Last two week I was busy planning a plot for a client. We were exploring a blended solution using mobile, bluetooth, twitter, and RSS for an user engagement campaign. Like most of the companies in this region, my client has been using mobile marketing for quite a while. They broadcast marketing messages via SMS.
Today mobile is no longer a geeky way of marketing practice. The reach and the end user adoption are very high. But while some marketers are still using mobile way to broadcast information, mobile marketing practice has been evolved from informing towards more involving.
Some marketers have confusion between broadcasting and engagement advertising. For sure they both need an effective call-to-action. But if your mobile marketing campaign aims at engagement, you need to pay attention to two parameters: (1) interaction (2) distance.
We hardly see end-user interaction happens in broadcasting SMS marketing except using WAP push. Most of the broadcasting mobile advertising campaigns keep end users in a remote distance from the marketers. The message is broadcast, recipients are merely informed. The rest of the experience are disconnected and untraceable.
From a perspective of end user engagement in mobile marketing, marketers need to transform mobile handsets as a vehicle not just a message medium. An experience that we want the recipients to respond to our campaign and create instant affinity. Some mobile marketing technologies such as 1D and 2D barcode are made for this purpose. Also, bluetooth and infrared beaming bring end users become more proximate to the marketers; the closer the distance, the better chance for engagement and conversion.
Recently I use twitter a lot. The microblogging tool turns 140-character small talks into a great application for user engagement. Here I recommend a BusinessWeek article, “Why Twitter Matters” for worth reading. I am also inspired by Twistori. An interesting experiment that sheds light on how participatory user experience creates instant affinity. All these marketing tools are not fancy; they are fascinating instead.
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Thanks for visiting this weblog. I am a digital marketer based in Hong Kong. After founding a marketing consulting company, merged it with a trade show company, and completed my tenure in 2007, I am blogging my insight and commentary for marketing and entrepreneurial experience. Now I am the Managing Director of 
