SMS SPAM and the mobile (part 2) - Following on from part 1;
Email is an essential part of work/life for many, and it's difficult to imagine us living without it.
But SPAM prevention needs to increase pretty rapidly. IMHO we're all becoming fairly immune to email - often binning emails we don't recognise without reading them, or setting up junk filters that we never manually review.
For important communications, we tend to rely on the mobile phone. It's on our person 90% of the time, only select people have the number (we think*) and as it costs significant money to make it ring or bleep, SPAM is vastly reduced.
But the marketing industry has started to realise this and bodies like the Mobile Marketing Association are championing the mobile phone as a valid route to personalised marketing.
Laura Marriot is one of their main public spokes-people and as a young literate, their webinars always seem credible ;-)
Human off-shore call centres and automated IVR systems can of course make our mobile phones ring and erm. "speak" to us.
But the current mobile marketing status quo is to use SMS Text messages to our mobiles instead. The messages have to be short (160 characters unless concentated) and are moderately unobtrusive as our phones only go bleep and they take half a second to arrive. Trouble is, half the time they are so short, they don't even say what they are about, let alone who they are really from.
ICSTIS (the independent telcoms body) are supposed to govern the use for premium rate response rip-offs and the like; but they don't handle individual cases.
The first port of call is still your phone operator, who in theory would then send the cumulative SPAM/rip-off complaints to ICSTIS.
But you have probably unfortunately already experienced how unresponsive mobile operators are. Once I paid 25p to get in a human operator queue, was on hold for 8 minutes and then the queuing system hung up on me. Nice!
More to come in part 3
