While I was watching the Celtics beat the Lakers in the first game of the NBA playoffs last night I found myself surfin back and forth between some of my favorite social networking sites on the crackberry. From Twitter, to Flickr, to Digg, there never seems to be enough time to get to them all. I did run across a pretty kewl site that I had never seen before called 3 Jam that allows its members to enter their cell # within their social group of choice and then have the ability to send a single text to their entire group of friends. Besides the massive growth rate of all the Social Networking sites it looks as though they are all making a mad dash to try and get their content more "mobile friendly". You can go to mobile social sites such as socialmediatrader.com and see an updated list of some of the top mobile Social Networking sites.

Thinking about the growth of mobile users I began to wonder how long it will be before every SEO conversation that we have with our customers will include the topic of mobile ad spend. Being the research junkie that I am I dug around for some forecast #’s to share:

"Industry analysts estimate the growth of mobile advertising will continue to skyrocket – 2007’s advertising revenues of $2.7 billion are predicted to rise to a staggering $19.1 billion by 2012. That said, there is a general consensus amongst industry pundits that this particular market will be made or broken within the next two years." (Source – MobiADnews)

Being a pretty heavy Blackberry user I am seeing the amount of mobile ready sites grow at a very fast rate and it seems that every time I get to one that isn’t mobile friendly…I simply hit the back button and move on to the next one. The advertising I’ve seen so far has been very settle and limited so I’ll be curious to see what happens when the mobile ad standards get worked out. Below are some additional Ad Spend forecasts from Eloqua:

"Marketers are continuing to put their ad dollars online at the expense of print advertising, according to the 2008 “State of the Marketer” survey report from Eloqua, which found that 55% of marketers anticipate a decrease in print ad spend three years from now."

Online Ad Spend Trends

"Online advertising spend is expected to grow at a rapid rate, with 90% of marketers saying they will continue to increase their direct online advertising budgets – and 15% saying they will “radically” increase online ad spend."

Moreover, some 78% of marketers say they will increase their social media spend; 74% say they will increase their direct email spend; and 65% say they will increase their mobile texting/SMS spend.

Overall, more than 40% of marketers have radically increased their budgets for online advertising from three years ago.

• Some 23% of all marketers surveyed say they have increased their spending on Google AdWords.
• 26% of marketers say they have increased their direct email spending.
• 60% said they have kept their text and SMS spending on par with spending three years ago.
• In general, print advertising, direct mail and broadcast spend remained the same vs. three years ago.
• Marketing budgets have increased over the past three years: 72% have had an increase in marketing budget, with nearly 50% increasing more than 10% and 11% increasing more than 50%

"Marketers view prospects’ needs differently from their own: 60% say text messages are not effective for themselves, though they will increase their spending over the three years by 65%."

• Marketing growth is continuing despite a down market: 95% say they will maintain or increase their marketing staff over the next three years.

About the study: The Eloqua survey was conducted with nearly 200 US marketing professionals at companies covering a variety of industries and ranging in size from $10 to $500 million in annual revenues and including industries such as business and professional services, high technology, manufacturing, retail and hospitality.