Australia and Japan are doing it, so are parts of Europe and the Far East. The United States is getting there, though it has taken some time. I'm talking about mobile marketing - such as a coupon from McDonald's that appears on your mobile phone when you walk past the restaurant. It's also the text message you send to get special ring tones or to vote for the next American Idol. But why isn't the US consumer fully inundated with mobile marketing, and why do other countries seem so advanced compared to the US?

The truth is that in other countries, people have grown up with their mobile phones, to the exclusion of computer usage. That being said, there is still some mobile marketing already happening in the U.S., for example, text messaging.

Now, with the proliferation of smart phones, the iPhone and the iPhone app store, as well as mobile-optimized applications such as LinkedIn, there are many new and exciting opportunities for marketers to engage their mobile audience.

My first piece of advice is that when considering mobile campaigns, consider mobile phone compatibility. Many mobile marketers are surprised to learn that great campaigns don't necessarily translate very well to mobile. But why should that be a surprise? After all, there are thousands of different mobile devices, and dozens of browsers. So with this vast array of software and hardware combinations that marketers must consider, what's the lowest common denominator? It could turn out to be a WAP browser that processes WML (Wireless Markup Language). The bottom line? Slim down your mobile campaign. Don't deploy fancy, rich web applications out of the gate. Start simple, and then, in a couple of years of mobile device technology advances and adoption, we'll be ready to move to more sophisticated content.

So, where to start? It's the just like traditional marketing. You should create the message you want to convey and what you want your audience to do. Is your campaign about brand awareness, transactions, or social networking? Maybe to generate user content? Define what you want to do and include mobile as one of those mediums to engage your audience.

While you are doing that, remember context. Context is paramount! Imagine your mobile audience - they could be out walking on the street, taking the subway, or driving a car. Depending on that context, there are some likely things they'd do with their mobile devices; for example, email, text, update Facebook, Twitter, or make a call, given the context. But it's not likely they'd be at the grocery store new online banking relationships from their mobile phone. So it's important to understand what is the context of the user of the mobile phone -- are they are work or at home? If you are a e-retailer, you have all sorts of ways to help people purchase online that actually might not be appropriate in a mobile context.

One way way to know whether or not you are succeeding is by using measurement and analytics tools. There's a whole new breed of mobile vendors who have worked around the limitations of the mobile channel. While these tools are not as rich in terms of segmentation as traditional web analytics, they do give you data you otherwise wouldn't have. You must have a process to measure the efficacy of mobile promotions. For example, how many people are engaging in a mobile-specific microsite? What are they looking at and what actions are they taking? It's just as important to analyze mobile content consumption as you would web-based content consumption.

And that's where it gets really interesting because now you are at the point where you want to analyze and fine-tune your offers. As a mobile marketer, a great way to know how you are doing is through testing and experimentation. Come up with offers and put them out there in a controlled experiment If you run an A/B or multivariate test campaign using a mobile-capability solutino like SiteSpect, you'll discover what works and resonates versus what does not. Perform tests again and again and use what you've discovered to fuel your momentum from a new mobile marketer to an experienced mobile marketer who understands what their audience wants.

Lastly, make sure you understand how different mediums are interacting and affecting all of your channels and that you aren't operating each one as a silo. It's important to understand how a TV spot causes people to interact with another channel, particularly mobile. That way, you'll be able to understand your how many of your audience members voted with their mobile devices after the last American Idol show. You must correlate and aggregate behavior across mediums, and there are many available tools and techniques out there for doing this. Who knows, maybe you'll be the next marketer engaging with consumers walking past a restaurant that sends out a mobile coupon to their mobile devices. Welcome to the new world of marketing!