Simon Moores - Text it
04 May, 2011
The 160 character limit is dead but few businesses have noticed its passing.
Once a week perhaps, your handset will chime with an incoming message, telling you perhaps, that you can claim for the accident you never had or even win the dream holiday you never wanted. But what such messages all share in common, is a dull and unimaginative medium, simple SMS text, a form of cellular messaging that hasn’t kept pace with the technology now present in the new generation of internet-enabled mobile phones.
When WAP-enabled phones (Wireless Application Protocol) first appeared, I wrote a column for The Guardian, wondering where this rather over-hyped technology might lead and the answer, it later transpired, wasn’t very far. Since then of course while the platform has evolved, almost beyond recognition, what business has done with the underlying medium, to reach-out to many millions of potential customers in 160 character messages, has changed very little.
More than a decade later and business is presented with not one but many potential and popular audience communications streams. They trip off the tongue with an easy familiarity, Twitter, Facebook, SMS, Blogs, YouTube and of course above them all, the marketing reach of an increasingly pervasive internet. The problem however for many, if not the majority of companies, is that these rarely, if ever, form part of a single integrated platform communications strategy. In fact, their combined use towards a purposeful goal can be at best described as ‘Ad Hoc’ for many businesses.
A report from Ignite Social Media this month illustrates the relative positions of the most popular social networks:
· Facebook is more popular among women
· Reddit and Digg are more popular among men
· Plaxo has the most users over the age of 65
· LinkedIn’s users are the wealthiest
· Plurk is #1 among well-educated users with graduate degrees
· Tumblr is the fastest-growing platform, while MySpace is declining the most rapidly
Organisations that are conscious of the potential reach of social media and web-based technologies, frequently use one or the other; Facebook plus SMS perhaps, to build part of an audience marketing strategy or campaign but in my experience, have yet to realise that the technical glue now exists to project a single powerful message over the mobile phone network. The personal interests of millions of users can now be reached and mined with rich text messaging, leveraging the more attractive features of a new generation of mobile phones and directing user interest back to a mobile business or social media landing page for further information or immediate sales fulfilment.
A new and cost-effective solution to tying these opportunities together in the handset lies with a UK technology company, TextIT. They have launched a web-enabled software editor that exploits the features of the mobile phones presently on the market and which makes 160 character limit SMS marketing look like a throw-back to the days of WAP, which in fact it really is.
Using TextIT’s editor, a business can, within a matter of minutes build a mobile phone optimised web page, with embedded links and images and push this out as a an SMS back link to millions of users. As an example, if a business was promoting an ‘Indie’ band in the music industry, the rich text message could embed a video clip, links to Facebook and Twitter pages and perhaps a direct sales link to an Amazon storefront to buy the latest album.
For an example of how this works in practise, try texting ‘sales’ to 80012 and for a look at how added functionality can work can look, then text ‘game’ to 80012
What TextiT’s editor then offers, is the long-overdue integration potential for a number of popular technology streams but optimised for the mobile platform; the increasingly ubiquitous and apps-centric device which most of us now carry with us every minute of the day.
Already, this new mobile editing package is being trialled by a number of well-known companies and the results have been more than encouraging. Not only does the software offer full-reporting and simultaneously capture responding mobile phone numbers but audience participation is significantly higher, cost-effective and more productive than comparative SMS marketing tied to the 160-character limit.
The future of mobile marketing offers a rich opportunity for businesses but for many it starts with a reluctant farewell to limits of 20th century SMS and the sudden revelation that the answer now exists to swiftly and effectively integrate several pivotal audience technologies in the customer handset at surprisingly low cost.