Now that U.S. Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps has eight gold medals tucked under his Speedo, what do you think he’ll be endorsing? Wheaties, on whose cereal boxes Olympic medalists traditionally appear? Perhaps more of those Rosetta Stone language-learning kits? Maybe even the same cellular service he helped tout pre-Beijing?

That last one. Well, sorta. It’s not so much that he’ll be the spokesperson immediately identified with a certain carrier–it’s that he could become the face of a certain mobile technology: SMS.

During and soon after the Games, several news stories discussed Mr. Phelps’ main way of communicating with his almost-as-famous mom: Text-message. Debbie Phelps noted that, during her son’s Olympic training, SMS was the only way she could have an extended conversation with the lad. He in turn talked about having to teach her to text, and that she soon got the hang of it–even if she didn’t type perfectly, it was good enough to communicate clearly. (Maybe she would find this whitepaper useful.)

What a great endorsement for a simple communication platform that still, in some minds in the United States, seems to be the realm of youth! What middle-aged consumer can’t identify with wanting to stay in touch with their grown children, and do so in the way those “children” most want to be reached?

Texting is intimate, but it’s also something people can do while on the go, whether in the pool or running around town. So it’s a medium that can either be enjoyed in real-time or whenever is most convenient. That’s what makes SMS a great marketing platform for reaching consumers.

With Michael and Debbie Phelps’ inadvertent endorsement, just think of how many more consumers–especially older ones–are going to start texting in earnest. The audience for mobile marketers just got bigger.

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm

“I’d rather you text me”

This is the final chapter on ideas for getting easy links. Let’s get into it right now! Here is what you can do to get more links:

Leave creative signatures with your inner links in the forums where you are active, if they are appropriate for showing up on your site, and also add the links to your personal profile page on the forums. If you make quality contributions to the forums, some of their users might follow these links and even “convert” for you.

Ask and answer questions on sites like Yahoo! Answers or Google Groups, and give some links to your site as a reference or otherwise. Get creative.

Encourage people to syndicate your RSS content; that might result in some additional “link love” for your webpages.

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I talked about link baiting ideas before and now I want to continue exploring this important topic. So, how else can you make links appear without too much hassle? Here are some more ideas to generate more links:

Interview big-time players in your field, real people with blogs. They’d love to link to your interview if it’s done well, and thus you will get quite some strong linkbacks.

Review products and services related to your niche. This method works as effectively as the one above.

If you sell products or services of your own, launch an affiliate program. Most of the links from your affiliates will not have any SEO value themselves—they’ll have unique affiliate IDs in the URLs or will use other identifications—but the added exposure will almost always lead to some regular links.

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This week I’m venturing beyond the marketing world and into the techie side of things. A few interesting things last week in the world of open source software caught my attention—at least because of the irony they both represent.

First, Apple’s App Store was subject to a suspicious, and slightly malicious, incident. An application called “I Am Rich,” which sold for $999 a pop, merely displayed the image of a ruby on one’s iPhone screen. Said to be a joke by its developer (uh huh!), the application was more of an ironic insult to the “open source-like” idea being promoted by Apple. After all, the open source movement has long been a community of progressive individuals dedicated to technology innovation, not profit like the kind Apple makes with its fat-margin iPhones.

Then there was the appeals court ruling in the case of Robert Jacobsen vs. Matthew Katzer/Kamind Associates, which further bolstered the idea of copyright infringement in open source. First, some background: Software developer Jacobsen created open source code used in software for controlling model trains. Kamind Associates downloaded parts of Jacobsen’s project, stripped out the copyright notice and other identifying information, and began redistributing the modified version without Jacobsen’s approval.

Jacobsen sued for violation of the terms of the license under which he created the open source code.
Last week a federal appeals court overruled the decision of a U.S. district court, which had ruled that the open source license was so broad that violations did not fall under the category of copyright infringement. The appeals court agreed with Jacobsen that Kamind did indeed infringe on copyright. Unsurprisingly, this is hailed as a victory for smaller developers in the open-source world.

But it seems to me like this also gives legal precedent to larger corporations like Apple or Google—because the ruling may help allow large corporations the exclusive right to control the open source process. If a developer somehow violates their terms, they can be held as a copyright infringer. Could this precedent give rise to censorship in the corporate-backed open source world?

What do you think?

Shaneli Ramratan, Marketing Manager, mobileStorm