When we launched Mobile Marketing magazine, one of the first pieces we commissioned was a piece that sought to define what mobile marketing is.
Now, we are delighted to say, industry veteran Helen Keegan, (pictured) MD and founder of mobile marketing agency, Beepmarketing, has agreed to provide us with her own personal view of what mobile marketing is.
Helen specialises in mobile marketing, She was in at the birth of the mobile marketing industry in 2000, as head of customer experience at ZagMe, the precision wireless marketing pioneer. There, she recruited more than 85,000 customers in Lakeside and Bluewater shopping malls (two of the largest in Europe) and ran more than 1,500 SMS (text message) marketing campaigns for over 150 leading retail clients, agencies and brands, including Esprit, Nike, TopShop, HMV and Waterstones.
Before that, she had a varied career covering retail, marketing and consultancy during which time she created and produced a live stage show and training seminar roadshow to drive change within a major UK public transport company, involving 30,000 staff. More recently, Helen created the worlds first mobile marketing course, in conjunction with the Institute of Direct Marketing in 2002.
Today, Helen runs her own mobile marketing consultancy, BeepMarketing, developing mobile strategies and implementing mobile marketing campaigns, using a range of mobile technologies for many blue-chip and agency clients, including Scottish Courage, UIP, Vivendi Universal, Sony Ericsson, Emap, Samsung and Danone.
She is a regular on the mobile marketing conference circuit and runs mobile marketing courses at the Institute of Direct Marketing, Academy Internet and New Media Knowledge. She is also a guest lecturer in marketing at the Universities of Westminster, Newcastle and Hertfordshire and a founder member of Women in Mobile Data, a global association for women working in mobile and runs Swedish Beers, an ad-hoc mobile networking event in London with Steve Flaherty from Keitai Culture.
In this first article, Helen lists out what she sees as the 20 key mobile marketing applications. In the weeks to come, she will take each in turn and look at it in more detail. Over to you Helen

Whenever I meet someone new and I tell them what I do for a living, they usually assume one or both of the following:

1. That mobile marketing is sending junk text messages to get people to subscribe, unwittingly, to a mobile content subscription service. Ergo, mobile marketing is bad.

2. That mobile marketing = marketing using SMS (text messaging)

Neither assumption is true so this is my lowdown on what mobile marketing includes.

Applications of mobile marketing
Of course text messaging is still an important element of mobile marketing, but not the only one. The following list is adapted from the course module on mobile marketing I wrote this year for the Institute of Direct Marketing (IDM).
Over the coming weeks, Ill look at each in turn in more detail and look at what it has to offer.

1. Text and win.

2. Voting and participation TV.

3. Quizzes.

4. Mobile content/mobile media (pictures, ringtones, video).

5. Mobile games.

6. Mobile Applications.

7. CRM customer relationship management .

8. Interactive Voice Response (IVR).

9. Multimedia messaging (MMS).

10. Direct ad-response/Red Button Mobile.

11. Barcodes.

12. Location-based services (LBS).

13. WAP portal or wap site (aka mobile internet).

14. Java magazine or java portal.

15. Mobile search.

16. Mobile music.

17. Podcasting.

18. Blogging and RSS.

19. Moblogging.

20. Bluetooth/infra-red.

So those are my top 20 applications for mobile marketing. Im sure there are more than that, so if anyone can think of any that Ive missed, then please do add your comments. In the meantime, next time round, well look in more detail at no.1 on the list, that most popular of mobile marketing applications, Text and Win.

To read more of Helens thoughts on mobile marketing, visit her blog.