THE NOOC BLOGS

With mobile devices we can do all kinds of things—check our flight schedule, transfer money from one account to another, pay our credit card bill, make a hotel reservation, check our investment portfolio, take and send a picture, watch a video, check the score of the baseball game, check the weather in Topeka. With the new 3G devices we can do even more, faster.

The mobile marketplace is significant. There are over 1.8 billion people out there with a mobile device capable of voice, text, image, and Internet communication. This number is increasing at a rapid pace as less-developed countries like China and India are going straight to wireless for their phones. We are seeing swift and wide acceptance with over 350 billion text messages exchanged over the world’s mobile networks each month. The Yankee Group tells us that over 15 percent of these messages are classified as commercial or marketing messages, telling me that there are 52.5 billion marketing messages currently being exchanged monthly.

Mobile marketing is a marketer’s dream. It allows direct, personal communication in real time with the opportunity for immediate, direct response. There are a number of mobile marketing opportunities—instant messaging, location-based services, profile-specific advertising, subscribed content, SMS (short messaging service), MMS (multimedia messaging service), and mobile blogging.