As mobile phone penetration continues to surge, the years-old hype about the mobile Web being the next big thing is no doubt coming true. But despite all of the industry gurus, conference keynotes and trade magazine articles imploring you to get your business ready for the mobile space, it’s not always easy to know where to begin. Sure, you could hire a team of top-notch mobile developers, but not every business owner has that luxury, especially with the economy still in limbo. Here are a few tools to get started: Sponsor Make Your Website Mobile Friendly Your company’s website may be getting you noticed on the desktop, but what happens when people try to access it from their phones? Probably a lot of pinching, scrolling and squinting. There are a few ways to get your existing site ready for mobile display with minimal coding and development required. One such tool is a hosted solution called Mofuse , which offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface from which to manage mobile content, design and ads. Plug in an RSS feed URL to pull content in from your company blog (or any source), or simply publish static pages with the most pertinent info. When it’s ready, Mofuse provides several flavors of code snippets for redirecting mobile users from your full-size desktop site to the more mobile-friendly version. Another option is Mobify , a freemium service that takes your existing website and strips it down to only the essentials you want your mobile users to see. The result is a clean, highly usable design that displays for the users who visit your site from their phones. Although they have different pricing plans and feature sets, both Mofuse and Mobify come with custom domains, analytics, ad server integration and e-commerce options. Get Started With QR Codes Although not yet as common in the U.S. as they are in Japan, QR (quick response) codes are popping up more and more in commercial and marketing contexts. These square barcode-esque patterns can be printed on any page or real-world surface to enable users with a QR-equipped mobile phone to scan it and then be be redirected to any URL. These could be used in print advertisements to send users to your mobile site for more information or for special promotional offers. While the jury is still out on if and when QR codes will see widespread adoption in the West, it’s easy to get started using one of the many QR code generators that are out there, including Kaywa QR Code , Delivr and QR Stuff to name a few. Keep it Social This may seem like a no-brainer and the last thing the world needs is somebody else espousing the magic of the social Web, but we would be remiss to discuss going mobile without touching on the most obvious and simple way of getting your brand onto people’s phones. Let’s face it: people access sites like Facebook and Twitter from their phones all day long. If your company has a social media strategy, then it already has the beginnings of a mobile strategy. Phone photo by Thiago Felipe Festa . QR photo by cocreatr . Discuss

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The conversation about conflict of interest for bloggers (and other social media types) never really dies down, and flares up constantly in ways large and small. Sometimes it’s something as major as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission going after blogger freebies . Sometimes it’s just a drive-by accusation that a blog post is “link bait”, and not a useful or genuine contribution to the conversation. The common thread is this: What responsibility we have to our audiences, when are our own interests in conflict with theirs, and what do we do when that happens? Sponsor Transparency is one answer. Disclose your interest, and all – hopefully – will be forgiven. ( Jeannine Schafer drew some great disclosure notifications on LouisGray.com.) And a little reader due-diligence doesn’t hurt, either. Knowing that a blogger is a political activist, or a real estate agent, or a (ahem) social media strategist means you can assess what you’re reading with some knowledge of their agenda. (Even the most well-intentioned among us writes with part of our mind attuned to the potential impact on things we value – whether it’s a social cause, our social standing, or a business bottom line.) Still, I like to suspend my skepticism once in a while. Because one of the things that makes social media so valuable is the chance to connect with genuine human beings, expressing themselves in ways that aren’t the result of careful calculations of strategic interests, sales trajectories, keyword analysis or free samples of probiotic yogurt drinks. And digging for that conflict of interest, while it may protect me from being taken for a ride, also means approaching social interactions with a degree of suspicion… which is a shaky start to a new relationship. Yes, maybe a blogger’s angling for trinkets or traffic. But maybe they’re expressing a deeply-held passion. And maybe it’s a little of both. Somewhere, there has to be a balance between the benefit of the doubt and a healthy skepticism. More Noise to Signal. Discuss

