Last Thursday, executives interested in marketing and advertising in mobile and social media gathered at the W Hotel in New York City for a conference called DigiDay. The first half of the day focused on Mobile marketing and advertising and the second on marketing and advertising in Social Media.

The day started with a conference sponsored by ChaCha. ChaCha is a service where you can text any question and receive a response from one of 55,000 ChaCha guides. These guides, many of whom are work at home moms or college students, have an active community for finding ways to quickly answer any question that might come in. The answers are supposed to reflect information on the web, as opposed to their own personal opinions.

When you text a message to ChaCha, you receive a text message back which includes an advertisement. These advertisements can be targeted by location or topic. Currently, location targeting is done at the area code level. It has been used by over four million people and their surveys get over a twenty percent response rate. Currently, they are receiving over ten million questions a month.

It seems like a great service so I thought I would give it a try. While no registration is necessary, on their website, you can register your email address and phone number. I registered my email address and verified it successfully. However, I never received my verification code on my cellphone.

I thought this would provide an interesting question, and I sent a text message to ChaCha asking why I hadn’t gotten my verification code. The response was unhelpful, simply saying that I didn’t need to use the verification code to ask questions. I replied, acknowledging that it wasn’t required but that I wanted to anyway, and asking how to get it. The second response was as useless as the first.

On Saturday afternoon, while I explored the Hebron Maple Festival, I noticed a car with the State Representative license plates for Assembly District 55. I sent a text message to find out who the State Rep for the district was, and was informed that it is Rep. Pam Sawyer. The message included her phone number and an advertisement for H&R Block. So, currently ChaCha is batting .333 for useful answers. I’ll probably keep using it from time to time.

However, I was also disappointed to receive a text message at the same time informing me that I had used 3 of 5 questions during a 48 hour period and that I could only ask 2 more questions over the next 18 hours. Considering that one of the questions was an attempt to get an answer for the previous question that they failed to answer adequately, and even that answer was not adequate, I was disappointed. Have you used ChaCha? How well has it worked for you? If you haven’t, you can text to their short code, 242242.

After the breakfast, the first panel was “The Mobile Marketer Roundtable: The Elephant in the Room: The Economy:“ Personally, I’m a bit tired of all the gloom and doom discussions about the economy. Yes, the economy sucks. However, there are still lots of people doing lots of interesting things. Tell me something I don’t know.

Fortunately, June Bower, VP of Marketing for Cisco-WebEx did tell me something interesting I didn’t know. There is a WebX app for the iPhone. Over 70,000 copies have been downloaded already and WebX will be coming to other smartphones soon. Another interesting idea from this panel was the cellphone as sales assistant. Someone is going to come up with an easy way for a user of a mobile device to find something he is looking for in a store. That will be a cool app.

There were discussions about ‘click to consume’ and the closest people have come up with so far have been buying ringtones, wallpapers and games. None of these are all that compelling, but they have been lucrative.

The biggest hurdle that members of the panel saw to mobile devices playing a bigger role was getting marketers to understand the role of mobile as part of their 360 marketing.

A final thought from this panel was that to television people, a mobile device looks like a small TV. To computer people, it looks like a small computer. More and more, simple telephony is playing a smaller and smaller part of mobile market.

This was brought home in the next panel, The State of Mobile Media by the Numbers, when Julia Resnick, VP Mobile Media Products for The Nielsen Company spoke about their research. The iPhone is drastically changing the data usage of mobile users and Android and Blackberry Storm are also making data a much larger part of the mobile platform. The other interesting tidbit that she revealed was that the average age for children getting their first cellphone is now 9.7 years. They also revealed that the average teenage sends 2300 text messages a month. That works out to around 75 text messages every day. I guess I’m not that heavy a texter after all.

The following panel, Keynote Panel: The Mobile Platform Implosion, spent time looking at appropriate metrics for mobile usage. Nothing particularly memorable came out of that panel except for the observation that cookies on mobile devices are a problematic stop gap measure. More interesting was a rant about metrics about how each decade has had it’s own ad science, but then about 2005, all that ad science went out the window simply for measurement without a lot of consideration of what was being measured and why.

It was an interesting observation. If you know what you are measuring and why you are measuring it, then you can determine if you are reaching your goals. Yet many people do not seem to have a clear idea of what they are measuring or why they are measuring it.

After this panel, a spokesperson for a company called Mojiva got up and made a sales pitch. It wasn’t all that compelling. What was compelling was the discussion afterwards. During the Q&A, he was asked about Twitter. He dismissed Twitter as diarrhea of people spending too much time online and having no mobile implications. The large community of participants at the channel who were having a great discussion about the conference on Twitter were merciless. They spoke about it as an epic fail, a credibility failure, a debacle, a shame, and some suggested that it is sometimes it is just better to get off the stage.