According to Mary Meeker's Annual State of the Internet Talk at the Web 2.0 Summit late last year, 2009 looks set for big developments in the Mobile Marketing and Mobile Search Marketing arena.

Take a look at a copy of the presentation here. Even though the figures mostly reflect the US market (South Africa or even Africa are not mentioned anywhere in the document), it should still stir up some excitement amongst eMarketers locally. South Africa has a very high mobile penetration rate and more and more people are becoming comfortable using their phones for more than just calls. With data costs coming down (can you believe it?) and data bundles becoming a household term, the www is reaching more and more people via their handsets.

My question is: How can we best use this opportunity, without being too invasive? Let's be honest, nobody likes to be distracted by several flashing ads all over a web page or different windows popping up the second a page starts loading. When it comes to mobile web browsing, this should be an even bigger consideration as screen real estate is at best, restrictive.

Marketers have several options available to tap into the mobile arena. On the one side, there is the option of developing a WAP site, optimised for mobile browsing. Depending on how well this is executed, this can be very successful.

On the other side, it could be as simple as getting someone to enter their mobile number to get SMS updates sent to them instantly. A step up from plain text SMS messages, are MMS messages. MMS allows for the use of rich media such as images, audio and even video. This can have a much greater impact and generate a better response. As the phone is a rather personal item and mostly kept quite close at hand, the response rate is generally also higher in comparison to other marketing channels.

The biggest challenge though, in my opinion, is getting someone to divulge their private number. Because Mobile Marketing often requires the consumer to send an SMS "request" to a short code, they thereby indicate that they are open to "communicate". And because they also usually have the option to opt out of a campaign, by sending a STOP request to the same short code, they can feel more in control.

Another technology that has not really been explored to its full potential, is that of semacodes, or mobile barcodes (also referred to as mobile tagging). Using barcode generators, a 2D image is created and can be displayed anywhere on your site (it could even be printed on a pin badge!). This can enable a visitor to your site to literally capture any information directly to their handset using a barcode reader. With the number of GPS enabled handsets on the rise, this can be very useful to quickly and easily locate your business using a GPS Navigation application (such as Wayfinder, Google Maps for Mobile or Nokia Maps). Online barcode generators are available for free and provide a direct link to the generated image, which can be embedded on any site.

The barcode above will decode to:

Quirk eMarketing

www.quirk.biz
3rd Floor Armoury Building Buchanan Square
160 Sir Lowry Rd,
Woodstock Cape Town ,
7925
Phone: +27 (0)21 462 7353
Fax: +27 (0)21 462 7354

This one will translate to: 33°55'39.55"S and 18°26'12.07"E, which is the GPS location for the above address.

As far as Mobile Marketing goes, the options are endless. At the end of the day, a client's specific needs should dictate the solution.