Hi everyone! Excuse me for being two days late with this post. Here I am with another case study on Mobile Marketing. Today I am going to introduce you the case of SoCal (South California) McDonald’s that were reaching their customers through text messages.

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AnnaAbi.com is a web page for Estonian students from primary school up the way to higher education, where they can quickly search about almost anything. Besides school study materials AnnaAbi.com has also the biggest dictionary in Estonia (in English- Estonian dictionary more then 180 000 words).

“During second semester in university, with course mates we were planning to create a web page where we could exchange material, not to make an effort with slow speed in MSN or SKYPE. The idea came from thinking - why to keep all the material to myself, rather share. Next idea was that everybody could share. Cause a human being is selfish, we had to think of a system that imposes people to upload their own material. By now AnnaAbi uses point system (buy-sell). People who instantly want to download the materials and/or don´t have nothing to give for the exchange, Fortumo came to help.”

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Hello, hello. Welcome this week for another issue of the History of Marketing postings. Today I am going to introduce another interesting idea that was implemented in Australia.
The Edge 96.ONE is Sydney’s leading hip hop and R&B station. It is an RnB radio that has a lot of new artists presented at the radio air. The radio staff wanted to develop a user-friendly interactive SMS service, allowing the listeners to request the name of the song that is on air and the performing artist by just sending a short message by their phone. This allowed them to reduce the phone call that they were receiving and added one more way for connection with their customers. Back at the radio there was constant work on the update process - the database with songs and artists has to be always up-to-date. Each time a new song is played, the DJ is announcing: “To find out what is playing, just SMS SONG to 1975 7777 and we’ll SMS ya back the name of the song and artist!” Finally, for only 55c the sender receives the requested information.

Did you get new ideas? As this article shows, no matter how simple an idea is, if implemented at the right place it can help you achieve a lot. So be creative, risk but be realistic, too.

As of today we will start a new weekly topic. It’s called “History of Mobile Marketing” and here we will present successful SMS-based campaigns from the first written SMS till now. Some of them are not so creative, and some of them are a real work of a genius but all have contributed greatly to the ones that ordered them. They can help you create your winning idea and take you to the top…who knows?

Today’s case will be about Dunkin Donuts.
In 2002 Dunkin Donuts, Italy started an SMS campaign that was based on interaction with their customers and aimed at increase of the revenue of 7 of their retail stores and finding new local employees. They wanted something different that will attract people’s attention as they were new to the market in Italy where Sweet & Co was already the local ruler there. The results were stunning - 9% increase in sales for Dunkin Donuts and a lot of interested customers. But what have they done?

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Moipal is a virtual world with an online environment for customizing the player’s own virtual content. It’s a virtual hang-out place for teens and can be accessed on both mobile phones and on the computer browser. MoiPal was launched in the end of 2007 and now has almost 100,000 registered users.

“In MoiPal, you first create an avatar called the Pal. You can play fun games with the Pal, take care of the Pal and train the Pal skills in hobbies like gardening, karate and nordic walking. You can also send the Pal on missions into the Pal City, to adventure, explore new locations and meet other Pals. The Pals create a 24/7 running virtual world, where actions and events happen even when the users are asleep.”

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Great news everyone - Fortumo’s expansion continues with some countries in the south part of Europe. We’re talking about Bulgaria and Romania. They are the two new members in Fortumo’s list of countries.
As it has been constantly proved, Fortumo is always in the right place, at the right time. This is the situation again - the new EU members are working in cooperation for years, so it’s only natural that we launch our services there at one and the same time. Now every person from each of the two countries can create services in BOTH of them and earn revenue right at his home or office and in his country’s currency. This is something totally new for the region. And when we add the fact that there are 8 and even more countries to come…wow. Hurry up and visit the two respective sites:
http://fortumo.bg and http://fortumo.ro

In the same time, Fortumo Serbia is preparing to meet its official start, too. Currently we send invitations to selected people there and soon they will enrich us with their presence on our Fortumo map.

As a concluding paragraph - have a look at the map of the Balkans. Do you know which are the next countries to join our mobile family?

In April the giant Pepsi Cola started a viral marketing campaign that went on for 2 months and is considered to be their largest bluetooth event ever. It run on public places like bus shelters in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Denver and Orange County, and pay phone kiosks in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

Each of these media networks has integrated Qwikker’s Bluetooth content distribution technology. Pepsi was offering wide clips on posters, with a particular code for access. The five offered clips were called “Pass The Mic” - hip-hop freestyle music provided by Yahoo Music.

In the first week of the Pepsi campaign, opt-in rates to download content were reported to be 27% across the network.

Have you ever thought of using such a campaign ever? Why not!

Fortumo’s plans are rapidly becoming real. In order to be really mobile, as the services that we offer, we wanted to expand to a few new countries. Earlier this month, we have started working in China, while now we are preparing to offer our services to the users of two new countries. Two of the most interesting detonations on the Balkan Peninsula. You wonder which they are - visit our blog in the forthcoming one maximum two weeks and you will see more.

Bidnet - is a popular and easy way to gain new products with low prices. It is a web based cent-auction that allows people to obtain product with much lower net value. Unlike the usual English auction, participating in Bidnet is priced and with each bet the product’s end price raises up for 0,01 Ls.

“The one-time participation’s price varies between 0,75 Ls and 0,36 Ls. It depends on the channel and at once bought credit. At the moment, people can participate via banklinks, Paypal and SMS”.

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More than an year has passed since the publishing of the first SMS-novel. It was created in Finland and it was called The Last Messages.

The entire narrative consists of mobile phone text messages, describing the life of a fictitious IT-executive in Finland who resigns from his job and travels throughout Europe and India, keeping in touch with his friends and relatives only through text messages. The author, Hannu Luntiala, has created around 1000 messages and replies of the main character . The author has left errors in the SMS messages, too so they look even more authentic.

“I believe that, at the end of the day, a text message may reveal much more about a person than you would initially think,” said Luntiala, who also is head of a company that keeps databases on people living in Finland.