Mobile campaigns are a lot like a child. If you don’t nurture them, or care for them, or just plain ignore them, odds are, they are bound to turn out all wrong.

And just like children they go through a series of steps: incubation, birth, adolescence, adulthood, and finally they reach senior citizen status.

But unlike children, there is no What to Expect When You Are Expecting to refer to. You want to be a good parent, and that takes preparation. I want you to be prepared. I want you to know what to expect when you are expecting (a mobile campaign). So, before you find yourself in a delivery room, about to give birth to a mobile campaign, please read what follows.

Phase 1: Incubation.

“We’re having a mobile campaign!” Elation! Excitement! Then, realization, “We’re… having… a… mobile… campaign…” But fear not. Incubation takes time. In the business word you probably aren’t going to have nine months to wait. The birth of a mobile campaign is going to happen much more quickly, so it is important that you get prepared.

Haphazardness is not going to cut it.

Realize that for this campaign to work it needs to be fully integrated with the other channels in your marketing strategy. Think of Incubation as the planning phase. It is important to understand how you can leverage your other marketing channels to get people to participate in the campaign. This could include in-store, radio, television, and social media promotions, to name just a few.

And just like preparing for the birth of a child, preparing for a mobile campaign means you need to have the proper infrastructure in place. With a baby, you would prepare the nursery. For a mobile campaign, you need to find a partner that best suits your campaign strategy. Your partner should be well versed in the mobile tactic(s) you’ll be employing. Just as I wouldn’t want a plastic surgeon delivering my baby, I wouldn’t want a mobile application builder delivering my SMS campaign.

Make sure that the entire infrastructure is in place, that you have a strong plan, clearly defined business goals, and a sound strategy that is tailored to achieve those goals.

Phase 2: Birth.

Congratulations! Your mobile campaign has been delivered. It came out kicking and screaming, but it’s here… finally!

This is where panic sets in. You are responsible for this mobile campaign… for the rest of its life. Because of this, you want to do everything in your power to nurture it, to grow it, and to have it reach its fullest potential. (One day it might even go down in the history books as one of the best mobile campaigns that ever lived)

It is important that in this phase of the mobile campaign’s life that you keep an eye on it all times. Monitoring it constantly, checking for any problems, and addressing those problems immediately. It is delicate little being and it takes special care.

Phase 3: Adolescence.

Adolescents need nurturing. Adolescents grow. You want your adolescent campaign to reach its fullest potential. But how?

Nurturing is an important first step. You need to give your mobile campaign attention. It is not okay to set it and forget it (it’s not a Ron Popeil gadget for goodness sake). You need to look at your campaign goals and see how the campaign is performing against those goals. If it is underperforming, it needs to go to tutoring. Re-evaluate your campaign strategy and be flexible with it.

If executed well, the campaign will grow itself. The power of mobile is the pass-along that happens. If your campaign includes running mobile coupons, people are going to forward those coupons to all of their friends. Make sure that in all of your messaging there is an awareness component. You would want your child to make new friends and be exposed to different kinds of people. Same goes for your mobile campaign. Make sure that people know how to get involved.

Help your campaign make friends!

Phase 4: Adulthood.

Your mobile campaign has grown up now.

I’m sure you could identify how easy it is to get set in your routine – but routine in the mobile world is not good. Whether your campaign has exceeded all expectations, and especially if it hasn’t, don’t continue to do the same old things.

The world is growing and changing at amazing rates. The same thing can be said of the mobile world. If you don’t adapt, you won’t succeed. If your mobile campaign doesn’t adapt, it won’t succeed either.

Phase 5: Senior Citizen Status.

This is the one place where a mobile campaign is not exactly like your child. You would want your child, who has worked hard through their whole life, to kick back, relax, and retire – but not your mobile campaign.

Life-cycle messaging is an important aspect. Think about how you can continue to communicate with your customers via mobile. The sky really is the limit – especially as mobile continues to grow and evolve.

So there you have it. Sure it isn’t as extensive as What to Expect When You Are Expecting, but hopefully this should, at the very least, make you feel a little less anxious about bringing a new mobile campaign into the world.

You are now fit to be the parent of a stellar mobile campaign.

Did you hear? Papa John’s hit $1 million in pizza orders via its new mobile site. Their sales are up from $400 million last year, to over $1 billion this year and a full 20% of all orders placed with the company now come online or via SMS, widgets or their mobile web-site.

In this article I read, Papa John’s states that their average order value via their mobile web site is $20.00. That means they’ve had somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 orders placed via their mobile web site alone. 50,000!

