When you gotta go, you gotta text.

In order to combat vandalism in public bathrooms, Finland—the mobile-savviest country in the world—is turning to SMS. According to Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s largest newspaper, the Road Administration there has developed a system in which the bladder-challenged must text the word OPEN to a short code listed on a bathroom stall. This will unlock said stall. The idea is that vandals will be less likely to deface a toilet if authorities have their phone numbers stored in a database and linked to that exact loo.

Hmm, could the same technology be used to regulate “glory holes”? Seriously, though, I think it’s a brilliant idea—and one that could be leveraged by marketers in the future. Since these are public toilets alongside major highways, it’s likely that many bathroom patrons will also be long-distance travelers. To add to government coffers (and perhaps relieve the Finnish citizenry of some of their infamous taxes) the database could be used by paying advertisers to market to hungry, weary road warriors. Here’s how:

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Be prepared to get schooled in the ways of the digital marketing industry

The second episode of Outside The Inbox: Video Edition is now up and running: http://www.mobilestorm.com/videos/Outside-the-Inbox-Video-Edition-Episode-2-v119.

This week, mobileStorm CEO Jared Reitzin talks about women outnumbering men on the Internet; the proposed New York state law that would make use of online behavior data illegal without consumers’ consent; and the tidal wave of SMS spam that plagued Chinese cell phones recently.

In case newcomers don’t know, Outside The Inbox: Video Edition is mobileStorm’s weekly online “news” show in the tradition of The Daily Show and other comic news spoofs. Complete with humor that, well, pushes the envelope of good taste and corporate dignity. We hope to entertain as well as educate marketers who are new to the digital space—or who are just bored at work.

Enjoy!

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

There’s a yellow brick road leading to the city by the bay this year.

Droves of us will make the yearly pilgrimage to the Oz of the online world, AdTech 2008.

Overnight, Moscone Center’s barren floors will magically transform into a pow-wow of who’s who in the online and digital space.

ad:tech is a global-forum where in-person discourse for digital marketing best practices and emerging trends and technologies can take place between industry leaders and executives. Anyone involved in marketing or advertising will be in for a special treat at this event. There will be a ton of knowledge regarding how to apply marketing concepts directly to your business, but also there is the opportunity to build new relationships with other companies that can help to achieve your digital marketing goals.

There is a broad range of attendees – but all are involved in some of kind of online marketing. Exhibitors range from Fox Digital to online networks like DoubleClick- recently acquired by Google. Keynote presentations from companies including Eastman Kodak, Alloy Media, and Diggnation will cover a diverse array of topics such as multi-platform distribution, consumer control, performance marketing, media fragmentation and more.

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Last week we covered the first few things on what not to do in SEO. Now let’s continue the discussion with some more Don’ts when it comes to SEO:

• Don’t use “Doorways” - Doorways are pages that do not have meaningful or useful content, usually created automatically to just manipulate search engine spiders, gain lots of content, place ads and earn money, or redirect traffic to real sites. These techniques are easily spotted by search engines so focus on creating a page that will be useful to visitors and you will be rewarded in time with a better search ranking.
• Don’t use mirror pages - These are pages with the same or very similar content. If your content is identical, it doesn’t matter how many sites you put it on as the search engines will only count it once. In fact, too many mirror pages might even harm the first/main page that they crawl so avoid mirror pages and make sure no one else has done so on other sites.

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