This an example of mobile crowdsourcing. He’s asking his fans to pick his finale performance, offering them a chance to vote via their mobile phones.

He has promoted  this on his twitter, and his facebook.

If you’re going to be in NYC, the show starts at 8 PM in Central Park with the New York Philharmonic. It should be a blast.

“Vote on Lang Lang’s Encore for July 13th with @NYPhil -Text FOLK (traditional chinese song) or KEY (Chopin “Black Keys”) to 839863 (US ONLY)”

We’re looking for a brilliant, charismatic, motivated, and curious intern for the remainder of the summer.

Are you that somebody?

Reasons to Consider The Internship:

1. You’ll learn a lot and get paid to do it
2. You’ll get to solve problems w/ technology
3. You’ll do work that has an impact
4. We’ll teach you about product development, software, and mobile technology
5. It’s in Chicago’s cool West Loop neighborhood
6. We go out to lunch every Friday

This position will gain experience in product management and marketing. You will have the ability to sit in on product meetings, develop resources, assist in marketing efforts, launch a product and show your skills.

Check the website: http://www.interactivemediums.com

Hit us with your resume: jrockwood@interactivemediums.com

Tweet it: @im_corp / @julianrockfish

The free trial includes access to all of the features available on the platform. You can create up to ten fully functional campaigns, create up to three user accounts to share with your colleagues, and interact with up to three mobile phone numbers. Best of all, is that when you decide to sign up, you can keep all of the campaigns that have created during the trail.

There really is nothing to lose. Click here to get started!

Titled, “Top 3 Opportunities/Challenges Ahead for Apartment Buildings,” the article immediately brought to mind Apartments.com, the online and mobile rental property search business that came to us to create an iPhone version of its service.

The topmost item on the list shows that competition among rental properties will escalate in coming years as more properties become available.  That would spell good news for a service such as Apartments.com, who provides a valued connection between renter and property that will be even more essential than it is today.

The second item caused pause, as it suggests that saltwater pools are becoming a table stakes feature of attractive rental properties.  Aside being another attribute renters may wish to identify while searching, it’s hard to envision how this impacts a service like Apartments.com.

The final item actually seems the most important by far; the emergence of online apartment ratings and the effect of negative reviews on occupancy rates.  Apparently many property owners are taking proactive steps to monitor their online reputations and addressing complaints directly.  That would seem to represent a significant opportunity for Apartments.com to create another value added aspect of its business.

As we have mentioned previously in our blog, social media is on the Interactive Mediums’ radar screen in a big way.  The most recent example is Hovewall, used to engage greater than 50 percent of the addressable audience in real time Twitter commentary at Mobile University 101, a conference held recently in Chicago.

To learn more about CouchDB please check out http://couchdb.apache.org/, and for information on Couchio, the company that provides services for CouchDB, please visit Couch.io.

This case study is just one example of how we’re always looking to improve the user experience of the Interactive Mediums platform.

Gary described the utility of siloed campaigns such as sweepstakes but that the effort required to execute one in the mobile channel is no less than projects marketers undertake around longer lived work, such as websites.  The upshot was that marketers waste the effort by not planning to use the mobile channel more strategically, a part of which could be limited life programs such as contests.

To help marketers to that end, Gary underscored the importance of tying mobile programs to business results such as actual product sales.  This is as of critical importance for marketers to get out of a “churn and burn” cycle.  The onus is on mobile marketing product and services providers to help their clients see the value of mobile to achieving their daily objectives, not just executing a one time campaign.  We could not agree more.

Today on MobileMarketer.com an article titled, “Rolex taps mobile to make print ad more interactive,” describes not a 2D bar code, MMS or text messaging call to action, but rather something much more simple.  The article describes a magazine ad program which allows readers to photograph any advertisement in the publication, then send it via email to a third party service that somehow recognizes the photo, ties it to the advertiser, then sends value-added content back to the reader and enters them into a promotional sweepstakes.

The key distinction between this approach and others we have talked about before is that email is the transit mechanism as opposed to mobile messaging techniques like SMS or MMS, and the provider somehow is able to recognize programmatically images sent via email and trigger relevant content to be sent back to the reader.

The benefit to advertisers is no need to modify existing ad creative to incorporate bar codes or require their readers to have smartphones equipped with software to interpret such images.  Negatives include a more narrow demographic accessible than with messaging techniques as opposed to email, but is probably immaterial in this instance since Rolex consumers probably have among the most advanced mobile devices available.

