Advertising Age this week ran a story talking about the major growth spurt that mobile search is set to experience. Nothing disagreeable about that premise, especially among mobile marketing experts.

However, the story takes a very odd frame in that it only touches on the newest and oldest technologies on cell phones: True Internet capability and voice, respectively. The piece starts out discussing the growth of smart phones, which will increase the number of mobile users who can access the Web and all its search options. Then, I can practically hear the phonograph needle jump as the story veers into how you can still dial up “information,” as we used to call it in the old days. You know, directory assistance numbers, which can now can offer answers for categories, not just for specific business names.

The article skips over one important aspect of mobile search: SMS. Nowhere does it talk about Google’s 466453 short code (it spells “Google” on a traditional keypad so it’s easy to remember), one of the first SMS search services to come out. Text a business name and city/zip code–or even a business category and the same location information–and Google will give you a relevant phone number and address. Notable competitors to Google, which has name recognition on its side, include ChaCha and 4Info.

While smart phones are becoming more affordable and are taking more of the handset market, text-capable phones are more dominant, as they encompass devices both with or without Internet access. Indeed, SMS is rather old in terms of “technology years,” so a larger number of people use/are familiar with it than consumers who use/are familiar with the mobile Web.

Hopefully, AdAge readers will be directed to this post from my link to the article–and thus will get the full story on mobile search.

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm

“I’d rather you text me”

This article kicks off a series of posts on website usability. While SEO is great to bring people to your site, WU (website usability) will make sure they enjoy their stay and don’t leave right away.

By focusing on WU, you will greatly increase conversions and sales since users always return, and will refer others to your site. You’ll also experience other positive side-effects when you show visitors that you care about their user-experience on your website.

Website usability includes almost all aspects of your site’s structure, design, programming, forms, scripts, layouts, and navigation. WU is closely attached to SEO; I am confident that many of its elements are built-in within search engine algorithms as ranking factors for websites. The more you take care of these elements, the better your rankings will be in the search engines. Note too that WU is more about converting the traffic, rather than just attracting it.

The first thing to do is to answer these three initial questions: What is the goal of your website? Who this website is for (target audience)? What are your resources?

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Universal search is here. Regular Internet users are enjoying it without even noticing that sometimes, along with the normal text results, they see links to news stories regarding their query; related images and videos; and even blog posts and books about what they were searching for. This is what universal search is about. It brings results in all different shapes and forms, thus making the life of a searcher easier.

Would that simplify the life of an SEO expert? Of course, not—everyone will have to become wiser about using optimization and link building techniques for not just textual content pages, but also for videos, images, blog posts, press releases, and books. We now need to expand our skills and be able to optimize external pages and objects that will eventually bring us traffic and leads. We need to expand our expertise to other fields and fight for rankings with all these forms in the SERPs (search engine results pages).The competition now isn’t the first ten places of text results on the first page. Now, it might be just four or six text results, plus image, news, or video results.

Other search engines besides Google are trying universal search. Yahoo’s cool-looking _blank href="http://au.alpha.yahoo.com/">Alpha Beta is a strong competitor. Live.com and Ask.com are implementing universal search as well.

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When I added a burgeoning rock band to my MySpace friends list recently, I got a pleasant surprise: A personal “thank you” that was a bit more than the usual “thanks for the add” that litters MySpaces. Though I already liked the group, this thoughtful attention to detail really made me believe they appreciated their growing fan base.

This wasn’t an anomaly on MySpace, however. These days, lots of bands stay online all day, every day, in order to stay engaged with listeners. At least with the bands I like, it’s not unusual to see comments on pages like “I can’t believe you wrote back! That’s so awesome!” in response to musicians sending a personal “thank you” for a friend add.

Though they likely wouldn’t say it in so many words, these entrepreneurial struggling artists are engaged in the best type of message marketing, keeping it personal between the consumer and the brand, and reaching to the consumer the way he/she wants to be reached. Best of all, they begin the marketing message relationship with a personal welcome–something that ALL marketers should do, especially when someone signs up to receive their messages.

We all know the importance of sending a “thank you” message to a new subscriber: At the very least, it can be incorporated into the double opt-in process, in which the person must click on a link or respond to a message in order to activate his or her subscription. But by saying thank you, marketers also show appreciation to the consumer, especially in light of spam concerns.

Making that message a bit more personal adds infinite value for the consumers. You’ll have them at hello.

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm

“I’d rather you text me”