Optism™

Welcome to Optism’s first blog acting as curator for the Carnival of the Mobilists. In our dynamic industry, we’ve found that keeping abreast of what ecosystem members are saying is critical to staying on top. That’s why we published our Permission Marketing in the News blogs for almost two years! Now, we’re happy and honored to be a Carnival of the Mobilists host — and we’ve got a great collection of articles to suggest to you this week.

Our favorite comes from mobileweb company’s Martin Wilson. Martin shared his thoughts on responsive web design and why he believes it is falling far short of what people need. According to Martin, responsive web design is “a lazy way to approach mobile.” It focuses on delivering content that suits the size, platform and orientation of the device in use, rather than the needs of the mobile user. Because the content is PC oriented, it includes information that is not relevant in a mobile context and bulky graphics that bog down the mobile experience. Worse still, the information the user is most likely to be interested in, such as store locations, is often buried under pages of this unwanted stuff. Mobile, says Martin, can’t be an afterthought. It’s time for businesses to think about “mobile leading their online strategy.”

Other interesting posts from this week: Read the rest of this entry »

With the maturing of mobile marketing, we’re starting to see changes in how marketers are approaching mobile, although as we see from the first item below, change is sometimes very slow.

InternetRetailing reviews the results of recent research conducted by M-Retailing and Sponge, a mobile marketing company. One of the main findings of the research was that “Retailers see mobile as a business essential but many [are] unsure how to maximize potential.” Sponge’s Phil Gault noted, “Our second wave of research has found that only 42% of retailers use mobile to drive traffic to their websites or stores. That’s a massive missed opportunity.” Read the rest of this entry »

This week we have a few articles with news from last week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) as well as several pieces with advice on how to maximize the value of mobile marketing campaigns.

MSearchGroove columnist Jeff Hasen takes a look at where Google and Twitter stand in terms of mobile advertising. Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo used their keynote addresses at MWC to present their visions for the future of mobile advertising. As always with Google, it comes down to creativity, innovation and technology. In his address, Schmidt told us, “the tools and technology that allow us to do targeted TV quality ads — again with permission and without violating privacy — is the next great frontier in advertising.” Read the rest of this entry »