As mentioned yesterday, you just can’t beat the ubiquity and reach of a text message interaction as a call to action.  For magazine advertisers in particular, who should be interested in offering insight into the response rates of ads by factors such as geographic distribution or variances in issues based on local market considerations, text message keyword segmentation is an easy approach to proving the value of print ads for use in direct response programs.  The Rolex example offers no such targeting or tracking.

Metric: Stickiness
Within the context of SMS text message mobile marketing, stickiness refers to the ability of a campaign to hold onto its opt in subscribers, such that customers may be targeted repeatedly over time.  The utility of a call to action has a great deal of influence over how many customers elect to opt out of your list.  Marketers want to see the trend in this analysis track positively over time as an indicator of stickiness.

Metric: Acquisition
Marketers need to view as a significant “win” the permission provided by customers to engage in text message interactions.  At-a-glance, marketers can instantly view the magnitude and trending for acquiring subscribers, by campaign.

Metric: Loyalty
Although referred to as “Retention,” this measure offers insight into the “mobile loyalty” of your customers.  Opting into communications is different from subscribing to receive messages proactively.  This view offers insight into the relative number of customers who have opted in that also elected to subscribe to a campaign.  Marketers can interpret this as an indicator of consumer receptiveness to mobile engagement, much as loyal customers engage in repeat purchase behavior.

Metric: Response Intensity
The ratio of messages a marketer sends versus those responded to by customers can be used to evaluate calls to action as contributing to mobile engagement.  MT, or Mobile Terminated messages, are those sent by the marketer.  MO, or Mobile Originated messages, are those sent by customers.  The greater the number of MOs for a given MT indicates superior engagement for a campaign.  Viewing MOs in isolation quickly across all Engagement Actions provides instant insight into the campaigns working best to pull customers into mobile interactions.

Metric: Reach
The value of SMS text message marketing is often described as offering universal access to consumers.  This is realized by analyzing the number of subscribers to a particular campaign, which is shown by keyword.  Keywords are how marketers connect their customers with mobile interactions and so viewing the aggregate number of subscribers per keyword illustrates the reach afforded by a campaign and its call to action.

Metric: Engagement Mix
Increasingly, mobile interactions are becoming “multi-mobile” in nature, inclusive of both SMS text messaging and the web (both mobile and desktop).  It is therefore crucial for marketers to have a single view into the interplay among these channels as part of mobile campaigns.  This analysis provides insight into the mix of distinct interactions stemming from text and web, which illustrates customer engagement channel preferences.

In her new role as Account Executive, Amanda Gilmore will be responsible for our inside sales operation where she will identify sales opportunities, conduct proactive outreach and handle in bound demand requests, and ultimately work with prospective customers to help them understand how mobile marketing solves business problems.  Amanda brings an extensive background in business development for high tech organizations as well as a wealth of experience working with direct clients and channels such as agencies.
 
Before joining the Interactive Mediums team, Amanda was a Business Development Manager for The SAVO Group.  Prior to that, she served as Media Sales Associate for VisualCast Media where she presented and sold outdoor advertising outlets in Chicago to national advertisers.  Amanda graduated from Loras College in Dubuque, IA with a Bachelors of Arts in Communications.

Also joining us today is Julian Rockwood, who as Account Manager assumes responsibility for the day to day tasks associated with ensuring our clients are satisfied and realizing the value of mobile marketing.  He came to Chicago this past July from the rust belt city of Toledo, Ohio, where he served as an account manager with a marketing strategy firm specializing in package design and building materials channel strategy.

Julian brings competencies in account management, marketing strategy, social media, analytics, and B-to-C thought process, and is very excited to bring his experience and enthusiasm to helping customers make the most of their mobile marketing efforts.  His hobbies include soccer, sound design, and running along Lake Michigan.

• Identity a project that aligns especially well with mobile marketing techniques such as SMS text message promotions.
• Help define success metrics to gauge the program’s success.
• Show just how easy our Customer Engagement Platform makes it to configure and execute effective mobile interactions.

To learn more before the official launch of Zero to Engagement, contact us at info@interactivemediums.com.

Drew’s professional background is centered around design, marketing and writing. He is proficient in UI design and cross-browser compliant XHTML/CSS development. He thrives on creative development and problem solving, and believes that good design communicates with simplicity, clarity and subtlety.

Drew most recently ran his own web design consultancy helping small businesses, entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations and educational institutions realize their online goals. He previously worked as an Interactive Web Designer at Duo Consulting, a web development and design company based in Chicago, where he worked with clients including CareerBuilder.com, the Chicago Park District and the Chicago Public Library.

Drew lives in Indianapolis with his wife and son, as well as a recalcitrant cat. He has left a personal blog languishing by the side of the Internet, but hopes to help it back to its feet one of these days.

