Compliance is King

Last week, this court ruling reminded me of a great decision Waterfall Mobile made in its early days.

It was February 24, 2006. Waterfall’s product team was sitting in our just-built conference room discussing consumer privacy. The conversation hinged on this critical point: that the mobile phone is one of the most personal effects a person has. As a point of ethics we knew we needed to respect that fact, so we unanimously decided to do whatever we could to build a product with built-in privacy protections.

Back then mobile companies were popping up left and right - and many of them weren’t bothering to follow the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA)’s strict campaign guidelines (pdf). Also at around that time, Waterfall had received some suspect requests from would-be clients.

After getting a few of these fishy new business opportunities, we opted to form a compliance team, one that still exists to this day. At least one member of each department (Product, Client Services, Sales & Engineering) sits on the committee.

Waterfall’s compliance committee reviews all major campaigns and collateral, approving all the items on this checklist:

• Message content
• Number of messages sent to the consumer
• Carrier-mandated language in the messages (i.e. “Standard message rates apply”)
• Terms
• Unsubscribe options
• Support and help information clearly displayed on all call-to-action materials and collaterals

In addition, we’ve created a very strict list upload policy, which ensures that the client has obtained its list of user numbers legally, and takes responsibility for same.

The result of all this? In a handful of cases, the committee has made decisions that resulted in Waterfall asking the client to take their business elsewhere. That’s a tough pill to swallow, but I wouldn’t have it any other way - because Waterfall has built a hard-earned reputation as a company that follows the rules.

The MMA, CTIA, mobile carriers and aggregators have made excellent progress coming together with simple and unified campaign regulations, and now take the step of routinely auditing active campaigns. These auditors check the message flow and the marketing collateral, and both are scored.

It’s always a pleasure when Waterfall receives an audit from a carrier or our aggregators. Why? Because most of the time we get perfect scores.

It is my distinct honor to send these high scores along to the rest of the Waterfall team, and a personal source of pride for me - because I know we’re doing our part to maintain the integrity of the mobile ecosystem.

I’m glad we made the right call on February 24, 2006.

Smart Thinking

CBS Outdoor recently announced it will be offering text message advertising as part of the company’s suite of out of home (OOH) marketing services.

Now the many thousands of billboards, checkout screens and bus kiosks owned by CBS will be launching pads for SMS-based marketing programs.

That means people who are looking for something to do while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting at a traffic light will have the opportunity to get targeted messages asking them to opt-in for SMS promotions.

Meanwhile, OOH video network operator Indoor Direct will be putting branded screens into 133 Carl’s Jr. restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles.  Imagine if all of those young, hungry guys - Carl’s Jr.’s bulls-eye demo - could opt in for SMS too?  Chances are they’ll be texting anyway until their fries show up.

By all accounts, texting continues to grow in popularity - and not just among young people.

As CBS Outdoor’s statistics note,

• 131 million mobile phone owners use text messaging according to Pew Internet Project
• 68% of parents communicate with their kids through text messaging (Kelton Research, 2008)
• 51% of women aged 35-44 and 42% of women aged 45-54 use text messaging (Mobile Marketing Association, 2007 Mobile Attitude & Usage Study)
• 35-44 year olds send an average of 236 texts per month, compared to making 223 calls during the same time period (Nielsen Mobile 2008)
• 46% of tweens aged 8-12 use cell phones (the tween population equals 20MM)
• 58 million of all U.S. mobile subscribers say they’ve been exposed to advertising on their phones in the past 30 days (Nielsen Mobile, March 2008)
• 26% of those who saw an ad responded at least once by sending an SMS text-message, the most popular ad response (Nielsen Mobile, March 2008)

Seems like the OOH market is heading in this direction. How long until CBS Outdoor’s competitors jump into the fray?

Service Comparison: PGA Tournament Leader Board Alerts

I love getting messages sent to my phone. Makes me feel cool when I’m standing in line at the post office or at the airport and my phone buzzes with a new message. I feel in the know, informed about things that are relevant to my life.

I’m also an avid golf fan. I respect the meticulous exactitude required to be successful at the game, and appreciate those in the professional ranks for their ability to overcome nerves and execute with such precision.

As a way of combining these two interests, I have signed up for two different tournament leader board alert services over the last year.  One from NBC Sports, powered by Simplewire, and one from PGATOUR.com, powered by Turner Broadcasting.

In the interest of best practices, user experience, and ultimately, me feeling cool at the post office, let’s dig a little and try to understand both by deconstructing each service.

First, lets get a feel for the alert content. For this I chose an update from both services from the end of the first round last week at the St. Jude Classic in Memphis, Tennessee.

