An FTC town hall meeting about mobile ads and consumer protection was held yesterday, where two leading advocacy groups filed complaints regarding several mobile marketing practices. Most notably, location-based marketing, where advertisers know a user’s exact location, was brought under fire.

Jeff Chester, founder and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, along with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group combined efforts to rally the FTC for more guidelines when it comes to behavioral targeting in general. The groups argue that marketers should not track people’s web-surfing activity for the purpose of compiling profiles about them without first obtaining their consent. Jeff Chester commented…

“…We’re filing a complaint to force the FTC to take a proactive stance. Mobile ad companies incorporate the same problematic business practices that we witnessed with PC-based broadband marketing, including behavioral targeting and profiling techniques–except that this time they know your location…”

The groups hope to influence policy now, while the mobile ad market is still in its infancy. Specifically, they intend to call on the FTC to create a task force that will include consumer representatives and industry leaders to craft a marketing regime that gives priority to privacy. They also intend to push for special rules regulating mobile ads to children and teens.

The FCC already has rules in place that prohibit the use of SMS marketing without a user’s consent, but other types of marketing like WAPl banners and search ads are not similarly restricted. The groups have observed that mobile marketing practices raise more privacy concerns than desktop-based behavioral targeting, because mobile companies can potentially determine a user’s precise physical location. By contrast, targeting that relies on cookies to track a user’s Internet history is usually anonymous and not tied to offline information such as location.

Share This

I just tried to view a friends web site on my mobile phone and here’s what I experienced. This is a site that was not optimized for mobile at all.

1. Entered the URL and went to the home page.
2. Browsed the available categories and clicked on one of the links.
3. My mobile phone starts processing that page and then tells me… insufficient memory.

So if you’re automatically assuming that your site will work fine on any mobile device you should think twice. In this case there were so many images that my phone just ran out of gas. That’s why it’s important to have a mobile site in place. It needs to be scaled waaaaaaay down and made simple. This is especially true if you’re attempting to conduct commerce.

Share This

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) published an update yesterday morning to one of their Best Practices Guides. It’s the U.S. Consumer Best Practices for Cross- Carrier Mobile Marketing Services.

I already have a copy of that guide in the mobile marketing resources section of this blog and so I’ve updated it for you (download here). The MMA publishes updates to this guide twice a year so don’t be alarmed that it looks nearly identical to the previous date.

Here are some of the highlights that I took from the press release:

• Free-to-end-user (FTEU) guidelines for messaging services
• Sweepstakes and contests
• Mobile Web and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) opt-in and billing modifications
• Affiliate marketing
• Participation TV
• Word-of-mouth verification
• New Code of Conduct reference (as developed by MMA Privacy and Preference Committee)

Share This

I’ve been meaning to make this illustration for a few weeks now since some discussion regarding sending SMS bubbled up here and here.

This is a very good topic for newcomers and so I’ll tag this in the Starter Kit so that folks getting their feet wet with Mobile Marketing will know to avoid using email as the sending engine. Though it can be accomplished in house by having your developers set up your application so that SMS is firing out of your email server that’s not really how you want to approach sending SMS messages.

Failing to have any kind of contractual agreement with the carrier is the primary reason you want to avoid the urge to simply fire your SMS campaigns from your own email server. You want these things getting sent from an organization that has agreements in place with the carriers so that your campaign isn’t looked at as potential spam that should be shut down in its entirety which might include blacklisting your email server for entire carrier network.

This is how the carrier is thinking and with no agreement in place you have no guarantee that your campaign will be delivered. That puts your conversion plan and the campaign at an unnecessary risk when you can engage a Mobile Marketing partner to deliver the message for pennies.

Sure, the Carrier is not stopping all messaging that comes through via an email server. In fact I just tested a Mobile application last Month and advised the company to change their sending strategy as soon as possible. The point though is that they very easily could and so you should not risk it.

Greg Harris from Mobivity posted this great answer in LinkedIn regarding the same question. It’s one of the best I’ve come across.

Share This

Apple!

According to ClimateCounts Apple is amongst the worst in the electronics space. I looked at Apple, Motorola and Nokia. To say that they’re even close to the efforts Motorola or Nokia is making would be an overunderstatement according to the reports released by ClimateCounts.

ClimateCounts rates organizations on multiple eco friendliness areas and rolls up an eventual score into their scorecard which includes Stuck, Starting and Striding. Stuck means an organization has pretty much given it little to no thought and Striding is an indication that the organization has indeed put some effort into making itself accountable to the climate. Starting is obviously somewhere in between.

Apple rated out with dismal score of 2. To put it in perspective Nokia rated out 1,350% better and Motorola rated out a whopping 2,900% better than Apple. Here it is.

