Situational Marketing

Carnival Of The Mobilists #116

Welcome to the Carnival of the Mobilists #116.  We're happy to be the hosts here at Situational Marketing.  Our firm is a provider for mobile and e-mail marketing services, and our blog is a collection of our thoughts and links from around the web.  This week, we have the best and the brightest in mobile marketing and advertising sharing their best posts of the week.

Take a look through the list, pick up some funnel cake, and feel free to leave comments on all the blogs you read today.

We start with the Best Post of the Week.  As always, this is a tough call, and purely subjective.  For me, Barbara Ballard took the prize, with her comparison of the Sanyo and Blackberry phones.  This may not be the high-level strategic posts that many of our guests made, but I felt this post was useful to the consumer - in this case, me.  So congratulations Barbara!

1. Barbara compares her Blackberry on AT&T with her Sanyo phone on the Sprint network, and compares NetFront to the Opera mini browser.  Changes in just the last few months have made the two services and phones far more competitive.  It's made me rethink my cell phones and data plan purchases.

2. Chetan Sharma moderated a couple of panels on Mobile Advertising at Mobile Momentum and TIE. 

The question on everyone's mind is how do we build mobile platforms and how we monetize her.  Cheten recaps his two panels and what they see in the future of Mobile advertising.

3.  Scott Beaumont at the  Mippin blog.  Scott traces steps he took to find out why his application wasn't working as well with some US mobile browsers.  It's a good detective story, easy enough to understand, even for the non-techies.  And if you're launching an application, uh, you should absolutely read this.  It's imperative.

Gateway Interactive Marketing Association

Heard the funniest thing last night about mobile marketing. It was at a GIMA panel on lead generation.  The moderator said,

"Mobile Marketing is like high school sex.  Everyone is talking about it.  Everyone thinks everyone else  is doing it.  And those who are doing it aren't doing it well."

Heh.  It's an old joke, but a good one.  It's from Katie Muldoon in 1997.

Carnival of the Mobilists is up at Mobile Messaging 2.0, number 110.

And from Escape From Cubicle Nation, I found another blog to read, Shoestring Branding.  It's all about internet tips and tricks for small businesses. More about him later.

More On Mobile Blogging

The convenience of sending text, pictures, and video to a blogsite sounds like a real winner.  The advent of citizen journalists and the belief in an Army of Davids gives rise to a culture where instant communication is  an exciting frontier for news media and social media.

Ewan of SMS Text News says that it's not working out how he liked.

Daniel’s been taking a look at mobile blogging — that is, blogging via your handset — and found nearly every offering to be substandard or in many cases, non existing. Most services rely on you using an email gateway — i.e. you email from your Blackberry or handset, that email is then converted into a blog post. I used this regularly when I was with Typepad.

What I really want is a symbian native wordpress client. Then I’ll be happy. Or a Blackberry wordpress client. Or a WINDOWS wordpress client. ANYTHING. I tried offering paying people to make some software for me but alas, no one wanted to know.

The original idea came from Dan over at Dan's blog 2.0. 

So I’ve been doing some research on mobile blogging, trying to find the best solutions out there. The situation is pretty dire. So far, it looks like the best solution out there is actually from Windows Live (née MSN) Spaces. Windows Live actually lets you register, create a blog and start publishing it all through the mobile browser.

In contrast, Blogger has some information on mobile blogging that involves a convoluted “email to post” (which only works with U.S. carriers by the way — HELLO PEOPLE - THE WEB IS GLOBAL). TypePad claims “industry leading” mobile features but doesn’t seem to have any way to sing up or create a blog from the mobile and it’s also e-mail based. You can use Nokia Lifeblog with Typepad but you need to have a Nokia phone to do this. Wordpress is likewise a wash. Vox doesn’t have obvious mobile support either.

The comment sections of both sites are must reads for those involved.  I'm dying for a solution as well, but I thought it was because I hadn't upgraded my cell phone as of yet.  My interest is more than elementary - clients want the newest and greatest, and one of those services I sell is instant marketing.  Video and audio and pictures, and yes, live posts sent from the cell.

