• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, April 26, 2007

Most marketers I interview about mobile search remain a bit skeptical about the platform for now. So much about mobile search remains unclear it is hard for anyone to stake out territory, let alone a strategy. The carriers are undecided about who should provide what kinds of searches. The technology is a moving target, with Yahoo and Google issuing rapid fire betas and mobile marketing companies scrambling to offer their own engines as white-label alternatives to carriers. And finally the users themselves are still just getting acquainted with the Mobile Web and the idea that they can access Internet data on a handset.

By any measure, we are still a long way from mobile searching being commonplace enough to become even a blip on marketers' radar. Nevertheless, the early evidence suggests that when people go mobile they bring their online brand loyalties with them.

It was good to see one of the leading search marketing companies, iCrossing (along with Optinion Research Corp.), take notice of mobile yesterday with the release of "How American Searches: Mobile" (available in its entirety at http://www.icrossing.com/research/). This is among the more impartial studies of the topic I have seen, and the numbers are both sobering and promising.

Foremost, mobile Web use remains a minority activity that is very much concentrated in the early adopter segments. About a third of mobile owners access the mobile Web at all, and among those who do, smart phone owners are the heaviest browsers. In others words, the most likely mobile Web users are those who were predisposed to use the platform to begin with, because they did buy a smart phone. The iCrossing study finds that having a QWERTY keyboard makes you almost three times more likely to use the mobile Web and four times more likely to use mobile search.

But what is most interesting to me about the new research involves the dedication Mo-Web users have for the platform once they discover it. Among mobile Web users, 43% of smart phoners do so daily, as do 22% of all other device owners. Another 27% of smart phoners go online several times a week along with 23% of general device users. As for mobile searching, 27% of the daily smart phone users and 16% of mobile device users search daily on their phones. with 31% (smart phone) and 25% other device users searching several times a week.

These numbers tell me that mobile content use becomes habitual with exposure to the medium. But it also suggests that once users get a taste for accessing the Web on handhelds they start looking to use the medium across a broad range of activities. A marketing executive at a new mobile social network tells me they get messages all the time from new members who love the service and are surprised that they can use their phones in this way. Most mobile customers have no idea that they can do by phone what they also do online, until some compelling application or brand brings them there.

Promoting the mobile Web ultimately benefits the entire content mobile content eco-system. The biggest impediment to mobile Web use, according to the study, is price; 52% of mobile customers cited overpriced data plans as the chief reason they do not go online from the handset. But add to that the sheer lack of exposure and education. Frankly, the carriers remain too ambivalent about the mobile Web to promote its use aggressively. This is a job for the content providers.

And there is another good reason for the content brands to promote mobile use. When customers do embrace the Mo-Web, apparently they bring their brands with them. U.S. carriers are afraid of losing their brand equity to Google and Yahoo, but the users could care less. The iCrossing study found that 69% of mobile searchers preferred a third-party engine to the query box that carriers are building into their interfaces. Expect that metric to haunt carriers and their white-label partners for a while.

If users want to extend their Web brand loyalties to the phone, especially as the interface looks more like a Web browser, then carriers who don't make this easy on their consumers become obstructions. And it is not surprising that among the slice of users who do search on mobile, 90% say they use Google, about 46% also use Yahoo and 19% use MSN. It would seem to me that the major engines should be pushing hard to grab mobile users and especially to tie their mobile search identity into any personalized home pages they have on the Web.

It is way too early in the game to argue that leading Web brands will easily extend their dominance to mobile. There is also evidence of many mobile-only brands that you and I never heard of coming out of nowhere to grab massive audiences. Just look at some of the mobile destinations that AdMob has aggregated -- or companies like MobileSidewalk, which get tens of thousands of mobile content subscribers a month, mainly via search engine marketing.

The viral potential of mobile, and the willingness of younger users to experiment with new providers, makes the notion of Web-to-mobile brand loyalty very uncertain. And still, the iCrossing study certainly points to the power of that Web brand to mobile users. If that is the case with search, then you have to wonder how it applies to other content categories like news, weather, and finance.

One of the statistics in this report really stands out to me as a warning shot for media and consumer brands. Among that small group who already do search the Web via mobile, a staggering 84% say they expect the sites they visit frequently to have destinations that are designed for mobile. When your customers finally do discover the mobile Web, they expect you to be there for them.