ChaCha, an SMS mobile search service, is expanding its national operations with the launch of a New York office.

Former Yahoo executive Rob Wilk will oversee national advertising sales from ChaCha's new New York office. The vice president of advertising sales will report directly to ChaCha CEO Scott Jones. Here's what Susan Marshall, vice president of marketing at ChaCha, Carmel, IN, had to say about the company's growth plans:

Why the need to open a New York office?
We want to be where the agencies are. It makes sense for us now that we are focused on building a stellar sales and account management team.

What will that office do? How many people?
The New York office will be our sales and account management headquarters.

We will use the office for meetings, presentations and potentially seminars on mobile advertising and mobile marketing.

Currently, we have four account managers and five advertising sales people.

What was it about Rob Wilkes that impressed ChaCha? What does he bring to the table?
Several key assets made Rob an obvious choice for the position - a brilliantly creative mind, wealth of industry insight and contacts, and his outstanding expertise in search marketing.

We're thrilled to have him jumpstart our national advertising effort, based in our newly-opened New York office.

Not only that, [but] Rob reflects the ChaCha style. He is open, hardworking and wonderful to work with.

We want to build long-lasting relationships with advertisers and he's the perfect person to help us build those lifelong relationships.

What milestones has ChaCha hit since its launch?
We are the fastest-growing SMS search provider. We are growing faster than both Google and Yahoo.

We quickly surpassed Yahoo in the number of searches and are closing in fast on Google. Not only that, according to Nielsen, we are among the top 10 SMS services with the likes of Twitter and Facebook.

Our tremendous growth and popularity is our advertisers' win.

Names of leading clients and some current campaigns?
We are currently running a campaign with H&R Block, Sprint and several other regional advertisers.

How does the ChaCha service work?
Users text a question to 242242 or call 1-800-2-242242 and ask a question. We send back the answer, for free, with a paid advertisement at the bottom.

The ads are often contextually relevant and targeted to our young 18-34-year-old demographic.

What kind of results have you seen for clients?
We are seeing 3-5 percent keyword response rates.

Also, 40.3 percent of users who saw the Palm Centro campaign indicated they wanted to buy one. Early results have been very positive.

What is ChaCha's strategy for this year?
Our focus will be on building strong relationships with advertisers that drive great results.

We've restructured our team to focus on measurability, reporting and client services. We are in this for the long haul and we want anyone who partners with us to feel tremendous success.

How does the New York office fit within that strategy?
Many of the advertisers we want to work with are in the New York area. To provide great, real-time service we need to be there.

We are also opening an office in Los Angeles so that we can better serve our West Coast clients.

What else is ChaCha up to?
Improving our answers and scaling our service to accommodate our tremendous growth.

What's next?
More targeting capabilities so that we can deliver more relevant advertising for our our users and better results for our advertisers. We also want to continue evolving and improving our reporting capabilities.