Recess Mobile

On mobile

The New York Times on SMS advertising,

The vast majority of people say they are averse to having advertisements text-messaged or otherwise sent to their cellphones. But nearly a quarter of people who have gotten such ads say they have responded at least once, a figure that is highly encouraging to marketers.

True as far as it goes – though the “vast majority of people” say that they’re averse to any kind of advertising, so that isn’t much of a surprise. The Times does find a correlation between availability of unlimited text plans and ad response rates. Even so, advertising is the nail for those with only a hammer. It’s still nice to know that consumers are coming around to having their walls perforated with nail holes.

This underscores our approach to SMS: provide a useful service first.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a series of posts that go into fair detail on startup marketing. Most of the techniques will be low-cost, quick, and templated solutions, although I’ll go into a bit more detail on the items I’m more comfortable with. I’ll do my best to provide as many tools, resources, references, and hard data as possible. The purpose of these posts is primarily to help me organize my thoughts, but I figured I would do it publicly in hopes the series might be helpful to others. I’ve found it very difficult to execute without a plan or process, so these posts will act as a marketing process template for us moving forward. We’ll have many followup posts so you can see how un/successful these strategies are. I’m hoping that you will participate and add value to these working posts in the comments.

This is the first part in a series covering messaging requirements, as set by the Mobile Marketing Association’s (MMA) best practices. There are a number of requirements you must adhere to when deploying a mobile messaging campaign, including following opt-in and opt-out procedures, and as I’ll describe in this piece, providing ‘help’ information.

All references are straight from the MMA guidelines and clarified where necessary.

Your program must respond to requests for help. From the MMA guide:

To help subscribers understand their participation, each program should respond with the program details listed below when the subscriber sends the keyword HELP to the program shortcode if they are only subscribed to one service.

Any time a user texts in “HELP” or “HLP” – HLP is optional, but recommended – to your shortcode, you need to return a message containing the following information (italics from the MMA document):

This recent episode of The Simpsons reminded me of Steve Blank’s post about keeping employees happy and preserving the “innovation culture”.

Pre-ramble

I apologize to everyone I promised this post to weeks, if not months, ago. The irony here is that I approached this in the least lean way possible and employed no customer development in the process, beyond gauging initial demand. This is to my detriment, and as you’ll see, to my readers’ as well; a lesson in how difficult it is to give up the endemic desire for completion among those who have only seen the results of creation and suffer from having taste. That violates the fundamental tenants I’ll describe here.

Like a startup, this should be a living thing, a shark, that has to constantly move forward or it dies.

And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark. As Mark Cuban points out, no one remembers where you came from. The same goes for writing.

Nursery Paging Systems Give Parents Confidence

Summary: A well run nursery is one that makes parents feel secure. Background checks, ID badging, and a solid check in/out procedure are just part of the total child safety picture. A nursery paging system that allows you to communicate with parents quickly and effectively is a must-have item. Do you run a church nursery or an on-site workplace daycare? Here’s some timely advice on how a text messaging application can help you stay connected, keep kids safe, and make parents happy.

Tips For Establishing Nursery Pager System Protocols

Summary: Are you responsible for the nursery at your church or other family oriented organization? If so, you need a nursery pager system. However, setting up the application is just the start. When there are multiple volunteers using the system, you’ve got to have some ground rules. Get clued in to the basics of church nursery pager protocol. This will ensure your facility’s new communication technology is viewed as a valuable tool rather than an intrusion.

Here is a list of international email (SMTP) to SMS addresses. Although we don’t recommend using this low-priority sending method for commercial purposes, we figured some of you might like this for personal use. For a quick search, hit CTRL+F on your keyboard and then type the carrier you’re looking for.

Aliant (NBTel, MTT, NewTel, and Island Tel)
Send email to number@chat.wirefree.ca

Alltel
Enter your phone number. Goes to number@message.alltel.com.

Ameritech (ACSWireless)
Enter your phone number. Goes to number@paging.acswireless.com

Arch Wireless
Enter your phone number. Sent via http://www.arch.com/message/ (assumes blank PIN)

AT&T
Enter your phone number. Goes to number@txt.att.net

AU by KDDI
Enter your phone number. Goes to username@ezweb.ne.jp

BeeLine GSM
Enter your phone number. Goes to number@sms.beemail.ru

Bell Mobility Canada
Enter your phone number, including the 1 prefix. Goes to number@txt.bellmobility.ca

Bellsouth
Enter your phone number. Goes to number@bellsouth.cl

Recess Mobile is looking for a sales and marketing intern.

Interested? Click here for more information and the application.

We’ve been getting a lot of inquiries about whether the Recess Paging System will work with OpenTable. The short answer — YES.

We designed Recess Paging System to work similarly to traditional restaurant paging systems so that you wouldn’t need to change existing operational workflow.

Here’s how it works –

Each guest that is entered into the paging system is assigned a unique guest number.

1. Enter the guest just as you normally would into OpenTable, but don’t close the window.
2. Now enter their phone number into the Recess Paging System.
3. After you create a new guest in the paging system, add the unique guest number into the note field in OpenTable.
4. When you’re ready to page your guest, use the OpenTable note field as a reference. Scroll to the correct customer in Recess Paging System and hit Send Page.