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!
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Wow, what a cool service. I hadn’t heard of Mozes before reading your post. But the country music fan is me is very excited about the opportunities it provides!
I like where you’re going with how conference organizers could use Mozes. I could see this quickly gaining popularity in the future.
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks, Nikki. My brain is exploding with possibilities and applications for Mozes … I hope some others do share how they’ve used it/seen it used. I forgot to mention that everybody does get their own personal pages with Mozes, too – and it’s Facebook Connect enabled. Mine’s here, and you can see all my recent activity, including the things that I texted to try to make it on the screen at the show. Even the ones that didn’t make it are still on my wall. (Yes, I’ve subscribed to a lot of country artists, but you’ll find that it’s not just country that’s using it. They just seem to be the ones that are embracing it the most/earliest.)
Twitter Comment
The mobile marketing service Mozes is pretty sweet. Thanks @damnredhead for the heads up! [link to post]
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Twitter Comment
Mozes provides mobile marketing miracles for mobs. | that damn redhead: Last week I attended the Detroit (read: Au… [link to post]
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For those that missed my auto-post yesterday, I wrote about a mobile service full of awesome – meet Mozes [link to post]
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Wow, I’m glad I came across your post. Very interesting. It’s amazing all the applications marketers and applications are coming up with for mobile marketing. I’d love to here your other ideas for how to use Mozes. Regards, Steve
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From @damnredhead: A well written post about Mozes, a mobile service full of creative marketing possibilities. [link to post]
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Nice post by @damnredhead on mobile marketing and Mozes [link to post]
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Just wanted to say that as the “invisible moderator” for Mozes on the Martina McBride tour, Im sorry your text didn’t make it up to the screen. It took some deep thought, but I decided against it going up, obviously. However, Im glad you enjoyed the service and of course the show!
You DO exist!! Hee hee … hey, don’t worry about it, I wasn’t expecting it to actually make it up on the screen, that’d wouldn’t reflect well on the venue or the artist, and would probably start the whole crowd texting about it and making your job harder. I was just having a little fun with ya.
May I ask how you got hooked up with that gig? It sounds like a blast!
Thanks for dropping by!
Haha, well Im glad you recognized why it didn’t make it to the screen. Yours was considerably mild compared to some of the unseen texts I get back there though!
One of my good friends works for Mozes here in Nashville. Since I just graduated college and am in the “wonderful” process of looking for a design job, he hooked me up with this sweet gig. And yes, it is a blast! So much fun being on tour with Martina and reading all the funny texts backstage.
Nice! I think it’s cool and worth it to avail Mozes service. Thanks for sharing this stuff to us!
Thanks for stopping by!
Thanks for this post Damn redhead lol. Nice name by the way.
Mobile marketing is going to become very powerful in the very near future when people start buying using their phones.
I think it’s even by now very powerful, but the (near) future will show, what endless possibilities the smartphone market offers. For myself, I use Mozes since long and I must confess, I don’t wanna miss it anymore – and honestly, the price is unbeatable for what it offers. Anyway, thanks for sharing and I’m glad to see other people being mad about Mozes
PS: couldn’t locate any post/review about the show. Would be quite interested in details.
Many greetings and keep “mozesing”
Heh, you couldn’t find the review of the show because I never got around to writing it! (Lack of demand also had something to do with it.) However, I do agree with you that mobile is not only where it’s at but where it’s going … more so than people even realize. I don’t know how many times I’m reminded of something happening because of Mozes … ,just the other day, it was a reminder of a live chat with Terri Clark, and I’m so grateful I signed up!
Thanks for stopping by, and feel free to come by again at any time. I’ve got another couple posts in the hopper that have something to do with country music.
I’m just starting to explore mobile marketing for my business and stumbled across this post. I’m definitely going to check out the service to see if I can make if work for me. Unfortunately, nothing as cool as country music stardom…(!)
Wow, I’m glad I came across your post. Very interesting. It’s amazing all the applications marketers and applications are coming up with for mobile marketing. I’d love to here your other ideas for how to use Mozes.
MM
I definitely like the ability to customize your settings so that connect to your own sources of interest as well as the ability to communicate back using text or voice.
