Salons, spas, beauty schools, aesthetician’s offices and tanning salons

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.

Just found this awesome presentation by Michael Marlatt, a recruiter and digital media junkie. It covers the growth of mobile and SMS with some phenomenal stats, so I wanted to share it with everyone.

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)

Greetings blogosphere!  My name is Emma DeMilta and I’m thrilled to announce I’ll be interning for Recess Mobile this summer.  I’m currently a junior at Syracuse University, majoring in English and Textual Studies.  I enjoy writing, croqueting, reading, and jogging.  I wear a size 12 shoe!

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.

Back in March, Yury and I presented “Solving Problems with SMS” at the Mobile X Conference in Columbus and Chicago. We’ve been hopefully waiting for the videos from the event to post the video and slides together, but the videos never went up =\

Anyway, enjoy the slides and feel free to post any questions.

Online Service Helps Residents Avoid Towing

On prototyping

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.

In my Twitter feed today, I caught a link from Robert Grevey and quickly made too much of it.

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.

First, Apple put the kibosh on the Flash-to-native-app compiler.

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.

Search for “how google works” in Google – one of the top results (#3) is: http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html.

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.

For an introduction to this series, see Writing SMS Help Messages. Today, I’m going to cover mandatory opt-out workflow, which is about as much fun as it sounds; like the procedural bits of the Ken Starr report (topical!). I’m focusing here on Standard Rate Messaging.

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?