This month marks the 19th birthday of the oh-so-popular SMS text message. According to Wikipedia, the first SMS text message was sent on December 3, 1992 from a man using a personal computer to a man using an Orbitel 901 handset on the Vodafone GSM network. The content of the message was, “Merry Christmas”.

Since then, SMS text messaging has certainly come a long way! Happy birthday text message, may you continue to connect us to one another, 160 characters at a time.

Source: Tatango SMS Marketing

Original Post at Happy 19th birthday, text messaging!

An effective SMS marketing campaign is one that relays pertinent information to those who’ve elected to receive it. So what happens when subscribers no longer want to receive your marketing or event-related messages? Are there any enforced rules for allowing users to opt-out of text message marketing campaigns?

According to the Mobile Marketing Association’s 2011 U.S. Consumer Best Practices report, users should be able to send any (or all) of the following responses to your phone number, short code, or in reply to any marketing messaging to immediately opt-out: STOP, END, CANCEL, UNSUBSCRIBE, and QUIT. They also state that instructions for opting-out should be included with every message sent. (For example: “Reply STOP to be removed”)

Some rights reserved by TimmyHamster

After a user has opted-out, it’s always recommended that a confirmation of their removal be generated to ensure they know they’ve been removed. Failure to comply with these regulations doesn’t have any direct repercussions as of yet since they’re not strictly enforced, but it’s best practice to do your best to structure your marketing campaigns around these rules.

Want to reduce the number of people opting-out of your SMS marketing campaigns? Make sure you’re following these guidelines for happy customers: 

1. Make sure you never add subscribers who’ve not opted in!
2. Keep messages short, to the point, and relevant.
3. Include your company/event name, links, addresses, and pertinent contact information with each message sent. (Some subscribers may be new and not know who the message is from yet.)
4. Segment your list as much as possible to ensure people are getting targeted messages.
5. Keep an eye on frequency! Being annoying is the quickest way to scare people off.

Original Post at STOP Protocol and Regulations for SMS Marketing

Did you know you can import your attendees directly from EventBrite into Broadcast to start sending targeted, 1¢ text message campaigns? Since registrants using EventBrite typically require a cell phone number to be included upon registration, you can quickly and easily segment your attendees into useful lists and send relevant, informative campaigns to any and all registered attendees.

You can use Broadcast to inform registrants of:

• Last-minute changes to the schedule
• New speaker announcements
• Day-of-event notices
• Reminders before the event
• Sponsor messages
• Links to maps, important phone numbers, or event website information
• Anything you can possibly think of!

Connecting your EventBrite event with your Broadcast campaigns is simple! Just follow these easy steps:

1. Login to your account and go to “Account” on the primary application navigation

2. From here, you’ll scroll down until you reach the section that asks you to connect to your EventBrite API key. (Need help locating your API key in EventBrite?)

3. Once you’ve located your EventBrite API key, enter it in the form field and click “Update EventBrite API Key” and a confirmation message should appear at the top of your browser.

4. You can now go to your “Subscribers & Lists” page and select “EventBrite” from the application subnavigation to begin importing lists from your EventBrite event.

5. Once you’ve imported the list you’d like from EventBrite, that list’s summary page will appear detailing how many subscribers were added and information about each subscriber.

6. From here, you can begin to send campaigns to this list by selecting “Campaigns” from the application navigation and selecting your event list when you define recipients.

7. You’re ready to start sending as you please!

This easy integration allows you to easily communicate important details about your upcoming event to the people who care about it most: those who’ve registered to attend!

For more information about EventBrite’s integration with Broadcast and all of their other partners, check out the EventBrite partners page.

Original Post at Feature Spotlight: Seamless EventBrite Integration

According to the Pew Research Center, a new study was released taking a look at how users interact with their cell phones in 2011. Their research shows that 83% of American adults own cell phones, and over three-quarters of these individuals use text messaging to communicate regularly.

Beyond basic access to their cell phones, it’s most interesting to note exactly what these individuals are doing on their phones. Gone are the days of cell phones being a handy tool people carry around to make phone calls. Instead, these devices are glued to their hands in an effort to be in contact communication with friends, social networking websites, and businesses through app usage, text messaging, and internet browsing.

The only other communication device with this type of penetration is the television. As business owners, digital marketers, and agencies, there’s no more promising source of marketing gold than the cell phone. No other communication device in our history has the penetration, dependency, and usefulness at the cell phone, making it the perfect medium for marketing communication messages.

With the exponential growth that the cell phone has seen over the last decade, it’s truly the future of digital marketing.

31% of your cell-phone toting, text message-using customers prefer to be contacted by text message over voice phone calls. What are you doing to cater to this need? Sign up for Broadcast today and start getting your message in front of them sooner.

Original Post at Smartphone Usage by the Numbers: The Future of Digital Marketing

Every so often we hear of a success story with one of our products and love to share what we hear. One such happy customer is the largely popular WordPress-focused conference, WordCamp Phoenix. Put on completely by volunteers and supported through corporate sponsorships, this event gathered over 750 attendees over a 5-day event, making it the largest-scale WordCamp in the world, to date. One of the sponsors, yours truly, allowed event coordinators to schedule text messaging campaigns for event registrants to communicate important announcements, event schedules over the five days, and specific information to prepare the speakers. The flexibility of Broadcast allowed plenty of day-of messages sent for various last-minute communication that needed to be sent quickly, and ensure that everyone received it.

