Mobile Marketing Companies

12Snap
21 Communications
5th Finger
Add2Phone
Admob
Admoda
ADTECH
Adultmoda
Aerodeon
Antenna Volantias
Bango
Blast Companies
Bluebook Advertising
Bond Wireless
Brainstorm
Brand2Hand
Brandscape
BuzzTone
Carat Interactive
Cell Trust
Cellempower
CellIt Marketing
Compeau Fawkes
Convergent Mobile
Digital Rum
Dyma Media
FlyTXT
GMR Marketing
Go Live Mobile
Gold Mobile
GoomZee
Graphico DMG
Greystripe
HipCricket
The HyperFactory
i-POP Networks
iLoopmobile
Impact Mobile
Interface
ipsh!
iTagg
ivisionMobile
Javatech
Knotice
Mach
MAGi7
MForma
M Channel
Mass1
Mass Media Studios
Mblox
Metaio
Minick
MobiFusion
Mobile Hunger
Mobile Messanger
mobileStorm
Mobile Dreams Factory
Mobile Trend
Mobilestreams
Mobilize Systems
Mobivity
Moozey
Moto Message
Motricity
Movo Mobile
Moxie Interactive
MSCorp
NetInformer
Netsize
Open Market
Ogilvy
OnPoint
OpenWave
Oxygen 8
Ping Mobile
ProSurve
Punchcut
Punchkick Interactive
Qwasi
Recess Mobile
Resource Interactive
ScreenTonic
Signal
SinglePoint
SmallWorldMobile
SmartReply
SMSShortcodes
SoapBox Mobile
Sponge
StopNText
Sybase
Syniverse
Tagga
Telus
Text Marketer
TextMarks
Text Power
The Concept Studio
Upoc Networks
Upstream Systems
Urban Eye
Viachannel
Vibes Media
Vidamo Group
Visage Mobile
WaterFall Mobile
Xiam
Yavox

While we’d love to tell you all the awesome features here, it’s best to just go to SMS White Label and see them for yourself.

Here’s the snippet –

or right click and save as: download the snippet

Salons and spas

Marketing and promotion

• Consumers opt-in to a mobile marketing list and the salon or individual beautician can then send special offers, coupons, or event notifications.
• Segment the list down to those who want to be notified about specific events, like peel or Botox parties, and send text message invitations that recipients can then forward to their friends.
• Run contests where a beautician or salon gives away a free haircut and color if consumers text in. Providing incentives to opt-in works wonders.
• Track when a customer last visited and program the system to automatically send them a reminder text message three to four weeks later to return.

Utility — consumers

• Send a text message instead of leaving a robo-dialer appointment reminder voicemail. Consumers constantly share their frustration with long voicemail messages, which they dread the prospect of listening to. Integrate the appointment system with a text messaging platform that sends out text reminders automatically. Statistics show that 95% of text messages are opened within 5-14 minutes [1] and can reduce no-shows by up to 70% [2].
• Don’t make customers waste time waiting around in the lobby. Have them check in at the counter and provide their cell number to the receptionist. When the beautician frees up, they can send a text message to the customer to come back in.
• Start an “ask us anything” campaign. Consumers can text in their questions and get answers directly on their cell phones from professional beauticians. Build rapport with customers, capture their information and then ask them to come in for a service (or just use it to build brand value). At the very least, you can find out which services potential customers are most interested in when you develop marketing initiatives.
• Run feedback campaigns with subscribers, asking them what they most enjoyed or disliked about their experience. Consumers can text back free-form responses, which can then be organized and cleaned up for reporting and evaluation purposes.

