Verizon Wireless been in the news a lot recently. And it hasn’t been the most positive press. Here are a few recent incidents:

1. The Washington Post accused the carrier of installing a cell phone tower on behalf of Senator John McCain. (He was getting bad reception.)
2. News leaked about Verizon’s per-message fee on outgoing SMS, which would have increased the cost to send messages by as much as 300%! Just in time to score massive revenue from holiday marketing campaigns.
3. The cellular provider is currently being reviewed by the FCC to determine whether or not a proposed Verizon-Alltel merger will stifle competition. (They’d be bigger than AT&T; did the iPhone choose the wrong carrier?)

With the retail industry in a slump, mobile and text message marketing may prove to be a great way to boost business, especially if campaigns include coupons or other discounts to lure consumers into the shops. Verizon’s tentative rate hike, though, could’ve dampened mobile coupon campaigns for the grim-looking holiday season, as it had been scheduled to begin November 1. Fortunately, with buzz in the blogosphere with articles like this, Verizon retracted its plan, saying the proposal was just an idea and had “been mistakenly characterized as a final decision to implement. That draft was intended to stimulate internal business discussions and in no way should have been released to the public and represented as a final document.”

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the rate hike is completely off. Verizon admitted that “we recently notified text messaging aggregators… that we are exploring ways to offset significantly increased costs for delivering billions upon billions of text messages each month.”

But I thought text messages had relatively minute cost for carriers. Hmm, is Verizon trying to generate fast cash to cover the cost of its acquisition of Alltel?

Shaneli Ramratan, Director of Marketing, mobileStorm

Last week the Moscone Center West in San Francisco was full of marketers and business owners attending Online Market World 2008. Unlike major conferences such as Adtech and SES, Online Market World is smaller and only its second year. Still, there were a number of quality sessions as well as the whole gamut of exhibitors–from Verisign to Google, UPS to the San Francisco chapter of the Digital Marketing Association. mobileStorm also attended; we had the honor to meet many business owners and fellow marketers who all are trying to learn more about how to stay relevant in the online marketplace.

Session topics included advice on online payment methods, website optimization, and crafting effective emails. For a glimpse into the discussions, you can check out the OMW community at: http://community.onlinemarketworld.com/.

I attended a session put on by an organization called Market Motive, a community of Internet marketing experts who have a subscription-only site loaded with information on advanced Internet marketing, site optimization, SEO, and PPC. Kind of like an online school for Internet marketing. Sounds great, but at $299 a month the price is pretty hard to swallow for smaller businesses on a limited budget. At least I was lucky enough to snag a copy of Web Analytics An Hour A Day, by Avinash Kaushik, a Market Motive founder. You should too; for a lot less than Market Motive’s hefty monthly subscription price, it gives a good deal of information for making your site a success.

The abundance of metrics afforded by Internet marketing at times makes it difficult to put your finger on success. Finding the right Key Performance Indicator, or KPI, to evaluate your online programs can be difficult. Is it the volume of visitors, or the time they spent on your site? A point stressed by John Marshall, ex-founder of ClickTracks, was the idea of “unintended consequence.” For instance, if your KPI is conversion rate, then driving too much traffic to your site can actually drive conversion rate down. Therefore, a positive thing like driving more traffic can result in a negative consequence like a lower conversion rate. When thinking about how you measure marketing success, I would encourage you to think about unintended consequence and where it may be manifesting itself in your marketing strategy. I know I will be!

For those who missed it this year, don’t forget to look out for Online Market World 2009. Not only is San Francisco a great city to visit, but I have no doubt this conference will continue to grow and offer marketers and business owners extremely usable information regarding the online space.

Shaneli Ramratan, Director of Marketing, mobileStorm

There’s been a lot of talk in recent months about so-called “cloud computing,” in which all software and utilities are stored and accessed on the Internet rather than on a user’s hardware. Think of Salesforce.com, which sells software as a service (SaaS). mobileStorm is SaaS-y too!

