Can you legally text your fans?

There are a number of high profile lawsuits from consumers annoyed with receiving unwanted texts. We often hear from Artists asking us whether they can legally text message their fans? Before we tell how and when you can text your fans, it’s a good idea to get a little background on the law that determines whether you can text message your fans legally or not.

There's a law about this. It’s actually a federal law, called the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which is governed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). While you may hear about CTIA or Mobile Marketing Association when researching best practices for SMS marketing, the TCPA is the only actual law when it comes to whether you can text message fans.

Since we're talking about fans that have expressed an interest in receiving texts from you (by texting your bandname to 444999, joining a contest, etc.) we're really interested in what the TCPA says about whether or not you can text messaging mobile phone numbers that you’ve already collected from your customers.

It’s actually pretty simple, if when you collected your customer’s mobile phone numbers, you disclosed the following two things to them in a  “clear and conspicuous” manner, you can text message those customers.

What does  “clear and conspicuous” mean? It means that the disclosures were displayed in close proximity to wherever you were asking customers for their mobile phone numbers. If you did not disclose the following two thing to customers when they gave you their mobile phone numbers, or you didn’t disclose these things in a “clear and conspicuous” manner, you cannot text message them.

Here are the two things you have to tell them:

• By participating, you consent to receive text messages sent by an automatic telephone dialing system.
• Consent to these terms is not a condition of purchase.

The great benefit of the Adva Mobile Service is that we comply with this law "for you", meaning that, when a fan first texts in, we send them a text telling them they can expect to receive additional texts from you. And we provide them a link to Terms, where the second requirement is met.

As you can imagine, most Artists, when they’ve collected their fan's mobile phone numbers in the past (through a sign up sheet at the merch table, for example) have either not disclosed the above two things, or haven’t done so in a “clear and conspicuous” manner. So we tell Artists to get fans to text in, and then everyone is compliant.

Who Owns The Fans?

Hi, At Adva Mobile, we want to help you make the most of your marketing efforts to connect with fans.  Part of that is showing the world more about who you are, your creative talents, and what you know by sharing ideas, starting conversations, and inspiring others with your creative work.  So, that raises a question: who owns all of the content you post on Adva Mobile? You do, and you always have. Whether it's music, a photo, a tour date, lyrics, videos, post, or anything else, we want to make it clear that you're in control of your content. Here are some highlights (you can read more in our blog post): You're in the driver's seat. * You decide when your content goes. If you delete something from our platform, we won't use it anymore. * Share wherever or whenever you'd like. We don't own or have exclusive rights to your content. It's yours, so feel free to repost it anywhere, however you want. What about fans? They're yours. We'll never offer advertisers or other Artists access to your fans. Only you can communicate through us to your fans. So they always know they are communicating directly to you.   We also want to give you even more control over your account so we're introducing some new tools:  * Now there's a single place to see all your fans and how often they are engaging you or your web App. You can upload fan data, either one by one or send us a spreadsheet - to add fans to your mobile marketing campaigns.   * The emails we send when you change your password now include info about the place where the action was taken, so you can rest assured your account is secure.  All of these changes are part of our commitment to put our members first.  With these updates, you can feel even more confident about who controls your content and personal data on Adva Mobile: you.  Thanks for being a member! The Adva Mobile Team

Thew New Shortcode 444999 - What it means

It was weeks of planning, hundreds of lines of new code, and an education for us (and we've been doing this for 6 years!) about the many ways different companies implement SMS Text technology. We were a bit late, but we're up and running successfully and a number of you have already run both incoming and outgoing campaigns on the new shortcode 444999.

The company we are now working with offers a number of attractive features that you will find useful. We're introducing the first of these today in the Adva Mobile Blog and our Artist newsletter - Custom, Flexible Keywords. 

This company has a number of impressive capabilities that are an advantage over our prior text provider (who we love!). Their reports engine is outstanding, and as we integrate our system with theirs, you'll see even more information that will help you understand your fans.

Coupons

Ever take a minute to stop and think about how ubiquitous coupons are in our lives? They're everywhere! I'm not a coupon guy, but even I can't ignore that, like advertising, they must work, because everyone is using them.

There's a really cool way to use coupons as part of your mobile marketing efforts with the Adva Mobile platform. A number of our Artists have discovered this and are promoting sales at the merch table with coupons that are part of an Adva Mobile marketing activity. Here's how:

First, create a simple coupon and save it as a jpeg image. Here's a simple example.

Second, many of the fan engagement features of the Adva Mobile platform including Exclusive Content, Voting, and Contests, include the ability to offer something to the fan as a thank you for participating. That can be your coupon. Here's a picture of where you set that up on the Voting & Contest setup pages.

Now, fans that participate in one of your marketing capaigns, especially at shows, can show the coupon they downloaded at your merch table. This promotes more sales.

This marketing tool is especially effective with Artists that are using the Contest feature during live shows. They run the contest, and the winning fan(s) get free merch for winning, and the other participants that didn't win get a discount coupon.

Get in touch with us here at Adva Mobile if you need any help setting up or executing a marketing campaign with coupons. 

Artist Insight - Driving Your Fans at Shows

Rock masterpieces from the White Album to Dark Side of the

Moon reinvigorated by electric strings, bass, drums and a touch of jazz improv. Founding member, composer, arranger, producer, multi-instrumentalist and father of 3 Will Taylor drives the band and promotes no boundaries - form doesn't matter as much as passion, fun and creativity.

Will Taylor & Strings Attached has been creating innovative music and supporting a music career since 1993, so he knows about the mix between creative and business in forming a musicians career. He's helpful and willing to share his insights with other Artists - there's an entire YouTube channel of helpful advice in the form of 5 minute tips you can find at his YT channel. 

When he joined Adva Mobile and we saw a rapid uptick in the number of fans opting in to receive mobile texts from him, we were curious as to how he was attracting fans. His solution: Sign Up Sheets distributed at every show to every audience member.  "I keep all of the sign-up sheets that my fans submit at shows." Says Will. "We have a very high success rate with guests  filling it out because we usually offer them a free bootleg CD in exchange." They include the request to be put on the text list,  their cell phone number and their wireless  provider. Will has been adding fans into his mobile database and, combined with the fans that join by texting in, over 300 fans are now part of his database in less than a month, with more added all the time. 

Will was also willing to share more info about how he's collecting fan info. Here's a link to a You tube video -  http://youtu.be/BAQpv7WcJvQ  (its about how he specifically captures fans with the form at shows, and here's a picture of the form he has fans fill out.  

Get Will's Free 5 Min Tips to Tame Creative Life so You Can Make More Art and Have a Life. Will's tips here are here: http://budurl.com/subscribew5mt

Sean Ardoin Update

Unusual for us to repeat a story about an Artist having success with the Adva Mobile platform, however Sean Ardoin' continued promotion of his mobile web app is producing some stunning results. In last month's newsletter, we showed this chart - his fan growth from February through May:  

Over 250 new fans in a little over 2 months. Here's today's chart:
 

Over 800 fans!

Most of this is from Facebook posts, telling fans they can get his new cover and video of Pharrell's Happy by texting getkool to 88704.
  

Sean Ardoin is killing it

Zydekool front man Sean Ardoin started using Adva Mobile in mid February, telling fans at shows, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on the streets of Lake Charles (and NOLA) to text GETKOOL to 88704 to connect with all things in the Kooliverse. Check this out:

He's over 250 new fans in a little over 2 months he can connect with now on mobile, through text, email, and social with new music, show dates, news, videos and merch. That's killing it.