By STUART ELLIOTT

THE song “Blues in the Night” includes a line that begins, “From Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe.” Now, marketers are studying the results of a campaign that extends from Mountain View to Mobile.

Where? Why, Mountain View, Calif., of course, the home of Google, which is sponsoring an effort to encourage businesses to offer Web sites that work well for mobile devices.

Mobile-friendly sites are typically simpler than regular sites, making them easier to read when peripatetic consumers use gadgets like smartphones and tablets.

Because of the play on words between “mobile” and “Mobile,” Google selected Mobile, Ala., as a focus for the campaign. The campaign theme is GoMo, as in “Go mobile” — mobile pronounced MO-bull, as in mobile devices, rather than mo-BEEL, as in the city.

The campaign includes a microsite, or special Web site, at howtogomo.com; videos that can be watched on the microsite and on YouTube, which Google owns; a blog, at googlemobileads.blogspot.com; and even a “GoMoMeter,” also available on the microsite, to show what an ordinary Web site looks like on a smartphone.

“The future is in your hand,” the campaign proclaims. “Mobilize your site and move your business forward.”

The campaign also featured a Mobile-centric initiative, called Mobilizing Mobile, which took place the week of Nov. 13. Google sent employees there to give Gulf Coast area businesses and organizations free mobile-friendly Web sites.

The Google representatives at the Mobilizing Mobile Expo, held in a storefront in downtown Mobile, were joined by employees of DudaMobile, which converts Web sites to mobile sites, and Mullen, the Boston agency creating the GoMo campaign for Google.

The campaign to promote the mobile Web is indicative of efforts by Madison Avenue to keep up with the rapidly changing behavior of consumers in the realms of local, mobile and social media. Consumers are embracing new technology with an ardor that few forecast.

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According to data from Google and the market research company Ipsos, almost a third of all mobile phones are now smartphones (including many using Google’s Android operating system), and 89 percent of smartphone owners say they use them throughout the day. Also, eMarketer predicts that marketers will spend $4.4 billion on mobile advertising by 2015, compared with $1.2 billion projected for this year.

There is “enormous growth, explosive growth” in the use of mobile devices, said Jason Spero, head of mobile ads for the Americas at Google, but “businesses aren’t ready” for those changes because too many are still offering consumers “desktop Web sites for mobile.”

For example, this year “we’re expecting 15 percent of all searches for ‘Black Friday’ to happen on mobile devices,” he added, compared with less than 10 percent last year.

“Having a built-for-mobile Web site is table stakes,” Mr. Spero said. “We’re trying to get the message out to businesses large and small” about “how to do mobile right.”

(Hmm. Maybe “We do mobile right” might have been a better theme for the campaign.)

The genesis of Mobilizing Mobile, Mr. Spero said, was an idea from Mullen, an agency Google began working with in May, that Google should “go to a city and watch what happens to consumer behavior when all the local businesses are mobilized.”

“Someone threw out Mobile, because of the name,” he said, “and there was a chuckle on the play on words.”

Interest in Mobile grew when research showed that it was “a community well above average in broadband penetration,” he added, but with a low penetration of smartphones.

The Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce promoted Mobilizing Mobile on its Web site, at mobilechamber.com.

“We got a call over the summer from a marketing team at Mullen,” said Leigh Perry-Herndon, vice president for communications and marketing at the chamber, seeking to determine whether the chamber was interested and whether it thought the effort would work.

“When we learned it was Google” that would be the sponsor, she added, “we said, ‘Yes, we would make it work.’ ”

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As it turned out, the chamber did not have a mobile Web site. “We were one of the first to sign up for an appointment,” Ms. Perry-Herndon said.

The GoMo microsite has had almost 200,000 unique visitors, and the GoMoMeter has had more than 100,000 hits, according to Google and Mullen. Also, more than 400 mobile-friendly Web sites were created during the Mobilizing Mobile event, for entities that ranged from a small business, All Critters Pet Sitters, to a national scholarship competition, Distinguished Young Women, formerly known as America’s Junior Miss.

“We’re thrilled with the outcome,” said Sandra Heikkinen, a spokeswoman at Google.

In addition to the chamber’s promotion of Mobilizing Mobile, Mullen ran print, radio and online ads and used social media.

“The long-term goal is to make the city the most ‘mobilized’ in the country,” said Dustin Johnson, vice president for creative media integration at Mullen.

“In the next six months, we’ll do additional research to gauge how successful we’ve been,” he added. Plans call for replicating the effort in 2012 in other markets.

“Google likes activities, likes things people can participate in,” Mr. Johnson said, so “from the beginning, the idea of mobilizing a city was powerful.”

As for the choice of Mobile, “I think I just blurted it out at a meeting,” he said.

It turned out to be serendipitous because Mobilians “are hungry for” the initiative, Mr. Johnson said, which might not have been the case if it had taken place in a more technologically up-to-date market usually selected for such efforts like Austin, Tex., or Portland, Ore.