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.

Now they’ve killed Scheme/Gambit-C and likely MonoTouch.

PhoneGap and its ilk are safe (for now), but this emblematic of Apple’s approach to third-party app development. It’s the price you pay for playing in someone else’s sandbox.

It’s a tidy sandbox, with rounded, rubberized edges and a bucket from FAO Schwarz. But it’s also sitting on the beach. When the industry grows up, it will end up there, embracing the open standards of the web over the passing benefits of a technocratic, on-deck distribution platform.

Apparently, this was an April Fool’s joke back in 2002. 8 years later, this page is ranking in the top results for the term “how google works”, which is typed into the search engine almost 15,000 times a year, according to the Google Keyword Tool.

I usually commend creativity and a transparency of a company’s personality, but people are looking for a serious answer when they search for “how google works”. As a matter of fact, the majority of these searches are coming from India and Singapore. How many of them do you think know what April Fool’s is? India celebrates a festival called Holi, but it’s in early March and very loosely related to our day of pranks in April.

Let’s hope there aren’t people walking around the world thinking about starting a search engine using a horde of Hawks…

From the MMA Best Practices, the source of all the pull quotes in this post:

It is fundamental to the concept of control that a subscriber maintains the ability to stop participating and receiving messages from a shortcode program when desired.

As soon as a user subscribes to your program, you must explicitly tell them how to opt-out, and they must be able to do so at any time. It’s an important measure against abuse, as any ethical marketer would agree.

That said, consider the well-intentioned, but rigidly applied opt-out workflow within a complex chat application. How do we discount the false positives?

The notable stipulation is that “Shortcode programs should support mixed case opt-out commands and ignore subsequent non-keyword text.” Consider the challenges of adhering to these restrictions while building innovative applications.

The CTIA seems to believe that SMS is strictly for coupons, as evinced by their dated use of ‘campaign’ as a catchall term to represent any SMS-driven program. For those of us building real, robust SMS applications (and who consequently take opt-outs more seriously than marketers because it reflects not mere attrition, but a failure of service), it’s an anachronism, if not an insult. A topic for another day.

Keywords you’re required to respond to with an opt-out:

You’re allowed to initiate opt-outs based on other keywords of your choice, but must respond to at least the five keywords above. And, apparently for consistency, you must send an opt-out confirmation message in response to any of these keywords, even if the user isn’t subscribed to any program at all. For instance, a user may text in STOP as their first message to your system and you must send back a proper opt-out response, pretending that everything is normal. The same applies to users texting into a programs that sends only one-time messages. If they text in STOP after that (even though there’s no subscription to end), you must pretend to opt them out. It’s all very Victorian.

Needless to say, but they say it anyway, “The STOP command should never result in an error being sent back to the subscriber.”

A STOP request should result in a message (MT) sent to the subscriber:

…This should not be a premium message. This message should reference the specific program the subscriber has opted-out from. No further messages should be sent to the subscriber from this program, including marketing messages for any related or unrelated programs.

Opt-out confirmation message

Multiple choice menus

For subscribers who’ve opted into multiple programs, a simple STOP request isn’t sufficiently descriptive. Rather than opting them out of all programs at once, you need to present a multiple choice menu.

You are required to present STOP ALL as the final choice in the menu, and respond to STOP ALL at any time by opting users out of all subscribed programs (even if it’s only one, or, as we learned above, none).

The menu need not include:

• “Msg&Data Rates May Apply” – by the way, this copy changes every once in a while, rarely becoming more elegant; classic committee-generated results. At least it’s now standardized across the carriers. It used to be worse.
• Pricing
• Sponsor contact information

Much like the Help menu, this could look like:

Subscribed to multiple programs. Rply w one of the following to stop:
A) First program
B) Second program
C) Another program
or STOP ALL
More, recessmobile.com

A reply with one of the options would return the appropriate opt-out confirmation message. I would suggest accepting anything from “A” followed by any text as well as the words “First program.” If users are going to the trouble of calling up a menu and replying to it, it’s clear that they want out, so make it easy for them. Subscribers who don’t want to be there will cost you more in the long-term and it’s in yours and your users’ best interest to do more than merely follow the letter of the law here.

This isn’t a common worfklow, though. Most systems aren’t sophisticated enough to pick up on these types of open-ended responses, so you’re typically stuck with something that more closely resembles the example in the MMA handbook:

Farm League Baseball: which service to stop?
4 Sports txt STOP SPORT or
4 Horoscope txt STOP HORO

And subscribers would reply with “STOP HORO” to end the Horoscope program. This is just lazy user experience design and engineering, not worthy of being a canonical example. Not to mention that they ignore their own requirement of including STOP ALL as the final option. Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.

Additional notes

For those doing IVR (those automated phone trees) opt-ins:

Any IVR system that offers the possibility to opt-in to a mobile service must also offer the possibility to opt-out. This should be available through the IVR, customer service, a web site, or SMS.

And be aware that users will try to opt-out by non-standard means (so much for the universality of STOP). Users text in crazy, crazy things.

Content providers should periodically scan their MO logs for subscribers that are clearly trying to unsubscribe to a service, but are not following the programmed rules. And then take the action to end their subscription based on those MO logs.

Log everything:

The content provider (or the aggregator) should record and store all opt-out transactions.

…

Independent of method of entry (SMS, MMS, Web, WAP, IVR) opt-in and opt-out records – including single, double and triple opt-in records – should be retained from the time the subscriber opts-in until a minimum of six months after the subscriber has opted-out of the program (minimum opt-in archiving period is one calendar year). These records should be made available to the aggregator or carrier upon request.