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A new comScore (@comScore) survey says mobile social networking is on the rise, with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn seeing their mobile audiences grow by at least 50% each in the past year.

More than 72 million Americans accessed social networking sites or blogs on their mobile device in August 2011, an increase of 37% in the past year. The study also finds that more than half of mobile users read a post from an organization, brand, or event while on their mobile device.

Over the last year, Facebook’s mobile audience doubled to 57 million users. Twitter saw its mobile audience grow 75% to 13.4 million people. LinkedIn has the smallest mobile audience of the three, but still experienced a boom in the past 12 months, expanding by 69% to 5.4 million users.

Read the news release in full.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you identify blue ocean strategy for your brand, especially in the mobile environment. And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Here’s a new facet to enhanced ebook publishing. Booktrack (@Booktrk) is a new technology that synchronizes a customized soundtrack of ambient audio, music, and sound effects to written text of ebooks in a way that’s automatically paced to the reading speed of the user to create an immersive entertainment experience.

Mary Meeker, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (@kpcb), explores in the slides below the significant trends shaping the Internet today. She says the mobile revolution is still in its infancy and poised for tremendous growth.

Her presentation zeroes in on the newest breakout trends driving e-commerce, including local commerce, the global race to adopt mobile devices and apps, and the latest innovations in online payments; the evolving social space comes under Mary’s scrutiny as well. She says the mega-trend of the 21st century is empowerment of people via connected mobile devices.

KPCB Internet Trends (2011)

See the report in full.

On Mashable (@mashable), Ryan Matzner (@rdm) of Fueled (@Fueled) explains how marketers need to think differently when it comes to the mobile space.

Users on the Web are notoriously distracted and hop around from page to page. Mobile users are distracted even further. Their devices are buzzing with push notifications from their apps, text messages and emails are constantly popping up on the screen. They might be standing in line at a grocery store, waiting for a movie to start, in a taxi, in an elevator or walking down the street. These scenarios — and mobile use in general — are defined by 3 key factors:

1. Pockets of Use. Picking up their mobile device is a secondary task. They’re just trying to fill up a pocket of time while doing something else. Users have just a few moments to check their phone or look up a piece of information while they’re completing a primary task (waiting in line, elevator, etc.).

2. Perpetual and Inherent Distraction. Traditional web users may face distraction from email, chat and the infinite number of other webpages they could be on, but when those users land on a page, they typically stick around until they become bored or want to check out some other piece of information on the web. Mobile users, on the other hand, face perpetual off-device distractions — use of their mobile device is secondary. Byrne Hobart, founder of investment research firm Digital Due Diligence, observes that mobile marketers are “writing for an audience that’s in the middle of something else.” They might be waiting for their subway stop, their floor on an elevator, their line to be called at Whole Foods, a friend to show up at a restaurant. Point is, the number of off-device distractions for mobile users is limitless.

3. The (Very) Small Screen. Mobile devices have tiny screens — they simply do not fit a lot of content. It’s critical that marketers keep this in mind as they write copy. What will fit onto a user’s screen without scrolling?

Read this in full.

Also see this excellent article by John Jantsch (@ducttape), “There’s Really No Such Thing As Mobile Marketing.”

The following chart is from the paidContent (@paidContent) article “Chart: Mobile Business Booms, Data Use Surges to 48%” by Ingrid Lunden (@ingridlunden). It shows that marketers need to be thinking about the mobile environment at all times.

In Business 2 Community (@B2Community), Cheryl Burgess (@ckburgess) writes, “In the future, a brand’s success may depend on whether it’s perceived as having a social purpose.”

Customers are no longer satisfied with just lodging complaints or casting opinions. Instead, they’re voting with their social capital and turning away from companies that fail to listen and respond.

In this rapidly changing landscape, marketers are challenged to humanize their brands and seize opportunities to engage customers across a multiplicity of touch-points and social media channels. With the rise of social media, the consumer is able to drive the conversation with or without the brand’s input. Only brands that are authentic and transparent will succeed.

Here are some of the accelerants she lists and explains how they’ll transform brands into the future:

1. Engaging

2. Relevant

3. Accountable

4. Collaborative

5. Voice

6. Creative and innovative

7. Purpose driven

8. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

9. Simplicity

10. Reflective

11. Your Culture is Your Brand

12. Listen

13. Brand Advocates

14. Millennial bonding

15. Crowdsourcing 2.0

16. Mobile

Read this in full.

Chart source: The Verge (@verge)

Amazon today announced the availability of the ereaders Kindle ($79), Kindle Touch ($99), and the Kindle Fire, an Android-powered touchscreen tablet with a 7-inch display that will sell for just $199, or less than Barnes & Noble's $249 Nook Color and less than half of Apple's entry-level $499 iPad.

Read the news:

Warc (@WarcEditors): "Publishers embrace Amazon's tablet."

Apple Insider (@appleinsider): “Amazon Kindle Fire aims to undercut Apple's iPad with $199 price.”

“Amazon's new $79 Kindle, $99 Kindle Touch stick with e-ink display.”

Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) live blog of the announcement.

PW writes, “The Kindle has a new feature called ‘x-ray’ that lets you look at ‘the bones of the book,’ by which Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos means looking up various historical references and real characters mentioned on a particular page of a book. Amazon has ‘pre-calculated all of the interesting phrases’ in a book, so along with the book comes a ‘side-file’ with all of this information included.”

About 83% of American adults own cell phones and three-quarters of them (73%) send and receive text messages. According to the Pew Internet (@pewinternet) project, people in the 18-24 year-old range are sending and receiving 110 texts per day on average (3200 texts per month). The typical user in that age group sends or receives 50 messages per day (1500 per month). (Chart of the Day (@ChartOfTheDay) illustrates the data above.) The overall average for texting per day among all cell phone users is 42, says Pew. That number is flat on a year over year basis.

Read the report in full.

How does this information influence your marketing strategy?

IDATE Research (@JeanDSeval) has just published its “World Internet Usages & Markets” report.

“Globally, the number of users of fixed Internet will continue to grow at a steady pace, reaching 2.3 billion in 2015”, comments Sophie Lubrano, Project Leader and IDATE’s Director of Studies. “Users of mobile Internet services will progress even more rapidly, however, and should reach 2.6 billion in 2015. This growth is fuelled by emerging markets, particularly China.”

Read this in full.

Let Somersault help you develop mobile marketing and publishing strategy for your brand.

According to new report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc., the world e-readers market is forecast to reach 53,870,000 units by the year 2017. The global economic recession, which put several industries under pressure and in a state of turmoil, has failed to rattle the market for e-readers making it an exceptional product.

The report states that the “growing popularity of these handy devices is pushing the book, magazine, and newspaper publishing industries to redefine their existence in this digital age and in the aftermaths of economic turmoil. Although sales of ebooks presently account for only a small portion of the overall book publishing market, with the passage of time, this segment is forecast to emerge a mainstream market.”

Read this in full.

MultichannelMerchant (@mcmerchant) says many marketers are not using 2-dimensional mobile barcodes properly.

Though they’re mainstream in countries like Japan, QR codes are still fairly new to most US consumers. If you just slap a QR code on the back of a catalog and don’t explain what it is, why it's there, how to read it – and include a backup URL in case the user scans it and comes up with an error – it may not gain any traction.

And if the QR code does not direct to a site that can be rendered on a mobile device, making it hard for the user to navigate with ease, the user is going to close the mobile browser and not come back.

Read this in full and see case studies cited.

Let Somersault help you set your entire mobile marketing strategy. And be sure to use our mobile site.