Four elements comprise a successful alert campaign. Let’s break each category down, using these two messages as examples.

1. Initial Call-to-Action:

I signed up for NBC alerts because the network’s golf broadcasts contain clear and concise onscreen calls-to-action (“Text GOLF to 51515”). That, and the announcers remind viewers to sign up every hour or so.

To sign up for the PGATOUR alerts, I had to dig around on their website and came across a page with all sorts of confusing calls-to-action to different alerts.

The PGA could improve this experience (and increase sign ups) by either having a widget on the FanZone page that accepts my phone number and maybe a selector for which alerts are available, or make one keyword that returns a menu to the user to let them select which they want to sign up for. (Doing this also allows for more powerful branding of a single keyword across other channels.)

Just to note, I also tried to sign up for CBSSportsline golf alerts, but at the moment they don’t exist. Odd, since CBS covers more tournaments than NBC does.

2. Timeliness:

By nature, score alerts are most useful when they arrive in a timely fashion – when the round ends, or during a break in the action.

In our example, the first round ended around 3:30pm PT. But both alerts arrived to my phone almost two hours later.

By comparison, the average shot and score for an online leader board is posted about 3-5 minutes after the score is recorded. So if the round finished at 3:30pm and the final scores are in by 3:35pm, then to be effective the alert should be arriving no later then 4pm, right? By 5:16 and 5:20 PM (when I received the alerts), I already had watched a broadcast of SportsCenter and knew who was in the lead.

Now I could have still been away from home or internet, and appreciated receiving the updates then, but overall the delay rendered the alerts less effective.

One cause for the delay could be that hundreds of thousands of gold fans have subscribed to each service – but I doubt it (and can’t confirm either way, because no publicly accessible stats are available).

Bottom line: NBC and PGATOUR could and should find a way to speed this up.

3. Character count:

The maximum allowed characters for an SMS message is 160 characters. Not a lot, but enough to get critical information out. Let’s see the character count for these two services:

NBC - 113 chars
PGATOUR.COM - 107 chars

Both services are well under the 160 characters, but both pack in some good information. I do think both could have filled the extra characters with something else here. While each needs to be concerned about the length of the leaderboard names, and how the character count can alter any other included content, there are ways to solve these issues (such as truncation and dynamic filters). More on that in the content section.

4. Content:

Content is king, right? To start, let’s dive into NBCs alert:

The first line tells us who the alert is from, NBC and what tournament and round it is, St. Jude Classic, Round 1. So far, so good.

Next, we easily see the top four golfers and their scores and the (F) indicates that is their final score for the day. Again, exactly what I want to see. Good.

Last, a link is provided to the mobile NBC sports website. It’s a nice up-sell, and sometimes I am almost compelled to click it.

Overall, well presented. NBC also includes an up-sell for another service with their in-round updates. For example, the alert I received from them at 2:02pm PT had this up-sell at the bottom: *Reply TENNIS for NBC tennis news/alerts.

(Smart of them to up-sell their own services. Since I like golf I must also like tennis and probably drive a BMW too.)

The alert I received at 11:02am PT had this up-sell at the bottom: *Free Baller Tones http://mvp7.us/3y. Random inserted ad, but nice to see at least they are offsetting their message costs by inserting ads. The SMS industry needs more solid examples of this to demonstrate traction.

Now, let’s look at the PGATOUR’s alert:

The first line tells us who the alert is from (PGATOUR) and the second tells us what round. They fail to mention which tournament this alert is for, so a point off their score for that.

Next, we also see the top four golfers on the leader board listed. They must think we have poor vision, or are very excited to alert us, as each golfers name is in ALL CAPS. This is annoying so let’s dock them another point.

Also, notice there is no indication if the golfer is finished (F) or say on the 15th hole (15) of an in-round update. Standard leader board practice is to give an indication of last hole finished. Another point docked, that’s three so far.

Next is a link to their full website, pgatour.com, which strikes me as odd, since I’m on my phone and not a computer. Why not promote the url of their (admittedly pretty nice) mobile site @ mobile.pgatour.com instead? Fourth point off.

Last, let’s look at the information on how to unsubscribe. This is important and required by the carriers so I’ll give them props for adding it, but reply STOP PLB?  Why not reply STOP instead? There is a good chance I won’t remember the exact keyword (PLB) I signed up to. And as we all know, making the process more intuitive means I’m a happier subscriber.

In Summary

Overall, I give NBC an 8 and PGATOUR.com a 6 (out of 10).

