Last week Facebook announced its 300M unique user!  Incredible.  I also heard that there is now over 65M users that are accessing Facebook daily from mobile devices.   I remember the days at Nokia where we discussed a service that had a mobile audience of >100M, but today I believe with over 65M active users a day on mobile, this has got to be getting pretty close to the the top.  I am sure there is a service in China that is getting more then 65M active users a day, but for something so sticky and mobile, I think we will probably see Facebook to be the first to “break the 100M mark on mobile”

So where does this leave them with a business model?  Also there was some unique discussions of Facebook killing on advertising.

Last week when I was at Advertising Week, Facebook sponsored a wrap-up party that I had the honor to attend ( Thanks Matt/Lance) .

So it is clear to me that Search and Social are keys to a digital marketing strategy in harmony and it only validates the dramatic ad revenue growth of Facebook.  Interested to see what Twitter does with links and lead-gen.  Will Social media someday match Search Revenues?  As long as the Brands can be satisfied with the proper placement of brands in the mix, as Search has become a direct marketing tool, Social media can become a brand marketing tool….. See the book by Alan Moore and Tomi Ahonen ( Communities Dominate Brands- written many years ago and quite visionary…)

I am really excited about the App becoming a loyalty card and a payment mechanism. I was discussing this issue with the head of marketing from Blenz here locally in Vancouver about 6 months ago, and he mentioned that the real problem with using a phone to purchase in more creative ways beyond using it just like a regular card was to leverage the location of the individual.  He described to me that coffee shops all have to maintain there quality level and to keep the coffee fresh and hot. We discussed the possibility of using Geo-fencing technology of the user to recognise if they entered a certain location circle, the coffee could be made ready for pick-up.

This way the purchaser of coffee would only need to buy it and then pick it up.

In the picture below shows what a Geo-fence could look like…. Image buying a coffee like an Song off of iTunes  and the minute you entered the Geo-Fence they would start to make the coffee for pick-up!  You just need to show your designated ID off the phone and pick-up the coffee.

We all have the pain of carrying around our wallets with multiple loyality cards and credit cards. This launch today of Starbucks iPhone App is clearing showing the new cross-media Analog to Digital world in the form of wallet for our mobile devices.

There are many companies focusing on the future of mobile payments and the wallet, but there is no better brand experience to be able to have the ability to buy from phyical retail from an application.  I see this as the start of a new phenomenal wave of retail convergence via apps that serve as our digital loyality cards.  Apps have really become the personal engagement mechanism beyond the rich multimedia and location based services for entertainment purposes to real mobile commerce.  I am excited to see how this will go cross-platform and even evolve into web widgets.  This is really a benchmark and taste to what will become a personal wallet of experiences in the mobile device and it is exciting to see Starbucks take the first step.  I expect to see lots more of this tied to all the loyality cards we have in our wallet today…

Despite the recent discussion that “WPP can not stop laying off people due to lack of growing revenues” http://networkedblogs.com/p12523536, there was a great inspirational session at the Mobile Ad Summit from WPP Digital’s Mark Read.  He said ” Mobile is not there year, but the key is for marketers to really look at the engagement strategies with thier customers and think of mobile as not the same, but Unique channel. With the explosion of Apps for dedicated experiences, the mobile experience is different and does require this kind of innovation.” When asked about convergence, he said” I beleive the opposite will be true. Marketers will continue to look for new creative ways to build relationships, and it is in the business model of the brand”

I have been a strong believer in a One-Web world where convergence will be the key. The reasoning is that the behaviors of Search and Social media link clicking is only growing and the glue for any digital strategy must be your website, untill all analytics of diversified customer engagement strategies can converge with analytics.  So even though there may be multiple different ways to market and build a media strategy, having cross-media analytics is going to be key.  There was not much discussion I have found so far on the Adobe-Omniture aquistion, but it is clear that the basics of analytics and search will be extended to widgets ( Air) and other dedicated marketing enablers in a site that need to be tracked in a systematic way.

My new interest in cross-media analytics has evolved to include a concept called ” Nested Social Media”.  We are starting to see where Facebook Connect ( by the way, of the Facebook users, 65% apparently access facebook from thier mobile), Twitter, MySpace, and the suite of mobile social apps are getting linked together for marketing delivery.  Twitter seems to be still lower in mobile access according the Jack Dorsey at the 140conf.com, but it is growing.  An example of this became very apparent to me when playing around with the mobile social app Foursquare.   I found it to be a prime example of a nested social application.   When I checked in using the app, and wrote a “status update”, it was spread to my Twitter, my Facebook and MySpace account.  Friends clicking on the link where then taken back to my foursquare webpage if they were not already users of foursquare.   This looping around between social media back to a landing page of the map and information on the club I was visiting became in my mind a nested social experience more powerful then just the Silo’d community generated site of Yelp……. So Yelp will as well need to become a Nested Yelp.

Martin Nisenholz, New York Times, gave a great presentation on “How to build a business model with their Developer API”. This again is another example of a brand that is driving distribution that nests back to the content and can be used in creative ways of linking to social media.  NYT has a great mobile strategy with their mobile assets, but still lacking a true one-web solution.

As the week is still just started, I am looking forward to the next couple days of mobile exploration…

Last year there was not much going on along Madison Avenue here in NYC during Advertising Week. There was a small mobile advertising event, but this year is a different year for mobile.  Regardless of what the economy did to the Advertising industry in general over the course of 2009, Mobile Advertising is big at Advertising Week.

Check out Microsoft’s Sponsored mobile website for on-the-go information  http://www.adwk.mobi.   ( Although it would have been better for the existing site to have gone mobile, it is a good start for anybody visiting the event to not have to carry around the large printed event book).

Also, there are going to be many panels and events at OMMA, MIXX and of course the MOBILE AD SUMMIT on Tues the 22nd.

ADObjects, Inc will be around and tweeting the event….