Rahul Dravid is a trending topic in Twitter and other social media platforms for some days. Anyone who has worked on Social Media Marketing knows how difficult is to make anything a trending topic. Because a trending topic is something which is owned by people, not by brands or organisations. Of course, some brilliant people have broken the rules and did their thing, as always in the history.

What if you can’t create a trending topic and your little blog post is not what people share and talk about? Well, you can do many things including closing the shop and going home. Or, you can try and leverage the current trending topic and put something like this on your blog:

What can I, as an Entrepreneur, learn from Rahul Dravid?

I haven’t heard anything about the author Prateek Panda before. But on his profile page he says he is a failed “A Successfully Failed Entrepreneur!” Huh? Let me try to understand here. You learned all that you said in your blog from Rahul Dravid and still you failed? Does that mean Rahul’s entrepreneur training is not good enough?

Or maybe we should let Rahul to deal with only cricket!

I think this guy is trying to achieve two things here.

1. He is trying to grab attention of the user: I should agree he’s quite successful in that. It made me read his article and now I am writing about this. Good work!
2. He tried to package his usual boring ‘advices’ with Rahul Dravid to make it a bit interesting. And he failed! failed terribly!! You read the first paragraph and you know this guy is trying really hard. And if you look at the whole article, you can see how hard he is trying to include relevant keywords. (I know it’s none of my business, but your first venture was an SEO company?)

I do think that the advice Prateek trying to give is important. But we have seen it enough. There are at least a thousand websites out there who give the same advice again and again. We need more insightful articles, Not some mashups like this!

I used to work with a research team who used to work on a text-free operating system for the illiterate users. One argument we used to go over and over in those meetings was that the illiterate users are are a majority that’s not targeted by anyone. I think that argument is true for the mobile users as well. The market is huge, that’s anyone holding a mobile handset, however basic it is (or, you should have a handset that’s like something my friend Mr. Shabeebudeen Kutteery used to have.) . And it’s an untapped market. I have tried to list the types of SMS campaigns that I have seen so far. Going through the list, you’ll know how this medium has been under-used.

1. Claim a coupon
   This is a very common SMS marketing technique. The advertiser will publish some phone numbers where customer can SMS his number and the advertiser will send back some coupon codes they can redeem. Apart from giving a sales boost, this will help the advertisers to get phone numbers of prospective customers.
2. Voting
   Advertiser asks users to vote for something. It works mostly for magazines, TV programs etc. Some people do live poll and maintain live statistics and make it open to public.
3. Promotions and Offers
   The advertiser will send you the latest promotions / offers running. Quite a useful thing for the shopaholics. Or for prospective customers who are towards the end of the purchase funnel.
4. Reminders / Wishes
   Advertiser maintains a database of important dates for a customer (birthday, anniversary etc.) and reminds  / wishes them on that day at the same time promoting one of it’s products
5. Send a link/number
   Probably the most easy one. Advertiser sends you his website address or phone number, hoping you to visit / call!

If you don’t use these methods carefully, this can easily become SPAM SMSes. And as a customer in the market you can see a lot of the campaigns are going SPAM.

Have you seen any marketing campaigns that use SMS intelligently? As an integral part of the campaign? Share the details in the comments section.