A couple of months ago, Brandon Zelasko gave a mighty fine Brown Bagger seminar on everything mobile. In case you missed it, these are his inspired words. (Hurry, post before it becomes outdated.)

50% of the world’s population has a mobile device. Only 10% of the world’s population has Internet. So what do you think is the best way to reach the most people?

Hey wanna go mobile?
In the old days, it was pretty easy to reach your consumer. If you ran an ad on one of the three TV networks, chances were, they heard your message loud and clear. But now connecting with your customer takes a lot more work. That is, unless you try to connect with them with an item they don’t leave home without – their mobile device.

Mobile marketing provides new ways to connect with customers. You might create a mobile Web site, serve up mobile ad banners for other mobile sites, send text messages, offers or coupons and well as provide mobile applications.

Mobile provides a totally new way for customers to experience and interact with a brand. Let’s say you’re a manufacturer of consumer electronics and your customer is shopping for speakers right now in a large home electronics store. They can scan the product bar code with their phone and receive user reviews, right then and there. Talk about opportunity.

Who’s on the go?
More and more people are going mobile with each passing year. In the United States, 84 million people, or 40% of all mobile users, have a web-enabled device and supporting data plan. They’re young, diverse and ready to listen to your message. In fact, 40% of users in the 18 to 34 age demographic were willing to accept advertising on their mobile device if they are going to receive a discount or desired content. The numbers are excellent, with a 10% response rate to ad click-throughs.

The mobile mantra: keep it simple.
Designing for mobile applications is really an exercise in restraint. The reasons you log onto a site are different for the mobile user compared to the home computer surfer. In fact, mobile users visit 6.4 Web sites a month, while home computer users visit an average of 100 sites. So you have to ask yourself, “Why would a user be visiting our site on their mobile device?”

Well, most likely because they want to:

• locate
• order
• enter a competition
• receive email
• buy
• forward
• video
• vote

How to speak mobilese.
There’s basically two ways to communicate with people. You can provide them with information that they’re interested in. Or you can actively engage them in your message.

If you choose to impart information to your customers, you have to make sure your message is relevant. If not, they will tune your message out with the click of a delete button. Production costs may be quite substantial and there’s a chance that they could perceive the message as spam so relevancy is the key.

Engaging customers means involving them in an interactive way. With the ability to text or send photos or video, mobile devices are the perfect medium for this strategy. Because customers opt in, spam perception is almost non-existent.

The following are a variety of mobile media tactics used to reach customers.

SMS/MMS.
SMS (simple messaging service) is the way people communicate these days. (Imagine, using a mobile device to talk, how very 90s.) Texting is available to any phone user and doesn’t require mobile web service. It’s ideal for reaching the largest number of users.

A great promo for BBC News invited viewers to text whether they thought the forces in Iraq were liberators or occupiers. The billboard recorded results.

Slightly more involved, MMS (multi-media messaging service) text messaging allows mobile users to share photos, video and audio. MMS is an obvious choice for viral, sharing, and live campaigns.

An integrated campaign for Nationwide invited viewers to send a picture of themselves that promptly appeared on a Times Square billboard.

SMS and MMS both have high retention rates. After all, it’s pretty hard to delete a text without reading it first. Production costs are often quite low and they’re simple to create and deploy. And the fantasy of every marketer, SMS and MMS campaigns are trackable.

Mobile display ads.
What’s marketing without ads? Mobile display ads appear on mobile-enabled Web sites. Or they service banner ads as the result of a mobile search. Mobile ads are the perfect way to round out a mobile media plan. But as in the offline world, media buys must correctly target the appropriate audience to be effective.

Because mobile ads are new, they have high click-through rates around 10%. (Just like in the early days of the Internet when banner ads enjoyed similarly high CTRs). But in the mobile arena, there are even more size and display restrictions and a correspondingly limited supply of ad space.

Land Rover served up a mobile landing page as a response to mobile ads. Customers could investigate vehicles, request a brochure or share with a friend.

Mobile sites.
Mobile Web sites are sites that are designed specifically to be viewed from a mobile device. In keeping with the mobile mantra of simplicity, they are usually pared down versions of standard sites. They provide a unique opportunity to reach consumers on their terms, wherever they are.

When designing a mobile a site, you have to imagine yourself in the customer’s shoes and figure out what they would want in a mobile environment. You can’t simply repurpose your existing content for the mobile world. After all, a customer isn’t likely to read corporate press releases while on the go. On the other hand, store locations are probably the most visited mobile element for many retail operations.

Amazon’s mobile site allows customers to search products, read review and purchase products in just a couple of clicks.

Mobile sites are top notch when it comes to lead generation, direct sales and branding. But they can be costly and they have to be maintained to be effective. (After all, you don’t want to have a customer drive to a store if it closed last month.) In some ways, mobile sites do limit creative expression because you’re often designing for the slower speeds and smaller screens of older mobile devices all in the name of accessibility. But with creativity and ingenuity (and of course simplicity), a mobile site can make a very branded statement.

Search.
Search just might be what mobile is made for. It’s super relevant. I’m hungry. I’m looking for the closest pizza place right here, right now.

