Situational Marketing

Wireless Amber Alerts

The Ad Council is sponsoring a series of commercials about Amber Alerts, the community response system in place for children who have gone missing.

The first three hours after a child abduction are the most important, and the Amber Alert system takes advantage of the eyeballs in the community to help law enforcement track down the abductors.

It's a great system, and one that works with citizens, rather than against them.

Which is why the latest technology upgrade to use SMS text messaging for Amber Alerts is such a great idea.  In addition to radio, television, and press releases, you can sign up for Amber Alerts on your phone, which means that driving around, you might be in the position to help save a child.

https://www.wirelessamberalerts.org is the site, and I urge you to join.  Just Text the word "Amber" followed by a space and your Zip code, and you'll be enrolled. You can stop at anytime, but it's a valuable service, and mobile bloggers can make a difference by writing about it and  linking to the website.

GIMA Meeting, Starring Chris Torbit!

Over 82% of the US population has a cell phone thus liberating our audiences from their computer screen and opening up to new ways of targeted marketing. This month, our panel of experts will discuss how to get started in mobile marketing, along with reviewing some of the most successful strategies they have encountered in the space.

Our panelists:
Rob Sprungman, Director of Sales, Midwest, AdMob - the world's largest mobile marketplace for advertisers while offering a surgical level of targeting through content, device, carrier, etc. Rob most recently was the Midwest Sales Manager for Electronic Arts (EASports.com, EA.com, and POGO.com) and has been in the interactive space for nearly ten years. Prior to interactive, Rob was a media manager and buyer for Montgomery Ward.

Chris Torbit, President and Founder, Blast Companies -  offering emerging communication applications and marketing services in text messaging, email marketing, mobile marketing and voice broadcasting that enable clients to effectively communicate with their target audience.

Steven Kelley, CEO and Founder, MessageBuzz - an innovative solution provider of choice to advertising agencies creating mobile marketing campaigns and strategic mobile communication solutions for their clients.

Join us and interact with the fast-growing St. Louis interactive community!
When:  Wednesday, April 16, 6-9 p.m.
           6-7 Networking - refreshments and heavy hor d'oeuvres
           7-8 Presentation
           8-9 More networking
Where: Monarch Restaurant, 7401 Manchester Rd, Maplewood, MO 63143, (314) 644-3995

To register at the GIMA site (Gateway Interactive Marketing Association)

No cost to you, thanks to our sponsors:

                                          

Selling Capacity For The 2008 Political Campaign

The calls have started coming in about voice broadcast, e-mail marketing, and text messaging for political campaigns.  Most political consultants are focused on the cost of robocalls, but there's more to an online campaign and messaging that voice broadcast. 

The smart campaigns are taking advantage of the internet to drive political messages, organize volunteers, and in the case of the presidential campaigns, raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

Don't get left behind.  Yes, you can contact us at Voterblast to talk about  your voice broadcast needs (it's cheaper now to reserve capacity), but be thinking about how you can use text clubs, e-mails, and blogs to affect your local district and state races.

What Do Mobile Customers Really Want?

It seems to be a question keeping a lot of us up at night:

Ewan takes some thoughts down from actual normobs (normal mobile users).

One of his commenters says it's predictability (I agree with that)

Kim lays it out in her blog series, and says it's location.

This is the no-brainer category of information to provide for your customers via mobile. Location-specific knowledge is the number one reason that people access the mobile web for mobile search.

That's true today - but I was at the Apple Store thinking about the upcoming uses for mobile phones.

I felt pretty cool, but now that we have smart phones and the iPhone and web access with cheap data plans, the possibility of doing live shopping without the help of someone at home is really going to take off. In addition to shopping at retail stores, we can comparison shop with friends, setting location against location, and pitting both against online versions.

Opt-In Complaints In SMS Messaging

Clients often call or write in asking us for list management, or wanting to broadcast marketing messages to people's cell phones and e-mail addresses.  In the rush to drive value from their marketing campaigns, far too man companies forget to address both legal and common-sense requirements in messaging.

Spam is not just Viagra e-mails and online poker rooms.  It's actually very easy to be categorized as a spammer, and if you aren't conducting a valid compliance check on your e-mail and mobile lists, you can run afoul of the law with heavy penalties.  And that's if you're lucky.  Worse than the penalties is the danger of broadcasting a message that has a negative effect on your intended audience.

Spending money that makes prospective customers actively work against your company should be the number one concern of online marketers.  Like Doctors, the goal of your marketing firm should be first, do no harm.

Mobivity addresses this point in defining what opt-in means.  It doesn't mean spam your customers and tell them to opt-out.

SMS marketing has clearly suffered from the email SPAM epidemic, and we work really hard to keep it honest and respectable.

What really gets to me is receiving unsolicited emails from SMS vendors all over the world that are clearly not directed to me personally. If you want me to consider your services, at least find out my name and email, and send me a note. Don’t throw our INFO email address on your list and start the spam stream!

