I went to see Amazing Grace at the cinema tonight. I fancied a bit of ye olde stuff and, well, the film met my expectations.
However, I forgot it was Wednesday night. Never go to the cinema on Wednesdays in the UK. You see, Wednesday is “Orange Wednesday”. The UK operator, Orange, sponsors a 2-for-1 deal on cinema tickets at most cinemas. If you’re an Orange customer, you can get a 2-for-1 on any film if it’s a Wednesday.
Unfortunately the whole sorry process is a total arse. You have to text to get a special code. Then you have to arse around staring at the wall whilst the cinema staffer waits for the machine to verify your code, so they can process you and give you the tickets. The net result? Huge queues. Huge queues of folk brandishing their mobiles. Whilst it’s an excellent example of mobile marketing, it’s a total ARSE when you just want to buy a ticket and get in to see your film (that’s me).
Standing in the HUGE queue in front of me were four guys. One of which caught my attention with the exclamation:
Yeah! I tried that XFM thing, you had to text [something] to 83XFM, right? But it didn’t work!
His friend queried this.
Yeah, see, when you put 8-3-X-F-M, the phone just says, ‘invalid’. It don’t like letters.
‘Am I hearing things?’ I thought.
I almost broke into the conversation and said, ‘Have you tried typing the numbers corresponding to the letters on the keypad?’
I thought it better not to. I think they would not have been impressed at me pointing this out.
The guy went on for a few minutes about how silly it was for radio station XFM to promote a shortcode that had letters in it, when letters clearly didn’t work……………………….
SURELY people know you have to type the numbers?
Ha!
On a similar note, many of our customers run promtions that say “Text APPLES following by FIRSTNAME + LASTNAME”
…I think you can see where this is going..
It is amazing just how many people actually enter the word FIRSTNAME and LASTNAME rather than their actual names!
It is equally amazing how many people also enter the word “Text”
Cheers,
Alastair
Operations
Txtlocal.com
I think the whole ‘text to numbers’ thing hasn’t really taken off over here yet.
It seems to be a very American thing really.
When we launched Mobizines in the US we were looking at combinations of letters and numbers for their own shortcode* as the that is the kind of call to action they are used to on that side of the pond…
Anyway – Someone suggested we did the same over here.
It was knocked on the head almost immediately because of the very thing you’re talking about – UK people are used to remembering phone numbers as numbers.
I don’t know why that is different in the US but it seems to be the case IMO.
So yeah – ‘text to text’ – a very US approach to a CTA.
Fair play to XFM for trying to kick it off – would imagine that at some point the people at XFM explained that you actually text to 83936 and the guys weren’t paying much attention.
Unfortunately there are idiots out there that bring down the need for a lowest common denominator!
Bless ’em…
*We settled on just letters ‘692355’ = ‘MYCELL’ – with the tag to be something like ‘Text FORBES to MYCELL to get FORBES on Your Cell! – here endeth the blatant plug.
😉
And the stupid thing is the XFM people will have probably made a right fuss about getting that very specific shortcode because someone in their marketing department thought it was a blindingly fantastic idea. Well what a bunch of fools.
They’ll more than likely be paying in the region of £800-£1000 per month on a 12 months contract for that dedicated code. Alternatively we now have about 30 radio stations paying £25 per year for a cool keyword on 60300 and the feedback from the stations we get is this is excellent value for money. And this isn’t a plug because I know there are other good shortcode/keyword providers out there who do a similarly great deal and service…and most of us even throw in free advice on the proper call to action wording to ensure clients don’t lose users slightly less able to understand a simple instruction.
So sorry XFM, great idea but terrible execution.
steve/itagg.com
Sorry Alastair but I’ve been in this game 5 years and even I would type the exact words FIRSTNAME + LASTNAME based on your call to action above.
Something like “Send a text to 60300 with the word APPLES followed by your first and last name” is a much clearer instruction.
It is important to understand the experience levels of real users rather than impose a logical instruction that makes sense to all us mobile geeks but that white van man or people stood in cinema queues don’t have the foggiest about.
steve/itagg.com
I have to say that if I’d been told to text 83XFM I’d have done the same.
I can’t say I’ve ever heard of using the letters in this way
I’m sure Radio 1 did something similar a while back but after EVERY mention of the CTA they gave the exact number + instructions straight afterwards…
Call it the small print or whatever.
CTAs huh? Never easy!
This doesn’t actually suprise me at all. Everyone is “up” on this in the states, but it is crazy how many people simply don’t get it over here.
For many years the states put the numbers underneath the letters in brackets so the customers knew what was going on. I think we need to do the same over here for quite some time.
I am certain that services such as 82ASK suffer from a similar issue and would get more questions if they included the number underneath. Ho hum 🙂
David
http://www.MobileMarketingWatch.com
While we are on this. I think bbc radio have some of the best shortcodes around, and telephone numbers. They use their radio station frequencies to help people remember.
For BBC Radio 2 their short code is 88291. Their station ads are always on about them being 88 – 91 FM. Or “eighty eight two ninety one f m”. Perfect 🙂 It’s the only shortcode I can remember most the time 🙂 lol
David
http://www.MobileMarketingWatch.com
The other issue with using letters is that I have an E61 with a full qwerty keyboard – the numbers aren’t on the sames keys as a candybar phone. When I hear “text 83XFM” I have to work out which numbers they mean – most of the time I just can’t be arsed.
