Mobile Marketing Magazine has an article by Richard Webster about the UK mobile market:

The key to unlocking the real potential for customer recruitment lies in understanding more about them and having the ability to interact with them directly. The availability of mobile data, and the intelligent application of it, is absolutely critical to SMS campaign success. Analysis and careful selection can be carried out before broadcast, and afterwards, with detailed responder profiling. Over time, companies can build profiles of their customers, and subsequently target them for highly specific campaigns, generating real and significant lifetime value.
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With intelligent application and targeting, SMS messaging can enhance a brand, and produce great results. Furthermore, it is cost-effective, measurable and intuitive: lifestyle data in particular has a wealth of additional variables, because the way in which the information has been volunteered allows for the fine-tuning of campaign targeting like no other data can.

John Hagel writes about communities, ten years after he wrote "Net Gain."

In reflecting on the experiences accumulated to date by companies seeking to build virtual communities, I’d like to focus on four challenges:
1. Language
2. Integrating diverse skill sets
3. Shifting mindsets
4. Organizational barriers
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Companies need virtual communities in order to successfully respond to growing pressure on performance coming from two directions simultaneously – customers and talent.

VentureBeat asks if Vostu can become the Facebook of Latin America. "Overall, Vostu’s marketing strategy takes its pages from Facebook’s, though its focus is on high schools instead of colleges. It is selecting elite schools and targeting the most popular students within them — aiming to make outsiders envious, and hoping to grow from there. Of course, access to Vostu is invite-only, and new members can only invite 25 of their friends."

There may be some interesting learnings for Indian companies by looking at what Vostu is doing.

Dina Mehta points to a comment by Jeremy Wagstaff which is so apt: "A blog isn't a publication. It's a person."

[via C. Enrique Ortiz] Paul Golding writes in his critique:

"Now, is there a different approach that might cause the mobile to become viewed by users as something different or more widely usable other than a device to make calls and send texts? I tend to think that there is if we bring the "address book" to the fore and create "buddy-centric" services; including the personification of services into buddies (e.g. I can ask send a picture to my "blog buddy"). Building an entire communications paradigm around buddies is now possible thanks to the migration from horrible old yucky telco signalling paradigm to the IP-based SIP paradigm. Is this the basis for Mobile 2.0? Perhaps. Can all this be merged with today’s Web 2.0 technologies? I think so, and to great effect. Usability limitations will still apply, but greater utility and reliance on new “must have” services could emerge. Will any of this happen? Well, going back to the question “What is Web 2.0?” one could say that besides the technology, it’s also an attitude, such as adventure, risk, entrepreneurialism, openness and many other frames that we don’t find much in evidence in the telco world.

Advertising has become the primary business model on the consumer Internet. Even though display advertising has been around since the early days of the Internet, it is search-linked and context-linked advertising that is now dominant. Whichever way we look at it, companies pay to be in front of users on the Internet. Whether we are surfing content sites or searching for things, advertisers use a mix of text and banner ads to attract our attention. The Internet has made advertising campaigns easy to roll out for a large number of businesses – all one needs is a ‘landing page’ where users click to and a credit card to pay for anything starting at a few dollars. Advertisers are also able to track the ‘clickthroughs’ thus enabling them to measure the response to their ads. In other words, the Internet has brought efficiency and metrics to advertising.

There will be two issues as the game shifts from Search and the Reference Web on the PC to Subscriptions and the Live Web on the mobile. First, the small screen of the mobile is not conducive to show a lot of advertising – content will need to be pushed down to accommodate ads (there’s no space on the ‘side’), and users may not take too kindly to that. Second, much of the current advertising on the Internet is focused on lead-generation. That is good when users can browse for more information and fill up a form or complete a transaction. The small screen of the mobile will not lend itself well to both – at least for the foreseeable future.

On the mobile, as greater control shifts to the user, advertising will need to be re-thought as invertising – advertising that becomes information and which the users invite into their lives. To understand this a little better, let us look at the five states of customers.

First, there are existing customers that a business has. These are the entire universe of customers who have done at least one transaction with the business. Second, there are loyal customers, who do repeat business and thus are the more profitable ones. Third, there are the future customers – the ones who have yet to do a transaction and whom the business is interested in targeting. They can also be thought of as prospects. Fourth, they are former customers or a competitor’s customers, who have either exited the relationship with the business or are doing business with a competitor. (There may be some overlap between the third and fourth categories.)

Advertising helps businesses build brand, retain existing customers, and convert prospects into customers. Invertising helps build relationships with existing customers to make them into profitable, loyal customers – and prevent them from becoming former customers. In fact, invertising can also help in educating future customers to initiate a business relationship.

So far, businesses have not had the means to do invertising and build relationships. This is where the mobile comes in – with its reach, its ability to handle subscriptions and provide new content to users as soon as it is published. Brands and businesses can encourage users to subscribe to content channels published by them – think of these as ‘infostreams.’ Users can subscribe to these infostreams by simply sending an SMS from their mobiles – a capability available on every mobile. To unsubscribe, users can send yet another SMS. This ability to start and stop infostreams shifts control to the users and ensures a spam-free environment.

Think, for a moment, about the relationships one would like to have – wherein we are as interested in knowing what’s new as the business as in letting us know. The neighbourhood kirana store, the bookshop, the multiplex, the phone manufacturers, deals from the supermarkets – these will form the anchor for the invertising-centric business model of the Live Web. They will all be willing to pay a ‘relationship fee’ to maintain an open communication channel to customers.

Tomorrow: The Next Google