The practice of engaging one’s audience through the mobile channel, i.e. mobile marketing, has been steadily growing over the years and as of late one simply needs to look at the increasing attention it is getting in the popular press, the plethora of new industry reports being put out, the steady rise of academic papers in the field, the levels of investment being made and the rash of recent mergers and acquisitions to get a sense that something is a foot.  It is clear that the mobile phone has made its way into main stream society.  In many industrialized states mobile penetration exceeds 100% (Netsize 2007), majority of U.S. households (85%) are now mobile (Steele 2007), the use of services like mobile voice, text messaging and the mobile internet are on the rise (CTIA 2007), not to mention the fact that mobile subscribers report that the mobile phone is a key part of their lifestyle and that they’ve developed a dependency on their mobile phone (MMA 2006).  The evidence and information that the mobile channel is a viable marketing medium is amounting as are the guidelines and best practices on how to use it as such. However, given the nascent status of the industry much of this evidence is scattered far and wide.  It can be found on the web, in electronic and print articles, reports, conference proceedings, white papers, journals, and tightly locked away within the minds of individual experts and corporate knowledge repositories.  While it is impossible in this short piece to provide an exhaustive list of resources, this article attempts to provide a summary of key sources of data and is intended to encourage others to help contribute to the industry’s growing body of knowledge around the development and practice of mobile marketing. 

In order to make sense of a phenomenon like mobile marketing we must first collect and amass data and then analyze the data to generate knowledge.  Miles & Humberman (1994) refer to the process of data collection and analysis as sense making.  They start with identifying sources of data, which include documentation and reports, archival records, interviews, observation, physical artifacts and the like, and then suggest any number of methods (coding, triangulation, factoring, relationship building, statistical analysis, etc.) to make sense of the data. As noted, however, in order to get started with sense making, one must first gain access to data.  The following provides a list of readily available resources for research into field and practice of mobile marketing. 

• Associations and industry organizations: Mobile Marketing Association, dotMobi Advisory Group, ICSTIS, FAME, Wireless Research Forum, Mobile Monday, InMobile.org, CTIA (e.g. Top 100 Facts), 3GSM, US Short Codes; Pew Internet & American Life Project
• Industry Guidelines & Educational Materials, such as those from the MMA
  • Code of Conduct for Mobile Marketing (Global)
  • Consumer Best Practices
  • Mobile Marketing Advertising Guidelines (North America, Europe, Middle East & Africa)
  • Mobile Search Use Cases
  • Introduction to Mobile Search
  • Glossary of Terms
  • Off Portal - An Introduction to the Market Opportunity
  • Understanding Mobile Marketing: Technology & Reach
  • Introduction to Mobile Coupons
  • Mobile Marketing Sweepstakes & Promotional Guide
  • MMA Annual Consumer Attitudes & Usage Study (2005, 2006, 2007) (for members only)
  • MMA Industry Brief (Members only)
• Events: such as the MMA Mobile Marketing Forums and related work shops (see MMA Calendar for a sampling of leading industry events).
• Journal: MMA International Journal of Mobile Marketing (there is no other journal dedicated to mobile marketing, however, many other journal’s do publish specific articles on the topic).
• Academic centers: Ball State University Center for Media Design, WINMEC, Oxford University
• Newsletters: MMA Messenger; Moco News; Fierce Wireless, etc.
• Mobile analyst and leading research firms: Yankee Group, Forester Research, Frost & Sullivan, Gartner Group, M;Metrics, Telephia, eMarketer, Ovum, Jupiter Research, and others
• Industry ecosystem players: Brands, Marketing Agencies, Application providers, Messaging Aggregators, Mobile carriers, etc., visit the MMA Web site or US Short Codes for list of leading ecosystem players.  Note, a wealth of data is available from players like Mobile Research, AdMob, and others on what handsets people are using.   
• Portals and alert services: For example, Google Alerts (e.g. setup keyword alerts “Mobile Marketing”, “Text Messaging”, etc.), Google Scholar, Yahoo!, Google Images (great source for tables and graph’s, e.g. search on “text messaging”)
• Books and articles

Again, as noted, the list above is by no means an exhaustive one, but it should provide those interested in mobile marketing with a place to start their inquiry.  If you are aware of additional readily available resources for mobile marketing data, please share it with the community by emailing the resource reference (name, description, URL) to research@mmaglobal.com.

About the author

References 
Miles, M., & Humberman, M. (1994). Qualitative Data Analysis (End). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

MMA 2006 Mobile Attitude & Usage Study (Metrics Committee, Ed.). Denver, Co.:

The Netsize Guide (Netsize, Ed.). Informa. (2007).

Steele, A. (Starcom/Vice President, Director). (2007, 13/October). Activating the

Top 100 Facts. (2007). Retrieved 10/17/2007, from http://www.ctia.org/content/index.cfm/AID/10377.

SMS subscription groups are a powerful, if not standard, way to communicate with a mobile audience. The premise is rather simple:

1. Consumer sees a call to action to join the group
2. Consumer gets excited and decides to join the group
3. Consumer periodically gets messages

The challenge is that there is often a fourth step:

4. Consumer doesn’t see anything of interest to them, gets bored, loses interest, and ignores messages or moves on

With the Targeted Messaging feature that is part of the mFinity 3.5 release, you can do 1:1 mobile marketing and communicate more effectively with the members of your mobile subscription group.

In the 3.5 release, you can create specific targeted messages based on attributes we know about the members of the group. The attributes usable for targeting include both information provided by the consumer, such as their age (as shown above) as well as other demographic data (opt in dates, carrier, area code, etc.) that mFinity collects or can infer.

What that means for your marketing campaigns is that you can create highly targeted messages that reach the audience you want with a message specifically for them.

iLoop Mobile released version 3.5 of the mFinity platform last week. This was a significant release for the platform as it contained improvements to most parts of the product including adding targeted messaging to subscription groups and across the board enhancements to reporting capabilities as well as adding new reports.

Over the next few days, we will look at some of the more interesting features in that release and I’ll show you how you will be able to build compelling mobile marketing campaigns using those features in the mFinity platform.

The MMA International Journal of Mobile Marketing is available in print and subscribers may sign up to receive the journal at the MMA web site, www.mmaglobal.com/.  In addition, MMA IJMM articles are now available for download on one of the world’s premier electronic databases, EBSCO Business Source® Complete.  EBSCO defines the database as follows: 

EBSCO Business Source® Complete:  This is the world’s definitive scholarly business database, providing the leading collection of bibliographic and full text content. Business Source® Complete contains far more active, peer-reviewed, business related journals than any other database currently available. As part of the comprehensive coverage offered by this database, indexing and abstracts for the most important scholarly business journals back as far as 1886 are included. In addition to the searchable cited references provided for more than 1,200 journals, Business Source Complete contains detailed author profiles for the 20,000 most-cited authors in the database. Journal ranking studies reveal that Business Source Complete is the overwhelmingly superior database for full text journals in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. Additional full text, non-journal content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses and more.

Being accepted into the EBSCO database is a huge compliment to the MMA and demonstrates the quality of the journal and its content.

In addition, the IJMM was recently listed as a leading marketing journal by the American Marketing Association.

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) International Journal of Mobile Marketing was recently awarded the 2007 ASAE Gold Circle Award for Peer-Reviewed Journals from an association with a budget of $2 million or less.  This is a significant accomplishment for the MMA and its Academic Outreach Committee, which is Co-chaired by Michael Becker, EVP Business Development at iLoop Mobile, and Michael Hanley, Assistant Professor at Ball State University.  

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