Mozes provides mobile marketing miracles for mobs.

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Last week I attended the “Detroit” (read: Auburn Hills) stop of the Martina McBride & Trace Adkins Shine All Night Tour, which was, as any country fan can imagine, a helluva show, to say the least. Of course, it wouldn’t be a show in the Metro Detroit area without a special appearance by everyone’s favorite local concert crasher, Kid Rock, who did a duet of “Picture” with Martina in her encore and then a song of his own.

This is not a review of the show. (I’ll write one of those later if you want.)

This is a post about a cool service that I signed up for a few weeks ago that I finally got to see in full action at the concert. It’s called Mozes, and it’s a mobile marketing powerhouse of awesome.

When I first discovered it a few weeks ago, I signed up as a fan to receive mobile marketing content from some of my favorite country artists, like Brad Paisley, Sugarland, Lee Ann Womack, and yes, Martina McBride. When you sign up, you join a “mob,” which is short for mobile list. It’s totally opt-in and since I signed up for all those things it was never once spammy. From the Mozes site:

When you sign up for a mob, you receive exclusive announcements, offers and content from your favorite band, brand, team, event or organization via the mobile phone. You can communicate back using either text or voice messages and can opt out of a mob at any time.

When I signed up for Lady Antebellum’s mob, I received a wallpaper for my phone and the option to hear a special voice message from the band. I thought that was pretty nifty, but I didn’t think much beyond Mozes until the Martina McBride show last week.

That’s when I saw the true power of Mozes. There were screens on either side of the stage that you could text messages to, using the Mozes service. If you texted the word “shine” plus your message to 66937 (that spells “Mozes”), as long as it got by the invisible moderator, your message would appear on the screen. Every text you sent also entered you in a drawing to win front row seats or something else. (I didn’t win anything but my date won a free 3 month subscription to Martina McBride’s fan club — which he’s giving to me.)

As you can imagine, people had a lot of fun with this. Aside from a lot of “pick me! pick me!” texts, there were a lot of cute messages like “Our kids got us these tickets for our anniversary … and we’re in the nosebleeds!” and “Hi Mom!” type things. (Unsurprisingly, my own message: “how about that $15 parking fee? Now I can’t afford a t-shirt!!” didn’t make it up to the screen.) There were also a lot of marriage proposals, such as “Kristie, will you marry me?” which got me wondering how many Kristies were there that night with their boyfriends who were not the intended recipient of the proposal and accidentally said yes, thus creating a lot of awkward moments.

But I digress.

Mozes is not just for music.

Yes, musicians seem to be the ones embracing it most, but there are endless possibilities for this service. On their site, they list a few ideas on how it could be used with sports, such as sending text updates with game stats; for brands and agencies, such as running in-store promotions such as text-for-info providing consumers with additional product specs; for causes and non-profits, such as integrating data captured, including issue and opinion data or extended contact information, into your supporter database; and my favorite, live events, where you could connect with attendees via pre-event announcements, poll the audience and see live voting results on-screen in real-time, and even send post-event thank you messages, coupons or links to images and videos … really, the possibilities are endless.

Of course, like everything these days, Mozes is integrated into all the major social networks and sharing options, and what I think is the coolest about it is the ability to target your messages very specifically by age, location, gender, likes and dislikes, and more, PLUS you get instant analytics on engagement/ROI.  Above the standard level, which is free for a month and then only $10 a month after that, all pricing is custom depending on your needs.

Example of real-world application for non-real rock stars

Most people are not real rock stars (or country stars, for that matter). So let’s say you were a person in charge of marketing the conference du jour, and you were aiming for people from all over the region to attend. You’d go with the Group Edition, which allows up to 25,000 messages and many more features and options than the basic. Once people signed up for your mob, you could send them a text or voice thank you, custom ringtone, and/or wallpaper of the conference’s brand.

Then, closer to the conference, you look at your stats and realize you’d really like more people from Ohio over 30 to attend. You could narrowcast to everyone in your mob over 30 about a promotion that if they referred two colleagues to buy tickets, they’d be entered to win something special – a conference package upgrade, hotel discount, whatever.

And then, at the event (which would have plenty of people over 30 from Ohio, thanks to your previous efforts), say you had a Q&A session with your keynote speaker. Attendees could text questions that could appear on a screen (or not) and there wouldn’t be any need to pass the mic, or have them stand in line, nor would there be any loose cannons that end up on CNN spazzing out and getting tased.

Or maybe you wanted to have a poll. Instant results could appear on your screen.

Or maybe lots of people at your conference were taking pictures with their phones. You could have them send those pictures to your screen at the event instantly.

My point is that this service is absolutely, amazingly flexible and the possibilities are endless. Have you used Mozes before, as a fan or as a business? What were your experiences like? I’m curious to see what kind of creative ways people are using it!

If you are not a public figure, you do not need a fan page. Period.

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.  You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.  ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 17

I’ve been noticing something on Facebook lately that absolutely irks me – regular people who are neither celebrities, nor an otherwise public figure, are deciding they need fan pages. I don’t understand why, and I finally tweeted about it last night after I had had enough.

I got a lot of interesting conversation out of it, mainly with Juanita Chronowski, who maintains a fan page for her writing as a way to separate the personal from the professional. OK, that I can understand. Ari Herzog does the same thing. But people who are NOT public figures in any way, shape, or form? Unless somebody else made the page out of appreciation or as a joke – my friend Jen had it right when she said, “that’s flippin’ weird.

Facebook allows personal profiles up to 5,000 friends, and if you actually have more than 5,000 friends then perhaps you do need one. Perhaps you are somewhat of a public figure, and if that is the case, then go ahead and make yourself one.

Call me a purist, folks, but if you are not famous except in your own mind, YOU DO NOT NEED A FAN PAGE. Regular people having a fan page for themselves screams of an ego problem and “look how self-important I am!” — and frankly, makes me question why I would be friends with that person in the first place.

I’m tired of regular people thinking they’re special, unique snowflakes and deserve their own fan page just to boost their own egos. Non-public figure fan pages cheapens the value of fan pages for those who actually are public figures. Don’t believe me? Fan my cat. She’s more of a celebrity than most of these conceited people.

What do you think? Am I wrong here? Am I missing something? Is there a reason regular people who have not exceeded the 5,000 friend limit on Facebook and are NOT public figures should have their own fan pages? This is such a turnoff!