Some innovative California Subway restaurant owners are experimenting with a new college-level mobile social network that allows them to offer mobile coupons to their college customers along side other social content such as school-related information, sports, and more.

The social network Subway has plugged into is lead by Hothand Wireless, who is offering specialized mobile social networks and content to universities across the country. Their approach is to offer targeted information centered around the school’s student body, along with local coupons, and be accessible anywhere with a mobile device. “The building of content, social networks and personalized coupons from local merchants “creates the eyeballs”, says Mr. Leet, Chief Marketing Officer for Hothand Wireless.

The networks began as a student resource for finding college-related sports information, school dates, and other social content, but as students become more comfortable with the idea of the networks, they became more trusting of local advertisers that support the network, such as Subway.

Another obvious reason for the push of mobile marketing to university students is the fact that college-aged consumers are far more apt to use and benefit from mobile coupons, and mobile marketing as a whole. They’ve already been using the technology for a while, and provides a perfect testing environment.

Read the rest

Share This

In a relentless effort to attract a greater number of listeners to HD Radio - which is now at more than 75 percent, according to Critical Mass Media - and transform that awareness into HD receiver purchases, the HD Digital Radio Alliance is embarking on an aggressive mobile marketing campaign.

Although mobile marketing has much of its roots in radio (some of the first mobile marketing campaigns were born of radio station contests), the HD Digital Radio Alliance is taking such efforts one step further and expanding the information available to consumers, retailers, and auto dealers at HDRadio.com. Read the rest

Share This

As we approach the July 4^th holiday, there are reminders all around of our freedom, especially when it comes to our mobile phones and the freedom of marketers to reach us constantly with their product or service de jour.

Across the pond, however, the European Union continues to emphasize its July 1 deadline for the mobile industry to “either cut the cost of cross-border text messaging or face legislative restrictions.”

Although European operators are resisting regulatory intervention much the way US operators would resist the same at home, it looks as though the EU isn’t going to relent until they see the “exorbitant costs” associated with mobile marketing endeavors brought down to a minimum. Read the rest

Share This

MSN is just the latest major company to seek out the professional services of a mobile marketing firm to accellerate business and drive higher traffic.

MSN has tapped 5th Finger, a globally recognized mobile marketing agency, to work on MSN Mobile and its mobile marketing strategy and campaign execution.

Aimed at “driving consumer engagement and increasing adoption of the MSN mobile WAP site, MSN Mobile (mobile.msn.com)” 5th Finger is looking to implement a range of innovative mobile marketing techniques aiming to build consumer awareness and drive trial usage of the site. MSN Mobile is presently billed as a place where consumers can “get their fix” of compelling entertainment, news, weather and sports updates, as well as user-friendly search.

5th Finger is one of many such firms aggressively looking to corner this market by securing as many high profile clients as possible. The industry, however, has grown so saturated with competing agencies that its safe to say that no single mobile marketing agency will dominate the entire landscape any time soon.

Share This

It’s important to take any press release with a grain of salt, but an interesting one has surfaced from M3NetworX®, a well-known Mobile & Media marketing firm.

As one who has long been curious about the accountability of incentive based mobile marketing, I was attracted to some of these campaigns developed for consumer engagement, at least according to the tracking and reporting methods used to quantify the results.

On Tuesday, M3NetworX released it’s first public case study. Utilizing a generic/non-branded campaign, M3 showed how it was able to drive results and engagement by building “challenging and fun quiz games” around winning prizes such as a big screen Plasma TV, etc. Read the rest

Share This

Since I’ve recently covered open source SMS/WAP from Kannel, I thought I would mention another open source mobile project that I’ve had my eye on for a while.� Funambol is an open source development company focusing primarily on mobile 2.0 messaging applications, such as their popular open source push email and calendaring software.� They also offer one of the largest open source mobile development communities around today, appropriately dubbed Funambol Forge.

Back in March, Funambol introduced new “Code Sniper” projects into their development community that encouraged the development of mobile social networking applications.� Code Sniper is Funambol’s community program that rewards developers with monetary rewards to work on open source projects that benefit mobile users around the globe.� This new slate of Code Sniper projects ranges from syncing photos of friends on social networks to the address book on a mobile phone, to making it easy to invite your mobile contacts to join your favorite social network.� All of the apps developed as part of Code Sniper are made freely available under the standard open source licensing.

Though the applications that have already been developed are somewhat basic in their social networking functionality, it still shows what the future holds.� The market for this is only going to expand by leaps and bounds, and going the open source route is the way to go in my opinion.� Not only for the low cost, but also for the intense creativity of a worldwide group of developers that all share the same ultimate goal; killer mobile social networking applications.

Share This

Yesderday after I weighed in on the speculated lack of advanced talent avilable in the mobile marketing industry, I came across an interesting article that connects this perceived small talent pool with mobile marketing’s growing focus on the Hispanic market.

For companies looking to take an aggressive lead in mobile advertising, hiring bilingual Spanish speakers on the marketing staff might not be a bad idea. Read the rest

Share This