I went to see a friend who worked at an interactive agency in London. He’d said that they were doing some mobile marketing themselves, and I wanted to see first-hand how it was being done. I had already set up a shop to start testing mobile in America, but I was a bit stymied by the technology end of things. I’m a marketer, not a telecommunications expert. So the first thing I wanted to know was how the guts worked. How did the messages actually get from your database out into the cellular ethersphere and into consumers’ handsets?

When I met the CEO of this agency, that was the first question I asked. He looked at me like I was an idiot. He pointed to his laptop sitting on his desk.

“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” he finally replied. “It all comes out of there.”

I begged him to elaborate. “I just plug my phone into the back of my laptop,” he explained, “and we wrote a little script that just, you know, sends them through the phone.”

To my British friend, it was the most obvious thing in the world. But to my American ears, it didn’t add up. There was no way to plug my American cellphone into a laptop. And even if I could, there’s no function to just send text messages. I knew enough about the American market to understand that there were many complications to take into account. Each American carrier (like Verizon or Sprint) had their own very particular way to send messages through their system. And even if you were technologically able to send bulk messages, you needed the carriers’ permission to do so.

I’m still no expert on the British mobile networks, and I’m not entirely sure whether what my friend was doing was kosher. But our firm has now operated scores of mobile marketing campaigns in the U.S., and there’s one thing I’m sure of: In the U.S. there simply is no “plug and play” way to operate a mobile campaign the way you’d send an email blast.

It is tempting to think of sending text messages like sending email. But there are crucial differences on both the marketing and the technological fronts that every marketer needs to think about. Here are the key differences to think if you’re someone who is familiar with email marketing, and thinking of moving into mobile marketing:

1. The Pipes are not Open: The Internet is not owned by anybody, so if you have an Internet connection then you can send email. There’s no real barrier to sending out batches of emails, notwithstanding whether they’ll make it through spam filters and to their intended recipients. This is not the case with mobile. Each mobile carrier owns its own network and has the right to control what passes through its system. Carriers typically require explicit approval of whatever you plan to send to their subscribers. Carriers have an acute interest in making sure that their hard-won paying subscribers are not bombarded by messages they do not want. So you’ll need to plan for the time and effort to get those carrier approvals before you can start sending text messages.

2. The Pipes are not Free: An email service provider may charge you to send your emails out through their system, but there’s no fundamental cost to using the Internet. Sending a text message incurs a cost that must either be paid by the sender, the consumer, or both. It’s more like postage than like email. If you’re a marketer, you probably don’t want to charge your consumers to receive your message, so you’ll wind up footing the bill. It’s only a few pennies per message, but with volume it adds up. That’s a significant constraint that you need to bear in mind and budget for.

Now, the ultimate goal is to have your advertisement photographed. That’s right: Charmin Toilet Paper set up clean and appealing porta-potties in Times Square as a promotion for their product. And they noticed that consumers weren’t just using them. They were photographing them. By the droves. With cameraphones and digital cameras, scores of tourists have been capturing Charmin’s visual message and taking it home with them to show family and friends, and even posting it on their blogs. Talk about viral marketing!

I personally noticed this phenomenon just a week or two ahead of the Times’s eagle-eyed reporters. Our agency had been helping Samsung with their own Times Square promotion to publicize the launch of the Blu-Ray DVD format. A billboard showed video clips of a character dressed in blue named Ray (get it, Blu-Ray) and consumers on the ground could vote on what sort of movie Ray should watch.

If they voted for “tearjerker” they saw him yanking out tissues; if they voted for “comedy” they saw him hysterically laughing, and so on. Neat stuff. The promotion had recently launched, and I wanted to see it in action for myself. I stumbled into Times Square not knowing exactly where the billboard was, and I was a little bit overstimulated and not sure where to look.

Then I noticed: lots of tourists were pointing their cameras in the same direction: uptown and 45 degrees skyward. Click click click! You couldn’t miss it. I traced back the line of sight to see what they were photographing and, sure enough, there was Blue Ray, bawling as he watched a tearjerker. Following that came the names that consumers had texted in when they voted: Alex. Franco. Monica. Click click click — more cameras! After all, who wouldn’t want a picture of their own name in lights in Times Square?

