Optism™

Here is our weekly collection of articles we found interesting. We hope you find these of value in your mobile marketing endeavors.

Check out the New TV episode from mobileYouth TV MYTV. Graham Brown provides his opinions on how to engage with an important demographic – the youth market – including how to use earned media strategies to engage with people by creating dialogues.

If you’re planning to employ coupons in your mobile marketing campaign, you’ll want to check out a recent article on Moto Message. The article highlights the advantages of mobile couponing over traditional paper coupons. It includes compelling stats on redemption rates, along with a selection of best practices for ensuring successful campaigns. We believe mobile marketing works best when you have people’s permission first and have asked what their interests are. This can go a long way in ensuring there is clear value for the coupon recipient, which has a proven effect on redemption rates.

In this brief video, home-based business adviser Kristen Darkenwald presents her rationale for getting into mobile marketing. It’s short and simple: according to Darkenwald, mobile marketing provides three times the return over traditional email marketing. We applaud Kristen for strongly encouraging marketers to consider mobile as an effective marketing channel, although we would caution advertisers to rely on permission based marketing services to ensure their messages aren’t perceived as spam. This is the foundation on which we built Optism.

For a different perspective on where marketing is going, see Jonathan Salem Baskin’s article It’s the Sales That Matter, and That Hasn’t Changed. We certainly agree with his statement that “ads aren’t credible when they’re useless or dishonest”, but we think his argument that ads will be welcome if they are relevant, they address an immediate need and they deliver meaning is missing one vital attribute: the person’s permission to enter their universe. Baskin cites as an example for immediacy, sending people a message that “there’s a sale at the store in front of you”. Our research suggests that’s only of interest to people if the store is in fact of interest to them. And you’ll only know that if, after you asked for their permission to connect them with information they may find useful, you also asked them what they are interested in. In other words, don’t interrupt me on my personal device to tell me golf clubs are on sale. I don’t golf!

Media Buzz reviews a recent Smaato publication and interviews Co-Founder and CMO, Harald Neidhardt about mobile advertising growth in Asia-Pacific. This article provides good current stats on this vibrant market (e.g., “total spending in the mobile advertising market will be about $1.5 billion in 2010 in the region”) and considers some of the challenges of working with the diverse cultures.

There’s a lot of helpful information out there in cyberspace and we hope you are enjoying our weekly roundups of things we found particularly interesting. If you find any articles you would like us to consider for review, please tweet us @optismww. We will give you full credit for finding things of interest!