Two ways NBC can improve their score (and increase their subscriber count) are:

1. Improve the content for in-round updates. They send 3-4 alerts per round, which always include the top golfers on the leader board. On the weekends, the first two alerts go out before the top players have teed off and rarely is a leader board that dynamic, so the content is the usually same as it was the day before. Wasted alert, in other words. The first alerts should be some other kind of tournament information. “Tiger Woods off to a hot start, -3 for the day” not only is more interesting (because we’re all wondering where he is, if not at the top) and also looks like a human is powering the content and not an rss feed.
2. Include opt-out instructions (as I mentioned earlier) with every alert in the extra content at the bottom. They send so many texts that I can see this would not be for everyone, so easy stop instructions should be included.

Ultimately, I will still stay subscribed to both (I’m in the business, and enjoy these kinds of things) but every time I see these issues, I hope they listen to their subscribers and continually look to improve the experience. After all, a better end user experience is healthy for the industry, the subscribers and the PGA Tour itself.

Ok, back to the Golf Channel. :)

(Craig Stoe runs Product and Operations at Waterfall and can often be found playing an early round at Harding Park before work.)

IVR: Not Just for Call Centers Anymore

IVR has been around for years. But when marketers think of IVR, they often think first of the automated phone lines that handle calls to the bank or the local cable company, rather than the incredible mobile marketing opportunities surrounding the technology.

According to Wikipedia, AT&T first used Dual Tone Multi-Frequencies in the 1960s and by the 1970s, companies began automating their call center tasks with the technology. In the 1980s and 90s, real costs savings materialized alongside the increases in computer processing power and introduction of Voice XML, which has made IVR a necessity for most corporations. Today between movie listings, bank balances, and voicemail, most consumers interact with IVR systems at every turn.

So when did IVR overcome its automated call center origins and become a hot mobile marketing tool that is still gaining traction with entertainment clients and brands? Automatic dialers for political campaigns and opinion polls brought awareness of non-traditional applications for IVR in the late 90s and early 2000s but I would argue that the first mainstream consumer marketing use of IVR incorporated customized messages from Samuel L. Jackson in 2006.

New Line Cinemas mounted an amazing marketing campaign that year, tied to the August ‘06 release of “Snakes on a Plane” that included a brilliant IVR component. More than 1.5 million people sent personalized messages from Samuel L. Jackson to friends telling them to get out and see the movie. From the movie’s website, consumers could enter their friends’ phone numbers, select personalized options including jobs, physical features or car type, and then their friends received a call incorporating the information.  People loved it.  And a new marketing tool was born.

In today’s world, musical artists and movie studios use IVR extensively to interact with fans. Celebrity talent frequently interacts with IVR technology to deliver messages to thousands of fans regarding pre-releases of songs, tour dates, and venue information.  IVR has fans feeling connected and engaged, and as a bonus, the marketing technology is incredibly cost-effective.

When you are realizing your mobile marketing strategy, be sure to think about incorporating an IVR component or you might miss out on a fantastic and fresh way to interact with your customers.

KITS-FM LIVE 105 Mobile Campaign

Every month, the campaigns that we power at Waterfall Mobile range from small test promotions to massive ongoing programs, and we often encounter marketers new to the mobile industry that are surprised at how effective targeted regional mobile promotions can be at building mobile subscriber lists and extending brand awareness.

One recent example that demonstrates the power of a targeted local promotion was a mobile campaign for KITS-FM LIVE 105, an alternative/modern rock radio station based in San Francisco. The campaign was conducted over five days as part of a give-away promotion that offered five weekend getaways stays at The Resort at Squaw Creek in North Lake Tahoe.

KITS-FM wanted to grow its mobile subscriber list and engage listeners with the brand on alternative platforms – in this case via its growing mobile marketing efforts.  Squaw Valley USA & The Resort at Squaw Creek hoped to get information on North Lake Tahoe out to listeners and encourage them to visit the area.

Together, the companies prompted listeners via on-air call-outs to text in the keyword of the day for a chance to win the “Woody Show Field Trip Package.” Each text received a reply with information on North Lake Tahoe and Squaw Valley and was enrolled into the radio station’s mobile subscriber list to receive further information from the station.

After the winner was selected each day, a text message was sent notifying other entrants they did not win and a second text offered additional information about North Lake Tahoe.

By the end of the campaign, KITS-FM’s recorded its largest-ever response to an on-air mobile promotion: nearly 200,000 texts received over the course of the five-day program. Listeners engaged each day with the radio station, which was able to further build its opportunity to interact with avid fans in the future (over 14,000 unique users were added to their subscription list), and KITS found a convenient way around typical phone contests that often greet callers with a non-interactive busy signal. The station’s partner, The Resort at Squaw Creek in North Lake Tahoe, also received a significant number of impressions and drove wide awareness of its brand across a major metropolitan market area.

