Archive for the ‘Business Life’ category

Mobile Marketing – You Can’t Win if You Don’t Play and While You’re at it, Play the Right Way

March 9th, 2010

Apparently I won two free tickets to Wicked, the musical playing in San Francisco. Let me start by saying when I got this text message last night, I was thrilled. My wife and I have talked about going for a few months now and other things have come up. So on January 9th we were shopping and I saw a “Win Tickets to See Wicked!” poster in the BART station in San Francisco. Being a curious person and also “in the business”, I will pretty much text anything. I vote for American Idol contestants, text questions to The History Channel and get text message alerts from Wired Magazine and the Syfy Channel. I’ve seen my fair share of both great and poorly executed mobile marketing campaigns.

After texting WITCH to 42903, I promptly got a response back saying “We’re sorry but the contest has ended. Thank you for your interest in Wicked the Musical.” My first thought was “bummer, I missed out” and my second thought was “bummer, they missed out on an opportunity to keep me interested.”

How did they miss out on an opportunity?

1. Use the Space.
Their “sorry” reply was only 89 characters, leaving 71 characters on the table (45%). I’m a huge fan of white space, but in my opinion, a text message is no place to try and get artsy. 71 characters is plenty of space to create an additional call-to-action.

2. Wicked has a wap site.
Being interested in the musical, I would have clicked on a wap link on my phone had there been one.

3. Wicked has a Twitter account.
 A Twitter account can easily be made mobile friendly by adding an “m.” in between http://twitter.com/wicked_musical

Two months have passed…
That was January 9th and a lot has happened since then, none of which has involved my wife and I buying tickets and going to see Wicked. I’m telling you honestly, we really want to go, but life happens and other things grab one’s attention. So last night, almost 2 months to the day, I get a random text message with “Congratulations! You won 2 tickets for WICKED! You will receive the redemption instructions via email within the next 48 hours. Please REPLY with your EMAIL.” So I did.

I’m not trying to be nit-picky here and even though they said they’d get back to me within the next 48 hours, I think there’s one more opportunity missed here. Instead of being like a friend who texts you and says “I have something AWESOME to tell you and I’m going to do so within the next 2 days” they could have sent an auto-responder email to tell me my email has been received, that more exciting details are on the way, but also give me photos, links, post-to-social-media buttons, etc. So here I am…waiting.

Wicked marketing folks: I hope you’re not reading this with a harsh tone and no, I’m not just saying that because I haven’t gotten my free tickets yet. In fact, I’ve now officially blogged about it and will be posting this to Facebook and Twitter as well so you get your proper “bounce” from the give away, but I thought this was a great example of how a mobile marketing could have been better utilized in an advertising campaign. Call me. :)

UPDATE:
Wicked (and not in the Boston way)…I just got the following message: Please disregard the txt u received re: WICKED. It was due to a transmission error. Ur info is secure & we apologize 4 confusion. For questions intsit@gmail.com

In case I have questions I can email their, uh, gmail address. I actually DO have a question: Will you call my wife and break it to her that we’re no longer going to see WICKED for free? Cuz that would be great. KTHXBAI!

Seriously, though, I do not envy the panic that took place when they realized they sent a “Winner!” text to everyone who entered the contest. That probably sucked. But, besides this mobile marketing fail, I stick to my original points about how other opportunities were missed in the first place. And speaking of opportunities…WICKED Mobile Marketing folks: If you’re looking for someone new to handle your text messaging campaigns, please consider Mosio.

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Posted in Business Life, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Technologies, mobile phones, text message marketing

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Simplicity in Mobile Software: Showing Instead of Telling

December 28th, 2009

Simplicity in Mobile Software Design

In Simplicity We Trust.

One of the most difficult parts about being a start up is focus. Initially you look at a bunch of different ways your product solves problems in the name of getting customers. After you get a handful of customers buying your product, you’d think that problem would go away, you’d have more confidence in what you are building. In fact, the opposite is true, because now you have even more people thinking of new interesting and amazing things that you should add to make your software better, faster and easier to use. The more features and functions you add, however, the harder your software is to use.