But the brilliance of what they are doing is not in the number of orders they receive, but that they are serving their customers better – wherever they are. Their customers no longer have to sit at a computer to place an order. They have the possibility to order from the device that goes everywhere with them – their mobile phone.

I’ve seen and heard it too many times, “We’re worried about putting our marketing dollars into Mobile . We’re afraid we won’t see a return on our investment.” Well, Papa John’s managed to get 50,000 orders to come from mobile site alone. That doesn’t even include the SMS and widget orders that come in. Clearly companies are seeing a return on their investments in Mobile.

Now, I’m not suggesting that all of our clients are going to see $1 million dollars worth of orders come through Mobile, but what I have seen, through the Mobile tactics we’ve employed with Souplantation, is an incredible interest in people using their mobile device to explore and learn more about the brand. This is what I mean when you hear me say mobile can’t just be quantified and rationalized based on simple, “I spend this much to get my customers to buy this much” mentality.

Done right, Mobile can make your brand, product, service… whatever, more relevant, more convenient, and more accessible. There’s actually a lot of value to you, and your customer, to be all of those things. Papa John’s understands that, and more and more, other brands are realizing this too.

Creating that opportunity for brand interactions, via mobile web site, mobile application, etc., may not return $1 million in sales, but it does provide more value for you and your customers than the alternative – no mobile presence at all.

“Google… advertising?” That’s exactly the thought that ran through my head when I saw a series of mobile banner ads running on CNN.com Mobile. I have to admit, I can’t recall Google ever advertising (although I’m sure it is entirely possible that they have in the past). In any event, I found it astounding!

I sat on this discovery for a few days. I didn’t know what to make of it. I was just too foreign to me. But after a few days I started my quest to answer the question that had been plaguing me… “Why is Google advertising mobile search?”

The answer may not be as obvious as you’d suspect.

I did a little digging around and found some interesting information to support the theory that Google is losing the battle on Mobile search. Yes, I said it, “Google is losing the battle on Mobile Search.” [NOTE: If I go missing tomorrow please search for me at the GooglePlex – where I’ll likely be held in detention with all those other people who have said that Google isn’t number 1 at everything on the Web.]

“Where did he come up with such an audacious suggestion?” you may ask. Well, I found an interesting statistic to back my hypothesis up. Both Verizon and T-Mobile offer a mobile search portal to their users (84 million users in total). If just 10% of those users used search on their carriers portal, there’d be 8.41 million users – twice as many users than Google Mobile.

But it doesn’t end there. Encyclopedia Britannica has also entered the fray with their mobile search, as has Alltel wireless with their own Mobile search solution. And yet, there’s more. Some search providers are already rolling out speech enabled mobile search – thus breaking down the barriers of mainstream usability – namely data plan costs, network speeds and hardware issues. So, while everyone may not have a device that displays search results well, they certainly have the ability to speak there query into the device. It is a phone after all.

I could continue but I believe you get the point.

So, what does Google’s campaign really mean? Their campaign is a proactive attempt to get us (i.e. – Mobile web users) to put them top-of-mind when we go to do our mobile searches. It means that they understand the challenges they face in getting users to adopt their version of Mobile search. It means they’ve got some catching up to do.

The caged bird can be set free! Now you Twitter birdies can sing your sweet melodies to the world from outside of your bird cage.

No longer are you confined to tweeting from your desktop or laptop computer – after all, there are plenty of other places you can find the occasion, or inspiration, to tweet from other than from in front of a computer. (How many people really want to hear about what’s going on within a six foot radius from your computer anyway? Or that you ran out of staples??)

Twitter’s mobile web site, and their mobile application, Twitterrific, allows you to tweet (up to 140 characters) from wherever the wind beneath your wings carries you. Now, when that little egg of an idea falls out of your head, you don’t have to sit on it and incubate it until you are in front of your computer. You can share it with your roost – immediately!

Marketers can capitalize on the immediacy of mBlogging (aka – mobile blogging) just as our customers and clients can. If you are in the restaurant industry, mBlogging would allow you to answer customer service complaints before the customer walks out the door vowing never to come back and eat there again. If you are a cell phone service provider, it could allow your customers to share with you weak signal spots (when they are actually at them) to help you improve your network. The practical applications seem, to me, to be limitless.

I believe that mBlogging will continue to grow as more applications and devices make it easier to do. More of your customers will use this avenue to talk about you so you’d better be there to talk back.

I need only 34 characters to summarize my point. “The early bird catches the worm.”