Thank You E-mail Marketing!

According to Internet Retailer’s new survey of retailers and manufacturers, a variety of innovative e-mail marketing tactics are increasing the effectiveness of the medium. Following up on a recent blog entry about the importance of CRM, these tactics are all fantastic additional ways to further extend your company’s relationship with its customers.

And the best part – the tactics mentioned in the article don’t need to apply exclusively to e-mail marketing. Rather than wait two years for someone to publish the same results and guidance on mobile marketing, I’m going to go out on a limb here and propose that these very same tactics can hone your mobile marketing as well!

Each of the tactics mentioned in Internet Retailer’s survey would also increase ROI for mobile marketing efforts and require very little effort to execute:

• 38.8% are triggering e-mail marketing messages based on behaviors or events.
• 36.5% are personalizing messages (such as by addressing customers by first name)
• 28.2% are adding Forward-to-Friend links
• 22.7% are leveraging transactional messaging for marketing communications
• 18.4% are providing multiple options during the opt-out process (for ex., opt out of promotional e-mails but receive newsletter)
• 17.6% are including customer reviews
• 14.1% are adding Share This links to social networks
• 13.3% are adding more video-related content

If you’d like to learn more about how Waterfall Mobile can help your campaign leverage some of these tactics to extend your company’s relationship with its customers, hit me up at msilk@waterfallmobile.com.

Release: Msgme v2.5

We are happy to announce that the latest version of Msgme was released on Monday, May 18th. Hats off to the engineering and product teams for the long hours and late nights. I’ll buy the first round.

Highlights of the release include:

• Enhanced Message Parsing - After a deep analysis of all messaging traffic on Msgme, we’ve improved the platform parsing logic intelligence to accommodate the increasingly complex campaigns our clients are creating. The result is increased subscription conversion rates, increased campaign interaction rates and an overall better user messaging experience.
• New Plugin Architecture - We’ve added a new plugin service to the platform that allows customization of the typical message flow of established campaigns. Plugins run within the platform, allowing direct customization of Campaign Management, including tracking of all interaction and results.
• New APIs - We’ve added to our growing list of developer APIs by introducing Send-to-Friend and SMS Callback APIs. Send-to-Friend allows IVR callers or visitors to a website to send a customized IVR call to their friends introducing them to a particular promotion. The SMS Callback API allows a user to receive a callback from an IVR site after texting a mobile keyword. For more information on how to take advantage of these or other APIs, please contact your account manager or sales@msgme.com.
• Binary Enhancements - We’ve optimized our binary delivery system across all carriers after exhaustive analysis and testing of the handsets that use our platform.
• Messaging Reporting - We’ve added more details to the messaging report such as phone number and exact interaction results. Each report is exportable into .csv format for more detailed analysis within your preferred spreadsheet tool.
• Compliance Maintenance - In an effort to keep in mobile marketing compliance, and to protect the end user participants in campaigns, we’ve increased the ways a user can opt-out/unsubscribe to single or multiple campaigns. All of this follows strict Mobile Marketing Association and carrier compliance standards.
• Platform Hardware Upgrades - We’ve upgraded our server farm with faster CPUs, 64-bit processing, and increased RAM. This more than doubles our impressive message-per-second output for our larger outbound blast customers.

It was great release, and after a day or two of well deserved relaxation, we’re jumping in for v2.6. Time to do it again.

Lead Generation @ Conferences Revisited

Booth babes, biz card swapping, badge-scanning: they’re all tried and tested ways to get leads at conferences and tradeshows. But what if you could automate your lead generation and free up staff by taking advantage of a lead-generation tool that doubles as a marketing outreach program?

Now you can use the same technology that advertisers put to use at concerts and sports games while tailoring the experience to your smaller company’s needs. The best part is it’s incredibly easy to set up in only a handful of steps.

1. Set up a subscription list campaign, and be sure to “reply-enable” the messages.
2. Place the mobile call-to-action on signage and marketing materials in your booth.
3. Tell your subscribers to reply with their e-mail address.
4. Collect the e-mail addresses and start marketing to your new subscribers!

That’s all it takes to build a mobile subscription list while at the same time capturing the e-mail addresses of potential customers.  You can even take the automation one step further and coordinate with your e-mail marketing efforts to deliver a full color brochure to their inbox that night.

Of course I’d recomend using Msgme, you can sign up for a free account have a test campaign up and running in minutes.