Search helps customers learn about your service or product. But they problem is, if you’re not in the top 5 results, you won’t be found. And while search doesn’t have the glitzy appeal of other forms of marketing, it is certainly one of the most effective. Because when you consider the three most visited mobile sites are Google, Yahoo! and MSN, it makes sense to be there. So take the effort to use short copy featuring targeted keywords in your meta tags, headline tags and body text.

Why mobile is going full throttle yet.
Mobile is well, cutting-edge. It’s about as forward thinking as you can get so it will take a little time before it is fully adopted. The following are a couple of reasons why marketers may still be hesitant to incorporate mobile tactics.

• Poor user experience – It’s true that some of the first mobile campaigns were exercises in poor user experiences. But, as devices have been built more capable, and marketers have learned from their past mistakes, user experiences are much improved.
• Cost of data plans – as greater bandwidths become ubiquitous, the cost of data plans for mobile devices will no longer be a barrier.
• Limits on creativity – As earlier generations of mobile devices become obsolete, technical limitations will decrease. It’s only been very recently that wider bandwidths and enhanced device capabilities, have allowed greater creativity in mobile campaigns.
• Analytics – The simple fact is there aren’t many mobile analytics providers out there yet. Industry giants like HBX and Site Catalyst are playing catch-up, and while they currently offer basic reporting, they will soon deliver the more granular reporting that marketers need and want.
• Hesitant population – The use of mobile is growing. In fact, the fastest growing segment is adults who are adopting mobile as means to communicate with their tech savvy children.
• Fear of mobile as intrusive – A marketer’s greatest fear is to be intrusive. But when customers opt-in, they are saying “I am interested in your message” loud and clear.

The mobile version of this article.
With mobile you must:

• Be navigable
• Be relevant
• Be engaging
• Add value

The caged bird can be set free! Now you Twitter birdies can sing your sweet melodies to the world from outside of your bird cage.

No longer are you confined to tweeting from your desktop or laptop computer – after all, there are plenty of other places you can find the occasion, or inspiration, to tweet from other than from in front of a computer. (How many people really want to hear about what’s going on within a six foot radius from your computer anyway? Or that you ran out of staples??)

Twitter’s mobile web site, and their mobile application, Twitterrific, allows you to tweet (up to 140 characters) from wherever the wind beneath your wings carries you. Now, when that little egg of an idea falls out of your head, you don’t have to sit on it and incubate it until you are in front of your computer. You can share it with your roost – immediately!

Marketers can capitalize on the immediacy of mBlogging (aka – mobile blogging) just as our customers and clients can. If you are in the restaurant industry, mBlogging would allow you to answer customer service complaints before the customer walks out the door vowing never to come back and eat there again. If you are a cell phone service provider, it could allow your customers to share with you weak signal spots (when they are actually at them) to help you improve your network. The practical applications seem, to me, to be limitless.

I believe that mBlogging will continue to grow as more applications and devices make it easier to do. More of your customers will use this avenue to talk about you so you’d better be there to talk back.

I need only 34 characters to summarize my point. “The early bird catches the worm.”

Staring at my cell phone this morning I had a vision. I know it sounds a little nutty, but it wasn’t one of these psychic visions – in fact it probably just the result of all of the research I have been doing on this subject. It was more like in the movies where the character looks into the mirror but sees a different world behind it. That’s what happened to me, only it wasn’t a mirror, it was just that piece of glass that shields the LCD screen from being directly pressed against my ear, and the world that I was peering into was clearly the not-too-distant future.

But this is when I realized the opportunity that this future holds.

My vision stared while staring at my Google Map application. I had typed in a local coffee shop to get their phone number, but instead of the typical resutls (address, phone number, etc.), there was also a coupon presented as part of the results. I’ve heard of mobile couponing before. That was not what I found interesting about the vision. What I did find interesting was that it was tied to a particular location, which had shown up as the result of a query I put into my mapping application. Here I was just looking for a coffee shop, but they offered me a coupon… on my phone, for that store, as part of a search! Brilliant! My vision didn’t actually showing me going to that coffee shop and presenting my coupon, but I’m willing to bet I would have gone.

As that vision spirited away, I saw something else. I was reading the news on my cell phone’s internet browser and I was presented a mobile ad (I think it was Spiderman Episode 12 or something). Anyway, I clicked on the ad (I mean of course I did… some mobile ads campaigns have shown click-through rate of up to 10%), but instead of going to a lame static mobile optimized page it opened in my YouTube application and played the movie trailer. Once the movie trailer wrapped up, the phone went back to my browser app and landed on Fandango.com showing the theatres nearest me and the show times. I bought tickets! My phone did all the work for me. I loved it!

(Since my vision this morning, I have come to find out that AdMob, a mobile ad network, is already experimenting with things similar to this.)

My vision ended there, but what I took away from it was this. We are currently there, right at the Mobile frontier. We should learn from the lessons of those who also found themselves on the frontier – like the pioneers during the California Gold Rush. The poor sap that showed up last also went home with empty pockets.

I guess what I am trying to say is this. I am not the only one who is seeing this vision. You have a choice, either you venture into this frontier early (before this vision becomes reality), or be the poor sap that shows up last and goes home with empty pockets.