GOLDEN TICKET
The guys at carsonified have come up with a great online marketing campaign for their series of conferences, Future of Web Apps, Future of Web Design, Future of Mobile and Fuel.
Basically they want people to hear about their conferences through other peoples efforts to “advertise” on their blogs and generating comments. See here for the competition.
MOBILE VIRAL MARKETING
It got me thinking about mobile viral marketing. How can mobile services improve on what already exists for online campaigns.
What we need is the operators to expose the how messages are sent through their networks.
The idea would be that anyone can submit a message to the operator marked as a viral message, this could be an advertiser, individual, blogger etc. The message is submitted through an interface which allows the operator to track when the viral message is forwarded.
The operator provides an interface to view the statistics associated with your message, you can see how many times the message was forwarded, you could match this up with actual click through on your mobile site received from sending the message.
MMS
This type of mobile viral marketing would be well suited to MMS, no need to trawl through the 100’s of millions of SMS just the few million MMS per day to provide the info, wouldn’t even need be real time. MMS would be well suited to containing advertising / marketing messages with its image and video capability.
CROSS-NETWORK OPTIMISM
Now I am being really optimistic but how great would it be if the operators worked together so that the way the messages were traced was consistent across all networks so you could tell from the outside when messages are sent from one network to another.
CHARITY USES
I think this technology would be extremely useful for the charity sector as well. Most causes, world wide events are spread virally, if there were a method of sending the message out and tracking its success and reach the larger charities would be very interested.
SOLUTIONS
There are some companies out there with solutions for the operators to make this happen. Vantrix, Mobixell and Amethon all have products which provide the trace through the networks messaging systems and provide the stats.
Let me know what you think of the opportunity for mobile viral marketing, remember I need 25 comments to be entered into the draw for the carsonified prize.

