Mobile social networking’s growth on a global scale is imminent and will be explosive, according to Buongiorno. But how can brands monetize these channels?

The key to monetizing mobile content and social networking is combining various monetization strategies. For example, Buongiorno has two business lines, consumer services and marketing services. Buongiorno combines revenue sharing with carriers, advertising and mobile content sales via subscription and pay-per-download models to keep itself in the black.

“We are in the process of selecting and shaping our most efficient products in both B2C and B2O areas of business for a simplified product offering,” said Fernando Gonzalez Mesones, head of global marketing, product and supply for Buongiorno, Milan, Italy.

“We have boosted experience quickly worldwide with the recent acquisitions of iTouch Group and Rocket Mobile in the U.S., which specializes in Brew and Java applications,” he said.

Buongiorno offers mobile content services distributed directly through its brand BlinkoGold and through its mobile social networking brand peoplesound, as well as through partnerships with telcos and media groups and digital marketing services referred to as sponsored content.

“Within B2C, our platform for subscriptions to base personalization products -- ringtones and wallpapers and games -- remains profitable through monthly all-you-can-eat offerings, and we are continuing to explore other segments of business that are long-term strategies around the pervasiveness and ubiquity of mobile Internet and social networking,” Mr. Mesones said.

These include Buongiorno’s mobile content 2.0 offerings HelloTxt and peoplesound.

“Buongiorno is perfectly poised to reap the benefits of the emerging mobile social networking market, a market that has until now been dominated purely by Web players,” Mr. Mesones said.

“Peoplesound’s business model will be based on commercial mechanics that the company has successfully harnessed in the past for selling value-added content in the telephony market,” he said.

Buongiorno specializes in mobile content and digital entertainment. The company operates in 57 countries, with 200 direct connections with 120-plus telcos and access to more than 2 billion mobile customers.

Buongiorno combines three main sources of revenue: revenue sharing with carriers, premium content sales such as music, videos, games and pictures, and advertising on both Web and WAP channels.

“Peoplesound will become an innovative sales channel for the vast range of products directly and indirectly sold by Buongiorno,” Mr. Mesones said.

“With the support of its marketing services division, peoplesound will offer companies consulting services for the design and implementation of digital marketing campaigns that cover the entire value chain, from concept to realization through its own dynamic ad-serving campaign management tools, well suited for fixed-line and mobile phones,” he said.

Research on data card usage shows the rapid growth of mobile broadband access, as users expect high-performance devices and faster mobile networks to deliver better user experience and data capacity -- all amidst a cheaper pricing environment and the pervasive use of Web 2.0 services.

Handsets are evolving accordingly, as consumers increasingly demand a rich experience based on seamless access to messaging, search, entertainment and content.

These consumers are redefining their needs, which are built around diversion and ever-richer connection, according to Buongiorno.

“Mobile social networking’s growth on a global scale is imminent and will be explosive,” Mr. Mesones said. “For marketers, the ability to tap into data collected through location-aware technology will be a huge opportunity to learn about consumer behavior.

“On a broader level, targeted advertising and sale notices, if done properly, and with insight into that particular person will also grow to be a more accepted and commonplace phenomenon,” he said. “Right now we are focused on growing the community and adding real value to users life’s on the go through peoplesound.

“The ability for users to communicate across the Web and mobile by instant chat or free SMS has taken off in popularity, and we’ve seen that a smaller network of just friends and family is easier to digest on mobile, leaving more bandwidth and attention for our users to select from premium content when the time is right.”

HelloTXT and peoplesound
Buongiorno’s mobile social network is called peoplesound. Buongiorno believes the success of Web social networking is only a pre-cursor to the explosion that social networking will undergo on mobile.

From a business standpoint, aiming at a market of mobile community users that will grow by a factor of 10 by 2012, to 428 million, according to Informa, opens up a huge market where mobile devices will prevail over PC-based Internet access devices.

The mobile phone is already the most prevalent social networking tool worldwide. Brands are still figuring out how best to take advantage of that huge audience.

Unlike others that focus on connecting acquaintances, peoplesound is exclusively focused on connection with friends, the close circle consumes phone or IM, rather than the acquaintances they email.

It brings these friends closer together by enabling them to actively and passively communicate across all channels, including the Web, WAP, client and SMS.

Consumers can follow their friends and interact through a suite of communication features, including text updates, picture updates, comments, chat, SMS, emoticons and voice, which are all available on mobile.

They can also choose to follow celebrities a la Twitter, which will create its own set of monetization opportunities.

Buongiorno’s HelloTxt is a rapidly growing status update aggregator for the social media market.

HelloTxt enables users to post their status updates just once and have it appear automatically on all of their networks, allowing them to keep all of their friends up-to-date with ease.

It is also possible to read friends’ updates from main microblogs and social networks all at the same time.

Status updates can be made via the Web site, by email or from a mobile phone. It is also possible to embed photos and video directly into these status updates.

In 10 months, HelloTxt surpassed 30,000 registered users with no marketing campaigns, spreading via word of mouth.

HelloTxt aggregates more than 45 social networks and microblogs, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, Identica, BrightKite and peoplesound. Users on average aggregate four.

The service is growing by approximately 8,000 status updates per day, with 65 percent of all status update being made through the Web and mobile and 35 percent of them come from third-party application using the open HelloTxt application program interface.

The HelloTXT mobile site is at http://m.hellotxt.com.

“HelloTxt will become the ?Swiss army knife,′ or the tool of choice for social Web interaction and aggregation,” Mr. Mesones said. “As more and more Web sites add social components, it becomes a burden to update profiles, or ?identities’ on each.

“HelloTxt is the most advanced and far-reaching social aggregator in terms of social networks around the world that it supports, and we are constantly developing, as well as making the API available, for anyone to improve and add to the service on a daily basis,” he said.

“The target demographic now is obviously early-adopters, but at the rate we are growing users, and with the popularity of ?un-walling’ the walled-gardens of the Web, it will undoubtedly become a very popular time-saver for people of all ages and incomes down the line.”