Mobile Marketing Will Work Here

I just read MediaPost’s Engage:GenY article “Mobile Marketing Won’t Work Here” and wanted to respond. The author of this post has taken a rather uneducated (some would define it as simply clueless trolling) view of mobile marketing that stands in contrast to a growing number of reports and case studies that reflect the health of the mobile marketing industry, particularly among Generation Y.

The statistics are there: just last fall, Nielsen reported that the average mobile phone user sent more text messages than phone calls in a month, and this is particularly true among younger demographics. Creative opt-in marketing campaigns by way of couponing, sweepstakes and audience interaction all have proven track records, and teens are the most likely to engage with short code marketing. Mainstream examples of mobile engagement with today’s youth include:

• American Idol’s ongoing incorporation of audience engagement by way of SMS text-messaging voting
• President Obama announcing his VP candidate via SMS to 3 million subscribers
• Text-2-screen campaigns at concerts and sports games

However, those statistics and success stories don’t address the author’s most egregious statement, his definition of mobile marketing:

Essentially, a marketer will gain access to a list of private cell phone numbers, unbeknownst to the owners of the devices, and will send them a text message with advertisement copy.

The cell phone is an extremely personal device and any reputable marketer is mindful of a heightened sensitivity surrounding the medium. Frantic urban legend e-mail forwards about telemarketers invading the mobile space have been popular for years but the Mobile Marketing Association works hand-in-hand with both mobile marketing companies and the carriers to ensure the sanctity of the personal device is not encroached by overzealous marketing clients. Each of us in the industry supports (or should support) this effort by offering built-in MMA and carrier compliant message flow policies into each campaign our clients run.

The possibilities for the mobile channel marketer are extensive – messaging, polling, ringtones and wallpapers, mobile websites, store locators, coupons, last-minute announcements and deals – but they, as always, need to apply standard marketing principles to ensure that their campaign or brand message not only reaches their targeted pool of potential customers in a creative and compelling way, but that it’s done in a manner that is beneficial to all involved: customer, client, mobile marketing platform providers as well as the carriers themselves.

SWAT Cleared Campus, Text Messaging Kept Community In The Know

Last week’s 10-year anniversary of the Columbine tragedy - and more recent school shootings that have benefitted from lessons learned in hindsight - continue to remind us how critical timely emergency communication can be during a crisis.

Last week Napa Valley College, our very first AlertU client back in 2007, became the latest successful example of how emergency notification services can get urgent news out to an affected community, potentially averting more disastrous consequences. The college was put on lockdown when two armed men ran onto campus after allegedly robbing a West America Bank customer at gunpoint outside the bank in the Riverpark Shopping Center around 1 p.m.  Police and SWAT were immediately brought on campus to search for the suspects.

While officers combed the campus property, college officials communicated with students and faculty in real-time. The school’s emergency communication plan – which included SMS, e-mails and website posts – enabled school officials to relay news immediately, ensuring the safety of students and faculty during a campus scare. Text messages warned subscribers that armed men were on campus and that people were instructed to stayed locked in their classrooms until SWAT team members secured the area.

Several of us at Waterfall Mobile were at a favorite lunch dive in SOMA at the time, and began receiving these alerts as part of our monitoring process (we sign up for every school). We quickly called our engineering team who were back at the office monitoring the SMS message flow through our platform and out via our aggregator. It was a tense yet smooth next few hours as, like the students on campus, we continued to receive the text messages and hoped for a safe outcome.

“During last week’s emergency, AlertU was an integral part of our campus’ emergency communication plan and helped us get urgent news out to our students and faculty,” said Ken Arnold, Chief of Police at Napa Valley College. “AlertU has a simple interface that made it easy for us to post frequent updates. This is a community service that you hope to never have to use, but when you do, it’s great to know that it works just like it’s supposed to, quickly and efficiently getting emergency news out to the community.”

The first text message went out to subscribers at 1:31pm, explaining to faculty and students the situation and warning them to lock themselves in their classrooms. As the search for the suspects continued, officials updated students and faculty via text with a total of 8 messages sent over a 4-hour period. More subscribers joined the service as the day went on, with the last text going out at 5:21pm, notifying the community that the campus was clear and the suspects were in custody.

Talking to Jason (who heads up our AlertU division) after the fact, it became clear that a convergence of multiple technologies helped keep people safe. One text alert could reach 1000 people who could alert 1000 more through a tweet, an email or blog post. That’s the viral world we live in.

Through the hard work of all the security personnel involved it was a successful end to an anxious day for Napa Valley College, and we here at Waterfall Mobile and AlertU were proud to be a small part of it.