We’ve collectively made a decision here to stick to simple. With the mission of making mobile technologies simple and accessible to more companies and organizations, we’ve collectively come to realize that simplicity starts with us. For our Text a Librarian and 2-way text messaging software it starts with believing in the “Big Red Answer Button” (a mantra that came from hearing one of our customers explain why she loved using our software).

Big Red Answer Button

In most others, however, it has come down to one thing: Showing, not telling. This means using visuals, videos, use cases, etc to illustrate our usefulness and reducing the amount of words used. This direction feels good. It didn’t come easy, but with everyone on board, it is easier to explain what we do and people are getting it.

Here’s to simplicity in 2010!

For those of you interested in learning more, here’s a link to the Ten Laws of Simplicity. It has played a vital role (along with us collectively asking “is it easy to understand?” at every turning point) in use moving this way heading into the new year.

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Posted in Business Life, Mobile Industry, Mobile Software as a Service, Software, Text 66746 (MOSIO), Text Messaging Questions and Answers, mobile phones, software as a service

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Mosio Featured : inGEN Magazine

November 11th, 2009
(click for larger image)

Mosio Featured in inGEN Magazine’s “Movers and Shakers” Issue, November 2009

Who doesn’t love a little recognition? We’ll take it. This month Mosio is featured in inGEN Magazine along with some great local entrepreneurs, including Aaron Patzer (Mint.com), Chip Conley (Joi de Vivre Hotels), Ted Rheingold (Dogster.com) and Bijan Mirashi (Xoopit).

Page 42.

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Posted in Announcements & News, Business Life, Mobile Industry, Software, social networks, software as a service

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Progress As Promised – The Future Value of Software as a Service for Libraries

September 10th, 2009

tree

“Here is the prime condition of success: Concentrate your energy, thought and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged. Having begun on one line, resolve to fight it out on that line, to lead in it, adopt every improvement, have the best machinery, and know the most about it.”
- Andrew Carnegie

My favorite thing about working at Mosio is that every day we get to come into work and improve ourselves, our product and our relationships with customers. Aside from the positive attitude and action from those who work here, our business model, offering on-demand mobile reference software as a service for libraries, enables us to create, test, launch, listen and then improve upon our product in an ongoing fashion. Text a Librarian is better today than it was yesterday and it will always be better tomorrow.

What Does it Mean? Ongoing Improvements and Progress as Promised.

Since we launched in beta almost a year ago, we have added literally dozens of features and improvements to the service, all of it based on feedback from our customers and those who have commented or offered ideas for improvements. All have been taken into consideration in our ongoing development of the service. We welcome constructive criticism and feedback and in fact, we live for it. Ideas and feedback from librarians enable us to make at least 2 major feature updates per month plus a handful of user interface, usability and back end improvements to the system.

Ultimately what this means is that if you read or send a comment about our product, chances are we have too and are looking into it. Truthfully, not all ideas and suggestions are feasible: for example, we have heard “why can’t the page auto-refresh when a new question comes in?” In theory this suggestion sounds great, until you are in the middle of answering a question and the page refreshes, quickly making your answer box a moving target. Other improvements, such as RefStart, have been made based on listening to the wishes of librarians and coming up with our own solution.

Why We Do It

The simplest answer is “because we can.” Compared with any other options libraries have for mobile reference solutions, we strive for ours to be the best. Being the best means always improving, always making the system more secure, scalable, more collaboration-friendly, easier to set up, easier to use and more robust with reporting. What it means for you and your library is that by signing up for our service, you’ll always have a product that gets better and better, built by people who love hearing what you think as you use it. The biggest compliment we hear is “I wish we could answer all reference questions this way.” Our standard response: “We’re working on it.” =]

One that you can always bet on with Mosio/Text a Librarian is that in pursuit of our goal to be the best, we’ll always be looking to out-perform and out-service any other mobile reference solutions available to libraries. We’ll always be doing this through listening, taking great notes and offering a little bit of personality with our customer service. What this means for libraries is that in their pursuit of being the best, once they sign on with our technology, they get the benefit of ongoing updates and feature-adds to make their services more robust and user-friendly without having to buy or license additional services/software.

