Of course, if you’re charging customers for something you MUST be very clear about how much you’re going to charge them, how and when.

There is at least a reply path so you can tell them to stop annoying you or even ask them a question like ‘where did you get my number’? Chances are you did legitimately tick a box 5 years ago that said send me marketing text messages, or it was hidden in some ts and cs somewhere.

Yes, they messed up, they should have added ‘reply stop to unsubscribe’ or something similar but it’s not the worst crime in the world – at least they’re trying it. My top tips for them:

* Add ‘reply stop to unsubscribe’
* Keep the telephone number as a single number so that most phones pick it up as a phone number
* Make sure you have a wapsite so that folks like us can click thru on the link in the message rather than having to wait until you’re near a pc to get to the website
* Identify the sender in the message (so if you had subscribed to say Mobile Offers Inc then [Mob Offers] should be included in the message – or at least a shortened version of it that would be recognisable to customers)
* Ask someone who knows about these things to check that your campaign is legit, usable and customer friendly.

The much worse crimes are *still* from the dodgy mobile content and ringtone companies sending out wap push messages saying you’ve got something free when actually, you don’t have anything free and it links you to potentially very unsuitable content. Or they’re just touting their dodgy services period. My number seems to be doing the adult content industry rounds at the moment and I’m getting some very dubious links to ‘hot sexy videos right now’! And as you’ll see over at Brumbletext (http://www.grumbletext.co.uk/vt.php?t=333) you’ll see I’m not the only one! Those messages are far more damaging IMHO than a company trying out mobile marketing first time round and making a few mistakes.

Guess it makes sense to ask someone who knows about these things before sending out your messages rather than relying on the salesperson who sold you the data or the sms marketing system in the first place who probably doesn’t have a clue

What if a pillock company decided to use spam and they gave public info on their contact details [Tel]. It is so…………….easy to do a DDOS on them with a VOIP system.

Anyways, OpenID and other ways to create verified identities is good, but what about making a gaming site where WE the gamers target the spammers and the phishers and the rest. Oh what fun…………….. To know that you can ruin a REAL [sic] business as well as improving your score would be so much fun. “Go ahead Punk, make my day, spam me and I will ……. your ass and get 1000 points”.

Yours militantly……………………Loopy

Let’s start making it a requirement for advertisers to provide access to the source of the opt-in. In other words. tell me what box I ticked (or didn’t tick). Show me the terms and conditions where I agreed to this. Explain to me what existing business relationship I have that permits this communication.

List brokering is BIG BUSINESS. If we add an entirely new level of transparency to this business it will cause a few very important things to happen.
1) List owners will be a lot more careful about how often – and to whom – they rent their hard earned lists.
2) The resulting increase in value of a transparent list will go up causing the price of list rental to go up resulting in fewer low quality campaigns.