Adva Mobile Voting Contest at the MIT In-NOW-Vation Event

Last Thursday Adva Mobile had an opportunity to showcase its VOTING feature at the MIT Enteprise Forum's In-NOW-vation event. This event was a showcase/networking event with 26 Boston area technology companies showing off their goods to an audience of about 250 worldwide MIT Enterprise Forum volunteer officers and a healthy group of Boston technologists, entrepreneurs, and Venture Capitalists.

Attendees were encouraged to vote in four categories:

• Best in Show (won by Zeo)


• Most Likely to be a household name (won by Everyspace)


• Coolest Technology (won by Infrared5)


• Company I want to have a beer with (won by MocoSpace)

We used the Adva Mobile Voting platform to vote. Attendees texted GETVOTE to 88704 (the same way you would do this at a live event or promoted on your Facebook page) and got a SMS link to the voting page. It looks like this:

During the event, we were able to show real time updates on a PC of how the voting was going. We could have put it up on a big screen, like you might do at a live event, but we just used a PC. It looks like this:

It was really cool to see how excited people got when they were using their phones to vote for their favorite companies. We did 3 shout outs during the event to remind people to vote, but as you can see from this chart, it was pretty consistent throughout the evening:

We learned that people with iPhones and Blackberry's and other smart phones had a better experience than feature phones, but everone could participate. We had a corner stand where people could come and get help - this was useful because it's still new (using your phone this way) so it was good to be able to help people who were trying this for the first time. (You could put a "VOTE HERE" sign at the merch table where fans could come for instruction if they needed it.)

About 60 percent of the attendees voted on their phones, so we think this was terrific engagement. It can definitely be used to engage your fans and collect their phone numbers for your mobile fan club, so be sure to try out Voting - another cool feature that's part of your mobile fan club.

Stars Go Dim Mobile Marketing Campaign Success

Stars Go Dim are prolific marketers of their music and it shows: Their music is featured on the Letters to God movie soundtrack, "Get Over It" was just featured on the AOL Music homepage, and they've been on MTV's The Real World. So when they wanted to get their mobile fan club rocking, they used the Contest feature of our mobile marketing service to get the word out and build their mobile fan base quickly.

Working with Adva Mobile, Stars Go Dim designed a marketing campaign around a free giveaway of SGD Content: an exclusive Stars Go Dim USB Thumbstick with music, video, pictures and a wonderful pdf file of song lyrics and the history of the band. Only 25 of these were created, adding to the exclusive nature of the prize.

For a chance to win this exclusive Stars Go Dim content, fans had to join the SGD mobile fan club (by texting in to SGD on their phone) and click on a link to participate in the contest. The Adva Mobile Artist Portal handled all of the details of the contest, including start date, end date, fan information collection, administration of the contest and reporting. At the end of the contest, the system automatically and randomly chose winners and sent them a text message telling them they won and how to collect their prize.

The contest ran for 3 weeks and was promoted on their Facebook and MySpace pages, and to fans on their email list. Stars Go Dim now have 87 new members of their mobile club (from zero at the start) and plan to grow their mobile fan club and incorporate mobile marketing into their ongoing marketing activities. And the lucky winners have one-of-a kind Stars Go Dim USB thumbsticks with exclusive content to show off at the next concert!

Adva Mobile Introduces Freemium Payment Plan

This weekend, we are making a major change to our mobile marketing service for music artists. We're moving to a “Freemium” model. Through surveys, communications with you, interviews with others in the industry, and advisors to us, you've told us that what we do is valuable and, like other marketing services, is part of the total marketing mix that helps you make money.

For the past 15 months we've been working through our initial service, adding functionality to help artists reach out to their fans on their phones. And, everything about it has been free. Today, we're taking an exciting step that will help us support the growth of Adva Mobile.. Over 700 of you have joined our service and I am pleased to announce that all of you will continue to receive all of the services that you currently use without charge. We've upgraded all of you to our Plus service. Beginning next week, for new artists who choose to upgrade to this level, they will pay $9.95 per month. It's our way of saying thank you to the pioneers of music mobile marketing -- that's you!

Our free service includes most of the features you have been using to promote your music on mobile phones, and is certainly the most comprehensive mobile marketing platform for music artists that we know of. As you grow your career and begin making money, you'll need more sophisticated marketing tools, and for that we will now charge a small fee. Also, as your fan base grows, you'll be sending out more SMS messages. You probably wonder who has been paying for all of those messages for the past 15 months, and it has been us. For some of you who are now sending out lots of messages as your fan base has grown, we now need to ask you to pay for those messages. Again, I want to emphasize that for the 700+ of you who have joined our service, you'll continue to have your existing services, including a limited number of monthly messages, all without charge.