Samsung was surely benefiting from the very same phenomenon as Charmin. It wasn’t just the consumers in that Times Square that day that had experienced their promotion. It was all those people turbo charged by an amazing viral multiplier: by being unique, interesting and most of all personal, a fairly ordinary brand had unleashed what is sometimes known as a viral meme. Lots of marketers claim to be doing “viral marketing” but whether intended or not, this was the real deal.

There’s a lesson here for all marketers, but I believe it has particular resonance for mobile marketing. Mobile marketing is still a new discipline. As I’ve mentioned in previous columns here and here, one of the greatest benefits of mobile is that it is highly measurable and accountable. But because it is so new, mobile market still has the ability to dazzle otherwise jaded consumers. No one sends an urgent email to their friends alerting them to a super-cool ad banner or popup. Maybe in 1997, but not now. But, hey, if you can help consumers do something cool with their cellphones, that still gets talked about, and photographed, and forwarded to friends, and posted to blogs.

We marketers are having an ever-harder time reaching a broad audience, as consumers are TiVo-ing and YouTubing themselves into smaller and smaller slivers. Those mobile numbers are certainly tempting: there aren’t too many other media that can reach three out of four Americans. Is the mobile phone — the most personal of all communication devices — actually the next mass medium? What do those stellar subscriber numbers really mean for marketers?

First, we need to understand what people are actually doing with their cellphones. After all, just because a person owns a cellphone does not mean that she is willing or able to receive your marketing message. At its core, a cellphone is simply another voice connection, and we are all aware of the limits of voice-based telemarketing in the age of Do Not Call. So what else are all those cellphones good for?

By a large margin, the number-one use of cellphones, aside from talk, is text messaging. The mobile research company M:Metrics estimates that 38% of mobile subscribers send a text message each month. That’s 73 million Americans who are text messaging. And the text messages are adding up: CTIA estimates that Americans sent and received 12.5 billion text messages in the month of June. Granted, we’re mashing together data from two different sources here, but both sources are generally reliable. And unless we’re completely off, that comes out to more than 170 text messages per subscriber per month. That’s almost six texts a day for every texter. Maybe one of those texts should be coming from you.

And what about all those other neat things you can do with your cellphone, like taking and sending photographs, watching video, and surfing the mobile web? Well, the numbers there aren’t quite as encouraging. Although there’s certainly growth, none of those activities approaches text messaging in popularity. After texting, the next most popular data application is photo messaging, but only 14.5% of subscribers do that in a given month. That’s 28 million photo messagers, compared with 73 million texters. And after that the numbers take a nosedive. Only 22 million have browsed news and information, 20 million purchased a ringtone, and a mere 6 million downloaded a mobile game.

Of course, “only” is a relative term. Mobile gamers are probably quite enthusiastic, and maybe they are particularly receptive to in-game marketing. All of these applications are experiencing rapid growth, and it’s early days yet in the mobile revolution. There’s no telling which application will break out to big numbers in the months ahead. But when you consider that mobile gaming is one of the most hyped corners of the mobile marketplace, the actual penetration numbers simply don’t live up to the hype. Not yet, at least.

What all these numbers suggest is that for marketers looking to make an immediate mass impact with mobile, text messaging is where it’s at. It is the most viable mobile medium for marketers looking to reach anything that could be described as a mass market.

Hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital have flooded into mobile, yielding a bumper crop of offerings that are just now beginning to compete in the marketplace. The moment is golden because few of these offerings have had the chance to disappoint or fail, so everyone’s outlook is rosy, everyone’s projections a hockeystick. When Tony Hawk launches a new mobile game by giving an extreme skateboarding performance on an enormous half-pipe built in the middle of the Los Angeles Convention Center, that’s when you know a market is overripe.

I visited the show not as a mobile enthusiast, but as a marketer, trying to understand exactly how all of this innovation could help us grow our brands and reach our marketing goals. It is not an easy puzzle to piece together. This proliferation of mobile service companies has brought an onslaught of services that sound neat but are difficult to decipher.