I’m very excited to announce that we’re looking for an Account Manager to join the Interactive Mediums team. The job description is below, if you are interested or know anyone that is, please apply via http://bit.ly/3Hkj0y.

Account Manager – Chicago, IL

Summary

Looking to hire an integral team member that thrives in a fast paced unstructured environment. Candidate must be capable of operating in multiple roles and enthusiastically perform a diverse range of tasks, duties, and responsibilities. Looking for candidate to grow and evolve within high growth company.

Responsibilities

• Respond to inbound sales inquiries, perform product demonstrations, follow-up
• Educate clients and prospects on mobile marketing, define objectives, and recommend solutions
• Provide first level customer support via phone and email, observe patterns, and recommend solutions
• Continuously improve the customer experience, identify issues, and implement solutions
• Assist operations with diverse range of projects and tasks
• Assist Director of Marketing with marketing actions

Requirements

• Ability to complete project tasks individually or delegate /coordinate with internal or external creative resources when appropriate
• Creative problem-solving ability and a consultancy mindset
• Demonstrated responsibility, follow-through and ability to generate results
• Strong analytic, strategic, and business reasoning abilities
• Entrepreneurial, enthusiastic, collaborative professional
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• A flexible, self-starter possessing an inherent intellectual curiosity
• Customer evangelist, passionate about providing excellent customer experience
• Experience in the following a plus (direct marketing, digital marketing, mobile marketing, brand promotions, CRM solutions, software as a service, technology / online products)

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in marketing or related field required.

Benefits

• Medical and dental insurance
• 401(k)
• Transit pre-tax enrollment
• Flexible vacation policy

We’re all very excited to have Ray join the team and dive into data. He’ll be working on an iPhone app for the next 4-6 weeks and then digging in.

If you’re interested, please send an email to me at jeff@interactivemediums.com.

UPDATE: As of 7/24/2009 this position has been filled

Mobile Monday is a global community of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influentials fostering cooperation and cross-border business development through virtual and live networking events to share ideas, best practices and trends from global markets. MoMo Chicago is the local chapter dedicated to Chicago and surrounding area (which is chalk full of mobile companies).

This month’s topic is “Niche Mobile Marketing.” As mobile marketing continues to mature, organizations are finding themselves looking for more personalized ways to engage target segments. In this month’s event you will learn key strategies from two mobile marketing veterans on how to effectively message to the growing Hispanic and Youth niche markets.

MEETING DETAILS
__________________________________________________________

Date: Monday, July 20, 2009
Time: 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Topic: Niche Mobile Marketing
Presenter: Ana Arredondo (Senior Consultant), Hugh Jedwill (Mobile Anthem)
Location: Acquity Group, 500 W Madison St, Suite 2200, Chicago, IL 60661
Location Notes: Participants can sign-in at the reception desk on the 3rd floor (picture ID required)

MEETING AGENDA
__________________________________________________________

6:00pm – Sign-In / Light-Dinner
6:10pm – 6:20pm Quick Industry News Updates
6:20pm – 6:40pm Mobile Marketing to the Hispanic Demographic
6:40pm – 7:00pm Mobile Marketing to the Youth Demographic
7:10pm – 7:30pm Marketer Roundtable
7:30pm > Beer / Networking

REGISTRATION
__________________________________________________________

To attend, please register at http://momochicago-07-2009.eventbrite.com/

Marketing Director – Chicago, IL

Responsibilities:

• Formulate unique market positioning, brand messaging, and elevate company profile and exposure
• Drive market research and competitive analysis; perform target market analysis and develop marketing strategies for aggressive target penetration
• Direct media relations and manage PR strategy
• Manage copywriting / content development (online copy, user documentation, media kits, whitepapers, collateral, press releases, case studies, presentations, blog posts, customer communications)
• Coordinate with creative resources to develop effective online and print marketing campaigns to support sales / awareness efforts.
• Manage redesign of corporate website (interactivemediums.com) and continuous iteration
• Manage TextMe (textme.net) product marketing efforts
• Manage SEO / SEM
• Lead creative client services practice and assist with ideation/program development

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience driving research, competitive analysis, launching new products, building brands, and developing growth strategies
• 3+ years of agency experience required
• Ability to complete project tasks individually or delegate /coordinate with internal or external creative resources when appropriate.
• Knowledge in creating national marketing plans, executing integrated campaigns and managing external / internal communications with press, analysts, employees, and customers
• Clear knowledge of the principles of integrated marketing and communications
• Creative thinker and problem solver
• Demonstrated responsibility, follow-through and ability to generate results
• Strong analytic, strategic, and business reasoning abilities
• Entrepreneurial, enthusiastic, collaborative professional
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Must be equally comfortable with identifying high ROI marketing projects and strategies as they are in personally performing the tasks necessary to complete projects.
• Marketing experience for companies providing technology enabled services and web software products.
• Experience in the following a plus (direct marketing, digital marketing, mobile marketing, brand promotions, CRM solutions, software as a service, technology / online products)

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in marketing related field required. Masters degree preferred.

