I just read that Verizon will begin charging content providers $0.03 for every message they send to Verizon subscribers.

According to the article on RCR Wireless, the carrier said that “the new fee was necessary to cover the carrier’s overhead in delivering MT messages.”

The fee will apply to standard and premium programs but not to free-to-end-user, mobile giving, or non-profit organizational programs.

That’s all, folks. For more information, check out the article.

It seems that carriers are cracking down on content providers who aren’t following the Mobile Marketing Association’s guidelines when it comes to premium messages and content. According to RCR Wireless, Sprint was the first carrier to begin fining non-compliant content providers and supposedly other carriers are following suit:

Sprint Nextel Corp. earlier this year became the first U.S. carrier to formally tie revenue shares to business practices, warning that partners who repeatedly violate Mobile Marketing Association guidelines—by incurring high refund rates, for instance, or not reporting billing errors to the carrier—can forfeit every dime and lose their short codes.

“Non-compliant short code campaigns will receive penalties up to and including program termination from Sprint Nextel Boost networks,” the carrier said in a confidential five-page memo. “Conversely, revenue-share incentives may be applied for programs performing will on policy compliance.”

Other U.S. carriers are quietly following in Sprint Nextel’s footsteps, according to Jay Emmett, general manager of the Amdocs subsidiary OpenMarket, which distributed Sprint Nextel’s memo and handles billing issues for the carrier. (rest of article here.)

So, maybe the Obama VP text message didn’t turn out like it was supposed to. And maybe I’m a little embarrassed because I hyped it up. But rather than rant about how horrible it was (because that’s what I thought I’d do that Saturday morning), I’m going to try, try to be objective about. Therefore, I’m going to use a numbered list because nothing is more objective than a numbered list.

1. Sending a text message to 2.9 million or so people at 3:24 AM ET is generally a bad thing. I’m a little strict about this, so I think sending a text after 7pm in most cases is pushing it (unless it’s a severe weather warning or a snow day announcement or about a dozen other reasonable things that I can’t think of at the moment). Therefore, in my mind, any time during the dark AM hours is off-limits. You risk waking up people in middle of the night (like this guy) and losing their trust, their business, and maybe even their vote.
2. Sending a text message containing information that the press leaked hours before is generally a bad thing, too. With mobile marketing, you should try to send timely, valuable information. Therefore, if everyone already knows the information you would like to present in 160 characters on their cell phone, then you also risk losing their trust, their business, and yes, maybe even their vote.

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Too many people in this industry make grand statements about how mobile-savvy they are….How tapped into the market they are, how they know what users want, how they can tell you the seven best ways to blah blah blah. I know. It’s annoying. Well, here’s one more person to add to that list.

I’m not an expert. I don’t have twenty years experience in the telecom industry. I’m just your average 26 year-old gal living in Atlanta who gets a little panicky when there’s only one bar of battery life left on her cell phone. Enough of the introductions. Welcome to my column.

So much of my life right now orbits around the moderately-sized screen of my RAZR. I have a tendency to exaggerate, so let me prove it to you with a brief but detailed view of my life. (more…)