Mobile marketing may have been proving its efficacy over the last few years. But for old-school marketers, the platform might seem a little too cutting-edge–more anime, less Disney cartoon. They don’t know where, or how, to enter the space and start deploying campaigns.

That’s where a new wiki, www.wikimobipedia.org, comes in. WikiMobiPedia aims to “provide a centralized, dynamic resource for buyers of mobile marketing, advertising and related products and services–so that they can easily access the information they need to begin the purchase process.”

WikiMobiPedia creator Jamie Wells tells us, “With our space moving so fast, I felt the industry would benefit from a place that “keeps up with mobile,so you don’t have to”… So far I’ve got most of the major mobile players involved–over 50 companies–in less than a month.”

As of this week, the site’s beta partners include AdMob, ComScore, HipCricket, the Mobile Marketing Association, Nokia, and Washington Post Digital. You see the entire list on WikiMobiPedia’s homepage.

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Microsoft has unveiled a mobile advertising agreement with Hyatt Hotels & Resorts.

In hopes of tapping into Microsoft’s search and display ad partnership with Verizon Wireless, the deal is driven by the heightened prospect of raising Hyatt hotel’s web presence and giving hotel-seekers a mobile advantage through their Gold Passport frequent guest rewards program.

Microsoft announced that Verizon Wireless subscribers will have an easier and more effective means by which to find hotels and points of interest through the mobile web. This includes, of course, finding, booking, rescheduling, and even checking out of rooms at Hyatt hotels. As you can imagine, the partnership also brings to life a number of other bells and whistles well suited for the mobile hospitality industry.

“Microsoft Mobile Advertising provides us with a compelling and scalable solution that can drive awareness, and encourages people to interact with our mobile Web site as another channel to register for our rewards program and reserve a room,” said Amy Curtis-McIntyre, senior VP of Brand Communications for Global Hyatt Corp.

“The powerful combination of Microsoft’s popular destination sites like MSN and Verizon Wireless’ Mobile Web service not only offers exceptional reach to our target audience, but provides us with an efficient solution to work with both a large publisher and service provider through one simple platform.”

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General Growth Properties, which manages the nation’s second largest network of malls, has teamed with MOBISIX to offer what they call the nation’s first “mall-based mobile advertising network.”

The new mobile network, dubbed “The Club Mobile,” is an extension of GGP’s already successful “The Club” program, which is an online consumer marketing program that sends email notifications of mall sales and events to an exclusive list of opt-in members.  The Club Mobile extends the value of The Club by delivering discounts and offers to on-the-go consumers through text messages.

The new program is powered by MOBISIX and its proprietary messaging platform, which is designed around “consumer-controlled preferences and data” as well as “analytics-driven decisions.”  The underlying technology allows consumers to get relevant and personal offers pertaining to malls operated by GGP.  In addition, the platform acts as a key enabler of green marketing by allowing brands and consumers to take advantage of shopping incentives and coupons without printing.
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I’ve been involved with affiliate, or performance-based marketing for a long time now.  More recently I’ve been interested in advertising models that utilize the benefits of performance-based marketing together with other forms of new-age advertising- primarily mobile marketing.

Taking the obvious benefits from today’s mobile marketing methodologies, and working them into a model that only charges advertisers for results would be a winning combination in my book.  Advertisers use affiliate marketing to drive sales, leads, clicks, etc, but only pay the publisher, networks, etc. when they produce results.  This takes a lot of the wasted ad-spend away, and significantly increases ROI in almost every situation.  This is the reason many small and large brands alike have been using the performance-based model for years and years.  Up until recently, however, it was only carried out online.

While there aren’t many services available that take this model into the realm of mobile, they’re starting to emerge if you dig deep enough.  One in particular is a company called RevTrax.  They’re utilizing mobile marketing, and mobile coupons in particular, together with a performance-based model to drive results to the brands distributing digital coupons or using any form of “customer loyalty” programs.

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Skyfire has been a leader in mobile browsers for a while now, and yesterday marked the long-awaited release of the 1.0 version of it’s full-Web enabled browser for Windows Mobile and Symbian devices.

The key difference with Skyfire remains the ability to support popular Web standards and plug-ins such as Flash 10, Silverlight 2, Ajax and JavaScript that we’ve all come to expect from the traditional Web experience.  The browser will now let users watch any Web video and live event on a small-screen mobile phone, and Skyfire users can even customize their start pages with RSS feeds from their favorite Web sites, integrate their Facebook and Twitter accounts to import status updates and tweets, and easily publish their status to these networks with a single click.

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Webcredible, a user experience consultancy firm, conducted a mobile Web-usage poll recently to find out what areas of the mobile Web are seeing the most traffic and user interaction these days.  Unsurprisingly, email and social network interaction are among the most visited.

The research polled more than 1,100 online users between February and April 2009 on what they used their mobile phone for most, with the exception of calls and text messages. Checking email and social networking came in as the most popular activities with 39 percent of mobile Internet users mostly using email and over 16 percent favoring social networking.  Just under 16 percent of mobile Internet users said they mostly downloaded ringtones.

The poll has been conducted in the past, and the new results show a clear indication of the evolution of the mobile Web over short periods of time.  Almost two years ago, for example, the same poll was conducted between August and October of 2007 which showed that downloading ringtones came in at the top spot with 43 percent.  During that particular poll, only 21 percent of respondents said they checked email regularly, and social network interaction didn’t even register.

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It’s an ever-growing trend, people searching online for coupons from their favorite stores and brands. In this economy, it’s as popular as ever, but one place people tend to overlook for deals, is Twitter.

Brands have flocked to Twitter to interact with consumers, and one way of doing so is to offer coupons in their Twitter feed. Consumers follow the brand’s Twitter feed which in turn comes up in their user-timeline, which is a feed of the latest updates from everyone a user is following. As the user checks updates, coupons from their favorite brands appear as they’re posted.

The outcome is a direct (and completely free) distribution method for brands to extend their offerings and messages to consumers. “Twitter Coupons” have become so prevalent, in fact, that a trio of startups have already launched that aim to find, organize and even distribute the best coupons and deals on Twitter. Read the rest

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