Utility — internal

• Beauticians are rarely sitting in front of their computers waiting for emails or available. Calling each one individually is a management nightmare. Use SMS to communicate time-sensitive information to the entire staff in seconds. Staff can be segmented down by specialty, location and more so a manager only needs to select the recipients, type up the message and hit “send.”
• Use SMS to run polls across the organization. Does the majority of your staff like chocolate or vanilla ice cream with their cake? How about finding out which hair style or nail color is in season?
• Similar to polling, use SMS as an RSVP application to see who can make it to, say, a training session.
• Finding a replacement for an absent beautician is often a challenge. Send a text message to those with the day off and offer a small bonus to the first that can take the appointment. Someone will grab it quickly.
• When beauticians encounter a support or maintenance issue, have the staff text in the problem. Requests can be organized, routed and responded to quickly when in an inbox, manually or with more automation. Staff will love it because they don’t have to call in, wait on hold or turn on a computer.

Beauty schools

Marketing and promotion

You can use SMS to improve recruitment campaigns.

• Most schools do out-of-home advertising; flyering, outdoor, TV and radio advertising. These methods rely on “ad recall rates,” which means they’re betting that potential students will later remember the ads they’ve come across. Use SMS to extend that advertising without incurring any marginal printing costs by including an opt-in call to action along with an incentive for the prospect to text in. When they do, you capture their phone number for later followup or as part of a drip campaign.
• When a recruiter goes into a high school or university to pass out flyers or to make a presentation, ask the student audience to text in their email addresses. Have the system send each student an email automatically containing a special prize or other offer. The recruiter now has access to all of the phone numbers and email addresses for further followup.

Utility

• Use SMS to quickly find a substitute teacher. Maintain a small database of all available substitutes and send out a text message to all those that might be interested. First one to reply can fill the slot.
• Communicate school delays, closings, lockdowns, or other time-sensitive information to all students, parents and staff at once.

We’ve deployed some version of all of these applications in the past. If you’re curious about how they work, feel free to get in touch!

Sources
[1] Jared Reitzin, MobileStorm, 2009
[2] Recess Mobile internal research

Some notable points:

• “The confluence of these three factors (computing, connectivity and the cloud) means your phone is your alter ego, an extension of everything we do. Here, right now, we understand the new rule is ‘mobile first’ in everything. Our job is to make mobile be the answer to everything.” Eric Schmidt, Google CEO
• “91% of the planet keep the mobile phone within arm’s reach 24/7. It is literally the last thing we look at before we go to sleep and again the first thing we see when we wake up.”  - Morgan Stanley, 2007
• 91% mobile penetration in the U.S. (CTIA, 2010)
  • Over 100% penetration for U.S. population over 5 years old (CTIA, 2010)
• 4.6 billion active global mobile subscriptions (Tomi Ahonen, 2010)
  • Compare that to 1.2B PC users and 1.3B landline users
• 3.6 billion global users of SMS (Tomi Ahonen, 2010)
  • Compare that to 1.4B email users and 1.7B MMS users
• 4.5 trillion messages sent globally (CTIA, 2009)
• 95% of SMS messages read within 4-15 minutes (Jared Reitzin, MobileStorm, 2009)
• “SMS usage is expected to grow by 22% in 2010, to – 5.5 Trillion total SMS text messages sent globally. The big driver in the SMS traffic now is North America…” (Tomi Ahonen, 2010)
• Quite a bit of SMS usage by 25-54 age range (see slide #87)

As an incoming intern for Recess, a company so well-versed in SMS and mobile marketing, I wanted to get acquainted with the best SMS technology out there.  Up until now, my personal experience with SMS has been limited to text messaging friends and receiving OrangeAlerts from my university any time there’s a local theft or nearby crime.  I thought that the best SMS could offer me was cheesy horoscopes or stupid jokes or obnoxious hip hop ringtones advertised on television.  I knew these services would charge me a minor amount for texting them a shortcode, and that I was better off without using SMS in this way; I’d leave it for the people who invest in things like that – the ones who buy too many lottery tickets and read tabloid magazines.