For example, I encountered no fewer than four companies that have competing technologies that allow consumers to upload photos or video from their mobile phone to a blog, a Website, or any other virtual destination. Sounds neat, very Web 2.0. There was another phalanx of companies that allow any owner of a Website to host a “mobile storefront,” selling a selection of ringtones, wallpaper, and mobile phone software for revenue that eventually gets split with the technology provider and the wireless carriers . Also pretty neat.

It’s exciting to glimpse into the world of gee-whiz innovation, but how much of this can we put to work for us as marketers right now?, My experience in building dozens of mobile promotions for major brands has taught me there is a what I call a “Gee Whiz Gap” — the gap between what technology can do and what marketers can use. My most recent visit to CTIA brought this into clear view. We marketers must be aware of the Gap if we are to successfully navigate the shoals of mobile marketing. The goal is not to be a skeptic, but rather to be selective and brutally realistic about which mobile offerings can help us reach the measurable results our brands and clients demand.

So how do you know which mobile strategy to deploy? Of course, it depends on your marketing goals. The first question to ask yourself is: What type of marketing are you trying to do? There are two types of marketers when it comes to mobile. Type A, let’s call them the “Cool Kids” want to use mobile to align their brand with cutting-edge technology and youth trends. They are less interested in how many people actually use the technology or in concrete metrics like response rates or sales lift.

For the Cool Kids, the ultimate win is an awesome press clip or a mention on MTV. As a mobile agency serving marketers, my company loves working with the Cool Kids. Who wouldn’t? Budgets are fat, the ideas are super creative, and the clients are energized. The Cool Kids don’t care about the Gee Whiz Gap. Like Tony Hawk, they’ll race right to the precipice and never look down.

The consumer gains a bit of amusement, and the retailer gains a valuable name in its database. Most major film releases now advertise an opportunity for potential fans to download ringtones, wallpapers, and even movie clips to their mobile phones. And it’s hard to watch a reality television show without being urged to weigh in on the various contestants with American Idol-style text voting.

But is all this really mobile marketing? Is it living up to its potential? And is it really achieving any measurable results?

It’s still early days, of course. As marketers, we are notoriously reluctant to release confidential results of individual campaigns, so reliable data is hard to come by. Press releases only tend to advertise selected statistics from winning campaigns, ignoring the dozens of tests that may have preceded them.

Still, based on four years of working with marketers to develop mobile programs, I’ve developed a pretty clear idea of the main challenge that confronts mobile marketing. It’s a pretty simple theory, really. Too many mobile marketers are focusing on the “mobile” and are neglecting the “marketing.” It’s understandable. It’s easy to become enamored with the neat capabilities of a new technology.

But time and again, I see marketers spending 90% of their time, energy, and creativity on the relatively mundane mechanics of the mobile channel, and only 10% on developing a really great underlying marketing strategy. Shockingly, some skip the marketing strategy altogether. Marketers who adhere to the time-tested principles of good marketing are likely to yield useful tests and successful campaigns. Marketers who ignore those principles are, sadly, wasting their time and money. Inevitably, they fail.

I learned this lesson very early on. More than two years ago, my mobile marketing agency executed a test program intended get retailers interested in simple mobile coupons intended to drive incremental foot traffic at holiday time. The idea was simple: Consumers in a selected area (downtown Manhattan) would opt in to receive valuable “mobile coupons” by text message for the days leading up to the December holidays.

They would get a 10-day series of exclusive discounts for top brands and retailers. We successfully sold the mobile coupon slots to various retailers, each promising to provide a valuable offer to our enrolled consumers. We determined we’d need at least 5,000 participating consumers to make the program a success. The only problem was: how do we get consumers to enroll?

So we hired a lively (and expensive) street team to stand on crowded pedestrian corners with handbills touting free coupons for top retailers. The retailers were all named, complete with their glistening recognizable logos. We made it super-easy for consumers to enroll, allowing them to dial a 1-800 number, since this was before most people were comfortable sending a text message. Upon dialing the number, the consumer heard a brief recording with the terms of the program and, presto, they would be opted in. After a few days of street-corner marketing, we reviewed the results: they were truly dismal. The program was on the verge of failure.

Our team brainstormed ways to promote the program better. We sifted through dozens of ideas before we decided that the best strategy would be to borrow one of the oldest tricks in the marketing book: We decided to incentivize participation. We decided to paste one-dollar bills on the backs of the fliers we’d been using.