It’s hard to believe that shortcodes for SMS or “text messaging” is only 5 years old in Canada.

It’s also hard to believe that many marketers are still largely ignorant as to what or how SMS marketing can be incorporated into a multi-channel campaign.

For those who think SMS is not yet ready for the masses, consider this:

• 10.1 billion SMS messages were sent in Canada last year - over 1 billion in December alone
• That’s more than double (~4.3b) from 2006
• Which is more than double (~2.1) from 2005
• There are over 20 million Canadians with at least one mobile device now
• Penetration of mobile is as high as 80% in urban areas

SMS marketing is already a mass medium.

Mobile messaging is evolving. MMS (or multi-media messaging) is finally going mainstream. Rogers now has an all you can eat plan for $15 / month. 2d codes are also coming to a broader audience as a few local mobile shops are working on some retail pilots.

Tonight the CWTA is putting on a party celebrating 5 years of text messaging in Canada.

I’ll also be celebrating what is to come!

Today the CWTA released their quarterly report on the mobile industry in Canada. Here are some highlights:

1. Over 350 active mobile marketing programs in Canada right now with a Canadian short code
2. 10.1 billion SMS messages were sent in 2007 in Canada (as previously reported) 
3. Over 1.2 billion SMS messages were sent in Canada in December 2007 alone - making a prediction of 15 billion total in 2008 easily within reach. 
4. As of September 2007, 37% of mobile users had sent at least one SMS message
5. MMA guidelines around mobile advertising and content may be adopted by the CWTA
6. 18 applications have been approved in Canada for mobile payments or micro-payments 
7. May 15th marks the 5th year anniversary of the short code in Canada. Look for information on industry event on txt.ca 

I’ll be getting on a plane Sunday afternoon to Barecelona, Spain for the 2008 Mobile World Congress - formely known as the 3GSM.

My plan is to blog at least once a day with summaries, points of view and perspective on a variety of mobile related topics including: 

1. How MMS is working as a marketing device in Europe
2. Applications of LBS (location based services) in Asia
3. Bluetooth marketing messaging in Africa
4. Mobile Search
5. Mobile web vs. Mobile widgets
6. Mobile advertising platforms, case studies and trends
7. Mobile Social Networking
8. Demos of 4G technology
9. New devices, or device trends
10. Off-deck content and applications

The plan is to also attend several events related to the conference including the Mobile Monday Peer Awards, Mobile Entertainment forum, Canadian breakfast forum, Mobile Jam session and the GoMo News blender.

Do you have other topics you’d like to hear about while i’m there? Send me an SMS, comment or email me through the contact form on this website.  

Over the past few weeks I’ve spent some time mapping out my conference schedule for the year. If you are interested in learning more about mobile marketing or the industry in general, I’ve listed my top 10 most important mobile conferences for 2008:

1.  Mobile Web USA. January 22-23, San Francisco. Although specific to the U.S. market, the speaker list is impressive with representation from facebook, yahoo, amazon, new york times, AOL and others. This is a great conference to go to if you want to get a jump on the mobile web.
2.  Mobile World Congress. February 11-14, Barecelona, Spain. The industry is shaped by players, if you’re not at the congress you are merely a spectator. This is the premier mobile event of the year featuring 690 GSM mobile operators across 214 territories and countries of the world.
3. Gartner Wireless & Mobile Summit. March 3-5, Chicago. Looking for the latest research, case studies and actionable recommendations? This is the conference for you.
4. CTIA Wireless. April 1-3, Las Vegas. CTIA’s spring trade show is the premier North American venue for all things wireless! This trade show has the distinction of being the largest and most comprehensive in the industry. 
5. Global Messaging Congress. May 8-9, Cannes, France. Everything mobile messaging including Ip-based, Mobile IM, SMS, and MMS and focus on advertising, enterprise messaging, conversion techniques and banking / m-payments.
6. MMA - June 10-12, New York. Agenda for this year’s event is to be posted - but it’s a great short event if you are interested in seeing what other agencies and brands are doing with Mobile Marketing. Case studies, best practices and often a platform for major announcements.
7. Canadian Telecom Summit, June 16-18, Toronto. The Canadian Telecom Summit is Canada’s pre-eminent gathering of the telecommunications industry and those with vested interests in its welfare.
8. CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment. Sept 10-12, location TBD. CTIA’s fall show is a follow-up to the spring show…but with an emphasis on content
9. Mobile Web USA, November. Location TBD. Follow-up to Winter event
10. Mobile Mondays - first monday of each month, Toronto. Small gathering of locals and out of town guests covering a variety of topics around Mobile. Not in Toronto? Check out their global site for a chapter near you.

