When I was in Nashville during a wedding last summer, a cousin wanted to take a trip downtown to the local American Apparel. But, she opined, she couldn’t look up the address because the Wi-Fi in our hotel wasn’t working. Not to worry, I said, and then showed her how to punch in a business name and send it to the short code “466453,” which spells out “GOOGLE” on phone keypads. Though adept at texting, my collegiate cousin had never heard of Google Search or any other search via SMS. And I have to admit, if I wasn’t in the business of writing about technology, I might not have known about it either.

Luckily, mobile search is expected to come into its own this year—meaning that more consumers will know about it, and thus more marketers can leverage the technology. Savvy digital marketers already plan on it.

According to eMarketer, the number and types of searches on cell phones jumped during the second half of 2007. That caused eMarketer to raise its forecast for global mobile search revenue to $3.77 billion in 2012, up from $83.3 million in 2007.

In the United States, such revenue will grow to $1.48 billion in 2012 from $34.5 million in 2007. That’s about 40 percent of all global sales! It’s a surprising figure, considering that usage of mobile technology in the United States is behind much of the rest of the world.

“The numbers coming from the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific suggest that mobile search traffic is starting to resemble Internet search traffic both in variety and potentially in volume,” said eMarketer senior analyst John du Pre Gauntt.

All this doesn’t just mean that brands should take advantage of mobile search-specific marketing opportunities. Instead, they should realize that the rise of mobile search means that consumers will rely even more on their mobile devices to find information. And that means, more than ever, cell phones are the best places to reach consumers.

So a marketer should use other campaigns, such as permission-based SMS, as part of an all-encompassing mobile strategy. Indeed, targeted messages can help brands stand out among the paid non-targeted ads that consumers will receive as mobile search becomes increasingly more mainstream.

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm
“I’d rather you text me”

Google certainly doesn’t let grass grow under its feet.

Just a scant three months after announcing its open Android mobile platform—and a standards group whose members include some heavy hitters—the first Android demonstrations happened at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain last week. Chip makers Texas Instruments, ARM, and Qualcomm—members of Google’s Open Standards Alliance—showed off prototype handsets using Android and multi-core architecture, which will give so-called “Google Phones” their numerous capabilities.

In Barcelona, observers were wowed by features like touch interface, one-button access, animation, and a true mobile web-browser. Android phones will also have multimedia capabilities, Google and its partners promise. True, some of those features have appeared on other mobile devices, most famously the iPhone. But unlike most other handsets’ software, Android is open-source, which is the real benefit.

Android is the first real open-source competition to threaten Windows Mobile, Symbian, and the various flavors of open Linux platforms. Three factors could make Android possibly superior to the other operating systems.

First, it has the ability to bring a wide variety of parties—handset makers, cellular service providers, semiconductor manufacturers, and software makers—in agreement about one standard. Secondly, it’s open-source, meaning that the code is open to anyone who wants to improve it or to build better-than-ever applications. (Linux is open-source, of course, but there are innumerable versions of Linux mobile out there, rather than one standard Linux platform.)

Third, consider Google’s announcement $10 million in cash prizes to the developers of the best applications created by non-Google employees—that’s enough to get even the laziest developer determined to create the ultimate mobile phone apps.

All this means it could take mobile communications technology far beyond whatever’s available today. And that’s a boon for both for consumers and the marketers who want to reach them.

-Eydie Cubarrubia, Mobile Communications Manager, mobileStorm
“I’d rather you text me”

Short blog this time — it’s been a crazy week. The majority of my time has been spent primarily on two areas:

1. Helping to set up our clients on our system – meaning setting up their email, DNS, and authentication settings.

2. Working with potential and current customers on delivery best practices – maintaining clean lists and using a confirmed email opt-in method.

Folks, I can’t stress enough the importance of these two items. If you send email, and want to have good deliverability, you have to follow some simple rules:

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Boo-hoo.

Social networking’s second boom—in the form of advertising frenzy—could go bust. That’s because of said frenzy backfiring, the research firm Comscore reported. We hate to say it, but we told you so.

First, a little background: The year 2007 marked the resurgence of social networks as the “it” thing in communications technology. Since their proliferation earlier this decade, social sites had proved their appeal to consumers of all ages. Even the college-centric Facebook became open to everyone. Time came for network purveyors and marketers to leverage this appeal—with “behaviorally-targeted” ads, which use software to track a Web-surfer’s actions and then serve up advertisements based on those actions.

Behaviorally targeted advertising became one of the biggest buzzwords for digital marketers in 2007. They dreamed that all their adverts would be eagerly received by Internet users since the ads would tout things in which the users seemed to be interested. And since the basis of social networks is “friends”— whether real life or cyberspace buddies—marketers thought they could enjoy more conversions by sharing users’ purchases with the acquaintances who appear on their profile pages.

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