In addition to finding a service, I'd like to know which handset/PDA would most help facilitate my blogging.  Do I go with the IPhone, or is there a better answer?

The Downside Of SMS And A Connected Audience

SMS is a wonderful tool to connect clients and customer, families and friends, and even political campaigns to voters.  The instant connection makes it easy to forward small messages to large groups of people, using the ease of communication to organize and plan.

That ease of communication can have negative effects, like the recent story in the Washington Post picked up by SMS Text News.  Someone looking to get out of exams apparently set off a rumor that quickly spread by texting throughout the school and to parents about a school shooting and suicide, clearing out an Arkansas school and setting off a local panic.

Rumors spread by cell phone text-messaging flew through a school after a student's suicide, rumors that other kids planned to kill themselves, that students planned to bring weapons to school, that there was going to be "a shoot 'em up." Panicked parents rushed to take their children home.

But police and officials at Augusta High School say the panic turned out to be only a way for students to avoid taking semester-ending exams.

The long-term effects of being able to mobilize people is positive, and will be credited with helping people in emergencies, the same way IM was credited with sharing information during 9/11.  At the same time, the potential for rumors to spread, especially among interconnected and inflammable student populations creates a new category of concern for principals and parents.

I wonder when the first politician will jump in and write the legislation that bans texting rumors on the same basis as the laws banning the yelling of "Fire!" in a crowded theater?

Let's All Go To The Lobby, To Do Some Texting...

I was a latecomer to the text marketing world.  My mother learned to text before I did, and that's saying something  Part of the problem is the uses of texting weren't fleshed out.  I preferred to speak to someone, or write a proper e-mail, which is why to this day I still don't turn on my IM client.

Well, all that's changed.  While I still don't socially text, I have been making use of various commercial versions of mobile marketing.  They help me get what I want, when I want it, and if these companies are smart about it, they're using my interest in texting to build a database of people like me interested in their products.

Two uses of texting I've noticed and heartily approve of:

Test Case 1:  The Movies:  National Treasure is officially a blockbuster, bringing in scores of moviegoers to watch Nick Cage figure out who really was responsible for Lincoln's assassination.  The texting?  The advertisements for the movie tell  you to text the word 'Treasure" to a number, and they'll send you showtimes for the movie.  I don't have the exact number, but saw it in the Post-Dispatch this weekend.

It's a smart piece of marketing - subtle, but if you forget the time, or want to check different times while out, you can shoot a text message and get all the info you need.  You can also tell friends how to do so, if you really like the movie, opening up a viral effect from word-of-mouth (the key to viral is having a message that is easy to repeat).

This is all part of a larger marketing puzzle ($160 million in total), that's keeping NT at the top of the movie list during the holidays.  It's doubtful you have a $160 million in your marketing budget, but what ideas can you borrow for your marketing campaigns?

T-Mobile Doesn't Support Social Messaging

My son is 14 and actively participates in the social media mega spot, Facebook. As a mom, I was a bit leery at first of allowing him to set up his own Facebook account, what with all the horror stories I have read and heard about cyber bullying and what not. However, we both agreed that if he wanted to be a part of this growing social platform, then I was to have full access to his account at all times.

What I find very helpful is the fact that I can receive mobile text alerts, through AT&T wireless, every time my son gets poked, receives a message or a friendship update. This keeps me on top of who he is communicating with and about what. Lack of privacy? Sure, but he's only 14 and his safety is more important to me than his personal space.

Darla, over at Mobile Messaging 2.0, recently found out that T-Mobile does not have a contract with Facebook and therefore this form of messaging is not available to anyone who's wireless carrier is T-Mobile. In a world booming with social media, I would have to agree with Darla and conclude that every mobile carrier should provide access to all social media applications.

We, Blast Companies, know how to do this.  One could even call us a leader in the area of mobile messaging.  T-Mobile - if you're reading - give us a call and we'll show you how to build an entire campaign around social messaging on Facebook.  And if you're a company looking to contact customers on all wireless networks, we do that too.

-Kristen