Optism™

This week marks our final Permission marketing in the news roundup for 2011. What a great year it has been! To send us all off to year-end celebrations in the right mood, we have reports on Mobile Marketer’s “Marketer of the Year” as well as some inspiring video of mobile campaigns from Mobile Marketing magazine. Also, we hope you will indulge us with our first two pieces, which feature our own recent publications.

Hot off the press, we’d like to draw your attention to a new article by Optism’s Lisa Ciangiulli, published on MobileGroove. In “Why Starbucks’ Mobile Strategy Sets The Bar(rista)” Lisa commends Starbucks for demonstrating their “respect for us (the customer) and a deep understanding of what we need on the move.” Lisa believes the most “effective advertising delivers us value.” And for Lisa, an on-the-go multi-tasking mom and marketing expert, Starbucks delivers the perfect mix of “utility and familiarity.”

Recently named the “Best iPhone Lifestyle App in the U.S.”, the Starbucks app enables people to use their smartphones to make mobile payments, track their Starbucks rewards and send e-gifts to loved ones. In her article, Lisa explores how Starbucks has succeeded by “paying meticulous attention to…the Three Rs of mobile marketing: respect, reinforcement and repeating.”

This week also marked the conclusion of our review of Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. The series was conceived as a fitting way to celebrate Optism’s one year anniversary. Over the past several months, we’ve featured a chapter-by-chapter review of Seth’s seminal book and analyzed how changes in the mobile and advertising marketplace have impacted the recommendations in his book. We hope you have enjoyed this series. For us, it’s been an opportunity both to be impressed with how innovative Seth’s original work was and to see how far we’ve come as an industry. At Optism, we are firmly committed to permission-based mobile marketing. Read the rest of this entry »

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, Eight and Nine.

In Chapter 10, Seth provides examples of companies that “have done it right, and some that haven’t.” Some of the companies he focuses on have thrived and continue to be dynamic retailers today, such as AOL and Amazon. Others – even some of the ones that were using permission marketing effectively – have disappeared. As we all know, the last 12 years have been tough ones!

The case studies provide good examples of permission marketing techniques in practice. Today, we can supplement Seth’s email-focused case studies with ones from the permission-based mobile marketing world.

Reach receptive audiences with targeted messages

Seth starts us off with an example of an opportunity missed. A kosher gourmet shop is advertising the availability of Passover dishes in an expensive, general population publication (The New York Times). It would be far more cost effective to direct advertising for these special-purpose products to a targeted audience. As a result, “the ad is wasted on the 95 percent or more of readers who have no interest in or desire for this product.” Adding insult to injury, the ad the shop uses doesn’t work visually – it’s too small and the call to action is unclear. Read the rest of this entry »

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.