Pop Idol is a global TV phenomenon that’s been credited with driving the uptake and usage of sms in key markets, like the US. Many thought that its format had peaked, but it took the canny Finns to breakthrough and take it to new heights.

Tomi Ahonen tells all on his blog, Communities Dominate Brands, which ties in with the book of the same name and which is quietly becoming a slow-burn marketing classic. Read my review here, before you buy yourself a copy.

Mobile Karaoke features “Jokamiehen” (literally “the common man”, in my imperfect Finnish!) Idols or People’s Idols as I suppose we’d say. The idea is that you call a number on your mobile, sing your song to the backing track provided, listen to it and then save it when you’re happy - or happy-ish, I guess.

Then, others dial in and listen to the entries and vote in a kind of “Hot or Not” audio poll.

Brilliant and simple, but what of usage? Tomi writes

Finland has a population of only 5 million people. 1,862 brave Finns sang songs into Mobile Karaoke to join into this common man’s Idols contest. 150,000 separate individuals called in to listen to these songs, to vote on them !

And the whole activity generated 1.95 MILLION separate listening/voting sessions in Finland. More than the total traffic generated by the voting activities of the “real” Finnish Idols show on TV.

For me, this shows how the mobile can be much more naturally married to TV, rather than the forced, shotgun wedding of sticking TV programmes on the handheld device, for which I’m very sceptical that a mass, paying market exists.

There’s also another very interesting statistic here though.

There’s a lot of hype around about User Generated Content as the next big thing and indeed, it is undoubtedly important. However, less than 0.003% of Finns actually generated their own content. The big numbers came from Interaction and it will ever be thus. As an example, for every blogger, there will be millions of non-bloggers, who, despite this, are all potential blog readers.

Therefore, if a business model relies on UGC, it needs to cultivate and cozy up to those people who are doing the work. The people who subsequently Interact, will come if the content produced is good enough.