Do's and don't's of mobile marketing

Highlights from this morning’s Restaurant Leadership Conference session on mobile marketing:

Tim McCallum, a Vapiano operator who also runs an online marketing consultancy, warned a packed room to avoid some common pratfalls with social media. Specifially…

*Don’t send out too many messages via Twitter, Facebook or texting. He finds that 1.5 to 1.7 messages per month—typically one brand-building type communication, the other more tactical—is just fine.

*Don’t equate texting with young users. Fifteen percent of the “elderlies” who have cell phones are using them to text, and that’s a huge number, McCallum said.

*Learn about QR codes, the two-dimensional bar codes rapidly coming into play as marketing tools. “I believe it’s going to be the next big thing,” said McCallum. Six percent of consumers say a code has led to their purchase of a good or service, and the approach makes tremendous sense for restaurants, he added.

*He expressed more than a little skepticism about restaurant-specific apps. Texting can do the same thing at a fraction of the cost, he asserted.