Success in mobile social networking will come for online marketers when they learn to make investments in the user's flow experience.
I often save my social networking tasks for my train ride home. It's a good time to approve friend requests in Facebook, answer questions from my LinkedIn network, and update my Twitter feed with my latest 140-character news nuggets.
All of this can be done from my BlackBerry Pearl, a smartphone that is a couple of years old, but by no means lagging behind the pack from a capabilities standpoint. Facebook has an application built specifically for BlackBerries, which I've been using for several months now. It's great for approving friend requests, sending and getting private messages, poking someone, or maybe writing on someone's wall, but it's definitely not the full Facebook experience that can be had on a PC. Still, I've used it to connect with friends and business associates alike, and the application is valuable enough to me that if I got a new phone today, I'd be looking to make sure whatever phone I bought was compatible with Facebook's mobile experience.
Twitter has a nice mobile site as well, stripping down the interface so that mobile phones can digest it more quickly and easily. Posting a tweet is easy, as is catching up on feeds from followers and folks you follow.
It's not as if Twitter had an ad-supported model to begin with, but when I network over my phone, there's a distinct and very noticeable lack of advertising. The targeted Facebook ads I'm used to seeing, as well as the generally irrelevant skyscrapers down the left-hand side of the website, are not part of the mobile experience. I don't see ads on LinkedIn when I log into my account.
It's obvious that decisions have been made that are favorable toward usability. I'm sure the social networking players have had offers to monetize the mobile channel but have made the decision to stick with keeping their applications easy to use. So the question on my mind is: "Will there ever be an ad opportunity in mobile social networking?"
I've long said that my own firm tends to shoot down many more mobile ad proposals than it approves for client media plans. By and large, this is due to a systematic problem with the ability of mobile ads to deliver. For direct response campaigns, the information-gathering process is often too cumbersome for mobile devices. (Not always, just the majority of the time.) For branding campaigns, we often don't have enough screen real estate to positively impact brand metrics. Couple all this together with the bandwidth restrictions of the typical mobile user and the fact that their mobile consumption tends to reflect a higher degree of immediacy of need for something other than a client's product, and we're stuck in a spot where most mobile proposals don't meet our needs.
Now, let's fold in some of the intricacies of social networking. I've said in this space before that extending utility to the end user and being a part of the flow experience are better approaches to the social space than straight advertising. I think this goes double for mobile social networking.
Think about it for a second. If you're managing your social life online, as many people both young and old do today, and you're on a mobile device that may or may not have a good enough connection in the next five minutes to continue a private message conversation or approve a connection request, how tweaked are you going to be when you find out that the thing holding your connection up is 45K worth of banner ads?
On the other hand, if a brand extended value in the form of a mobile app that supported multi-user mobile chat, would that not be a better position to be in? Instead of mobile users dreading the connection-clogging properties of your ad, they're actually looking forward to it. Seems to me that I'd rather have people welcoming my marketing material than shunning it.
To me, success in mobile social networking will come for online marketers when they learn to avoid straight messaging and make investments in extending utility and becoming an uninterruptive part of the user's flow experience.