One of the huge trends and consequent opportunities in the next couple of years will be peer transmitted content on the mobile phone. Just as our email inboxes fill up with jokes, news and “interesting” info sent by well meaning friends, colleagues and relatives, this trend will start happening on your mobile.

Actually, this sounds rather curmudgeonly. I know a lot of people hate this sort of email, but personally I love it. Or if I don’t like your brand of humour or interests, I’ll break it to you gently and quickly.

This trend was given a significant boost recently by none other than Google and their new Tool Bar extension:

Google Send to Phone for Firefox is an extension that enables you to send short text messages of web page content to your mobile phone. For example, you might text message yourself a phone number, an address, or directions that you find on the Web.

Or just fill up your arch enemy’s mobile’s inbox - because you can.

This trend will create commercial opportunities too, as marketers attempt to harness it for their own ends - so called Viral Marketing will be coming to your phone soon, if it hasn’t already.

Despite its rather unpleasant name, viral marketing actually makes a lot of sense for recipients of marketing messages as well as the marketers themselves. Your friends and colleagues act as your marketing gatekeepers and only pass on messages that they think you’ll appreciate. OK, Uncle Charlie doesn’t quite understand that just because something arrives in his email box, you’re not necessarily going to find it funny too - but generally the self-filtering, or policing, works surprisingly well.

Marketers love viral as it’s cheap (no communication or crippling media costs) and effective (when it works) as an email from a friend is generally going to get opened and read (apart from Uncle Charlie’s).

So I was interested to read about Sharpe Partners’ survey into viral marketing reported in eMarketer. Note that this was about email viral campaigns and that Sharp Partners are a viral marketing agency, so their motives aren’t in doubt - they’re not likely to conclude viral marketing is bad thing, after all.

Even so, I was mildly surprised at how high sharing email content is and I think it’s a sign of things to come for your mobile. Brace yourself for an onslaught.

89% of US internet users claim to share content, 63% share weekly and an amazing 25% share daily. Note that this isn’t necessarily commercial viral campaigns, it’s anything doing the rounds that these people feel the need to share with others.

75% of respondents shared with up to 6 people.

The most popular things to share were jokes and humour, somewhat predictable coming in first at 88%, followed by news and articles at 56%. For me, a surprising 30% claimed to share religious or spiritual messages, but then maybe my friends don’t think I’m worth saving.

As far as commercial or sponsored messages are concerned, only 5% said that they would definitely NOT send these types of messages on. And for some reason 43% said they were MORE likely to forward these on. Umm…why? I can understand people saying that if a funny joke comes with some branding, they’d still send it on, but why would they be more likely to?

They also uncovered a type if person called a Brand Fan, who basically loves spreading branded content. It takes all sorts, but please don’t go giving them my email address.

As we see our mobile phones used to spread content by our peers, whether it be motive-and-commercial-free, or sponsored, I have a final thought. In many ways, I’d be much more inclined to sign up for a mobile marketing channel, where I controlled what messages I receive, when I get them and how many, than rely on the vagaries of what my friends think I might like. Interesting, no?

And in the meantime, if you have something you’d like to share, please drop me an email and leave my mobile out of it.