On a recent trip in Milan, McDonalds had a game going on where you registered via SMS. Using SMS to connect with customers is quite common in Europe and Asia, but still in its infancy here in the US. When looking at it though, it sparked the idea that SMS could really change the way merchandise promotions functioned. The simplest example would be the Coke rewards program. How much simpler would it be if they had a short code and all you had to do was send an SMS to their short code with the number on the bottom of the bottle cap. There system would then recognize your phone number, register you if you haven’t yet and track your points. I bet many more people would participate if they didn’t have to keep track of those bottle caps until they were near a computer!

My favorite merchandise promotion is McDonald’s Monopoly game. Since I was a kid I loved collecting the game pieces and hoping that I’d win one of the big prizes. I never did though, but still enjoyed it each year. Now that I have much cooler toys that use the Internet, I’d like to see a virtual version of the game where each game piece could be registered online or via SMS. This way, I wouldn’t have to keep track of the pieces.

The possibilities are endless and the customer connection is intimate. Provided you were exceptional about how you used and protected your customer’s mobile phone number, I think a lot of people would participate. The trick with all of this will be integrity. You need to state your rules right up front (like how many times you’ll contact the person if they give up their number and send a message to you). After that, you have a two way dialogue you’d never have had.

   Posted by Darin Archer on July 24, 2008 | Comments (0)

After completing a SurveyMonkey survey today for work, it dawned on me that you could take that basic tool, leverage a SMS gateway application and have a very cool marketing tool. Here are a few general areas I believe SMS surveys could be used:

Use Cases:

2.) Trend (Pulse) Analysis (consumer markets, employee morale) – Find out up to the minute insight on how a message is being received in a demographic of people or bounce ideas off of a target group to see what their response is (e.g., “Should we provide a subscription service to iTunes for music?”, “Do you want to know where your friends are on a map from your mobile phone?”

3.) Customer Feedback (amusement parks, restaurants,) – On your exit sign, receipt or other take-away collateral, provide a short message code to have your customers participate in an exit survey. You could find out: how the service was, were the bathrooms clean, will they come back, did they have fun, and what else would they want. You could even follow this up with an electronic coupon.

After thinking this through, I figured there must be some vendors out there that provide this platform. And of course, after some short google searching, I found the following:

Existing Vendors:
- Raosoft
- CodeSegment
- ABBIT
- Apollo Mobile
- mFUSION

However, my searches seemed challenging and the messaging of these companies seemed to target technology people or application developers rather than marketers. I think the one that understands better how their product could be used and who their likely customers could be will find huge success in the coming years. The other trick will be to provide an easily accessible hosted solution for small to medium size companies that want to leverage this type of mobile marketing service.

   Posted by Darin Archer on January 31, 2007 | Comments (0)

idea: Create additional service offering for outdoor advertising companies to provide an additional value added service of SMS marketing

Background: Having just returned from India, a more advanced mobile phone market than the US, I experienced first hand great usage of outdoor advertising and SMS marketing. While driving I saw a billboard for a bank that was promoting a specific account with a great interest rate. To get more information, the billboard instructed to text a short code. I had a Hutch mobile phone at the time and thought I would give it a try. After sending the text message to the short code advertised I received a message instantly thanking me for my interest and informing me someone would get in touch with me to discuss further. Only a few minutes later my phone rang from an outbound telesales agent ready to answer any questions I had and promote the product.

Thoughts: Not only is the integration with the call center extremely effective for those travelers stuck in traffic, but provides an instant connection with the customer and drives real sales from the outdoor ad. An alternative approach would be to simply capture the customers info and provide basic info in a reply SMS, additional menu options to get additional info or a reference to a web address where they could visit later. After a brief search for potential platforms in the US to support this marketing strategy, I found a large number of them. Given this, I think the key is to not be the platform, but the service provider that educates the customer on how to build, manage and monitor the campaigns. Goomzee Connect should stay focused on offering services related to specific industries such as real estate, classifieds, and potentially outdoor advertising. Goomzee Connect could partner with the outdoor advertising companies such as ClearChannel, CBS, and Lamar to allow them to provide this capability as a value added service to their portfolio of outdoor billboards.

