Archive for July, 2012

In Spain, text message use exploded during its Euro 2012 victory over Italy.

Winners text more than losers.  At least when it comes to sports.

During the Euro 2012 final between Spain and Italy, there were some interesting trends.

• At kickoff, text message traffic dropped by 40% in both countries as fans were glued to the event.
• After the first goal by Spain, traffic shot up by 120%.
• After the second goal by Spain, traffic shot up by 200% as the Spanish citizens began sensing victory.
• During half time, Spanish traffic increased by 25% while Italian traffic remained average.
• On goal number three by Spain, traffic increased by 175%.
• Goal number four by Spain saw a 30% increase.

Clearly, people like sharing their successes via text message much more so than their failures.

In the continuing list of ridiculous lawsuits, the US District Court of Southern California has thrown out a case where the plaintiff wanted to sue Taco Bell for sending him confirmation of his opt-out.  Just another case of a consumer wanting to make money off of a big company for doing what it was supposed to do!

The Taco Bell case confirmed the need for a reply message when a consumer opt-outs of a text message marketing program.

In Ibey vs. Taco Bell Corp, the plaintiff agreed to consent to receive text messages from Taco Bell.  Later, the plaintiff wished to opt-out of the Taco Bell database and texted ”STOP” to do so.  At this point, Taco Bell’s text message marketing system replied with a confirmation message indicating that the plaintiff had indeed opted out.

The plaintiff brought suit, alleging that the confirmation message was in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act on the grounds that it “constituted an unsolicited advertisement placed via an automatic telephone dialing system.”

The Court found that the confirmation message was not in fact “unsolicited telemarketing.”

At 84444.com, we have customers that often consider that they should not send a receipt confirmation message in an interactive text message marketing program.  In fact, it is one of hte features that we offer to those customers that may wish to save money from not responding to incoming texts.

Such a practice, however, is almost always a bad idea.  When a consumer sends an interactive text, if they don’t get a response quickly, what do you think they do?  They send another one!  You need to give them the confirmation that the interactive text worked in the first place.  If not, they will think that they haven’t opted-out of the database and they will be even madder.

Read more here about text message legal cases that were legitimate and that businesses should be aware of.

We just talked about how our 84444.com site is getting texts from followers of the television show Glee which uses a similar 94444 short code.

Well, our short code isn’t getting mixed up with the short code being used by Katy Perry for her new movie, but it’s pretty cool that Katy is using a text message program to promote her new movie.  In fact, it seems like more and more movies are using a text message element to them in their previews when the movie is being released.

Now, Katy could have taken a little help from our staff when she advertised the text message program.  From looking at the advertisement, I really didn’t know what I was going to get from Katy.  After texting, I now know that Katy is going to “share my incredible journey.”  That’s good enough for me.

What’s even better, however, is that Katy loves me.  She said so right in the text.  ”Xo. Katy”