I covered the South by Southwest Interactive Festival from a mobile perspective because that is the “hot” area for the social web. I am fascinated by location services and what I think are the conservative predictions by web analysts that half of the web connections will be on a mobile device within 3 years.

The mobile device is central to social web 2.0 growth, “because it is carried with the user at most times, is ideally placed to capture information at its source, and is a key enabled of user-generated content and social web interaction.” The report also predicts that the mobile web market will reach $19 billion by 2014.

I am fortunate to have had Verizon Wireless, a regional client, to also be interested in supporting this coverage. We decided to have a little fun with this project as well. I took several new Verizon mobile devices with me, the Droid by Motorola , and Devour with Moto Blur, the HTC Eris, and the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus. Also the Verizon Wireless MiFi mobile hotspot, which I happily named, “Web in my Pocket”.

The coverage around this project is not meant to be a review of phones or service, just how we used them and how they were presented within the context of brand journalism. Author David Meerman Scott talks about brand journalism in his book New Rules of Marketing and PR, also in a recent Marketing Edge podcast episode

I believe this will be the way marketing, PR, and trade journalism morph into coverage of topics, products, and services. It will become part of the conversation of these topics in social ecosystems.

Web In My Pocket

Look it’s one thing to make a voice call driving 80 miles an hour but it’s another to connect to the web, send emails, upload photos from your lap top with Wifi speed. That’s what my traveling colleague Rick Mahn, founder of Social Media Breakfast Minneapolis/St. Paul and I did on this road trip. It was virtually uninterrupted coverage using the Verizon MiFi in the car plugged into the car charger port. We didn’t miss a beat with other work back home or with the Twitter stream following our trip on #smbsxsw Oh, did I say 80 miles an hour, no I was mistaken I meant 70, sorry.

I gave it the nickname “web in my pocket” during the Social Media Breakfast at South by Southwest. The popular morning gathering of those interested in social media and marketing held a wonderful breakfast on March 14 at the Hyatt hotel in downtown Austin, TX. There were more than 200 in attendance which would push many hotel WiFis to the max.

I was either A) selfish or B) considerate in that I did not tap into whatever open network was available, I did turn on the Verizon Mifi, which was a secured network requiring a password, to access the web, twitter and email. It was fully charged so the couple of hours during the breakfast was a snap. I also used it during some of the peak times of the SxSw conference panels which worked out great. Selfish or considerate you decide.