After delving into an online investigation, though, my perceptions about the technology have changed.  I realized we are just beginning to see what SMS can do for us as a society.  SMS is a whole world onto itself, beyond horoscope spam or advertising fluff (although there is that too, of course).  No, with companies like Recess, I see SMS can provide practical solutions to future generations.  In fact, SMS could very well be the key to getting me through the next five years of my life alive, especially as a young person dealing with the economic strain effecting job markets.  Here’s how:

1. Finding a Job

Most if not all students my age are nervous about finding satisfying careers.  In order to keep ‘post-grad’ from being synonymous with ‘post-apocalyptic’, I found their are neat services like TextMe, a New Zealand-based company, send notifications/alerts to subscribers looking for full time, part time or one off type jobs.  Using an SMS service like this, I wouldn’t even have to look in the newspaper or on Craigslist.  Job leads would come to me.  The subscribers can personalize their preferences.  The service ideally makes little employer/employee love matches.

2. Under-the-Board/Bored-Room-Table Updates

Like most twenty year olds, I love checking email, fbook, twitter, etc., on my Smartphone.

(Check out how subtle the ATAT logo is in my smartphone’s obnoxious preset screen)  Once I find an entry-level job in my desired field, however, I will curtail that habit.  An entry-level job means working my bum off to advance, and being discreet if I’m using my phone at work.  Unless I’m lollygagging about town delivering greasy pizzas, I won’t be able to be web surfing on my phone for any prolonged period of time.  Instead, I can invest in SMS to keep updated about interests and events.  While earning my stripes working those long nights, I look forward to utilizing clever products like Scores to SMS, which sends live updates on sports scores.  The service lets you follow any game, match, or tournament that you can dream of!  Updates about Cavs games – evidence of life outside the board room – will keep me refreshed and working hard.

3. No-nonsense Updates

During my research, what impressed me most was the amount of useful SMS products and services readily available. Many provide simple updates.  This spring, Wells Fargo and Visa have announced they will be offering rapid alerts to their cardholders not only to help manage their accounts, but also to catch credit card theft more easily.  So in addition to getting sports scores updated via SMS, I’ll also be investing in some services that provide super-practical updates, like getting a message when my credit card number is being used or like Recess’ AntiTow, which alerts Columbus locals when the street sweeper is coming.

4. Tummy Treat

I like to cook, but some nights when I do finally make it home from my first major job, I will be in the mood for quick-and-easy.  Thanks to SMS, I’ll be able to order a pizza or takeout with a single, short text, without even having to log onto a webpage to fill out the takeout order.  Then my hassle will be reduced to worrying that the pizza guy is lollygagging.

The technology seems simple enough to teach to people of any age group.  The need to neatly manage bank accounts and to find employment quickly is across-the-board universal.  I found that SMS is unique from other methods of communication and surprisingly applicable to my own life.

So after investigating, that’s the verdict: From here on out SMS is gonna help me out.  Finding all of these neat uses of SMS makes me even more excited for this fun summer of working with Recess Mobile.  Make sure you subscribe to the Recess blog because in addition to great posts from the co-founders of Recess (Yury and Vitaliy), I will also be posting as I further investigate great SMS campaigns, instances of incredibly successful SMS marketing, and more.

Until then, you can follow me and my mammoth feet on twitter.

Anyway, enjoy the slides and feel free to post any questions.

I’ve been considering a switch to Fireworks from Photoshop and other heavy editors for mocking up layouts.

With many of our projects, we’re skipping this step entirely.

On that note, see also Mockups with markup – Using Blueprint to sketch in code and Meagan Fisher’s fantastic piece, Make Your Mockup in Markup. For the Ruby-inclined, there’s a nice writeup on prototyping workflow, Rapid prototyping with HAML, SASS and Ruby, by the skilled UI designer Jérôme Gravel-Niquet.

That said, and even considering the pain of iterating mockups in a graphics editor, I still turn to them. Maybe I’m stuck in my ways. Maybe it’s just more fun.

