private and intimate screen in the world of marketing. As MobileYouth point out the strongest position you can get is if you provide a social fabric and a lot of bang for the social currency buck for your customers.

Get out there, participate instead of pushing broadcast marketing messages. This will put marketing and communications departments in tailspin, since you need to be 100% transparent as well. The marcom departments have often taken the gatekeeper role here. Mobile internet offers the world’s largest and most powerful  direct response machine. Twitter, texts, Facebook mobile and Bambuser are only the tip of the ice berg in terms of tools the consumers have to talk with, about and to you.

As you can see I am warming up ahead of today’s panel at the mobile marketing seminar here at CTIA. It will be fun. You will read more here about it as it happens.

The thing is though, you gotta have good stuff in them stores. And guess what, there are only that many different apps and derivatives of them you can market. In this great post  by Timothy Hay we see one side of that. The funds set up about a year ago to fuel the growth of apps have slowed down the investment pace. This makes perfect sense. Since these funds are normal VC funds and not government grants they will not fund any guy with an idea and the iPhone SDK downloaded to their laptop. Matt Murphy at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and the other VC guys are still in the VC game. Finding the next Google or twitter. Not clogging the pipes in these various app stores with more of the same. 

What effects can we expect then? The loss of the near monopoly position in distribution that the mobile carriers have had is becoming more obvious. Just in the last few weeks more of my partners at the big mobile carriers content groups are talking about widgets, on-device-portals, preloaded app with attached flexible billing more than the portal. Off the record comments like \”I don\’t care about the portal anymore. It is all about getting stuff in front of the consumer in all possible ways\”, are on my record. 

App Store the new black? No, but a great catalyst for the next phase of the mobile content/app/web/expereince industry.

In that environment it might get even tougher for some of the newcomers to the show. The media execs. Well, some have probably been there at least once. But for most media companies the mobile channel is virgin territory. This will change. Is changing. Has already changed. There are more than anectdotal evidence for this. Which media outlet with some self-respect has not a twitter account today? By the way you find my tweets here. Yes twitter is a hybrid web and mobile service, but very much a mobile service. Twitter also makes it possible to be a one man news agency/editorial crew. One example being Thomas Crampton with his blog, mobile videos and tweets.

But beyond that? What else? Since the mobile phone is the item that stays with us for most of the day it is _the_ screen to be at. It starts with the wakeup call, most likley coming from the mobile phone alarm. Then checking what texts, tweets and news have come in during the night. On to the day with phone calls, picture taking, texts, surfing and some tweets. It continues like that until we go to bed. 

In a recent report from Strand Reports there are some interesting facts. This should make good reading and solid base information for some important decisions at the media commpanies. Even though the time spent for media consumption on the phone is still measured in minutes versus TV-consumption in hours, the growth is in mobile. If we include social interaction when we talk with our friends about media and entertainment, the mobile becomes even more important already today.

Mobile also opens up for co-creation, dialogue and participation. All magic keywords for creating strong loyalty. After some experiences are gained I am sure we will see entirely new production methods and shorter cycles for some media properties. 

The key here is to strike the right balance between mobiel add-ons and create for mobile from the ground up. And manage to do that in a multi-channels scenario covering for instance TV, radio, event, web and mobile to take a fairly common set of channels that one media commpany might use.

There are very cool ideas and facts coming out of some of the experienced players like Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore running Communities Dominate Brands blog. They are on top of the pyramid perhaps, but the pyramid is growing, the base is widening and there are new great talents added to the mobile media scene every day now. One proof of this is that the mobile content hall at MWC09 has grown substantially this year. And the porn companies are in minority. There’s hard work ahead but we _are_ on the fast track to become part of mainstream media. Oh happy days!

Dear Big Media Exec, did you get all that down with your Mont Blanc pen in your paper notepad?