The targeting information is also quite impressive. There is lots of potential research done and marketing tactics implemented with this info
Thanks for the article and review. We’re looking at some interesting ways of using SMS messages and mobile here in the UK and this type of service might be useful. In fact the UK seems to have some pretty sophisticated tools itself anyway. For some reason text messaging became a craze anf then a habit far more quickly than in the US and I think that we’re a little more comfortable with it. Like everything in the marketing world, I like the way that the consumer can control the unsubscribing.
Hi Stacy
I found this post whilst checking that we were using the best option for our mobile marketing.
I work in the music business in the UK, but we have clients who have active fanbases in the US. We have been using Mozes for several years for those artists at the direction of the major record labels.
And, it’s great.
What has amazed me is that in looking to see if there is a viable alternative (just to make sure that we were doing the best for our clients), there isn’t really a competitor trying to take Mozes on with an offering that is as good.
Maybe it’s because Mozes is so good and they have the drop on the market place.
There are others with some of the features but they don’t specialise in music.
Used properly, it is an essential addition to our data capture and engagement and the live interaction that you experienced is LOVED by music fans.
Ian
I was simply unaware of this mode of marketing. Thank you opening up another avenue that I can explore in these challenging times.
Peter
I find Mozes very interesting; I went to a music seminar back in 2006 — one of the speakers talked about “Pandora” but it doesn’t appear to have helped artists as much as was predicted.
I still think Mozes could benefit from a few slight improvements but no doubt those will be forthcoming in the future.
Best Regards,
James Shoob
This is an awesome service and I have to agree with Tim about the price being unbeatable.
There’s many ways to utilize it and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dave
This sounds very similar to twitter feed apps that I’ve seen at some semi-private concerts. I’ve attended some big corporate functions where maybe 3-4000 people attended a private concert put on by the company hosting the event and often you could use your mobile to tweet something along with a hashtag, and it would show up on the screen. It definitely keeps people’s attention focused on where the screen is.
But I never thought of it as a marketing experiment / tactic. Neat stuff. Thanks for sharing this insight
Chris Thompson
Webmaster at MikeMandelHypnosis.com
@ Chris
I heard something about that private concert that you mentioned
Its good to see that some companies are getting pretty inovative about their marketing techniques and test new things like that.
@that damn redhead
Thank you for sharing this post with us and I completely agree with you that mobile is not quite there yet but in a year or so most of the marketing will be mobile based for sure!
WOW I’ve seen Mozes around but haven’t really looked into it and am amazed at all it has to offer. I know mobile marketing is already huge but once marketers start their creative wheels spinning using services like mozes the sky is really the limit. You have me thinking with some of your “real-world application for non-real rock stars” examples. Thanks for the great post and ideas. Cheers!
Eddie Orman
Webmaster, Free–CreditScore.com
I’d like to acknowledge Mozes for being a kick-ass technology that lets me get cool info, let’s me publish things to my friends and let’s me join my favorite bands mob.
Thank you for this information regarding Mozes. It’s a little surprising that you can target specific groups of the market so exactly! Will be researching this a little more.
I haven’t used Mozes yet, but I am starting to hear more and more about it, similar to the way you learned of it.
I do know that mobile marketing isn’t just the next big thing… it is already big and will grow huge over the next few years.
As an example, my son is just starting to develop a big following for his swing dance business and group classes, and Facebook is already the biggest part of his marketing plan in getting people interested and showing up.
Mozes of course would be even better than Facebook, since it makes the message about the next dance even more personal and immediate for his followers. I’ll be telling him about this for sure, thanks for bringing it to our attention!
Daniel
I’ve got to be honest, I’ve never even heard of Mozes before, not being an expert in mobile marketing, but I’m impressed by what it can do. It’s not really something that I’d get any use out of, but I can see how fantastic it would be at conventions, concerts, and so on. It could even make those long waits in the airport a bit less dull, but I somehow don’t see that happening
This is interesting. Given that 40% of people have internet capable phones and that most of them access the internet each day now there is a great demand for this type of serice. I had not heard of it before I saw your post, it looks like a great way to stay in touch with your customer or fan base. Thanks for the share.
This is the beginning. Ads on mobile will change how we use our devices or local search and local usage. i can only imagine that the prices of cell phones will decrease because advertisers will help subsidize the cost in order for more users to have smart phones.