Paid SMS Marketing Just Got Put "On Notice"
>Do you hear that? It’s folks who sell on-site sms products saying “oh crap”.
If you wanted to communicate with your onsite guests with any sort of safety or merchansiding messages, you tried to inspire them to text you and then odds are you were paying per text sent in some fashion. Of course twitter was a nice as a way to communicate to a few who are plugged in and already able, but now twitter has taken a bite out of the paid sms market with the ability for the public to get twitter updates sent to them via txt without having any sort of a twitter account. This means that business can do the same thing they were doing before to communicate to on-site folks, but without paying for it! They’ll just need to start pumping their desired twitter handle to people over the speakers or on signs.
It’s called “fast follow” and it’s going to zoom around pretty quick. The next time you are at a concert, football game, ski resorts like Bachelor, casino, or the like, odds are you’ll have a twitter account blasted at you to “fast follow”. Check out the blog post announcing it. Right now it sounds like it’s only available in the US, so Stephen Colbert would be proud.
Tell the thousands of folks on site when they need to leave by, if there is an emergency, what’s the happy hour band, where to get t-shirts, if there is a rain delay, how much to stay an extra night, why to take a lesson, etc. Of course this info will need to stay relevant (just like all of today’s marketing) because people will be giving it their time and maybe even their “standard text rates”.
