Mobile Marketing Survey

I recently read that in this economy "opt out is the new opt in". 

Yeah right.

This was literature on a site (which I won't mention) that sells marketing lists, so I had to chalk it up to wishful thinking rather than benevolent distribution of informed market information.

For those of us that take this stuff seriously and know that blatant Spamming erodes respondent cooperation, we need to know that even when we think we're following the rules, local laws might derail our efforts. As as we move too add SMS survey invitations to our toolkit, the landscape is getting tricky to navigate.

Now, marketers who advertise products and services such as alcohol, tobacco and gambling cannot market to any phone number or address which is registered on a do-not-contact registry within Utah or Michigan. It's all about protecting families, and you can check it out here.....

"But I don't advertise tobacco! I'm in research!"

Maybe... But my point is that we need to be careful. Extend this to our world of mobile data collection for a moment, and is it really so hard to believe that similar legislation could be introduced to protect certain groups.... like children for example, a segment for whom we already need explicit parental consent before we can engage.

"One odd aspect of the laws enforcing these programs is that even if a consumer double-opts-in for an SMS campaign and verifies that he or she is 21 or older, marketers would still be in violation if that person previously submitted their mobile phone number to either state’s do-not-contact list."

Could you be unwittingly inviting minors to participate in your mobile marketing survey? Or are you treating SMS invitations with less ethical scrutiny than email? Might be time to re-scrub that list...