The Clean and Green Club

Mobile Marketing, Part 2: Legal, Ethical, and Strategic Considerations: Shel Horowitz’s Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip, September 2009

Once again, this article owes much to The Mobile Marketing Handbook: Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Mobile Marketing Campaigns, by Kim Dushinski–read this book BEFORE you implement any mobile campaign.

The careful mobile marketer will keep some basic principles in mind, not only to avoid alienating your prospects, but to stay on the right side of the law. First of all, in a potentially intrusive technology, privacy concerns are key. Second, more than in any other medium (even the Internet), you must coax the customer to opt in. And third, the customer or prospect should feel that interacting with you improves his or her life.

With its legally mandated emphasis on authenticity, honest disclosure, and customer involvement/opt-in, mobile marketing is very much in harmony with the ethical methods I’ve been advocating for years (see my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People first, https://www.principledprofit.com).

Still, mobile marketing may or may not make sense for you–or for me. Dushinski’s 16-point checklist is a great tool to determine if there’s a fit. In my case, she convinced me that if I do any mobile marketing at all, it will be a text-based SMS newsfeed that I can pilot first on Twitter; most of the other mobile technologies are either too expensive and complicated for me, or simply don’t apply to a non-location-based business like mine–this is crucial information that could prevent me from wasting a lot of time and money on methods that aren’t appropriate.

One thing I WILL do after reading Dushinski’s book–and soon!–is set up a website that’s optimized for mobile phone users, and includes a press kit for reporters on the go; this is a no-brainer! Optimizing the experience for anyone wishing to access at least my main site from mobile could potentially yield huge dividends, and can be set up simply by simplifying existing content and hosting on a subdomain of one of my existing sites.