You can easily make going to these events your full-time job - or at least you’ll need one to pay for them all! I’m hoping to get to the World Congress in February and a few others during the year. Last year I made it to the World Congress, CTIA and the MMA event in New York. I’ve also really enjoyed attending most Mobile Monday events in Toronto.

Am I missing a good one? Please comment, SMS, or email me your suggestions and I’ll add them to this list.

It’s a silly excercise, but everybody does it.  After a banner year for mobile in Canada, here are 10 outrageous predictions for 2008:  

1. SMS third-party advertising - every SMS you send is 150 characters…most of which is sent as blank space. I predict new services will take advantage of this in 2008 to deliver SMS advertising to off-set mobile costs for the consumer (but only if they opt-in of course)
2. Mobile Web advertising will take a piece of your media buy. We’ve seen it happen with online media…now with more inventory becoming available off-deck, the time is right to test and pilot this channel
3. MMS Common Short Codes will finally arrive and usher us into a new era in Mobile marketing in Canada….or at least catch us up to the rest of the world.
4. Mobile payments (m-Commerce) will start to emerge from text books, blogs, and sales pitches.  Look for pilots from Interac, Visa and at least one of the major banks next year.
5. The iphone will finally arrive in Canada - but it will be the second generation 3G phone that will support higher internet access speeds and cool features like video calling. This will be offered exclusively on the Rogers network - but don’t be surprised if another non-mobile retailer offers them for sale first
6. Fixed or low-cost data plans will be universal across all carriers in Canada. It’s already started with Bell and Rogers now offers an $80 / month plan for 500 megs of data - plenty for most of us. It’s still a long way from other plans around the world that are 4 times cheaper or better, but it’s a start
7. Due to fixed or low-cost data plans, look for the mobile web to catch fire.  Marketing campaigns will start incorporating mobile web strategies as part of their marketing mix
8. A new mobile carrier will be announced. The Canadian government announced the opening of new spectrum and is reserving a piece of it for a new player and with special engagement rules that will make it easier for a new competitor to enter the market.
9. Google will continue its charge towards world mobile domination. Look for their gphone sometime in the 3rd quarter and look for them to either bid on spectrum in the U.S., buy a carrier like Sprint outright to own a piece without having to go through the auction process or leverage their new mobile platform called Android to get direct access to many subscribers across many carriers.
10. Social Networking will make the leap from desktop to Mobile as a primary interface / access point 

Even if only a few of these come to fruition in 2008, it will be a great year for Marketers and a great year for Consumers.

Happy Holidays!

Steve Levy, President of Market Research in Eastern Canada for IPSOS Reid, declared at this week’s CMA digital marketing conference that there is no mobile marketing in Canada. According to their research, 27% of Canadian marketers agree that mobile marketing will be very important in the future with 9% indicating they are practicing it now. Steve indicated he didn’t know how anybody could actually be doing mobile marketing now as Canadian carriers don’t yet support it.

I had an opportunity to speak with Steve after his presentation and suggested that his definition of Mobile Marketing was likely different from the 9% practicing it in Canada today.

He pointed out that when he walks by a retail outlet he doesn’t get coupons or messaging sent to his mobile device - which is how he defines mobile marketing. His definition really refers to location based services (LBS) or sometimes referred to as location based messaging (LBM). LBS / LBM does work in Canada across all carriers for those with built-in GPS in their devices (like the Blackberry 8800), but all the examples I’ve worked with require you to download a supporting application to your mobile device to make it work. Related to this are QR Codes (or Quick Response Codes) which are already rampant in other countries. Oh, another interesting stat from the Ipsos-Reid survey, 29% of marketers believe that QR Codes will be a part of many campaigns in the next three years. I’ll cover more on LBS & QR Codes in an upcoming article.

Mobile Marketing is more than LBS and QR Codes, although it is true that the future of Mobile Marketing could revolve around them.

Mobile Marketing is about creating conversations and creating engagement with audiences through the Mobile channel. Put another way, mobile marketing is about amplifying branded events, extending product or service experiences and extending the reach of a campaign which may already include TV, print, web, and email.

When I give an overview of Mobile Marketing to our clients, I tend to break it out into four channels:

1) SMS (or text messaging) & MMS

2) Downloading (ringtones, video & images) & Applications

3) Mobile Web

4) Mobile advertising

Of course others may define or categorize the mobile channel a bit differently, but I’ve found that using this approach can bring clarity and focus to your conversations. Over the coming weeks, I’ll provide my point of view of how to leverage each of these channels into your marketing mix. This year’s CMA conference had its moments, but I’m looking forward to next year’s conference where I’m expecting a location based message to be delivered from centre stage.

