Talking again about being remarkable...

Following on from my last post about being remarkable, based on what Seth Godin speaks about in his talks and books, I found something remarkable too.

OK, so hands up this happened because I made a mistake, but with that said, it's still quite a remarkable result.

Now our service has a feature that allows you to send a SMS to a virtual number, and that message is then forwarded onto a group - great for sales people on the road to tell everyone about a new sale they got, or for emergency alerts to where it can reduce the time it takes to send out to people that need to know by some margin.

So, I had a school send me an email about it, and I thought, I haven't played with it for a bit so I'd refresh my memory about how it worked, trying things I knew would work to make sure they didn't and vice versa - since working in an IT world, I've learnt about replication, where as coming from an engineering background it was always a matter of getting on to rectify the problem.

So with that I logged into my web account and sent a SMS to a test group that was already in there.

Now, because I generally use my account for testing, I assumed the test group just had my number in it - but it didn't, it contained 125 mobile numbers, whom I have no clue who they were or are.

The service worked great, and all 125 people got the message "this is a test message".

Bugger it, I could have done with not doing that, but there's nothing I can do about it now, I'm sure someone would reply, and I'll just send back a message apologising for it and I had the wrong number.

So over the next hour or two, I checked the inbox a couple of times, nothing, no one replied - odd, but good in a way, so I didn't worry about it again and went on with what I was doing.

It did nag a bit at me, and late in the day I went back to my account and had a look around, oh no, the service alias (which means the originator of the message I sent) was set to a mobile number I didn't recognise?

The next day, Lorretta, the building manager came to see me asking a question about her phone, she'd received so many messages and a number of calls from people asking who she was? Strange, but then it dawned on me that the message I'd sent, I sent it from her number.

It was because a while before she had asked me to SMS someone who wasn't getting the messages from her phone, and so she would get the response I set the messages to come from her number, and then forgot to take it off again.


Is that remarkable? It's a remarkable stuff up, that's what it was, but that's not what it is.

It is remarkable because she received 60 messages back and 5 phone calls - that's a response rate, to a test message, of over 50% - in fact one caller told poor Lorettra that he needed to know what she did because he was so intrigued by the message.


Now of course you can't send out to a marketing list "this is a test message" to trap possible punters to buy your wares, but it does show with the right message, response rate can be massive.


Compared with more traditional methods where a 2% response rate is almost unheard of, 1% is a real win, and average is less than that. In a world where no hears you any more because the noise is so loud, this is what it was like when the idea marketing was born, and you only had to whisper to be heard!


Now that's what I call remarkable!


Enjoy,
C