In February we launched a “Post to Twitter” function within the Mosio mobile messaging platform and Mosio’s Text a Librarian. We wrote a blog post about why this was good for libraries: user generated marketing.

I’ve pasted the original blog post about why it was good for libraries below. It’s great for every business and now the post to Facebook function gives organizations the ability to post questions and answers to the world’s largest and most powerful social network. If you’re a librarian you can read the information below as is, but if you’re a marketing or customer service manager at a company, simply replace the word “patron” with “customer” and “library” with “company” and you’ll see that the feature holds the same great function for either.

Enjoy!

Original Post

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).

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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Augmenting Toll Free 800 Numbers With Mobile Text Messaging for Customer Service
Americans are texting more than they’re talking, a trend that’s likely to grow more than slow down over the next 5-10 years. It’s easy and it’s quick. The popularity and usage of texting is no surprise as the on-the-go lifestyle ends up being more like living than a style type. The truth is, people are still going to use the phone to talk, but the growing usage of text messaging across all demographics shows more people prefer text messaging.

Customers Will Be Heard
The bell curve above illustrates how customer feedback has traditionally been given: in person, comment card, telephone and email. It used to be an extremely effective way to give feedback to a company. But with the growth of social media, customers are being heard by their friends, co-workers and strangers whether they are happy or unhappy with a product or service. Some companies have taken to Twitter to handle customer service issues, but “we’re on Twitter” is not a social media customer service strategy (and it’s certainly not a mobile customer service strategy).

I’m not suggesting companies using Twitter don’t continue to do so, but reacting to a tweet about a bad experience is like someone yelling “this food sucks!” in a crowded restaurant: you can run over and help your upset patron, but the damage has been done. That’s the obvious reason why so many companies are jumping into the social media space: they have to do so to protect their brand image. But there’s another way to protect one’s brand image: make yourself more available to communicate directly with your customers.

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Text Messages: Direct Customer Conversations
If people are texting twice as much as they are talking and they’re using text messaging and mobile apps on their phones to update their status and communicate with friends, companies need to make themselves available via the mobile channel. People are posting their loves and dislikes for a product or service on social media services because it’s easy to do so. Integrating text messaging gives companies an opportunity to start a customer conversation using the medium customers prefer and keep the conversation between them. Is it going to stop everyone from ranting on updates and blogs when they’re upset? No, but it opens up dialogue with more possible customers at a fraction of the cost of 800 tolls or chasing down posts online.

Text Messaging Beyond Customer Service: Direct Response in Marketing and Advertising
I hate the word “blast” when it comes to mobile marketing and it’s a word used far too often in our industry. Customers don’t want to be blasted on their mobile phones. In fact, it’s the last place they’d want to be communicated with in such a way. The mobile medium offers so much to traditional advertising with more and more research showing mobile getting better response rates than online advertising.

We soft launched a mobile advertising response product with a few marketing and advertising agencies and are getting great feedback. The system lets customers help themselves get more information immediately using their mobile devices. Text messaging as a method of responding to ads, whether they be print, TV, billboards, posters or flyers is going to be a huge hit in 2010 and beyond. Used in customer service, direct response or as a helpline for a brand, mobile text messaging is still in its infancy. What’s better, you don’t need “an app for that” to use it in your business.

For information on how Mosio can help you set up mobile text messaging customer satisfaction, service and feedback systems,contact us or visit www.mosio.com.

Reference Librarians: SMS Skills Are Not Needed, Your Research Skills Are

As excited as I am to see that more and more libraries are seeing the value of offering text message reference service to patrons, I find it troublesome to read posts and articles claiming that “librarians need SMS skills now.” It’s unnecessary pressure being put on an already tough job market at a time when new technologies are flying quickly at everyone in the working world at an alarming rate. Texting in the U.S. is more popular than talking on mobile phones and you can bet that a large % of your patrons send texts on a regular basis, regardless if you are at a public, academic or corporate library. SMS reference services increase your patron outreach, provide them access to you wherever they are and mobile reference is definitely here to stay. But to say that this increase in text message usage means you need to get skills doing the same is like saying English teachers need skills in rapping because many of their students are writing hip hop rhymes. It’s helpful for them to be aware of and embrace it, but it’s totally unnecessary for them to grab a microphone and sign up for the next MC battle they can find.

Although a handful of us are active participants, being a texter is not a job requirement at Mosio / Text a Librarian. In fact, if a candidate stated that they sent/received 200 texts a day or that their last phone bill had 10,000 SMS messages on it, I would sincerely question what they spent their days doing. In fact, one of the people doing our market research is not a texter. Do you know what that person is great at? Research. That’s why we hired him, that’s why we love his work. He knows a lot about the mobile industry and can find information for us faster than anyone I’ve ever met. His skill set in research and his abilities to produce it for us is why he is here.

Should your library embrace and offer text messaging reference services?
Absolutely, according to many librarians and from the hustle and bustle of things around the office at Mosio, the entire industry sees it as a need.

Should you run out and buy a smart phone and get on a SMS plan so you can learn how to communicate with your patrons utilizing the SMS reference service?
No, unless you want to. If you’re curious and you want to try it out, we think that’s great. If you feel that it’s a big part of the future of libraries and think your library should offer it, even better. That is the most important part.

Here are three reasons why you don’t need to have SMS skills:

1) Mobile phones are an inefficient way to answer reference questions.
Texting on a phone is not and will never be faster than typing on a computer. Mobile data speeds will never be faster than internet speeds. Phone processors will never be faster than computer processors. Even if you send and receive twice as many text messages per day than the average American teenager, it doesn’t mean everyone else does and you still will not be able to help patrons faster.

2) You have and use a computer connected to the internet.
You don’t need a gadget along side the computer you use at the reference desk. If your library just bought a phone and signed a 2 year contract so you could offer text messaging reference, I’m sure there’s an element of excitement about having the phone at the library. The form factor is cool, but  you don’t need a phone, you just need the computer you’re already using.

3) There are better things you can do with your time to be of great assistance to patrons.
In a glance at five job posts/descriptions for reference librarians, there are three keywords that I found show up consistently: research, resources and experience. Patrons need you to help them find information, they don’t need you to be a good texter.

Our belief in this is why we chose the tagline “Patrons text questions. Librarians type answers.” Text a Librarian’s technology enables libraries to implement text messaging reference at their libraries without SMS skills. Patrons have those skills, but if you don’t, you’re not alone and we’re here to help.

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.