Mobile social gaming community Cellufun is letting its eight million monthly visitors create discussion groups and advertisers can use this content to psychographically target their ads to members.

Each group has real-time chat and its own private forums as well as officers who get to decide membership criteria and review applications. Group affiliations also appear on users? home pages, enhancing social ties throughout the community.

?Cellufun has become a social hub for millions of users all over the world, and they?re increasingly opting to spend time on our site rather than PC focused social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and hi5,? said Keith Katz, VP of Marketing at Cellufun. ?We?ve always had informal groups popping up and posting in various forums, but one of our most frequent user requests has been to have a more formalized system for creating affinity groups, much like what?s available on various Web-based sites.

?We added real-time chat a few months ago, so in many ways this is an outgrowth of that functionality,? he said. ?So now each group has its own internally moderated forum, private real-time chat, and even officers that set group rules and take applications from prospective members.

?It works very much like a guild or clan systems you?d see in MMO?s, so it?s unprecedented on the mobile platform. Of course we?ve made the entire process very simple for casual users on all kinds of phones and in over 10 languages.?

The formation of groups on Cellufun is quite unique in that it represents a shift in people using mobile devices, rather than a computer, to not only meet, shop, and play social games, but also to share common interests and shared ideas. 

One such user is Tiffany, a 23-year old stay at home mom from Middletown, OH, who plays Cellufun a few hours each day on her LG Lotus from Sprint. She has an avatar known as Tiffany513 and has recently started a Mommy Group. 

Within the group moms talk to one another about their experiences. Already 200 moms have joined the group and a few fathers have as well.

Most mobile content providers can provide targeting based on carrier and handset type.

Cellufun does that but also layers on age, gender and geography. With groups, the company can now target not just demographically but also psychographically.

Marketers can say they want to target sports fans, new moms or even Lynyrd Skynyrd fans. 

?It?s been pretty clear to us for some time that users in the U.S. have been moving more toward the mobile behavioral patterns that we see in Europe and Asia,? Mr. Katz said. ?Consumers are using their phones as mobile computers. Unfortunately for consumer, most web-based social networks are pretty awful at creating a positive user experience for people on the go.

Sure, certain smartphone users can download a decent app if they live in the right country, but even then it?s apparent that the app is just a bad port of a PC based product,? he said. ?We?ve created  a social grouping experience explicitly for mobile that works great on any phone and without a download. Consumers are clamoring for this stuff, but most companies are woefully bad at it.?

One of the things Cellufun is really excited about is tracking group formation within the mobile social networking site to get a sense of what is important to users of various ages, countries and cultures.

Marketers will have access to the hot-button issues of the day, because there are already groups sprouting up around those issues.

Marketers looking to get a read on what consumers are focused on can construct a poll that can be sent out to targeted groups, or Cellufun can create an ongoing panel of thousands of users who have a declared interest in something.

Mr. Katz gave his outlook on the future of social networking and mobile.

?Consumers around the world will expect to be connected to their friends and group affiliations wherever they are?not just on the PC,? Mr. Katz said. ?Marketers who want to reach those folks are going to have to be on mobile, much like marketers who used to reach people on TV had to figure out how to start targeting people on the Web.

?This is a natural evolution, but it will happen faster than many folks expect,? he said. ?Marketers need to start testing this stuff now, or they?ll be caught flat-footed when their old social networking strategies no longer deliver results.?