Your best customers have something in common – their interest in your brand and your category (of products or services). We’ve spoken about a service named Twitter (see Stay close to mother hen ) that lets you stay connected with your customers by text message. Now there’s a more robust offering that helps you create a mobile social network with your customers.

Frengo lets you create text messaging channels called buzz, then invite people to participate (by mobile or web). Once you’ve created your channel, you can then interact by text message with your members. You can keep these text messages private (restricted to your members) or let anyone follow it by opening it to the public. There’s almost no limit to interesting content – imagine updates from the latest industry trade show, a fashion show, or even a sponsored sporting event. Or, you can just push original content, say a groovy growth idea, to anyone who subscribes.

Your customers can follow your brand wherever it goes – all for free.

Today social networking is most associated with websites like Facebook or MySpace. However, the real social marketing device isn’t a website that you can access from your laptop on our desk . . . it’s in your pocket.

Dodgeball (owned by Google) shows you how social networking can take advantage of the fact that everyone carries a mobile phone. What’s interesting here is how the combination of mobile phones and social networking can bring together people. Members of this system sign up and confirm their cell phone number. Then, they check in with the service, say when they’re at a bar. The service will then let their friends know where they are and also alert the member if friends or friends of friends are anywhere nearby.

In the same way, you could create a social network today, using low cost tools, and combine it with basic mobile phone capability to keep your customers close to you. While it’s not as easy as just flipping a switch, it could help you retain your existing customers and bring them back to your business more frequently.

Here’s the deal. Your cell phone runs on a closed network that belongs to your cell phone company. Your laptop or website connects to a network called the internet that is open to the public. Where does the opportunity lie? Connecting these two networks.

3 Guppies gives you a vision into how this can be done. It lets users transfer any music, pictures, videos, or MySpace information from a website to a cell phone. Users can simply install a mobilizer widget that in turn lets them send pictures and videos on that page to any cell phone, with just a simple click. Alternatively, with this same widget, your friends can turn your pictures into cell phone wallpaper or watch videos on the go.

While this site is free, the lesson remains the same. Your users are trying to move content from one place to another. While not everyone can develop an application to transfer content, how about just creating a separate section of your site with optimized sizes and formats. Or, how about making it easy to send content by text message?

If your buyers want to move content from the web to their phone, how easy are you making it for them to do so?

When your key customers call, who picks up the phone? When you think about it, for many businesses, there are really only a handful of people who are “make or break” for the business. The big question is . . . how do you make sure that their calls get answered?

Consider using services like Grand Central or Virtual PBX. Grand Central gives you one phone number that rings all of your phone numbers. No matter where you are, your office line, your home line, and your cell phone (or any others) all ring at the same time. In addition, users can route calls, record messages, and set distinctive ring tones. This can be a great way to guarantee that your customers reach your sales team (the system is currently transitioning to Google’s systems, so it’s temporarily unavailable). Virtual PBX is an online system that replicates the office systems that we all know (press 1 for sales, press 2 for customer service) for any size company. It can help your customers find your sales team by integrating their cell phones into the office PBX, instead of assuming that everyone is sitting at a desk.

Grand Central is free (for now), and Virtual PBX starts at $9.99 a month. Are you satisfied with your sales team’s ability to identify and respond to important customer calls?

It may seem as if the race for search advertising supremacy has already been won by Google. When you own the searches, you win the spoils by earning the right to place the search related ads. Even if you are already placing ads next to Google or Yahoo! search results, are you prepared for what may be the much bigger search related advertising market – the cell phone?

Advertisers should consider opportunities to place mobile ads with mobile ad networks like Medio. Medio, the “on-deck” advertising partner of Verizon, T-Mobile, and others, offers advertisers the opportunity to use its ad placement system, with a minimum spend of $25. Much as with Google’s Adwords system, it’s easy to use and lets you choose targeted searches, develop a short text ad, and place bids for optimal ad placement when a user searches (see this Medio overview). It remains to be seen if consumers will use the search systems that are built into their phones or if they’re going to download and use the phone-based applications provided by Google and Yahoo! (that in turn tie to their respective text ads).

One thing’s for certain, when one of your customers or prospects is searching on a phone, it’s almost guaranteed to be a great selling prospect. Just as with web-based text ads, why not get your feet wet and learn more about how mobile-based text ads might drive sales or leads for you? Remember . . . there are three times more mobile handsets in the U.S. than PCs. On top of that, data usage (such as when you conduct a phone-based search) is doubling every year.