The Mobile Marketing Association has released their latest update (version 3.3) to their Consumer Best Practice Guidelines today, you can download it here:

http://www.mmaglobal.com/bestpractices.pdf

Highlighted in the guidelines are updates to general conduct (section 2), advertising and promotion (section 3), marketing to children (section 4) and explicit honoring of SMS STOP commands (section 8). We’re happy to see MMA continue to push forward with policies demanding that participants in the mobile ecosystem honor consumer’s choice and participation. We actively review our logs and add additional opt-out phrases that we see commonly used, such as sentences starting with “please remove”, or “take me off”, for which we honor just like any of the other required opt-out commands (STOP, STOP ALL, CANCEL, QUIT, END, UNSUBSCRIBE).

I’m blogging from BrandSmart 2008, a brand marketing event put on by the Chicago AMA. It’s been a great day so far, with keynotes from thought leaders from Miller, Thinktopia, Digitas and Google. Interactive Mediums is lucky enough to have the opportunity to co-sponsor the event, and provide the ability for conference participants to text their questions for speakers throughout the day. It’s a really simple thing to do, but it’s also very useful as people are asking questions that they might not otherwise (I think some people don’t like raising their hands).

As you can imagine, the key message from this conference is: the world is changing. What was is no longer what is. People do not want to be communicated at, they want to be communicated with. The mobile phone has a strong seat at the table in this new world…and we feel right at home :)

It’s a big day of news for Interactive Mediums.

First off, welcome to Doug Barth. Doug is joining the Interactive Mediums team as Lead Architect. Previously, Doug worked for Orbitz Worldwide, where he helped build out Orbitz’s complex event processing framework, recently highlighted at JavaOne. We are super excited to have Doug join the team.

Secondly, we’re blogging. It’s silly that it’s taken us this long to fire this up, but we’re here now and we’re excited to start posting about some of the things we’re working on, and things that we find interesting.