Do you twitter? It’s a question I recently posed on my facebook account. Only a handful even knew what Twitter was…only three actually admitted to having a Twitter account.

Twitter is a really neat free social utility tool - it essentially allows you to post very short messages about what you are currently doing RIGHT NOW to the Twitter website - which you can personalize. This is very similar to creating status updates on MSN messenger or facebook…or even setting up email or SMS auto-replies.

The neat thing about Twitter is that you can follow somebody’s Twitter in many ways - either through a website (by visiting their site), as an update on your IM, as a SMS alert, RSS, or email. Think of it as micro-blogging - or blogging for people who don’t have enough to say to actually blog… or for people who want to say a few things but don’t want to create an entire blog posting around it.

I created my own Twitter account and admit i’m struggling to really find a use for it. After investing significant time in building my social equity on facebook, why do i need a separate social utility tool for status updates when facebook already does this automatically to my network of friends? Do i really want to tell people what i’m up to all the time? Do people even care? Will people accept my invitation to join Twitter in a lame attempt to make my twitter page more popular? I’m thinking the answer is no to all of the above.

Having said that, some people have said that Twitter has become a hot newswire - industry insight and news is sometimes available through a Twitter feed before it hits the blogs or news pages. I guess that’s important for some industry people…but does anybody else really care if they hear about industry news 3 hours before they read it in their RSS newsreader? One sign that Twitter has become a hit is the fact there are lots of imitations now available globally - like Pownce, Jaiku and Dodgeball.  Wikipedia reports that there are over 100 knock-offs of Twitter now. It seems like instant messaging 2.0 has arrived. 

As marketers, how do we leverage this channel to reach our audiences and deliver messages? If you are marketing an established personality (or trying to create one), this is an interesting space to play in. Celebrities and politicians have setup their own Twitter pages in order to connect with a younger audience. U.S. presidential candidate Obama has his own Twitter page here.

In previous blog posts I’ve discussed the idea around “Identity 2.0” or creating a way for people to manage their online profiles centrally so that they don’t need to manage multiple accounts or create new ones when they want to join new communities. I would suggest the same thing is or will be needed for micro-blogging to go mainstream.  Wouldn’t it be great if somebody created a widget that automatically updated my status on all my channels? In this scenario all I would do is create a status update on facebook and watch (or not) as the widget automatically publishes my status to Twitter, Pownce, MSN Messenger, my RSS feed, personal website, blog,  or email. I reference facebook because it’s easy, it’s already there and there is already huge social equity in the platform.  

If Twitter can build more social equity beyond the early adopter tech / celebrity / politician communities, it has a great chance of being really useful. The best way to do this will be through real integration with facebook, myspace, and all other social networking tools

UPDATE 10/07: IF you actually click on the Twitter settings within facebook, you can have Twitter automatically update your facebook status. Sweet!

Social networks and text messaging have changed the way people interact with each other… and now it’s changed the way bars and clubs promote their events.  Gone are the days of the promotional flyer as your principle communication device. 

A long time friend living in Ottawa reports that his promotional printing business has dropped to almost nothing over the last 7 months. Having been in the business for over 10 years, he’s seen his share of ups and downs…but nothing like this before. The reason? He reports that promoters have moved to social networking platforms (primarily facebook) and text messaging for all their outreach work.  By now we are all aware of the popularity of facebook (Toronto is currently the second largest network within facebook in the world), but did you know that we are on pace to send over 8 billion text messages this year in Canada? Last year Canadians sent 4.3 billion messages - which was three times more then the previous year!  

Besides the continued adoption of SMS and the creation of niche social networking sites or micro-sites within existing platforms, what’s next? One candidate is the eventual adoption of MMS or multimedia messaging service. Going from SMS (or text messaging) to MMS is like going from radio to TV. SMS is still the killer application for mobile marketing, but MMS is coming and could change the way we promote our events, brands, or services. Again.

Instead of sending a message with a link to a site where you can register for an event… imagine sending a VIP ticket via MMS that can be used as entry into your event, meeting, or conference? Or imagine sending coupons to mobile devices that are redeemable at your favorite retailer?

The technological barriers in sending MMS betwen carriers has been resolved. As soon as carriers introduce pricing that makes MMS affordable (much like they did a few years ago with all you can eat SMS plans), we will see another paradigm shift in how people and marketers interact with each other. This should be interesting.