Whether or not you celebrate Christmas The Text Works team wish you all a happy holiday and a happy new year.

We hope 2010 will be prosperous, and there might even be a few special offers coming your way (hint hint).

As the holiday season approaches it seems that a substantial amount of marketers are levering new and diverse marketing techniques including:

• Viral marketing
• Web 2.0 branding
• Interactive billboards
• and SMS mobile marketing

The problem with increased marketing initiatives is the general spam affect experienced by certain demographics - for example business owners with young children.

So how can you market with SMS and not contribute to the spammers of Christmas past?

The best recommendation we can make is give them something in exchange for permission to promote your brand or service. It's easy at this time of year to give away gifts or opportunities to win seasonal prizes such as hampers, toys and shopping vouchers. Football tickets at Christmas do not sell because it is out of season, so the more relevant and timely the better your response will be.

Whatever you do consider your audience first, your message second and your end goal last. If your attitude is what can I give them to get something back you've nailed the Christmas marketing spirit.

The NYSEMO, New York State Emergency Management Office, have set up an SMS service for New Yorkers to receive appropriate hazard alerts and notifications. Through the SMS web interface New York public sector staff can set up emergency alerts and private notifications for New Yorkers. It is claimed the service will help raise public awareness and obtain vital information for the emergency and local government services.

The service received 4.7 million subscribers with 2.3 million opting in to receive related promotional messages. The opt in population covers 64 college campuses and the the New York City University network. The subscription is free and allows subscribers to register one or more mobile devices to receive alerts and notifications.

The alert systems is said to include major road closures, weather warnings and state recommendations with regard to public safety, as well as notification for local governments and universities.

British government bodies could learn a lot from New York's modernisation, local governments could offer a text message support channel and subscriptions for public announcements.

Numo's SMS preview application has achieved 600,000 new registrations in the last two months. The application displays a preview of SMS messages of any inbound text messages.

The app is targeting Android and Symbian mobile devices, it is free and remains one of the most popular download at app stores. The app is available for download from Numo's website.

For those who are using SMS as a marketing tool this is not bad news - I promise! The previews, lets call them snippets, are just like a search engine result. The opening to your SMS message can give it context and appeal. So design you messages with this in mind, experiment with this application - for instance do attached images appear in the preview?

Developments and obstructions to existing strategies can be turned to your advantage and don't forget the iPhone allows SMS preview by default anyway, so make the first 8 words an encouragement to open the entire message.

Some really great news for T-Mobile recently as their mobile website has been ranked No.1 for the second year running. Global reviews announced T-Mobile the best of its assessed mobile phone websites this week.

Mobile web design is still the under dog

Mobile web is still largely an untapped lead generation resource - so does this mean their success will be short lived, who knows. Another interesting factor derived from the Global reviews findings is that the mobile web development is not keeping pace with the vast growth and evolution of mobile related offerings.

With Google and Yahoo looking to dominate search for the mobile web will T-Mobile and similar industry leaders be able to rely on their mobile websites being a real web referral? Only time will tell.

The criteria

The survey measured user experience on the T-Mobile, Orange, Vodafone, 3, Virgin, O2, Carphone Warehouse and Tesco mobile websites for a reasonable cross section analysis of the industries services.

They assessed each mobile service provider using the following criteria:

• content and tools
• customer support
• prospective customer information
• purchasing process
• site utility

The results

T-Mobile received a total score of 66%, O2 were a close second with 61% - an improvement on last years results. Vodafone are still in third position with 59%. I think all companies could invest in mobile web optimisation and facilitation - the question is can you afford to miss out on mobile?

Email marketing has always been a favourite marketing method in the past and no doubt for the future. Email and mobile marketing have a lot in common, this article has some great information for email marketers. Using a variation on their advice I have compiled the following tips for mobile marketers;

• Customer Engagement

  Use profile information from previous SMS campaigns to engage users with opinion poles, promotions and competitions.

• Stay on target

  Always make sure your campaigns and promotions are as relevant as possible. One way to make sure participants are willing to spend money is to have them text in to start the campaign. That way you know they are interested in your offer, competition or opinion pole.

• Twitter

  Use mini blogs like Twitter.com to promote campaigns, people share a lot of information very readily on social networks - can you afford to ignore them?

For a comprehensive introduction to our service see our full list of features.

We have noticed a couple of blogs appear around the subject of mobile marketing and advertising. In short mobile advertising can be described as having a paid advert hosted on a mobile facing website or application. One or two blogs mentioned SMS messages as being "strictly" mobile advertising, and I wanted to discuss the distinction between sending an SMS advert and SMS mobile marketing.

If an SMS message is a stand alone advert then it is mobile advertising - I can't argue with that. But mobile marketing by definition is building a group/demographic of mobile device users from an array of mobile campaigns, sending them targeted messages and perhaps finishing with some follow up contact with other campaigns or promotions. SMS is one of the BEST ways to profile, promote and persuade mobile users.

My advice to anyone interested in learning more about mobile marketing is Google the term "mobile marketing" and have a look at the real industry news. SMS is still a core foundation to many mobile marketing success stories, from ABC's Heroes interactive initiative to Future Publishings editorial profiling campaigns.

We offer a free trial and live demonstrations of SMS mobile marketing. Don't just take our word for it, research and try it for yourself.