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The “Dark Figure of Crime” is not, as one would imagine, a London-fog-bedecked, cloak-and-dagger figure slinking down a shadowy alleyway. It sounds very Hollywood, but “The Dark Figure” is simply a term used by statisticians to describe a crime that goes unreported. Serious and even violent crimes go unreported for a myriad of social, political and personal reasons. What does this have to do with Twitter? Criminologists have for years grappled with that dark figure, and while police science research on social media is in its infancy, the ability to compare official and real-time crowdsourced data could change how we research crime. Sponsor Guest author Laura Madison is the co-founder of the Canadian Association of Police on Social Media. She will be publishing the results of a survey regarding Twitter use by North American and U.K. in the coming weeks. She tweets @org9 and @canadianpolice . Crime that has been reported by victims – a burglary for example – is only a percentage of what is actually occurring in our communities. How do we know? We use what are called social surveys. Some of the survey questions could be: “Have you been the victim of a burglary in the past five years?” and “Did you report it to police?” We then look at the official reported crimes involving burglary and compare that with social survey results. All of this is very interesting but what does this have to do with social media, annotation, metadata and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets? For me as a social scientist on Twitter, there’s an exciting potential for everyone from governments to nonprofits to utilize the power of real-time to hypothesize, design, conduct and finally utilize analytics. If good research design is defined as “the analysis of data in a manner that aims to combine relevance to the research purpose with economy in procedure,” then Twitter’s new promotional platform not only adheres to this principle but advances the potential for rapid-paced and geographically salient research results on just about any topic. Possibilities For Policing Agencies As a criminologist I think a lot about how social media can be utilized in my field and in the field of police sciences. We can study attitudes about crime, fear of crime, urban myths, moral panics, laws, legislation, police services, victim impact, sentencing reform, prison reform and restorative justice. We can look at social media studies and compare them to official crime rates and government social surveys, reports and peer-published research and analysis. We can do research around issues such as the Facebook panic button and other social media applications directed at sex offender detection, and importantly we can elicit responses from those who currently use social media. Policing agencies, for example, could use their annual communications budgets to purchase a number of Promotional Tweets to, for instance, alert the public about a wanted person or request information from targeted geographic population. They could use polls to gauge performance, community perceptions, satisfaction and reform. Then they can use the associated data for back-end analytics and to illustrate what I call user-to-user “resonance chains” that show where their tweets went and who retweeted them, and lay out this info for further proactive planning. For a good example of this in action check out @vpdcanada , @trafficservices and @deputysloly ; a further good source for police information on social media is @cops2point0 . What Must Happen Next With all of the positive out of the way, let’s look at some issues that may need to be addressed before some of what I outlined can come to fruition. I will also introduce some of my ideas for application development. First comes privacy wherein an application that we could build would gather relevant data such as age, location, education level, etc., but would hide identifying information by assigning a code number for those wishing to contribute to social science research. Second, ethically acceptable research policy beings with the establishment of a clear and fair agreement between the investigator/agency and research participant that clarifies the responsibility of both. Professional researchers and agencies may request a release before research is conducted. We could make an application for all sorts of legal and research releases for use on social media, could we not? Third, random sampling is a requirement for many experimental designs. How can we do this on Twitter? Perhaps this can be achieved by the creation of an application that can do random samples or shuffling of willing participants. Fourth, not everyone who may want to purchase promoted Tweets knows how to design an effective 140-character promotion, so how can we assist? Again, create an application or an easy editor/style guide that enriches what Twitter might already have. A Final Note As Twitter rolls out its platform for Promoted Tweets, I encourage my peers and social media scholars to get to know what they look like and begin to imagine new ways this could be harnessed for social change as well as for promotional value. I invite further discussion about these are ideas, and I’m hoping that together through innovation we can make Twitter a socially and scientifically accepted tool with which people can do valid and welcomed research. Photo by georgie_c . Discuss

