Use Voting on your mobile web to atract new fans

I am noticing a lot more polls today, being used on everything from Sports Illustrated, the Weather Channel, and my own Yahoo web landing page. Advertising for car insurance is even presented as a poll. It got me thinking about how valuable the VOTING feature on the Adva Mobile service is for music artists.

Fan engagement is the key to maintaining loyalty and Voting represents a very cool way to keep engaged with your fans. You never want to overwhelm your fans with too many texts, but I can see where they would never get tired of answering polls because they are so much fun. Asking your fans about everything from what they think the conclusion of the Egyptian revolution will be to what should your encore song be at the next show helps you understand your fans and connect with them in a personal way that only the mobile phone can offer.

The Adva Mobile Voting feature is easy to set up. Under “Your Mobile Web Pages” on your Dashboard, go to the Voting page and set it up. Then, scheduled a text blast to your fans that drives them directly to the Voting page on your mobile site. Very simple. It's only available to our Silver and Gold members so another good reason to upgrade your account - get a better looking mobile website and take advantage of some of the terrific tools on our platform that help you acquire new fans, engage with them and convince them to buy your stuff. The insight you get from asking your fans questions and getting that feedback is a key component to understanding your fan base and being able to connect with them in a very personal, rewarding way.

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.