What is Mobile Marketing?

Mobile Marketing involves communicating with the consumer via cellular (or mobile) device, either to send a simple marketing message, to introduce them to a new audience participation-based campaign or to allow them to visit a mobile website. Some of the tools of the trade and a few of the concepts that will be featured in this Mobile Marketing 101 article are:

• Short Message Services (SMS) also known as texts.
• Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS).
• Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD).
• Bluetooth, Wireless and Infrared.
• Mobile Internet and Social Media.
• Mobile Applications.

Mobile connectivity not only enables people to connect to the Internet via a cellular telephone, PDA or other gadget, but also consolidates the different communication channels in a simple, yet effective, medium. Cheaper than traditional means for both the consumer and the marketer - and easy enough for almost any age group to understand and engage with - Mobile Marketing really is a streamlined version of traditional eMarketing.

Facts and Figures
Let’s look at some interesting Mobile Marketing statistics:
Even in the US, SMS technology was not widely used until only a few years ago – but
in June 2008, CellSigns reported that over 75 billion SMS were sent each month
(contrast against only 18 billion just 18 months before). It was most likely Idol’s SMS voting system that got Americans texting.

Experian, a marketing services provider in the US, estimates that the number of
SMS users (approximately 1.8 billion at present) is twice that of active email users. These text messages are generally read within 15 minutes and responded to within the hour – compared to email communication which could go unread for days. Experian, The Standard, MarketTree and Cellnumbers.com relay the following
statistics about international mobile users: 30 countries exceeded the 100% mobile device to population ratio.

As you can probably imagine, the younger generation are able to recall a lot more Mobile Marketing content than Generation X and the Baby Boomers. The younger users are more in tune with Mobile Marketing due to the increased connectivity and a general interest in market related news.

Further Discussion Points
How does your audience connect to the Internet?
How can you contact those without mobile Internet connectivity?
Which mobile medium does your target audience communicate with its peers
(SMS, voice, mobile social networks)?
How can you use mobile content such as video or games to spread your message?
How can you make your marketing/advertising campaign engaging for the users
(and avoid it being spam-like)
However, only 80% of the population of the US were mobile users.
60% of the world’s population (4.1 billion) are mobile users.
China has over 400 million subscribers.
There are over 50 million subscribers in Indonesia.

In 2006, there were 241 million mobile users in the US alone (out of a total of a possible 332,156 million people in North America).

98% of all handsets in the US have SMS capabilities.
68.7 milion US citizens use SMS and text services.

Although a relatively new service to the US, over 300 billion SMS messages were sent in 2007. South Africa is 6 th in the world for mobile Internet connectivity (which can probably be contributed to the lack of traditional, desktop based Internet connectivity).

And Some More...
Over 70% of South African mobile subscribers do not own a land line connection. Surprisingly, South Africans over the age of 50 spend more on their mobile communication than their junior counterparts.
Only 10% of SMS messages are spam (compared to over 65% of email). The average American text message user in late 2008 sent 357 SMS messages per month and made or received 204 calls, compared to early 2006 where the average user sent 198 texts and made or received 198 calls.
A study of South Africa’s Mobile connectivity estimated 19 million active mobile users in 2006. As coverage increases, so does the connectivity, with 90% of all new cellular connections in the country being prepaid and top-up packages. (NOTE: South African figures are estimates only as Vodacom is the only service provider
willing to release data.)
According to African Telecoms News, Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa have the fastest growing mobile markets. In most areas of East Africa, mobile phone taxes range between 25% - 30%, compared to the 17% average of the continent.
Nielsen Mobile reported in mid-2008, that 51% of US mobile users responded to some or other form of mobile advertising; while Jeff Herrmann went on to say that “only 10% of data users say they find mobile advertising acceptable”.

The most common mobile media content categories in use today include:

1. Portals
2. Email
3. Weather
4. News/politics
5. Search
6. Business/finance (especially since the recent economic downturn)

Who’s Connected?
Known as the Baby Boomers - the generation born between the 1940s and 1960s, predominantly in the US and UK - form today’s older online market. Born between the 1960s and 1980s, Generation X are more connected than their senior counterparts. They are tech-savvy, but remember a life before the Web, unlike
the younger Generation Y – today’s teens and 20-somethings - who have generally known the online world from an early age.

