In a world when it seems that individuals worldwide are bombarding each other with trillions of text messages everyday, it looks like marketeer want to get in on the act.

A recent survey shows that mobile marketing comes in 2nd only to web-based marketing among marketeer.

In my opinion, these marketeer are only being held back by the lack of polished mobile marketing techniques and measurements.  When the telecoms or the advertisers ( … or perhaps an interested 3^rd party… ) figure out how to provide those all important addressable advertising techniques and platforms, mobile advertising will TAKE OFF… and some one will make lots of money building SMS spam software to block those advertisements from our phones.

One of my favorite resources is Tim McElligott.  He has a good carrier/vendor story about Frontier Communications.  It showcases how well you can utilize a telecommunications service providers data warehouse to impact the bottom line across the organization from subscribers to SOX compliance.

In my opinion it takes one of the first steps by utilizing subscriber and product order information to provide visibility into the organization.  The next step is to take the usage data and show not just product “order adoption”, but product “usage adoption” to show where on the product life cycle a particular product resides:

Being able to track products in this manner is key to managing the “long-tail” product catalog that telecommunication service providers should be embracing in the years to come.

You have to love those studies/observations that “prove” what probably seems like a very sensible concept but never had enough evidence to get pass the “gut feel” stage.  Well, here’s one that I think that you will like….

It appears that McKinsey “discovered” that if you ask for contrarian view points during the decision making process you will receive better results than if you had made the decision in an “echo chamber”.

For telecommunications service providers, I think that this lesson should be applied in the area of strategic direction and avoiding the “echo chamber” of Wall Street analysts.  Those analysts are looking to drive “stock price” more than to drive “value add to the market” for telecommunications service providers.

Rather than looking for the “quad play” business model because someone said it was what Verizon was doing, look to what your organization does best and build on that strength…

What's the different between online banking and mobile banking?  It appears that while the banking industry views them as similar... Gen Y doesn't.

Steve Mott has a good look at how Gen Y is acting more like Baby Boomers when it comes to finance... except for the use of ... you guessed it... the iPhone.

Note - It is interesting to see a "generational" jump from Baby Boomers past Gen X to Gen Y for certain concepts relating to finance.  I wonder which similar traits the upcoming generation will have with the Gen Xers.

OK.  I don’t usually comment on “press-release” pieces.  However, I thought this one merited some commentary on two fronts.

Here’s the concept according to the report from Monica Allevan:

“The Skydeck service allows consumers to see their voice mail, text messages, calls, contacts, the last time they talked to a contact and more, right from the desktop. Users also can make notes about conversations and store them, and they can have voice mail transcribed through SpinVox.”

I get the fact that if you use your phone “professionally” that these are concepts that you would like to see.  For my iPhone, I wish that these capabilities were a little more robust since my last backup/restore was less than successful ( …but that’s another posting… ).

However, the company thinks that the wireless providers will allow this type of functionality to go unchallenged since they don’t currently offer that type of service….  Hmmm either the CEO wants to be acquired or he’s not following what Verizon and AT&T usually do to people to make revenue on off-deck content and don’t let them “wet their beaks”.

Apple and the App Store seems to be the one operation that I can think of, but they have a “relationship” with AT&T.

What do the people think? Please post your comments below or send me an email (JohnLMyers@msn.com) with your comments about how carriers treat off-deck content providers.