I really liked MarketingSherpa's recent article, "Mobile Marketing: Quick Overview of Options" (open access until July 23). This new channel is both exciting and a little frightening to marketers, and it generates a lot of questions.

For most marketers, mobile marketing represents a mix of things: advertising networks, branded downloads such as ring tones, directed communications such as SMS alerts, and interactive branding such as polls and contests.

MarketingSherpa's article focuses on the area most aligned with email marketing: SMS and text messaging. Some great takeaways include:

• Nearly 10 billion text messages are being sent each month.
• Mobile text marketing requires a heavy focus on the limited space and size--messages typically can't be more than 160 text-only characters.
• A great primer on "short codes," and what marketers need to know in order to use these shortened telephone numbers to make it easier for customers to contact them