You can download the reports for the 3 companies here:

• Apple - Score Card 2
• Motorola - Score Card 60
• Nokia - Score Card 29

If I were Motorola or Nokia I’d consider getting this message out in my marketing.  Sort of in a fun way, the way Apple pokes fun at Microsoft in the Mac vs. PC commercials.

Share This

This is the third installment of the Mobile Marketing Starter Kit Series that I kicked off in July. All of these posts are filed under Starter Kit if you need to get caught up. The goal is to continue adding helpful resources for professionals in the mobile marketing community. There is no set order, if I write about a new topic I’ll generally issue it a new Chapter number. However, I may go back and install additional posts within a previous chapter or allow a guest writer to do that same.

So if you’re in the mobile marketing space and want to get some exposure on a topic for this series contact me. I will let you talk about your company (are you listening mobile marketing geeks) in these posts provided that the majority of your post is contributing to the Starter Kit theme for the mobile marketing community.

The theme for this installment is obviously testing. Testing is really important for mobile marketing folks; it’s absolutely critical that you test your campaigns and content to see how they’re received on various devices prior to launch or your campaign will never get off the ground. What you don’t want to do is launch and then discover 35% of your audience is using a device that is not capable of rendering your content. The root cause of this type of failure is going to be lack of testing and that will really reflect poorly.

So with that said here’s a web site that can help you test your mobile web site, free.

dotMobi has a fairly exhaustive emulator that will run your mobile web site through 35 tests to determine how it will appear on a mobile handheld device. I recently installed a wordpress mobile edition plugin for my blog so I thought I’d use it as my test for this post.

Here’s how the emulator impersonates my site on a Nokia N70. Oh and you have the ability to cycle your mobile site through several other types of emulators too which didn’t get any better for me.

My blog is average at best according to their test emulator… yikes. So, if I were planning on launching a mobile awareness campaign to promote my blog I’d delay until I addressed the issues that have been identified.

Overall, the test summary indicates 21 passes so perhaps I’m slightly better than average in my mind but there are 4 failures and so it’s a good idea to understand what those are.

An area my site didn’t fare so well in was Compliance Testing… whoops, maybe I am just average, these are important.

The valid markup is something that I might be able to address, in my particular instance I’m running wordpress and so I’m not really interested in monkyeing around with the markup. However, in a campaign setting I’d have to address this issue or my content might not appear as I had originally intended.

XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP) is a content type declaration that appears to be missing in the mobile version of my blog. I might be able to address this by reviewing the suggested XHTML MP Doctypes that dotMobi has made and plugging that into my system. However, in my case I’m using a wordpress plugin so I’ll alert the developer of the plugin and see if he can implement the upgrade not just for me but all of the folks that are using this plugin.

Here are the suggested XHTML MP Doctype declarations that dotMobi has made for me.

If you’d like more information on XHTML MP, Wikipedia has a nice reference on the topic and the evolution of mobile web standards.

There are few unique features in the dotMobi test system that I’ve not seen anywhere else, two of which are illustrated in this scorecard I received on my blog. The first two scores across the top show my stinky score and overall file size which appears to be lightweight (good thing). Look closely at the two features across the bottom though. These are unique. Estimated cost by Country and estimated speed by network technology.

This is spectacular information; I wish it could be expanded to include other Countries. Marketers would be thrilled to know what the cost of receipt estimates look like while testing campaign variations. Who knew campaign optimization would include something like lowering the cost for the end user! This is another reason why mobile marketing is different, end users have data plans of one type or another… they’re paying to look at your stuff, so why not take advantage of a tool that can help you make optimizations in this area.

Look at the level of detail that is implemented, this is impressive; here are the checks that my blog was measured against. I do have a Google sitemap and I believe my plugin assigned it a nutty file extension like sitemap.xml.gz and so I’ll bet it’s not finding that.

Green=pass; Red=fail; Silver=comment; Orange=warning.

In the event of a failure or warning in any particular area a hyperlink’d shortcut is offered to help you individually address these issues. The shortcut takes you off to a new window to prevent leaving your test.

To sum it up here are the 35 tests that the dotMobi emulator will execute against your mobile site.

• Multiple device selection
• File size check
• Estimated cost
• Estimated speed
• Mime types
• Character encoding
• Pop up windows
• Alt Text
• Image maps
• Specify images sizes
• Measures
• Page title
• Use of stylesheets
• Stylesheet dependency
• Objects or scripts
• Auto refresh
• Redirection
• Default Input Mode
• Provide defaults
• Page size limit
• Large graphics
• Tables
• Nested tables
• Tables for layout
• Access Keys
• Caching
• External resources
• Avoid free text
• Structure
• Google sitemap
• Form submit buttons
• XHTML mobile profile
• Valid markup
• Second level domain
• No frames

You can test your mobile web site at dotMobi. Leave a comment if you have some other really useful mobile website testing tools that you use.

Share This