Photo courtesy of wcphx

Amanda Blum, Operations Director for the event, informed us that they used Broadcast as much the day of the event as they had all the months prior with scheduled campaigns. The easy-to-use interface allowed her to load scheduled text message notifications for the different groups attending different locations and quickly broadcast sponsor messages and giveaways.

Photo courtesy of wcphx

Reactions during and after the event from attendees were that they felt completely involved thanks to the timely updates and simplicity of message delivery. Because of the great reaction to the level of communication provided to attendees, Broadcast will also be sponsoring the upcoming WordCamp in Las Vegas in December 2011. Event organizers are already planning informative text messaging campaigns about hotel information, day of registration, and speaking schedules during the conference as well as keeping their sponsors happy with another way to reach the attendees.

As you can see Betwext Broadcast makes for a great flexible Event Marketing tool. Find out more about Broadcast at www.Betwext.com/Broadcast/ and let us know how we can power your event!

Original Post at WordCamp Phoenix uses Broadcast Text Message Marketing to Organize Event

As many of you know, we’re working hard to make the Betwext Remind and Broadcast APIs publicly available. The good news is we’re super close – we’ve already started beta testing the Betwext Remind API, and we’re hoping to see some really cool stuff from developers wanting to integrate SMS reminders into their apps. Betwext Broadcast API is in an alpha stage as we work hard to make documentation awesome and squash any bugs. If you’re a developer and you’re interested in testing either the Broadcast SMS marketing API or the Remind API, shoot us an email to info@betwext.com or ping @betwext on Twitter.

Original Post at Betwext API Status Update

Based on popular demand we’re announcing the release of the Chrome Extension for Betwext Remind. Thanks to our friends and beta testers we’ve worked out the bugs and have a stable release available in the web store.

Screenshot:

Betwext Remind is a SMS Reminder service that lets you quickly and easily setup text message alerts for the things you need to do, all without cluttering your calendar.

Installing the extension will add the Betwext logo to your toolbar area right of the address bar. Click that and you’ll need to enter your Remind account info. If you don’t have that yet, it’s free! Just sign up here and enter your info when you’re done.
After you enter your account info all you have to do is start scheduling your reminders and simply hit “Enter” or the “Remind Me” button.
Done deal – that’s it!

Download the Remind Chrome Extension at the Chrome web store

Don’t forget to Rate the extension! If you have any problems or feature requests feel free to use our support system for that.

Enjoy!

Original Post at Betwext Remind Chrome Extension

We’ve talked to a lot of customers, and wanted to share some of our ideas on the future of Broadcast specifically and some new features. In the coming weeks, we’re going to be adding white-label type brandability and client management support. Think how you can customize Basecamp to have your company’s logo and name on each page. We’re working on making this as intuitive and powerful as possible, so if you have any thoughts or ideas, feel free to contact us here.

Original Post at Roadmap Updates

It’s exactly as the title says – you can now import participants from any Eventbrite event that you are hosting into Betwext Broadcast! Your subscribers will go through our usual scrubbing process, including removal of duplicates and extra info, so you don’t ever have to worry about keeping things clean and up to date.

Importing is easy with a couple of quick steps to get started.

1. You’ll need your Eventbrite API key, which you can find by visiting your Eventbrite Account settings and then clicking on “API User Key” in the sidebar (or click here if you’re logged in at eventbrite). Copy and paste the key into the Eventbrite API Key field in your Broadcast profile.
2. When setting up your event(s) in Eventbrite, make sure to have the mobile phone number field in your form and set it to a required field – if you don’t do this, we can’t import your event subscribers!

After you’ve done all of this, click the “Eventbrite” link in the Subscribers section of your Broadcast account. You can choose what event to import from, as well as what list to add your new subscribers to.

And that is how you can do text message marketing with Eventbrite. Now get sending!

Original Post at We’ve Added Eventbrite Importing!

Early this year, Betwext was launched as a way to send text messages to a group of people and see everyone’s responses. It was really super cool. Originally built as a toy, we decided to try and sell it as a service. Long story short, Betwext was too expensive and had no marketing budget, but it was loved dearly by a small group of people that used (and still use) it religiously.

A few months later, we inspired some competition. They seem to be doing really well, which is amazingly great.

That being said, Betwext isn’t dead. This week, we’re launching two new products: Betwext Broadcast, which is a professional grade SMS marketing tool for business and organizations of all sizes, and Betwext Remind, a simple reminder app that texts you when it’s time to do something. We think they’re fantastic, and believe that there’s a very large market of businesses who can’t afford 20¢ per message – that’s why we’re charging 5¢ per message for Broadcast, and making Remind 100% free.

We’re also going to relaunch the original Betwext product, renamed as Betwext Talk in the next several weeks. Unlike our competition, it will not be free – there will be a per user charge of a few dollars. However, that charge will include unlimited usage, and it will allow us to offer some pretty valuable tools – things like online logs, management via the web, and eventually the ability to chat with your group via SMS from the website itself. We think that it makes sense to ask for a small fee per month in order to provide incredible features, service, and support for our customers.

Betwext is no longer just a product – we’re a company. We have incredible support behind us and are truly looking forward to providing a fantastic new way of communicating via text messages.

If you’d like to get in contact with us, feel free to email info@betwext.com, shout out to @betwext on Twitter, or visit our main site at http://www.betwext.com. You can also connect with @kressaty on Twitter (he runs things around here).

Original Post at New Beginnings