The Fireworks Blueprint template

A Blueprint template was noticeably absent from the Fireworks arsenal (odd, because there’s even one for Balsamiq), so borrowing from the Photoshop template released by Konigi, I put a template together. It has vertical and horizontal guides and zebra-striped columns from the Photoshop template. Hope you find it useful.

Click to pull the full size image, which is the proper 24 columns across.

Does state-sponsored innovation work? Ask Russia -http://nyti.ms/cKvNd5 via / @NYTimes

Here’s the direct link to single-page view. My replies:

1. @robertgrevey Ugh. Soviet-style ‘innovation.’ My grandfather ran a nuc sub research center there. Little innovation happened w/out the KGB.
   @robertgrevey The article cites the # of Russians the Bay. Neglects to mention that many, like Sergei Brin, fled systemic antisemitism.

I tried to find the buried lede that would best summarize this proto-Soviet adventure. The most telling line:

…the new city was conceived by what is called the Commission on Modernization

At least the Times wasn’t credulous enough to swallow the party line, but they failed to provide the necessary context. Perhaps rightly believing it to be obvious and reducing my invective below to irrelevancy.

Soviet innovation wouldn’t have existed without the KGB assisting in the reverse-engineering of Western technology (casually mentioned American equipment mysteriously appearing on scientists’ desks, completed plans emerging from the ether), or the lower ethical standards of Soviet science and its willingness to sacrifice human life. That’s no aspersion on the scientsists themselves, but rather on the flaws of Soviet isolationism, both on a national scale and in the microcosms of research cities.

They crushed Georgian innovation, marginalized, murdered and exiled the Jews (do I even need to cite references for this?), and emerged a Dutch disease blighted autocracy with atavistic delusisons of empire, dissipating and depopulating itself with drink at a rate matching the casualties of the Great Patriotic War.

The Times continues:

For nationalistic Russian officials, it only rubs salt in the wounds that Silicon Valley companies so easily recruit bright Russian scientists. AmBar, the Russian business association, estimates that 30,000 to 60,000 Russian-speaking professionals work in the San Francisco Bay Area.

A marquee name in the high-tech world, the Google co-founder Sergei Brin, immigrated to the United States from Russia with his parents when he was a child. Had Russia been a different place, perhaps Mr. Brin might have started Google there instead of in Silicon Valley.

Mentioning the Jewish Sergey Brin in this context is akin to the Antebellum South lamenting that Frederick Douglass chose to pursue his career elsewhere.

Besides, new ideas in technology emerge from density (the Valley’s suburban distances notwithstanding), amplifying the diversity of thought. They come from people negotiating the spaces between disciplines. They acuminate on interaction with customers and the market. All of these elements are missing in the silo of a research city. Boffins aren’t immune from the reality outside of their village palisades.

With SV innovation focused on disrupting and democratizing media and back-channel connections (the utterly forgettable Fouresquare and Gowalla aside; if anything, they make it easier for the Politburo to keep tabs on those threateningly capricious early adopters), what’s the likelhood of something competitive emerging in a country that makes a habit of assassinating dissidents and journalists?

The only ideas to emerge out of Russia that channel the open spirit of the internet have been Chatroulette, started by a 17-year old in his bedroom, and the black market for stolen credit cards.

What a sad waste of Russian talent, forged in a culture that venerated the engineer, the chess grandmaster, the scientist (but notably, not the intellectual; a necessity for an entrepreneurial culture?).

I’ll conclude with another excerpt from the Times piece:

Skeptics see a deeper strain of Russian tradition: trying to catch up with the West by wielding the power of the state. Looking askance at the incongruous blend of the Kremlin’s will and the openness prized by Silicon Valley, they refer jokingly to the new city as Cupertino-2.

Good luck, Putin Medvedev. I hope the inevitable collapse of this Potemkin village serves as a warning to those who might try it stateside.