David Berkowitz

The world may not need a Google-branded social network along the lines of what Google is reportedly building. My fellow columnist Cathy Taylor made that perfectly clear last week. Yet I can offer a barometer to show whether Google will launch a great product: the more boring Google makes it, the better it will be.

Google excels at boring. Look at the heart of its business model, search advertising. I’ve worked for companies with strengths in search engine marketing since 2004 and penned over 200 Search Insider columns for MediaPost, and I love search as few on this planet do. Still, Google’s take on search, with its character counts and algorithms, doesn’t provide great material for a Cannes award submission or a David Fincher movie.

Google has a similar track record with social media. Its most exciting contribution is a site that has contributed to the democratization of video production and distribution: YouTube. Most of what’s great about YouTube already existed before Google acquired it, while Google has done well with the “boring” aspects of making it scale and developing revenue streams.

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Whenever mobile social media comes up in conversation, I tend to hear a lot of f-words. Hopefully they won’t be censored here, as the ones I’m referring to are Foursquare and Facebook.

Perhaps I’m part of the problem. When I’m not writing about all the mobile check-in apps I use or what it’s like to be a Foursquare Super Mayor, I’m making overblown claims about Facebook gaining a universal following thanks to growth in its mobile user base. The f-words play important roles, but mobile social media is much bigger.

To give a sense of how much bigger it is, below you’ll find various forms of mobile social media that may be relevant when developing a marketing program. Perhaps mobile social media is part of the core idea, or it comes up specifically when assessing mobile or social media. However the plan comes together, the tools and tactics should come last, but understanding them provides a sense of what’s possible.

Much of the information below has been adapted from a guide to mobile social media that I’ve been working on and has just been published on 360i’s blog. The guide has much more information overall, while I’ve added some color in here that you won’t find in the official perspective.

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“Ubiquity” was one word that struck me when David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect,” kept mentioning it at a Gotham Media Ventures breakfast panel last week. The other was “China.”Those were the answers. The questions, if you summon Johnny Carson’s Carnac, were, respectively, “What is Facebook’s goal?” and “What is Facebook’s biggest obstacle in achieving its goal?”

China may be Facebook’s single biggest obstacle in growing from 500 million users to 7 billion and beyond as it tries to gain adoption by every single person on the planet. Yet there’s a bigger obstacle collectively: the other 4 billion people who are neither currently using Facebook nor living in China. How will Facebook colonize the rest of the world?

The question came up on the panel, and I had an answer. By the time Facebook has exhausted other courses of pursuing growth, it’s going to go for its most ambitious marketing push yet: Facebook will give every person alive age 13 and up a phone.

Facebook will need to do this once its growth levels off, as it reaches somewhere between 1 and 2 billion users. Once it has signed up between 15%  to 30% of the world’s population, one of the most ambitious companies the world has known will need the mother of all stimulus packages.

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If, decades from now, I lie on my deathbed having flashbacks of some of the more humiliating moments of my life, then last week’s encounter at a 7-Eleven will be one of them. It was at such an establishment on East 23rd Street in Manhattan where a young, amiable staff member saw me working the Slurpee machine and asked, “Do you need help with that?”

The fact was, I did. I didn’t know how to get the Coke Slurpee to come out, nor did I know how to order an Oscar Mayer hot dog. I was juggling a handful of store-brand products as well, while surreptitiously reaching for my iPhone to document it all (see photos and screenshots on Flickr).

You might ask why I was playing the part of a convenience store anthropologist. No, I wasn’t trying to be the Jane Goodall of the Slurpee kingdom. Instead, I was there, still in my sport jacket following an Internet Week event, to arm my mafia. This mafia consists of nearly 300 friends and virtual associates in Mafia Wars, one of three of Zynga’s social games (along with FarmVille and YoVille) participating in a cross-promotional deal with 7-Eleven.

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Image by Angus_Clyne via Flickr

Some people compete around badges and mayorships (Foursquare), connections and testimonials (LinkedIn), followers and list appearances (Twitter), and gang members and farm acreage (Zynga). Lately, I’ve found a new addiction: racking up profiles added and managed (Geni).

Geni, one of the leading genealogy sites, tells me I’ve added 334 relatives to my family tree. I created the tree on January 17, 2007. Most of the connections happened in the past few weeks, and it’s all thanks to social media.

The network effect applies to genealogy. Having more people active in a network increases the value of the offering for everyone taking part. In this case, when more people are part of my family tree, it increases the likelihood that I will connect with others in the tree and thus discover more people in turn. Additionally, as I create more spokes branching out from me, other family members will gravitate toward me as a hub, and all such hubs in turn will strengthen from the increased information flowing among us.

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Is all mobile social?

Five years ago, penning a MediaPost piece that feels like it was written far more recently, I asked, “Is all mobile local?” That question would have been a more fitting title for the column rather than the wonkier one I used, “The Mobile-Local Redundancy,” which sounds like a rejected name for a Jason Bourne movie. The question and the column answering it remain relevant, making me wonder if so little has changed in sixty-one months.

A very different question probably wouldn’t have crossed my mind back then: Is all mobile social? More specifically, is all mobile media inherently shareable through digital social channels, and should that be the case?

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Do you wish there was another mobile application where you could check in at a location? There’s no shortage of options. Yet another contender just launched very publicly with a different approach, turning the whole act of checking in into a game.

Meet SCVNGR, which is as long on ambition as it is short on vowels. With its latest version having debuted last week for consumers, it’s making big announcements at Google I/O, the annual developer event. SCVNGR has been quietly growing over the past couple years, reporting that over 600 institutions in 44 states and 20 countries have worked with them so far. Today, it released the names of some of the larger brands that are starting to build on it: the Boston Celtics, Boston Globe, New England Patriots, Journeys, The New York Times, Universal Music Canada and Warner Bros. Its client base also includes hundreds of colleges and universities – notably Princeton University, where 21-year-old SCVNGR Chief Ninja founded the company in 2008.

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