Hofstra University alum and social media guru Michael Della Penna (who tweets at @mikepenna) writes widely on marketing practices. In a recent column, Della Penna identified “10 Relationship-First Mobile Marketing Best Practices”: “There is little doubt that mobile marketing has become the dream channel for marketers. Not only is it ubiquitous – there are five times as many mobile phones in the world today as PCs – but its real-time nature and commercial power have elevated its importance in the marketing mix. In fact, not a week goes by where mobile isn’t grabbing headlines – like last week’s announcement by Orbitz highlighting the fact that smartphones now account for one in five of all its bookings. But those headlines aren’t always positive – like when news came out that Papa John’s is facing a $250 million spam lawsuit related to blasting customers with illegal text messages. The suit once again reminds us that mobile is a highly personal channel and marketers interested in leveraging mobile to build a community must now, more than ever, take a relationships-first approach. So how do you build a relationship and community around SMS? Here are some tips.”
Click Della Penna’s photo to read his ten tips.
The case is similar with Facebook and the rest of the social media when they originally launched. Lawsuits for using personal information without authorization from the users created problems originally in Facebook, however the network overcome these obstacles. Similar with the Mobile Marketing after this channel has grown enough and consumers are familiar with it, new rules and authorities will be established in order to set some clear structures about the way it is going to be used.
I feel the most important points Penna brought up here were the first, as designing and building a mobile presence is more important than ever now with the emergence of mobile phones giving one access to social media sites like LinkedIn or Twitter as a networking tool, and the tenth point which states the importance as testing and learning, which reminds me of an acronym I learned in my Public Relations class: RACE, which stands for Research, Action, Communication, and Evaluation, which after the Evaluation portion calls for a repeat of the process in order to put anything that was learned in the testing process into effect in order to make this process as efficient as possible by learning from every aspect of the process.