Optism™

Heads up folks! Tuesday, December 6th, you are invited to a free Mobile Marketing Association webinar featuring Optism's own Mihai Vlad, Head of Audience Management.

Permission mobile marketing provides a unique opportunity to get up close and personal with people, but you need to recognize the very human nature of connecting via a mobile phone. And you need to demonstrate quickly that what you are offering – your content – is worth paying attention to. You need to focus not only on getting someone's opt-in, but also on strategies for keeping them engaged. The webinar will provide several best practices for doing just that.

Sign up now for this MMA webinar.

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 are our summaries of earlier chapters: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight.

Seth starts Chapter Nine with a look at the impact the Internet will have on the world. In 1999, the Internet – or at least broad public access to it – was still very new. Still, it was already making billionaires out of the visionaries who figured out quickly how to make the most of this new phenomenon.

Seth identifies six key benefits that the Internet offers direct marketers – many of which we can now also claim for mobile marketing. With some paraphrasing and modernizing of Seth’s original text, these benefits are:

1. No postage costs
2. Testing any campaign or initiative can be completed very quickly
3. Response rates are high
4. You can educate people about your product and build their appreciation for its virtues over time (referred to by Seth as “curriculum marketing”
5. Once you’ve made a connection with someone, you can keep the conversation going with little or no additional cost
6. Printing is free (printing is done by the consumer, not you) Read the rest of this entry »

It’s celebration time again at Optism! We’ve just announced our recent expansion into Ghana, working with Tigo (Millicom International Cellular), a leading supplier of mobile services in West Africa and Latin America. Ghana is enjoying an exciting period of economic development and the mobile services market is extremely competitive. Tigo wanted to increase revenues and differentiate its services from its many competitors. It also wanted to meet the needs of advertisers and deliver value to its subscribers. Read the rest of this entry »