You can see a standard list of Text a Librarian features on our website, or if you are a current Text a Librarian customer, click on the New Features link inside your Quick Links module when you’re logged into the system.

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Posted in Business Life, Digital Reference, Library Industry, Mobile Industry, Mobile Technologies, SMS Reference, Software

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Gearing up for ALA Annual 2009 as a Library Mobile Technology Company

July 8th, 2009
This sums up Mosio's excitement for ALA Annual

This pretty much sums up Mosio's excitement for ALA Annual

Trade shows and conferences can be exhausting. You’re over-stimulated, standing up, talking a lot, meeting people, smiling and doing what you can to make a great impression. A number of friends that I speak to are not all that excited about them when they have to go, but there’s no point in talking about those who don’t like going to trade shows, it’s more fun to note the positive people excited about attending. A great example is Attack! Marketing who had USA Sumo Champion Byamba on hand for photos with booth visitors.

Half of the Mosio team left this morning, the rest of us are heading out tomorrow. The buzz and excitement around the office has been incredible, I can’t wait to head to Chicago and meet up with everyone else. Why not? We have a lot of things to be excited about: showing our hard work, introducing people to Text a Librarian and meeting up with those librarians who are already using our product is worth the time away from our loved ones, pets and comfortable beds, especially over the weekend. The mobile industry is a very exciting place to be right now. So many things changing, so much new and yes, many challenges in keeping up, staying on track with the carriers and gadgets. We accept those challenges gladly, working with libraries make text messaging reference a reality for their patrons, truly helping them extend their outreach and continue showing how valuable our nation’s libraries are to those in search of information.

One of my favorite quotes, one I try to live by, is by Charles Kingsley:
“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”

Heading into this conference with all we have going on, the folks at Mosio definitely have plenty to be enthusiastic about and it shows.


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Posted in Business Life, Library Industry, Mobile Industry

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Library Software and Reference Technologies: Software as a Service (SaaS) Value

July 4th, 2009
SaaS as a lower cost strategy

SaaS: A lower cost strategy for libraries.

While reading a great article by Marshall Breeding about library automation and the state of the economy, I was very pleased to see Software as a Service (SaaS) listed as a lower cost strategy:

“[a SaaS] arrangement involves a fixed, annual subscription fee, but it saves the library the costs of purchasing software licenses, server hardware, and technical staff that would have otherwise been needed to maintain a local installation.”

This sentence does a great job of explaining the value of what Mosio’s Text a Librarian offers libraries looking to extend their outreach by offering text messaging reference services to patrons. While I feel like we do a good job of nailing it in a single sentence, “No software to download, no hardware or mobile expertise required,” his next paragraph, although specific to automation, made me literally say “yes” out loud as I read it.

“Vendors like SaaS since it allows them to set up large-scale implementations of their software and provide instances of it to individual customer sites at fairly low unit costs. Libraries appreciate having a predictable annual cost that encompasses the entire project. For libraries that have technical personnel available, going with SaaS for some applications can help reduce their workload and allow them to attend to higher strategic priorities. For smaller libraries that may not already have staff members with technical skills on board, SaaS may be the only way to move forward with automation projects since the cost of hiring technology personnel may be prohibitive.”

Like nearly all businesses, organizations and libraries in the current economy, we’ve had to cut costs, do more with less, all while working at extending our outreach and output. We’ve been able to do so by using new processes and technologies to make us more efficient. Web-based applications are helping us to get more done. The exercise has been great, the team has been forced to think differently, but also to come up with new ideas about time-saving features for the product. It has been showing in everyone’s work. As we continue to grow and as the economy rebounds and improves, we’ll keep the processes and continue using the technologies, so we can keep offering higher levels of service to our customers as they will to their patrons.


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Posted in Business Life, Digital Reference, Library Industry, Mobile Technologies, Reference Tools, SMS Ref, Software, Virtual Reference, software as a service

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