This morning I attended a mobile media seminar hosted by Capitol Communicator and Brunner Digital in DC. There were about 40 attendees and the group was starting at a nice level of sophistication. They gave a number of nice example of what large brands are doing in mobile, but also addressed the fact that any one can enter with a simple SMS campaign opposed to starting in with a custom app.

I thought it was amusing how the mobile development platform was compared to the early days of web development where you practically had to build a different site for each browser. In this case, the diversity in standards is even greater because of the new ways of interfacing with the devices such as turning an iPad or pointing your iPhone.

Some nice open source resources are emerging like PhoneGap or Wurfl at allow you to detect the device type in addition to your OS or browser detection. They also had some useful stats on market share and how mobile devices are expected to surpass tradition web surfing in the next year or so. I’ll post these when I get a chance. Mary Meeker fro Morgan Stanley was also recommended as a great statistics resource by Bill Hennesey of Washington Post Digital.

As someone that just spent the last hour “patiently” trying to find a wifi hotspot that would accept a standard RDP connection just to add two seconds to a Flash animation, I’m eagerly watching the emergence of viable mobile platforms and happily participating where it makes sense.

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At a minimum, I’m beginning to appreciate Twitter (and my new fave tool TweetDeck) as a better-than-delicious RSS feed. It is showing me what people that I personally know are smart and on-the-pulse of online activity are doing right now. Assuming they choose to share.

Case in point: Katherine Maynard (@KMaynard_SCC) tweeted about ClickZ’s article on measuring social media metrics: Social Media Sites Force Analytics Tools to Evolve. I was very excited to start reading the article because one of my main roles on the Army’s FOS project was to track and analyze all of the campaigns activity…not just log files and Google Analytics, but what we could learn from visitor activity on Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. I was disappointed once again to learn that the samples they cited were either 1) just tracking referrers or PPC Facebook ads, or 2) built their own app to track visitor lifetime value/interaction over time. Another point that caught my attention was that Experience Project gets most of their referrals through organic search.

Learn more about the Army Faces of Strength Campaign.

We found in the FOS project that our external social media destinations were covering about 50% of the first page of Google for our key phrases. We also discovered that half of our campaign activity was occurring on the social media channels we set up and that the statistics available from each varied and had to be manually aggregated with the others to create a monthly analysis report that allowed us to create completely educated recommendations. I got pretty quick at it and produced some insightful reports, but I also know that we will be doing this for every client we can. And I don’t want to do it manually each time!

So starts my quest to automate the aggregation. Awhile back, I learned of tools/companies like ComScore, Quantcast, BlogPulse, Converseon, and BuzzMonitor but have never had the time to conduct research on them that wasn’t directly tied to a paying client project. Now, I have the opportunity to look into this periodically to see what is already out there without paying an arm and a leg, and what could be built. I know that we can use APIs like Facebooks to pull their Insight Statistics and Fan/Group data, but run into issues like Facebook not indexing their FQL page_fan.page_id field which means that it isn’t easy to pull data on your fans through a custom PHP application.

So anyway, I’ll keep you updated on where this goes and what I learn.

It is an ever-changing race to find statistics on online communication. While it is very helpful in deciding who is viewing what and what technologies you might want to use, the gathering of visitor data is not an exact science. Sure, it is better than using distribution number of a magazine, but there are so many variables, that you don’t always get them all. For example, Twitter publishes their user statistics, but doesn’t account for those that twitter using their cell phones or PDAs. This is probably a large percentage because of the short, text nature of Twitter communication.

That said, we are compiling useful statistics in a new category here for your viewing pleasure, our need to archive this stuff for reference, and because I love stats. Maybe it will be a widget someday.

Facebook

• More than 110 million active users (people who have accessed Facebook within the past month)
• Facebook is the 4th most-trafficked website in the world (comScore)
• Facebook is the most-trafficked social media site in the world (comScore)
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older

LinkedIn

• More than 25 million experienced professionals from around the world,
• More than 150 industries listed on LinkedIn

Twitter

(Only includes website users. Cell phone and Twitterrific users not included)

• Total Users: 1+ million
• Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
• Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day

Source: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter respectively. Compiled by http://thebabyboomerentrepreneur.com/261/social-media-statistics/