It's a simple thing to understand. Don't take actions that require your customers to perform your data cleansing for you.  Those customers have access to the web, and may not be happy with you.  Which means you'll hear about it from them.

Carnival Of The Mobilists #116

Welcome to the Carnival of the Mobilists #116.  We're happy to be the hosts here at Situational Marketing.  Our firm is a provider for mobile and e-mail marketing services, and our blog is a collection of our thoughts and links from around the web.  This week, we have the best and the brightest in mobile marketing and advertising sharing their best posts of the week.

Take a look through the list, pick up some funnel cake, and feel free to leave comments on all the blogs you read today.

We start with the Best Post of the Week.  As always, this is a tough call, and purely subjective.  For me, Barbara Ballard took the prize, with her comparison of the Sanyo and Blackberry phones.  This may not be the high-level strategic posts that many of our guests made, but I felt this post was useful to the consumer - in this case, me.  So congratulations Barbara!

1. Barbara compares her Blackberry on AT&T with her Sanyo phone on the Sprint network, and compares NetFront to the Opera mini browser.  Changes in just the last few months have made the two services and phones far more competitive.  It's made me rethink my cell phones and data plan purchases.

2. Chetan Sharma moderated a couple of panels on Mobile Advertising at Mobile Momentum and TIE. 

The question on everyone's mind is how do we build mobile platforms and how we monetize her.  Cheten recaps his two panels and what they see in the future of Mobile advertising.

3.  Scott Beaumont at the  Mippin blog.  Scott traces steps he took to find out why his application wasn't working as well with some US mobile browsers.  It's a good detective story, easy enough to understand, even for the non-techies.  And if you're launching an application, uh, you should absolutely read this.  It's imperative.

Hosting Carnival Of The Mobilists Monday

We've got the Monday, March 24th Carnival of the Mobilists, so be sure to send in your entries to mobilists@gmail.com before Sunday at 5:00

Integrating Your E-mail Marketing With Blogging

Smart e-mail marketers know that bulky e-mail attachments clog up inboxes and don't get read.  A lightweight HTML newsletter that gives portions of the content but drives readers back to a website is the key to adding traffic and getting read.

It's an old trick, but a good one.  But it usually means you have to create the content for a newsletter and post it in two places - your e-mail marketing piece and your website.  If you're interested in displaying the same amount of information without doing double work, I'd suggest you start using a blog software as a content management system.  Blogposts are published using HTML.  It's very simple to take a blogpost and turn it into an e-mail newsletter.  At the same time, writing and posting just once a week gives you four articles to add to the newsletter.

Some people read content from the newsletter, and some read it online.  If you're looking to save time (and improve your SEO), learn to publish blogs that can be reconstituted as your monthly newsletter.  It's as easy as write, publish, and send.

Using PPC In Your Marketing Plans

I'm not a big fan of PPC for marketing. It's not that I don't think it works - it's that I don't think it works for most people.  I can't tell you the number of clients I've seen who've dropped a grand or two into PPC and had no results.  Or $50 a month with no results, but hey, it's just $50 a month, right?

PPC is a discipline, and as such, it takes someone who knows what they're doing to get it right.  The limited PPC campaigns I run are for branding, so I'm not an expert.  I know just enough to tell you if you're wasting your money or not, but your accountant can do that.

So I turn to people who do know what they're doing. One is RobDogg, a commenter from February who writes about online marketing, and clearly understands the correct way to run PPC campaigns.  In this post, he covers Grouping of Ad Words in a video tutorial on bridal dresses.  It's 15 minutes, but if you're running a campaign, it's 15 minutes well spent. 

Hey RobbDogg - if you want to integrate with us for texting, e-mail, or voice broadcasts, let me know.  You're now on my short list for PPC referrals. 

SMS For Political Donations

The next great feature of the SMS marketing world is waiting to be used.  All you need to do is convince the FEC that donations by text are a function of a free and fair election process.

The big news this year has been microdonations - donations to political campaigns that are less than $100. Barack Obama has set new records for money raised with donations from over a million donors. These donors are not tracked under $100 (which should raise eyebrows but doesn't), but what if you could drop the limit down to $10.

Imagine this.  You're at a rally with 10,000 people.  You ask them to pull out their mobile phones, and in a display of solidarity, donate $10 to the candidates by texting the name of the candidate to a number on a screen.  If half of the people comply, you're just raised $50,000. Well, actually you've raised $50,000 minus the cost of the calls, which would actually be substantial with today's carriers.

But what if you could get the carriers to go down to $1, $1.50 a call - and take the $8.50 for your candidate?  Instant fundraising, tracked through the mobile phone bill.  It's the ultimate in direct democracy, and it's going on in Korea.  Why isn't it going on in the United States?