Yahoo, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard have a joint project to create a network that lets researchers test their cloud computing experiments–the goal being that open collaboration among industry, academic, and government researchers will advance the state of the cloud. And geeks were atwitter over a leaked video of a virtual world called City Space that will run on OTOY, a 3D engine that runs games in the cloud–an example of how the cloud might combine the power of different hardware into an all-encompassing supercomputer of sorts. These bright stories, however, became cast under a cloud of a different sort this week, when open software activist Richard Stallman warned against the technology.

“It’s worse than stupidity; it’s a marketing hype campaign,” Mr. Stallman told The Guardian. Basically, he sees the cloud as another trap that forces users to buy into locked, proprietary systems–the same argument against Microsoft, the ultimate enemy of open source.

I’d been wanting to write about cloud computing, as it is related to how mobileStorm and other SaaS products work. But Mr. Stallman, whom I usually find to be logical and compelling, is a bit off here–and I want users of our marketing software to understand why.

We all know technology is ever-changing. Messaging, and especially mobile, technology overturns fast. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) respond to constant spam worries by regularly updating regulations for how marketers can send email through their services. Cellular service providers, now that worries about privacy are on the rise, have followed suit. In addition, the perpetual improvements rocking cellular technology right now–3G networks, smart phones with increasing multimedia and Web capabilities, etc.–will also affect how marketers should send messages via text, mobile email, mobile ads, and other ways to reach customers on their cell phones.

Because of these changes, software and/or best practices need to grow as well. That’s why Web-based solutions like ours are ideal: You don’t have to worry about updating your software because it will automatically be done at the source. And some solutions providers are also dedicated to educating their clients, keeping them abreast of happenings related to best practices and regulations.

Then there’s the cost savings to the neophyte. Marketers just getting into a new space, like digital messaging, might not want to spring for a whole package of software, so they can start out paying for a cheap monthly subscription.

Sure, Mr. Stallman points out that in the long run, a monthly subscription could cost more than a one-time payment for a package of software downloaded on computers. Indeed, that’s the argument I have long had with subscription-based music services–you pay out over a long time and don’t own a single song in the end.

But software always changes, and eventually people have to buy brand-new packages anyway. And in realms where the platform-user also needs extra help like education about best practices, the cost of a subscription is worth it.

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

Interview marketing is more than a self-branding tool used by the likes of Barbara Walters. It is a powerful strategy that gives you free quality content and free quality links. If done right it, might place your site into top rankings without much effort. Interview marketing is clear-cut: You interview people, place these interviews on your site, and get link-backs from the interviewed individuals’ sites.

However, this strategy isn’t for everyone. It is only possible if interviews would be natural for your type of site—one good idea is to have some sort of  “resource” feature there. Interviews can be organically placed on blogs, article sites, reference lists, informational portals, etc. If your site is corporate or strictly commercial selling your services or products, this probably wouldn’t work for you. Still, almost all commercial sites have blogs or resourceful pages (best practices, white papers, etc.) where you can put the interview.

The interview marketing process is as follows:

- Decide who to interview. Search the Web for individuals with accomplishments in your field or related fields and study their personal and professional information.
- Send an email introducing yourself, your resource feature (mention all the best things about it), and ask to conduct the interview with this person. Explain the benefits they’ll get from the exposure, and add a “call-to-action” at the end of your letter;
- If the person agrees, prepare unique interview questions for him or for her. It is also a good idea to ask for a photo of the person to run with the written interview.
- When publishing the interview, don’t hesitate to include links to their sites if they ask.
- Let the person know when the interview is live, and give her/him a direct URL if he/she wants to let the world know.
- The linkback is not always guaranteed, so don’t push it. In most cases people would love to link to a page that is totally devoted to them.
- Thank them for the interview, and establish a connection through a social network like LinkedIn or Facebook.

Now, what have you got? (more…)