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Imagine if Tom Paine, or Benjamin Franklin, or Emma Goldman had the power to cast their passing thoughts, while walking down the street, to thousands or millions of people all around the world, with ease, in minutes. They would expel the building material of a mason, wouldn’t they? That power is now in all of our hands, thanks to a new class of mobile applications that’s maturing very quickly. Mobile podcasting apps are now powerful, easy to use, free and tied to big social networks for distribution. The latest to hit the scene is Cinch , from BlogTalk Radio, which landed in the Android marketplace this morning after several months on the iPhone. Sponsor Cinch is a relatively simple app, and it has its technical issues on occasion, but it’s absolutely revolutionary and so far could be the best in its class. Users launch the app, hit record, speak into their phone, press stop, give their recording a title, aim it at their Twitter or Facebook friends, and then hit publish. Within minutes the recording is uploaded to the Cinch servers and a link to listen is pushed out to the designated social networks. I’ve been using Cinch on the iPhone for months now, to record my thoughts about art and the internet , about writing, or the soundscape from the train station in my home town. I marvel, every time, at the fact that I can publish my thoughts so effortlessly in audio out to the world now, from wherever I am. Just like blogging made text publishing and distribution more accessible and democratic than it had ever been before in human history, mobile audio publishing apps like this are truly world changing. The availability of Cinch on Android is an important event. Cinch isn’t the only mobile podcasting app available for today’s smartphones. AudioBoo is another one that you might enjoy on the iPhone. It’s far more attractive visually, has more features, more users and appears to have fewer bugs. It has a 5 minute time limit on audio recording, though. That’s very inconvenient, as the timer is usually out of sight up against my ear. I also regularly have 6 or 7 minute long thoughts. I haven’t hit the time limit on Cinch yet. Social media apps come and social media apps go, more launch every day than anyone can keep track of, but some of them are worth taking pause and considering the implications of. The power of instant, mobile, global audio publishing in your pocket, for free? That really means something. Discuss

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Social media is going to rule the Web until at least 2012 – according to a post by Justin Kistner , a Social Evangelist at web analytics company Webtrends . Kistner also claims that Facebook has become the king of social media. In a panel at a Portland event today called Lunch 2.0, Kistner said that the current era of the Web “is Facebook’s game to lose.” Data from Google Trends suggests that the term ‘web 2.0′ became popular in 2005 and peaked in mid-2007 (as measured by how many times the term was entered as a search term in Google). Towards the end of 2008 ’social media’ started to get popular and then rose steeply in 2009. Sponsor If the above chart is to be believed, social media overtook web 2.0 in popularity at the end of 2009. I’m inclined to trust this data, as it matches other data sources we have reported on in ReadWriteWeb over the past couple of years – for example a Nielsen Online report from March 2009 stating that people spent more time in 2008 using social media than on personal email. The ‘news references’ chart (the secondary chart below the main one) is also interesting. It shows that over 2009 news media organizations used the term ’social media’ far more than ‘web 2.0.’ Partly that’s because ‘web 2.0′ has always been an awkward term for anyone outside the tech world to understand (“You mean there were two Webs?”). But it undeniably also shows that the term ’social media’ began to be bandied about in news media a lot in 2009. And not coincidentally, that’s when Facebook and Twitter became very popular in the mainstream. Nowadays, it’s hard to walk anywhere in a metropolitan center without seeing the logos of both Facebook and Twitter. Last week I was in New York and snapped a photo of a local eatery promoting its Twitter account at the counter. OK, this was New York. But I am seeing both Facebook and Twitter being increasingly used by a wide variety of businesses, online, on TV and in the real world. The rise of social media is impacting many industries, including news media itself. Kistner points to a Hitwise study which showed that Facebook is sending more traffic to news sites than Google. This isn’t necessarily true for all news sites (Google is still ReadWriteWeb’s biggest traffic source, for instance), but Facebook and Twitter have become significant drivers of traffic for most news organizations. I’m inclined to agree with Kistner that there is at least another year or two of growth in social media adoption, so 2012 sounds like a good bet for social media to peak. What do you think, will 2012 be the peak for social media? Or will the Social Media Era last for even longer than the Web 2.0 one lasted? Discuss

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