As the mobile messaging ecosystem is experiencing a growth in spam SMS and MMS, giving marketers a space that is regulated and secure will be key in helping brands maintain a legitimate connection with consumers.

It is important for marketers to play by the rules of SMS and only send secure and desired messages to consumers. Spam SMS clutters the messaging atmosphere and puts legitimate brands' messaging campaigns at risk.

"This ecosystem is critical, it?s being leveraged by the entire world," said John Wick, senior vice president of network at Syniverse, Tampa, FL. 

"This should be no surprise to any of us that we need to take these measures because it?s no different than the network we have at the office and how to protect that," he said. 

"These devices that we have in our hands are powerful computers. The smartphone may have more power than our laptop. Needing to put measures to protect that is completely logical."

Syniverse works to regulate SMS and prevent spam from reaching receivers. The company analyzes messages for patterns to be able to identify spam models.

Here, Mr. Wick discusses the importance of maintaining a safe SMS ecosystem by preventing spam in real-time.

What kinds of spam SMS are you seeing?
People are organized and really attacking populations of subscribers with this spam, whether it?s just purely trying to flood a network with traffic to impact the quality of the network. 

You can introduce a flood of traffic and impact the quality of the network. 

We see a lot credit card fraudulent activity where they try to get you to provide personal information. They ask you to click on a URL and then provide name, date of birth and social security number. And it tells you that your card has been reactivated, but in reality there is no card.

They?re going out and enabling the ability to put a bug on a smartphone, the whole malware. 

There are now messages in the system that make it into your smartphone and put a virus onto your phone. We have a lot of occurrences of that, that we?re actually able to detect and prevent. 

Once your Android smartphone is infected, cleaning or repairing it can be quite complex. In a lot of cases, the carrier has to replace the phone. And there?s a cost with that. Customer satisfaction is impacted. Replacing a phone, nobody wants to deal with that.

How can real-time reporting advance spam prevention?
If you consider, what did the spam prevention model look like before this was deployed, it was primarily subscriber implemented. 

So you or I would realize that we were attacked and we would report that, that would go in a database and that database is shared with carriers throughout the world, and they would be required to take action based on the info in that database. 

The things that we?re doing to identify and prevent the spam, we obviously connect into that database. But clearly the model that we have in place is real-time versus depending on subscribers to report. That?s just not fast enough. 

And the things we?re talking about here is very serious. It?s viruses. It?s people that are sending these inappropriate messages to our children. So these things need to be dealt with in a real-time fashion. They can?t be dealt with after the fact or weeks later.

What are the implications for marketers of the growth in spam text?
Having a solution like this is actually a positive for the marketing side of the industry that wants to interact with users and provide some call-to-action that is legitimate.

Maybe you and I have given permission to a retailer to interact with us on a regular basis to let us know about certain promotions or maybe we?re traveling in a certain part of the world and that retailer or marketer has that info and based on the fact that I?m vacationing in Paris they provide me with a special offer in Paris, which is something that I?d be OK with. 

I wouldn?t be OK with receiving a bunch of spam that was adult related or going after my credit card. I think it?s positive for marketers. Marketers should like that this insurance and security is in place.

Legitimate brands are out to access the ecosystem and take advantage of it. 

It?s important that we look at the content. Because what happens is that these legitimate brands get hacked and they?re not even aware of traffic that uses their brand and is spam. That?s why it?s important to look at the signature of the brand and the patterns.

It?s certainly important for us to make sure that the marketing entities in the industry understand that this kind of protection is in place and that the carriers are embracing it. Ultimately that protects them and allows them to continue what they do. 

Making sure that they understand the steps that are being taken by the ecosystem is important. So that people understand what?s being done.

Mr. Wick

Is there any form of penalty in place for SMS spam?
You just get rid of it, there?s nothing formally in place that would effectively prevent them from doing it. 

They?re very smart. They get the ecosystem. They know what the warning flags are and they know how to avoid them. They?re very sophisticated and organized. They?re referred to as gangs. 

They understand what carriers are looking for and they know how to avoid this, and that?s why it?s important to have a solution like what we have.

Final Take
Rebecca Borison is editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York