To see the differences between the three plans we now offer -- Free, Plus, and VIP -- go to the artist portal at www.AdvaMobile.com, login, and check out Account Services.

Thanks again for using Adva Mobile, best wishes for your careers in music, and let me know what you think of this change and any other ways we can improve the service to help you create closer relations with your fans.



Jack and the Adva Mobile Team

Adva Mobile Artist Survey Results

Many thanks to everyone who participated in our recent survey. We were very encouraged by the general feedback that you appreciate the service, see value in it, and want us to continue providing a service for you, to reach your fans on their mobile phones. We also appreciate the comments related to simplifying the experience. We will be working on that as we continue to add new features and try to make the service simpler.

Your response to the questions “whether the service was valuable enough to pay for” was encouraging. We are looking to introduce a “Freemium” model, where some artists could receive basic mobile web and mobile marketing services for free and others could have more specialized services for a small price. While some of you indicated you would never pay for it, more than 85% indicated you would pay for it, or you would pay for it once it started generating revenue for you. That’s great news for us, since we expect mobile commerce to really take off in and outside the US in 2010, and that your fans will be increasingly comfortable with making purchases for your music, tickets, and merchandise on their phones.

Shortly, we're going to introduce a paid service to complement our free service. While going from a free service to a partially paid service may be a difficult transition for some, were committed to our existing artists and you will continue to have all the services you currently have without cost. Moving to paid services is good for everyone, since it will make us stronger and more valuable to you, the artist, and to your fans. The financial support we receive from those of you who choose to upgrade to the paid service will help us build a stronger platform and provide each of you with better resources.

We built our mobile marketing platform when we realized nothing existed to help artists connect with fans on their mobile phones. Our mobile fan club service will continue to be, built with your feedback. We want to hear from you about these changes and the many future improvements we will introduce to help you expose your music to more fans, market to them, and realize your dream of creating a career in music.

Jack and the Adva Mobile Team

Use Mobile Alerts to Help you Market

For people to come toward you when you are marketing to them you have to make your fans’ lives better in some way for them to accept mobile marketing from you. Otherwise, they will ignore your campaigns just like they ignore anything that is irrelevant or annoying to them. Two insights here can help you make sure you are providing value, and not interrupting their lives:

Timely Alerts: Your fans want timely alerts. Adva Mobile provides a terrific tool - Fan Blasts - for you to schedule your mobile alerts so that the information your fans are receiving is timely and relevant. there's lots going on in your music career, so let your fans know about it! Upcoming show this weekend? New merch item for sale? Heading into the recording studio? Relevant info is important, and mobile provides you with the capability to reach out to your fans.

Location Specific: Your fans in Tampa don't need to know your upcoming show dates in Portland, so think about who needs the information you're trying to send them. Our Fan Blast tool lets you filter your messages by location, so that relevant information is sent to those who really appreciate the alert.

Upgraded Twitter Mobile Page!

Following your feedback (which is always welcome!) we've upgraded the Twitter page slightly. It was too condense and confusing.
Your new Twitter page allows your fans to view your tweets separately from 'All Tweets', and then they can also tweet about you.
Here's an example of how this new page works:

The key to making this page perfectly is to enter your Twitter credentials on the artist portal, in the "Fan Comments" page. With that, we can accurately present the information and create tweets on your mobile page.
If you do not enter your twitter details then your mobile page will not be as great, because we will be effectively guessing your twitter user name...here's an example what that would look like:

So...what you need to do?
If we do not have your Twitter details already, log into your Adva Mobile account, enter your Twitter details on the fan posts page and you'll be all set!

From If to How Much

We recently attended a mobile event in Boston where Jumptap CEO Dan Olschwang was asked about how brands view mobile advertising - the market of Jumptap. Referencing the recent acquisitions of Admob by Google and Quattro Wireless by Apple, he said "One billion dollars moves a market. Their attitude is no longer if, but how much." So brands have moved from asking themselves if they should be advertising more on mobile phones to how much they should be advertising on mobile phones. They see value.

I was thinking of this and how it applied to mobile marketing for music artists. Will it take a watershed event like the movement of a billion dollars for artists to move from "if you should be connecting with fans on mobile phones" to "how much should you be connecting with fans on mobile phones"? When will the value of mobile marketing be apparent to you?

We ask ourselves about value here at Adva Mobile all the time, especially about services that you, the artist, find valuable enough to pay for. The text messages we send out to fans, in particular, cost us, but reaching fans on their phones - that's valuable. Some of you are building large fan clubs so we'll need to begin to charge for those. Other services, like location targeted text alerts, also provide a valuable service to you that we believe you'll pay for. As your fans increasingly appreciate text messages and mobile web connection to you, you'll no longer ask if you should reach out to them on their phones, but how much.