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!

The Best of the Red: Dust Bunny Edition

While doing some recent housekeeping in the back end of this site I uncovered some posts in my archives that many (read: most) of you missed, and I thought they were worthy of having the dust bunnies brushed off them.

I realize that the majority of you are newer readers and/or haven’t known me as long, so here are a few of that damn redhead you’ve likely never read:

• What my small town dentist can teach us about social media
• The internet is one big expo – what is your booth like?
• The high school notebook – social media casualty?
• How I accidentally started #ThankYouThursday
• Social media lessons from water skiing (and vice versa)
• Social media is like plastic baggies
• Facebook, LinkedIN, and Twitter are NOT the Holy Trinity

You can’t see it yet but I’ll be doing some restructuring of the direction of this blog in the near future. Everybody’s blog evolves over time, and this one is no exception. For details, visit my new “About” page.

Enjoy and thanks for reading. Stay tuned.

Be careful whom you “unfriend”

Something happened earlier that made me almost feel bad for somebody. Almost.

By now we know that “unfriend” was the official word of 2009. (I’m going to just set my Grammar Goddess cringing aside and go with it for this post.)

I’m in the process of (re)developing a brand for a client of mine, and while I know a lot of people in various disciplines of web design, graphic design, or any other kind of design in between, I had a certain former colleague in mind whom I knew would be able to conceptualize the perfect new logo for said client. I had worked with her in the past, had been impressed with her work, and she had expressed interest in working with me after the start of the new year.

I kept that in mind, and decided to take her up on it. I went to Facebook and tried to search for her in my friends, but to no avail. I remembered that she recently got married and her last name was different, so I searched again. No dice. So I searched one of our real-life mutual friends’ friends, and sure enough, she was in there.

Former colleague had unfriended me. To my knowledge I did nothing to offend her, and I’m left a little confuzzled.

No matter, I’ve got myriad contacts that would gladly take this referral, as it has the potential to be pretty lucrative and would be a great addition to any portfolio. But I can’t help but wonder why the heck this former colleague “unfriended” me. No, we don’t see each other every day, and no, we were never BFFs by any measure, but she was the perfect person for this assignment, and now … well, as my dad likes to say, “You snooze, you lose.”

The lesson to be learned from this?

Be careful whom you unfriend — it could cost you!

Image by robotclaw.

Social media is way too smurfy these days.

[If you know me in person, chances are you've heard this before, but I'm at the point now where I feel it just needs to be written down.]

I hate the term “social media.” Really, I do. Why? Because it’s too hard to define. I’m definitely not the first person to blog about this, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. But here’s the truth:

All media is social media.

Media, at its very ethos, is social. Cavemen didn’t paint cave paintings and not talk about them. Egyptians didn’t carve hieroglyphics just because they were pretty pictures — they told stories. Radio never really was one-way — it encouraged interaction with people calling in. TV may seem one-way but do people not sit around the TV and watch it together? Do people not talk about their favorite shows with each other?

All media always has, and always will, encourage social interaction. Whether it’s immediate as what we understand “social media” to be nowadays or not is a different story.

The only difference between “traditional” media and “social” media is that “social media” makes two-way (or one-to-many, or many-to-many) communication a helluva lot faster. And let’s just face it – this is simply the way the world communicates now.

However, like those folks I linked above, I understand that there is no one, true definition of “social media,” and that alone is a problem, illustrated by a story a few friends of mine relayed to me recently:

A colleague of ours, a rather big name in the “social media world” and a bigwig at a rather large, world-famous company, was to speak about social media at a local event. I did not attend said event, but my colleagues did, because they wanted to hear what he had to say about how he’s used “social media” in/for his company. Based on the questions from the audience, however, it became more of a Twitter 101 class, and my colleagues admitted they were a little embarrassed for him. This was not a marketing fail, as the event was promoted appropriately. Or was it?

My colleagues’ definition of social media was and is much more complex than that of the audience. They were expecting how this guy applied “social media” for marketing/PR purposes. The audience was apparently expecting how to use a tool or two, which is a lot different.

Social media is the new smurf.

Smurfs used the word “smurf” for just about anything, and it was understood without question. Or they used it when they couldn’t think of any other word for something, which is where we are now with “social media.” Hell, any kind of interaction via the internet or mobile now can be considered “social media,” and I can’t believe that for a society as chatty and as articulate as we are, we can’t think of any other words for what the heck we’re talking about.

We need to expand our vernacular.

I was taught that you shouldn’t complain about something without proposing a solution, but honestly? I don’t have one. What I do know is that the more we use “social media” as a term for just about any kind of communication these days, the more confused people get, and the more smurfy things become. I like to be more specific when I speak of expedited communication through ever-changing technology, but I realize that sometimes it’s easier smurfed than smurfed. I know that many times, I still go over peoples’ smurfs and they still don’t smurf what I’m smurfing about, even when I think I’m smurfing on their level.

So what do you smurf? Is “social media” too smurfy these days? Should we be more specific and throw that term out the smurf? Or is it fine and smurfy? Leave your smurfs in the smurfs.

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