Blogging Dictionary

Adverblog
A blog that advertises a product or service.

Audioblog
A blog where the posts consist mainly of voice recordings.

Blegging
Blogging for freebies (money, help, etc.).

Blego
A combination of the words Blog and Ego, used to describe the actions of bloggers who write as to their own self worth.

Blink
Short for “web link”; a bookmark or URL

Blog
A blog is a website in which journal entries are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. A blog comprises hypertext, images, and links (to other webpages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular “area of interest”, such as Washington, D.C.’s political goings-on. Some blogs discuss personal experiences. Blogs can be hosted by a blog hosting service, or can be run by a user with blog software on a regular web hosting service.

Blog Posts/Posts/Entries
Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”.

Blog swarm
In BLOG, Hugh devotes a chapter to blog swarms and opinion storms. The analogy describes what happens when dozens of bloggers “swarm” around an issue/story like...a swarm of bees. That’s the image. An opinion storm is the result of a blog swarm.

Secondly, I need to clear up something. What happens when bloggers descend on an issue is a blog swarm – two words – not a blogswarm, blogstorm or blog storm. This a pet peeve of mine, and I cringe whenever I see “blogstorm.”

Blogfoo’d
A comment on a blog was directed at you without using your name.

Blogger
1. A person who posts entries into their blog.

2. Google’s free software program, which allows you to create a blog. They purchased the software rights from Pyra Labs in February 2003.

Bloggerville
A term used to describe the blog community

Blogging
Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called "blogging"

Blogosphere (alternate: BlogSphere or BloggingSphere)
The collective term encompassing all weblogs or blogs as a community or social network. Many weblogs are densely interconnected; bloggers read others' blogs, link to them, reference them in their own writing, and post comments on each others' blogs. Because of this, the interconnected blogs have grown their own culture.
The term blogosphere was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke [1]. It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick (quite seriously) [2] and was quickly adopted and promulgated by the warblog community.

Blogover
A weblog redesign; done by someone other than the author or with outside consultation; see also webloglog. (Thanks to Jish for the word!)

Blogroll
A collection of links to other weblogs. When present, blogrolls are often found on the front page sidebar of most weblogs.

Blogvana
1. (n) - the state entered by a blogger when that person's blog reaches a popularity level which is in direct proportion to the number of things needed to be blogged about its readers; the state at which the number of personal family, friends, or acquaintances of the blogger equals or exceeds the number of neuroses carried by the blogger in question; bloggers reach this state and either quit (become "losers") or forge ahead (become "the blogger elite").

2. the state at which a blogger no longer tries to hide the fact that s/he is ego-surfing; a blogger who is in blogvana will click directly on their link from an ego-surf and not try to cut and paste or open new windows to hide the fact that s/he is ego-surfing.

Blogware
Commonly used in reference to the tools used to write blogs, such as WordPress or Movable Type.

Blurker
One who reads many blogs but leaves no evidence of themselves such as comments behind; a silent observer of blogs. 2. One who reads many blogs but has no blog of their own; a blog-watcher or blog voyeur. (It was coined (at least for me) by the ultimate blurker herself, Liz. Mike.)

Dark Blog
Blogs hidden behind corporate firewalls that the public does not have access to. Many companies are using dark blogs because they speed up internal communications and allow information to be shared within the corporation.

Featurette
A "special" item on a blogger's blog, usually relevant to Bloggerville residents and no one else.

How Blogs Differ from Forums or Newsgroups
Blogs are different from forums or newsgroups. Only the author or authoring group can create new subjects for discussion on a blog. A network of blogs can function like a forum in that every entity in the blog network can create subjects of their choosing for others to discuss. Such networks require interlinking to function, so a group blog with multiple people holding posting rights is now becoming more common. Even where others post to a blog, the blog owner will
initiate and frame discussion.

HTML
Acronym: "hyper-text markup language"; this is not technically a programming "language"; it is a sort of code which browsers interpret to present web sites to people on line.

Internet troll
In Internet terminology, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory messages on the Internet, such as on online discussion forums, to disrupt discussion or to upset its participants. "Troll" can also mean the inflammatory message itself posted by a troll or be a verb meaning to post such messages. "Trolling" is also commonly used to describe the activity.