Potential Customers:
- Outdoor Advertising Association of America

Platform Competitors:
- iLoop
- Soapbox Mobile
- GoLive! Mobile
- Cellit
- flyTXT
- TextSMSMarketing
- Movo

Mobile Interesting Facts and Figures

   Posted by Darin Archer on January 11, 2007 | Comments (0)

Part of the excitement of blogging is the dialogue that is created between different people. Initially, we had the simple comment responses, but as the product developed the idea of trackbacks was included. This allowed each blogger to post their commentary on their respected blogs and link the two so viewers could still understand the dialogue and expansion of thoughts. After reading CIO magazine, I see that they do a great job of providing a short URL to each article for reference. Wired does this as well. The really cool trick would be to provide a trackback URL instead so that if a reader wanted to comment on a particular article, they could trackback to the original publisher’s article.

   Posted by Darin Archer on December 24, 2006 | Comments (0)

How often do you get the whim to just go see a play or concert. Have you ever found yourself needing to plan an afternoon adventure for you and your friends or a lover? It seems to me, this should be a simple effort, but after doing some research, I didn’t quite find what I was looking for. There are plenty of ways to get discount coupons for everything from a dinner out to the hottest adventure theme park, but wouldn’t it be nice to browse all available activities in one place? My idea is to create a marketplace for individual businesses to post their services and provide instant day of discounts when their supply is shorter then their demand. For example, if you run a small speed boat rental company and you’ve got a weekend coming up that is low on bookings, you could post a special offer on this site to close out the gap. For the system to truly be awesome, it would have to be flexible for the businesses to load their excess capacity and cover enough different types of activities that it’s interesting to the consumer. The theatre industry has done well at this with their “half price” tickets at specific box offices. They sell a deeply discounted ticket on the day of the show when they didn’t sell enough seats. It’s obviously beneficial to the business as this is revenue otherwise lost.

To get really fancy you could add a recommendation engine to it based on previous activities purchased and/or recommendations from others with similar interests.

   Posted by Darin Archer on December 18, 2005 | Comments (0)

I think most good ideas are like cooking. Most of us want to be like Emeril, but few of us really have the knowledge to mix the right ingredients to make some new masterpiece. However, I think it?s easier in the business world. Take one cool technology, connect it to another and bam! you've got a new meal. So, a few nights ago I was laying down to go to bed and started thinking about Supply Chain Management and Just-in-Time inventory management. I have no idea why I started thinking about this as I?m not in either industry, but I know that since studying information systems in school I have always been impressed and annoyed by those companies that have what I want on the shelf when I want it. (I?m really tired of stores not stocking enough Mach3 razors) Yet it still amazes me that the connection to the consumer is not there. Now if you think about it, WalMart would really appreciate a phone call a few weeks prior to your shopping trip where you would let them know what you were going to shop for. Yet this doesn?t seem like a likely scenario. However, take those nasty little club cards from chains such as Safeway, add some fancy modeling and pattern identifying technology, and you?ve got the connection. Let?s take a specific product for example. Toothpaste is purchased by almost everyone and has a finite quantity that is most likely consumed in a linear fashion as you usually put the same amount of tooth paste on your brush each day. Take this average usage pattern and determine when that toothpaste is going to run out depending on the size of the container (you?ll know the size of the container purchased if you track it at the time of the sale). Now that you have this information, you can look at my individual buying habits. How often do I come back into a store, and which store, to buy toothpaste. Combine these two averages and you?ve got a pretty good bet as to when I?m going to need you to have my tooth paste stocked on your shelves. I imagine you could do this with most products from bread to toiletries. If you?re really on top of it, you?ll send me a coupon for the toothpaste just to make sure I come into your store.

   Posted by Darin Archer on April 17, 2005 | Comments (0)

Today I saw my first embedded video advertisement on a web page. Now, I've seen the fancy flash ads that run across the screen, pop up or are just placed as a banner, but those are like animation not full motion video. The online version of the Wall Street Journal today has a full motion video advertisement, with sound, for FedEx regarding international shipping. It's new, so it stopped me dead in my tracks. I saw the screen moving much more than an animated GIF would and I was intrigued. So, naturally I clicked on the sound button and low and behold I was watching TV on a website. I have a DSL connection so this worked fantastic. However, I figure the novelty will last only months and then it will just be another ad. Given I pay for my online subscription to the WSJ, I will be upset if they put in a larger ad or insert it between pages, but I think that is the future for free content online. It's as easy as putting a page in the click process that makes you watch a full motion advertisement before letting you on to the next page of information. It?s very annoying if you ask me, but it could incent people to subscribe to a pay service without ads. Either way, keep your eyes on the look out for full motion advertising online. It's here!

   Posted by Darin Archer on February 20, 2004 | Comments (0)