Perks:

• Medical and dental insurance
• 401(k)
• Transit pre-tax enrollment
• Flexible vacation policy

UPDATE: As of 7/22/2009 this position has been filled

And that makes a total of two blog posts in one month :)

• In January we started working on our first iPhone application for a client, and that will be provisioned in the app store in beginning of the summer (more on this app when it’s ready). We’ve got a couple more applications in the pipe, and would love to take on more.
• Also in January, we hired John Wood as Lead Engineer
• In March (actually last week), we released a redesign of TextMe. We’ve rolled out a whole new look and feel which we’re super excited about. We’ve gotten a ton of great feedback from customers and we’ve been making tweaks every day.

Over the next few months we’ll be working on new features for TextMe, more iPhone apps, our first BlackBerry app and looking to partner with companies who offer solutions for which it doesn’t make sense for us to tackle.

Lots and lots of exciting mobile stuff happening right now. If you’re reading this and we can help you with anything, please send a note to hello@interactivemediums.com.

• Web voting widgets: No you can create true multi-channel voting by adding a web voting widget to your website. Web votes can be unlimited, or limited to the number of allowable entries that are defined on the campaign.
• Dynamic tags for vote response messages: A ‘dynamic tag’ is a small string that can be inserted into a message that will be changed in real time at the time of vote. For example, inserting ‘[TOTAL#]‘ into a vote response message will change the string to ’42′ if there are currently 42 total votes. We’ve added a slew of tags available for each voting option (keyword, description, current number of votes, current percentage) as well as total number of votes.
• Contest response tags: We currently support four types of unique contests, and we’ve added a ton of tags for each type of contest. A few examples include, current number of entries, count of entries left until a winner has won, etc.
• Routing campaign management updates: What’s a routing campaign? This is the simply the mechanism that we’ve setup to route incoming text messages to and from another system. When we receive a text message with a matching keyword, we’ll forward on to the third party system for that system to do their processing, and once they’re done with that processing the third party can then send a message back to the user through our messaging API.  We also support nifty stuff like sticky sessions (basically locking a phone number into a route for short period of time). We’ve also added keyword management to the API.
• Email and SMS notification of activity: A great example of this is with our info on demand campaign. Upon receiving the corresponding keyword, we can send a notification to any email address or mobile phone number via SMS. To test this out, just text DEMO to 839863 and you’ll get a call from a member of our team.

If you’d like to chat about any of these features in more detail, give us a ring at 866-683-9863 (866-6TEXTME), or email us at hello@interactivemediums.com.

In addition to that stuff, I just wanted to let people know that we’re working hard to build the best mobile marketing platform out there, and are adding new stuff each week. We support clients from big (Orbitz, Anheuser Busch, Ogilvy) to small, and we understand that everyone has their own unique needs. Here are some bread and butter features that we think are important, but we frankly don’t spend much time talking about:

• Support for multiple accounts: Need to manage multiple accounts? Want to assign different permissions to each user? Want to get setup with your own domain/sub-domain? No problem.
  
• Support for multiple short codes: Yep, we can do this.
  
• Aggregation partner managment: We currently work with three different aggregation partners are and are building relationships quickly. We can work directly with an aggregation partner, or you can setup an account with them directly and just provide us your account details.
• Short code management: We’ll work directly with the CSCA (Common Short Code Administration) on your behalf to secure your code and manage billing. Or you can work with them directly.

Finally, there are great things happening within mobile right now outside of mobile messaging, and we’re jumping in (hint: it starts with iphone).

As you can imagine, the key message from this conference is: the world is changing. What was is no longer what is. People do not want to be communicated at, they want to be communicated with. The mobile phone has a strong seat at the table in this new world…and we feel right at home :)

First off, welcome to Doug Barth. Doug is joining the Interactive Mediums team as Lead Architect. Previously, Doug worked for Orbitz Worldwide, where he helped build out Orbitz’s complex event processing framework, recently highlighted at JavaOne. We are super excited to have Doug join the team.

Secondly, we’re blogging. It’s silly that it’s taken us this long to fire this up, but we’re here now and we’re excited to start posting about some of the things we’re working on, and things that we find interesting.