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.

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The other day I blogged about TeleFlip and a couple of things that I thought they needed. Donna Amato, Director of Communications at TeleFlip contacted me to let me know that they just released a feature that lets you upload your entire address book. Nice!

Truth be known, Donna emailed me Wednesday and I’ve been behind all week. I’m such a slacker! Anyone that has a 19 Month old in their house knows how hard it can be to get things done when kids are at that age. I think I logged 20 miles in August following my Daughter around the house. I love it though, my highlight of the week was when she sat down with me while I read her If You Give A Moose A Muffin.

Thanks for the status update Donna, this is something that users will certainly appreciate. Who wants to enter contacts in manually right?

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I’ve never heard of TeleFlip until about a week ago when someone sent me an email telling me to check them out. I’m going to give them a try with my Mobile Marketing Watch email.

What’s cool about TeleFlip is that it’s actually better than real email because it utilizes a trust network. So if you’re not in my trust network then you can’t spam me because I control who goes into the trusted list. Users upload their contact lists and those lists effectively become your white list. Officer trusty isn’t going to let an email get sent to the SMS gateway if it’s not in your white list otherwise he’s gonna get fired.

In the last couple of days there has been a tremendous amount of blog chatter regarding trusted networks. One A List Blogger even predicted that these types of trusted fabrics are better and that over time users will move away from applications like Google as an example and gravitate towards applications that rely on trust. I think he’s on to something even though he’s getting skewered.

Now, speaking of trust. You’ll need to trust TeleFlip because one of the first things they ask for in the sign-up process is your email account credentials. I definitely see some people bailing on this service at this point. To be perfectly honest, I hesitated too and so I’m not going to test this service with my GMail Account but I am going to try it out using one of my Mobile Marketing Watch email accounts.

Here’s something that it’s missing and I think it’s critical but I’ve been told by someone very close to the Company that they’re working on it. TeleFlip right now does not offer integration with things like LinkedIn or GMail to load contacts. I think this is going to be mandatory to get adoption. Who wants to spend time typing this stuff in repeatedly?

I’m still going to give TeleFlip a whirl though.

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