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One of my clients is a global auto company and for one of its small cars that it was aiming to push in the small towns of India, we were recently discussing how we can engage the audience in these regions in an exciting manner using a digital platform. Social media engagement is good for the young crowd in urban areas but when it comes to small towns where laptops and internet broadband connectivity are still issues, there were limitations. We agree that one of the workable ways could be mobile phone, which we all know that almost everyone from a rickshaw wallah to a corporate CEO owns one.

But is mobile exciting enough? That was our next conversation. For sure we have the short codes SMS and some interesting IVR stuff. We can also probably create WAP sites and some banner ads. Not engaging enough still.

So imagine my delight when I bumped into some nice people from RockeTalk, one of the leading mobile phone social networking service, at the recent India Social Summit at Delhi.

Here are some salient features that you might not know about mobile social networking:

1. There are a lot of users. Rocketalk has around 5mn. That’s almost on par or more than some well known global and Indian social networking sites. Check out this Jan 2010 blog post from Rocketalk.

2. These sites are targeted towards the young population in Tier II and small towns who don’t have a laptop/PC but who have mobile phones with data connection. 60-80%% of users are from small towns.

3. We normally are on Facebook to connect with old friends. Generally many users on mobile social networking sites use the service to find new friends. In fact, you can specify age, gender, location, etc. and search for new people as soon as you create your profile on the site. Users from small towns often say their friends are right next door in their neighborhoods – why spend money on the data connection to connect with them when you can just visit their houses any day.

4. Users do a lot of fun stuff like play a virtual antakshari game or send virtual gifts to total strangers even if buying those gifts costs anywhere starting from Rs. 10-20 each. They also upload pictures and videos.

Also Rocketalk just opened up an API recently so we might see some nice applications in this space. Rocketalk is not the only player. We also have Mig33, which I suppose is promising and interesting equally. Here’s an interview of Mohit from Mig33. Will connect more and try to do more posts around this in the future.

What I’m interested to see now is how these sites gear themselves up for brands and corporates. When Facebook opened up itself to brands and created Facebook pages, it did make a very smart move. Now we see every brand on Facebook doing their own thing and ultimately all that is making Facebook a very fun place to be at for everyone.

Mobile service provider Airtel has tied up with UK-based Affle to provide SMS 2.0 – a new generation SMS service in which SMS messages will have colour fonts and lots of better looking emoticons. The ads are supposedly going to be shown on the mobile phone after someone sends a SMS, in those few seconds when you see the ’sending message’ icon.

Tolerable so far! But if this becomes like you have to listen to an ad jingle before sending a SMS message, I have serious doubts how many users would opt for it.

Before this, we have seen two new start ups based on a similar consensual SMS ad marketing model – mGinger and mGarlic. These services allow their users to receive ads of their mobile phones and pay them in return. The ads served are based on the user’s specifications.

How does this work? You get 20 paise for each SMS you receive on your mobile phone. You can get around 10 SMS ads in a day. Then, you can refer your friends to the service. For every ad that your friend receives, you get 10 paise. Further, for every advert that your friend’s friend receives, you get 5 paise. The chain stops here – not like the Amway chain that you can extend endlessly :-) You can also specify what time of the day you can receive ads.

These services are new and so you might not start receiving ad messages instantly though.

Now I wonder how many users would like to participate in such schemes. The people at mGinger and mGarlic insist that it is more for the information that users should sign up and not entirely for the money. After all, how much can you earn accumulating Rs.2 per for 10 ad messages a day. But where is the lack of information? Today, if I need anything, I just need to search on the Net. In addition to that, we are anyway bombarded with ads on TV, newspapers, magazines, billboards, etc. However, this is just one way of looking at it.

On the other hand, there might be mobile phone users willing to receive such SMS messages in the hope that they can at least recover their mobile phone expenses.

Recently there was another news that talked about Cellebrum planning to pay its consumers royalty fees for ringtones and pictures composed by them if they are downloaded by others users. 

The story quoted the Cellebrum spokesperson saying that they are piloting user-generated content in Punjab and Karnataka. Users can generate their own content and upload it to their data centre. Each such content will be protected through a username and password. On any content that is downloaded the user who generated that content will be paid a royalty.

Seems like interesting times for the mobile phone users. More interesting times for the advertiser.