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Recently, IBM announced it will be bringing Mobile Social Networking to RIM devices. They see a growing and lucrative market opportunity.

Microsoft also has the same vision. They sent 30 employees to the Community 2.0 conference and several of those were responsible for their mobile group.

My believe is that Collaboration and Social Software vendors will need to go mobile with their product strategies if they want to remain relevant over the next few years.

Analysts predict that mobile social networking is expected to grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012.

IBM predicts that the mobile Web market for consumer services such as entertainment and e-mail will reach $80 billion by 2011, more than a 36 percent annual growth.

Another company very interested in mobile social networking is HP. Eric Kintz, Vice President of Strategy & Marketing for HP, made the following comments in this blog, The Digital Mindset:

• John Hadl, whom Brandweek called “the father of mobile marketing” and a top 10 Next Generation Marketer, predicts that in a couple of years mobile phones will be the “premier consumer connection and medium for insights available for marketers.”
• Julie Ask of Jupiter Research makes the case that mobile has already become a natural and increasingly important complement to social marketing campaigns. She provides a list of seven best practices for marketers to keep in mind when creating mobile social marketing campaigns.
• In his keynote at Mplanet 2006, AT&T’s COO Randall Stephenson, said that of the three vehicles AT&T has to reach customers in their new Three Screen Initiative (internet/PC, TV, wireless/mobile phone), wireless is the most important.
• Wireless Week’s Brad Smith suggests mobile advertising may be poised to explode next year.
• Tomi Ahonen calculated that in 2006 mobile social networking was already worth $3.45 billion. In Ahonen’s view, “if you are not on mobile, you won’t be relevant soon.”
• Mmetric recently reported that 12.3 million consumers in the United States and Western Europe accessed a social networking site with their mobile device in June. And this was prior to the launch of the iPhone.

It will be interesting what type of mobile innovations these and other companies will bring us. The future is in Mobile and all collaboration and social software companies should not ignore this channel.