Mobile News

The mobile marketing campaign will require mobile content such as SMS texts or other more advanced formats. An important consideration here is to separate the authoring of such content from its handling. The mobile marketing software will usually not help with the authoring part, relying instead on third-party software.

Mobile marketing campaigns make heavy use of SMS, which defines in its specification a number of attributes that can be of interest for the authoring of mobile content.

The first attribute is the alphabet used to encode the text message. A functional requirement is the support of the default GSM alphabet, as well as the UCS2  alphabet with message-length counters. UCS2 allows the content to contain a “new line” character, for example. A second functional requirement is the support of Flash SMS, which is used to display content immediately on the handset. Another requirement related to SMS attributes is the support of rewrite SMS. Finally, the short message validity period support is a functional requirement that lets the content author control the delivery of messages.

While the support of these attributes depends on the capabilities of the SMS gateway used, the requirements should not be dependent on a particular SMS gateway. Additional functional requirements for mobile content may be the support of concatenated messages for text messages exceeding 160 characters in the default alphabet or 70 characters in Unicode alphabet.

Messages containing enhanced messaging service (EMS) pictures or Nokia ringtones are considered by handsets as carrying binary data and interpreted according to the manufacturer’s support of a particular specification. A generic requirement is therefore the support of user-defined binary data by the author of mobile content without assuming vendor-specific data structures of the user data part of the mobile message. This permits a separation between the authoring of non-text message content from its use for campaign messages. Alternatively, a functional requirement may be the specific support of a given specification or message type within that specification, such as support of picture messages or EMS melodies.