I wonder if they’re missing a lot of people for this reason too. I’m sure I could work it out if I wanted – but it’s been so long since I used a candybar phone that it’s just too much effort for a long-shot competition entry etc.
Using words is a very American thing and while it’s easy to remember the XFM shortcode like this there are a number of reasons why it is just not quite right in practice.
Why on earth should anyone think that text ’83XFM’ means anything other than text to exactly those characters? People are used to entering letters in the message of a text, so entering letters in the shortcode doesn’t seem at all odd. It’s what I would do.
If the code is a number, then give out the number for heaven’s sake. I wouldn’t even know how to convert letters to numbers, because I use a touchscreen not a keypad.
I have to agree with David on this one:
“For many years the states put the numbers underneath the letters in brackets so the customers knew what was going on. I think we need to do the same over here for quite some time.”
Numbers -> Numbers & Letters -> (finally) Letters.
The way forward.
There is definitely a lack of education in the UK market about using alpha’s as opposed to numerics.
The point about deciding whether or not to use them for me really comes down to the call to action. If for instance it’s a radio station that only needs/wants listeners to engage whilst the show is on, and where the DJ is going to say the shortcode every time he wants to receive text messages, then clearly an alpha code is relatively redundant. Similarly if the call to action is on TV or print press, then a simple and ‘nice’ number will suffice.
The differentiation for me comes down to where you want users to engage with your brand/service at times where their contact is not triggered by a service provider driven call to action. Examples here would be 82ASK, AQA (63336), paying the London Congestion Charge (81099), Sending in a Photo to The Sun (63000), or the News of the World (63300). In these instances I can near guarantee that 82ASK comes up trumps. At least for those amongst us that have ’emotive brains’ (that’ll be around 70-80% of us then).
The point about drop off by users who don’t understand how to type 8-2-A-S-K, or who have smart phones/PDA’s (and can’t be bothered to work out the true key presses), is that this still pales compared to the advantage 82ASK will receive by having the more memorable Alpha shortcode. Sure they’ll lose a few users, but they’ll retain one hell of a lot more.
I’m all in favour of using Alpha’s shortcodes, but only where the context calls for them, and where the use of the Alpha will really benefit the service.
> Sorry Alastair but I’ve been in this game 5 years and even I would type the exact words FIRSTNAME + LASTNAME based on your call to action above.
No you wouldn’t Steve, and we all know you wouldn’t. Cheeky!
This is why you’re supposed to do usability testing.
I remember an old DOS app where the instructions said “Press F8 to continue” and the tester pressed the F key followed by the 8 key. The instructions were modified to say “Press the [F8] key to continue”.
The tester wasn’t stupid, or wrong… just following the instructions as she understood them. Your guys in the cinema are the same – doing what they were told. The answer is to make the instructions clearer.
Njar: I might not type it but I will drag in 10 people off the street right now and 9 of them would. And that is the major point here. Don’t design it for us mobile gurus, design it for real people – the people in the street who we want to use these services.
The points about touchscreens and full qwerty keypads is an excellent one – they don’t have the same mappings or any at all. So the historic American idea of representing a phone number with letters simply does not work for mobile handsets. I also saw someone the other day with a simple candy bar phone but the characters under each numeral were Arabic letters. So IMHO the letter thing is 110% flawed.
And Njar, “can’t be bothered to work out the true key presses”!!?? What on earth!? If we all go around saying “well my product is perfect, but my customers just can’t be bothered to behave in exactly the same way as our designers did back in the lab” then we’re all doomed I tell you…doomed!!
steve/itagg.com
My point wasn’t to question the fact that using Alpha’s is generally a bad idea in the UK, and I know better than anyone how few are in existance (Not least because i’ve personally sold more shortcodes than anyone in the UK). It was more to validate that in certain circumstances their use can be very good news for the brand. Admittedly 82ASK is one of the very few examples, but i’d bet my entire future career earnings on the fact that it’s done them infinitely more good than bad.
Both sides of the coin.
Incidentally Joe Public don’t tend to have qwerty keypads or Arabic text. Not in numbers anyway.
The ones that send keyword SPACE whatever (instead of keyword whatever) in to our shorts always makes me chuckle.. or the people that insist on having conversations by text with automated services, not realising that the whole point of the reply was to charge their account – and keep replying saying ‘don’t text me anymore, I told you already’ and stuff like that.
But anyway, back on topic..
Hi all,
As a regular reader but irregular contributor (a voyeur perhaps) to SMS Text News, I found this topic particularly interesting!
From 82ASK’s perspective, there is no doubt that people don’t all always “get it” and can’t remember the number but do remember the name. However, a sizeable proportion “get it” immediately and for the remainder, when (if!) it clicks it is indelibly marked on their brain :o)
We do publish both 82ASK and 82275 on materials, to cover both angles – hopefully reducing (eliminating?) uncertainty. Of course, lots of our growth has been viral, so dedicated users explain to their friends how it works.
The real challenge for any shortcode service is getting it saved in the phone address book in an efficient manner…