One of the most commented-upon elements of the US election was the importance of social networking to the campaign process. It was especially remarkable considering that Facebook was barely months old when the 2004 election took place, and YouTube had yet to be invented.

Social networking has swept across the internet like a storm. According to comScore, 580.5 million internet users were networking socially on the web as of June 2008. In the last two years, the web giants have started to target mobile.

They’ve done deals with operators to secure presence on deck (MySpace with Vodafone, Bebo with Orange) and increasingly teamed up with handset companies to pre-load a rich application on devices – witness Facebook’s much-trumpeted deal with BlackBerry, for example.

As a result, the social networks have poked and nudged their way to the top of the mobile internet. In its August ‘State of the Mobile Web’ report, browser vendor Opera confirmed that MySpace and Facebook were the most visited mobile sites (in the US) after Google.

We shouldn’t be surprised that social networks are making the switch to the small screen so successfully. Mobile is self-evidently a communications medium. It’s sociable – that’s the whole point. Only issues such as data charges and user experience are barriers to the ongoing proliferation of sites like Facebook on mobile, and all of them are being solved.

Needless to say, the power of the social network concept has not been lost on the world’s brand marketers – especially when those brands inspire love and devotion. What better way to communicate with your consumers than to build a platform on which they can communicate with each other? Take football clubs, for example.

Footy fans have been sitting in pubs for decades debating the greatest ever goal in their club’s history, arguing about whether the new right back is any good, discussing arrangements for the next home game. Well, what is a social network if it’s not a kind of digital pub, but without the beer?

Clubs have already launched their own TV channels and credit cards, so they’re used to extending their brands into new areas. Social networking is a no-brainer. The problem, as we all know, is the sheer complexity of launching on the wireless channel. All those handsets with their different screen sizes and APIs – all those operator billing systems to plug into.

It’s why zamano has teamed up with PeekabooTV to launch SoreThumbs as a collective portal for branded entertainment channels. The appeal for brands is the speed of set-up. A channel can be created and switched on within 24 hours to provide fans with a community through which to chat, blog and share or purchase content. This channel exists both on the wired web and the mobile internet.

Even better, brands can then monetise the channel with advertising, subscriptions or micro-billing for content. Critically, it’s the brand that owns its user data, enabling it to start a dialogue with fans and track usage. Partners also benefit from the extra traffic that accrues when a user decides to explore their channel from one of the others hosted on SoreThumbs.

We have already signed a partnership with Infomedia, the mobile services specialist that runs mobile sites for Premier League football clubs such as Man Utd, Liverpool, Arsenal, Everton and Chelsea. We’re all looking forward to kick off.