Link rot
The process by which links on a website gradually become more irrelevant or broken as time goes on, because the websites that are linked to disappear, change content or redirect to a new location.

The phrase also describes the effects of failing to update webpages so that they become out-of-date, containing information that is old and useless, and that clutters up search engine results. This process most frequently occurs in personal homepages that the owner has lost interest in, and is prevalent in free webhosts such as GeoCities, where there is no financial incentive to fix link rot.

Meme
An idea, project, statement or even a question that is posted by one blog and responded to by other blogs. Although the term encompasses much of the natural flow of communication in the Blogosphere, there are active bloggers and blog sites that are dedicated to the creation of memes on a regular basis.

Milblog
A soldier's military chronicle.

Moblog
Literally a mobile phone blog, a form of photoblog that consists of the photographs taken on users mobile phones. Particularly useful at times of crisis and major events, in which mobloggers (mobile phone bloggers) post direct pictures from the scene.

MP3 Blog
A blog that hosts downloadable music in the MP3 audio file format.

Permalink
A hyperlink on a blog which links to a specific post. A permalink (a portmanteau made by contracting the phrase "permanent link") is a type of URL designed to refer to a specific information item (often a news story or blog item) and to remain unchanged permanently, or at least for a lengthy period of time to prevent link rot.

Ping
A ping is a program that checks to see if a remote computer is working. In the blogging world it is a way to let other computers know that you have updated your blog.

Podcast/Podcasting
A form of audio blogging created by Adam Curry, a former MTV Host, and Dave Winer, the founder of Userland Software. Its name comes from the targeting of audio posts to Apples iPod audio player, although podcasts can be listened to on competing players and on computers.

RSS
The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider it’s meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It creates an index of your messages (posts) that others can access, if you allow it. It may show just the headline or the headline and a summary of your post.
Visitors to your blog can sign up on your blog to be notified when you make updates. This is called an ‘RSS feed’ and can be read by an aggregator (similar to how your email shows you who has sent you a message.)

Simulblogulation
The (pointless) act of identical content being posted to several weblogs simultaneously.

Trackback
TrackBack is a type of peer-to-peer communication system that was designed to send notification of updates between two Web sites via a Trackback Ping. Ping in reference to TrackBack refers to a small message sent from one Web server to another. TrackBacks are useful for informing a Web site that you have referenced its Web site within your own Web site, and is popular with bloggers. TrackBack was first released as an open specification in August 2002

Vblog/Vlog
Video Blog: a blog that consists of video posts.

Blogging Plan - Day 7

On day 6 we used a few sites to get traffic to our blog.

Day 7 – Check, Improve and Market Like Crazy

Objective: To gather data on your site’s performance. With that data do some minor changes to your site and continue to market it.

Login to your Google Adsense account, and check your stats. See how much money you’ve made, and notice all the other stats. Notice how many people click on your ads (CTR).

Login to your Cpanel account, and it is click on “Webstats” and check for the “Awstats” function. See how many visitors came to your blog in the past month. Identify which websites they are coming from. Identify what keywords they typed into the search engines, and which search engines they used.

Did anyone come from Technorati? How many people came from Google and what keywords did they type to find you? Do you have this keyword in your list? If not, add it to your list and create more posts containing these keywords.

The more you know about what’s happening, the more you know what to improve.

Go to Google and type in this instruction in their search box: site:yourdomain.com

Clicks on “Search”. See if Google has already indexed some pages from your site. If you’ve followed the guide so far, your site should already be indexed. If not, check back in a few days and you should see your main page indexed.

You’re now at the end of day 7, where you should take a complete break from all your Internet activities. Read up more on your niche market, or just do something else not related to your blog.

Then set-up a working schedule, clearly writing how much content you can post in a day, how many directories you can submit to, how many articles you can submit, and how many blogs you can read and comment on a daily or weekly basis.

Last, all you need to do is to repeat days 1-7 over and over again. Along the way, you’ll pick up some of your own ways of doing things, and apply them.

As you Adsense income increases, you may want to consider other forms of monetization to your blog to make even more money and maximizing your return on investment.