Staring at my cell phone this morning I had a vision. I know it sounds a little nutty, but it wasn’t one of these psychic visions – in fact it probably just the result of all of the research I have been doing on this subject. It was more like in the movies where the character looks into the mirror but sees a different world behind it. That’s what happened to me, only it wasn’t a mirror, it was just that piece of glass that shields the LCD screen from being directly pressed against my ear, and the world that I was peering into was clearly the not-too-distant future.

But this is when I realized the opportunity that this future holds.

My vision stared while staring at my Google Map application. I had typed in a local coffee shop to get their phone number, but instead of the typical resutls (address, phone number, etc.), there was also a coupon presented as part of the results. I’ve heard of mobile couponing before. That was not what I found interesting about the vision. What I did find interesting was that it was tied to a particular location, which had shown up as the result of a query I put into my mapping application. Here I was just looking for a coffee shop, but they offered me a coupon… on my phone, for that store, as part of a search! Brilliant! My vision didn’t actually showing me going to that coffee shop and presenting my coupon, but I’m willing to bet I would have gone.

As that vision spirited away, I saw something else. I was reading the news on my cell phone’s internet browser and I was presented a mobile ad (I think it was Spiderman Episode 12 or something). Anyway, I clicked on the ad (I mean of course I did… some mobile ads campaigns have shown click-through rate of up to 10%), but instead of going to a lame static mobile optimized page it opened in my YouTube application and played the movie trailer. Once the movie trailer wrapped up, the phone went back to my browser app and landed on Fandango.com showing the theatres nearest me and the show times. I bought tickets! My phone did all the work for me. I loved it!

(Since my vision this morning, I have come to find out that AdMob, a mobile ad network, is already experimenting with things similar to this.)

My vision ended there, but what I took away from it was this. We are currently there, right at the Mobile frontier. We should learn from the lessons of those who also found themselves on the frontier – like the pioneers during the California Gold Rush. The poor sap that showed up last also went home with empty pockets.

I guess what I am trying to say is this. I am not the only one who is seeing this vision. You have a choice, either you venture into this frontier early (before this vision becomes reality), or be the poor sap that shows up last and goes home with empty pockets.

My life changed today. This day, July 11th, 2008. It’s a momentous occasion, an occasion I plan to celebrate for years to come. But like any good occasion, it needs a name. I’m going to call this glorious day “iP app Day”.

You may be asking yourself, “What is iP App Day?” and, “Why, even if I did know what this mysterious day stood for, would I celebrate it?”

Well, iP App Day is short for iPhone Application Day. It’s the day that the first iPhone applications became available to us common people, and it’s a day that I believe will change the marketing forever.

Certainly there have been major advances in phone marketing technologies – but I believe none are remotely as important as this one. Now it’s easier than ever to literally be within one touch of a finger to your customers.

iPhone users can now log into the iTunes store and download custom applications for their phone from such categories as Business, Education, Lifestyle, News, Social Networking, and so on. Now, do not be confused, I am not celebrating the basic unbranded applications that are sprinkled around the application store. What I am celebrating are the fantastic branded applications that will put our client’s brands literally in the palms of the customer’s hands.

Doing a cursory search around the “store”, I see brands like EBAY, Travelocity, Twitter, FaceBook, SalesForce, Frommer’s, and the MLB – I’m sure with hundreds of brands to follow. I stopped in at the Travelocity store, where I found a handy tool to pick up. It was the Travelocity Gnome app. I said to myself, “What the heck. I’ll throw him on my phone.” After all, he was free!

Besides, he’s handy to have on my phone. I don’t travel a lot, but I could see how it would be cool to be able to check flight times on the go, book a flight, or check security wait times. I could see how many of these applications could be handy… but I don’t think that’s the whole point.

I’ve looked at my phone now a few times in the past couple hours and every time I see that welcome screen, there it is, the Travelocity app staring me in the face – and that, I think, is the point. Sure it will lead to increased bookings, etc., etc., but every time I see that app there, it’s just a little more brand enforcement. It’s benignly advertising to me… “Travelocity, Travelocity, Travelocity”. Who do you think I’m going to think of first the next time I have to book a trip?

All that aside, I can see amazing opportunities on the horizon. How long will it be before Pizza Hut offers an iPhone application to order pizza at the touch of a button (With the new GPS functionality of the phone, you likely won’t have to even type in the delivery address – the phone will send all of that information for you), or Wal-Mart has their weekly coupon book available as an application.

I could go on and on, but do I really need to provide any more reasons why we should all be celebrating “iP App Day”? Let’s break out the balloons!