Spamalots will let the side down

I would be lying if I said that I leapt for joy at the prospect of meeting another mobile provider last week.

In all honesty, these are the ever-available appointments that I (and I’m sure other marketing journos) tend not to prioritise.

It’s not due to a lack of interest in mobile marketing. Far from it.

The whole industry is eager to crack the concept of how to target mobile users with relevance and tact.

After three years or so of industry soothsayers predicting the advent of mobile ‘next year’, there is now real anticipation that the time is nigh.

The problem is that so many players are now jumping aboard the bandwagon. With this comes a genuine concern that firms without solid strategies, or tried and tested technology, will bombard the masses with SMS and prompt “Email spam comes to mobile” horror headlines.

Well, dragging myself out to meet m-send (a mobile player that’s been quietly bubbling away on sorting out its technology before launching a PR drive – others take note), left a better taste in my mouth.

The focus is apparently on engaging with consumers, fitting messages into brands’ overall comms strategy, and building long term, ongoing CRM via mobile.

The MD’s assurance that m-send wants to ‘earn the right’ to contact people was refreshing, and, I hope, honest.

If brands get mobile right, offering something relevant, useful and downright interesting, its massive potential could finally be realised.

Case studies are trickling through and there are already some clever little campaigns out there.

In the meantime, if you’re unlucky enough to be spammed with texts, beware of opening them before deleting – doing so added a hefty £20 to my last bill.

Old school meets digital - over a posh lunch

I had the pleasure of lunching with the Sky News team yesterday afternoon. They are a bunch of people with serious aspirations for online.

The jolly Adam Boulton, political editor for Sky News, admitted that the golden and privileged age of old-school media tycoons is dying a fast death (and not just from an overdose of free foie gras and Chateau Lafite-Rothschild).

Alluding to digital, he joked about the photographer, David Bailey, "I had my photo taken with him this morning," he said, in a more casual tone than most of us could muster.

Boulton said Bailey's previous muse that morning, PM Gordon Brown, had asked why Bailey wasn't using a digital camera.

"It's like socialism, it makes everything look the same," Bailey said.

Lord knows what Brown made of this.

"Film? Remember that?" quipped Boulton to me.

But the point is, 'digital' is leaking its formidable influence into even the most traditional arches of society.

And the right here, right now, two-way of influence of the web has not escaped Sky News.

The media owner is the first channel to produce a nightly news programme based on the content its web readers have been consuming that day. Whether its the ousting of the Pakistan prime minister or the disappearance of a one-legged cat - the story gets a showing on the programme.

Here, the web agenda truly influences the TV agenda.

Martin Stanford, the programme's presenter, told me: "It's fascinating. At the moment, we're balancing the 'push' of our Sky News agenda from our trained news team with popular content from our web readers - but who knows where we'll end up?"

Sinister snooping in social media

Facebook was bound to start snooping on our behaviour, but just why are people surprised? I can't say I'm stunned that Facebook is monitoring users' purchases but I have to admit, its turnaround is quite spectacular.