Optism™

This week, we shine the spotlight on the importance of consumer privacy and congratulate those who are making effective use of SMS mobile marketing to promote their business.

This week Warren Moss at Mediaonline provides some sound advice in his article “SMS marketing: do it right to protect your brand.” He does so by illustrating “what not to do,” using an example of the recent South African local elections in which mass unsolicited SMS campaigns were delivered by the ANC and DA political parties. Moss points out that while the campaigns were legal, there were some crucial compliance requirements in South Africa’s Consumer Protection Act that they should have taken into account. Read the rest of this entry »

This week MobileGroove features Optism’s own Hani Ramzi as guest columnist. Hani writes about how successful businesses understand the importance of “keeping it simple.” As Hani says, “Complexity distracts companies from zeroing in on key growth areas and opportunities that generate the most profits….Keeping it simple is not just a way to streamline where is counts; it’s the way to make it big.”

In his article, he pays particular attention to how to apply the “keep it simple” approach to permission mobile marketing. He looks at how a simple strategy like permission-based SMS marketing can benefit each member of the ecosystem: customers, mobile operators, agencies and advertisers. The point isn’t to have the most complex or elaborate creative, it’s to be relevant and offer people an easy way to engage with you. Excellent advice. You can read the article here.

Optism provides permission-based, mobile marketing services. Providing the opportunity for mobile subscribers to opt-in to advertising messages based on their preferences is the core tenant of our service. Our blog series Permission Marketing in the News has been highlighting mobile and other permission marketing news for the past year. The leading proponent of permission marketing is Seth Godin who coined the term in his book Permission Marketing in 1999. To celebrate our one year anniversary, we are running a series of blog posts summarizing his book chapter by chapter and analyzing how changes in the mobile and advertising marketplace have impacted the recommendations in his book.

Here is our summary of Chapter One.

In Chapter Two of Permission Marketing by Seth Godin, he shows how marketers could start using permission marketing instead of interruption marketing.

Godin starts off the chapter by stating a key point about today’s economy:  consumers have limited time and attention, while marketers are trying to gain that attention. To illustrate this point, Godin presents an analogy about two gentlemen: the interruption marketer and the permission marketer. Each of them wants to get married but they have different approaches. Read the rest of this entry »