Even before I embarked on what was to be a three-year adventure in Asia, I’d heard all about Japan’s advanced mobile phones that left North American cellular service in the the dust. “You can take pictures!” “You can send to people’s emails!” “You can send pictures—and videos you took on your phone—to people’s emails!” All that sounds like a no-brainer today, but this was way back in 2002. I still remember my American friends’ utter amazement when I’d take photos of myself and instantly send them from my phone to their email addresses back in the good ole U.S. “Wow! Send me another!” was one friend’s typical response.

Eventually, North America reached the point occupied back then by mobile pioneers like Japan and parts of Europe. Like those regions early this decade, many Americans these days have a camera-enabled cell phone—and use it for everything from MySpace profiles to witnessing crimes. Meanwhile SMS usage rates keep climbing; CTIA reported in June 2007 that there were 28.8 billion SMS messages sent every month, compared to 7.2 billion just two years ago.

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SMS spam has a long, long way to go before catching up with email spam. Ferris, a research firm, estimated that in 2007 1.1 million spam messages were sent via SMS. They also said that this is up 38% from 2006. Sure, that is a big jump, and we will continue to see these numbers climb. But note that there are billions of email spam messages sent on a daily basis; there is no comparison. Also think about the ratio of cell phone users to number of spam messages. There are currently 250 million Americans with cell phones, so Ferris’ figure is considerably less than one spam message per cell phone. Below are the reasons why SMS spam will never reach the heights we see with email:

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2007 was a watershed year in digital marketing. From mobile marketing finally starting to see some traction to increasingly strict email regulations, there were no shortage of things for a digital marketer to keep busy. Here are my top 7 for 2007 (in no particular order):

1. ISPs Shift to Reputation as Key Driver for Filtering Bulk Email

It had been a long time coming but in 2007 most of the major ISPs finally got serious about making reputation as the most important criteria for bulk emailing. While what you send is still important, the ISPs really want to know who you are. This means digital marketers need to get away from the Batch and Blast mentality that has caused issues in the past. Those days are quickly coming to an end.

2. Mobile Marketing Takes Off, Kinda

2007 was when mobile marketing started to gain a bit more attention with the major brands, which shifted from using mobile as primarily experimental communication to a more mainstream vehicle. The debate of profit vs. promotion (as I wrote about a couple of months ago here) raged on while companies expanded their mobile marketing efforts. However, adoption isn’t quite there yet. The Mobile Marketing Association last month put out a study that indicated that 5% of those surveyed willingly participated in a mobile marketing campaign. Yet, 25% indicated that they are interested in receiving such campaigns in the future. So, while still very much in its infancy, all signs point to 2008 being the year for mobile marketing to gain widespread adoption, at least here in the U.S.

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Our CEO, Jared Reitzin wrote a great article for DM News a few days ago about the importance of sender reputation and how it can affect successful email deliverability. Among the items discussed were suggestions around lowering complaint rates, list hygiene, branding and relevancy. In addition to these recommendations, I would like to note something else that I have found a lot of clients either don’t understand, or even know about, ISP whitelisting and feeback loop programs.

While it sometimes is hard to believe, ISPs really do want to try and work with legitimate senders to get their messages delivered to the Inbox. As such, some of them offer whitelisting and feedback loop programs to not only give priority to senders that qualify, but also give sender a chance to clean up their subscriber lists and remove those that don’t want to receive their messages. Here’s how the two programs work:

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