Did you know you can archive an old account? It’s really easy and helps keep your interface up to date with just live accounts. This option is just available to partners from within the partner control panel.

To get to it, just click on to the control panel, then Archive (under accounts) and on the “Click here” link:




Select the account you want to remove, enter the password you logged in with and click Remove. As a safety measure, your data is not actually deleted, but put into long term storage for a year. This allows us to retrieve it should we receive a consumer complaint or request from a client. After a year, we do delete it and then it’s gone forever!

When you archive an account, all active keywords, usernames and credits are removed. All that’s left is the customer data, such as messages sent, received and personal information like emails and names.

We recommend regularly archiving out old data to keep just your live accounts in the drop down. This keeps your interface clean and tidy, which is always a good thing!

Sometimes when you add data to an account, you just want to quickly add a list of mobile numbers. Adding just numbers by Excel or entering manually can get tedious so we created a facility to copy and paste them in.

You can get to this by going to Contacts > Copy & Paste (on the right hand side).



Copy the numbers (or type in directly) from wherever you have them stored, one number per line. Numbers should be in international format, ie 1xxx... for US and 447xxx... for the UK. Don’t worry too much about invalid numbers as we’ll cover these later.



When you are done click Import. Any numbers unsubscribed will remain unsubscribed, bad data will get omitted & duplicates are ignored. When the data has finished getting updated you will see a confirmation screen:




This will show any bad data for you to edit, along with the number of people successfully imported. This is a fairly simple, straightforward option and should not too difficult to master!

Excel is very useful for typing up large numbers of contacts from other sources such as business cards. Within our platform, you can import this directly into an account, just make sure you have their permission to market to them. If you do, head over to Contacts > Import Excel File, which is under Add Contacts on the right hand side.

Each column in your excel file must have a column heading in the 1st row. This can be anything you want and just used to help identify columns to match with database fields. Mobile numbers should be in international format (eg 1xxxxxxxxxx for US and 447xxxxxxxxx for UK).

Sometimes excel does strange things with dates (eg dates of birth), so take care to format them correctly, eg DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY for US.

When you are ready, save your excel file as .xls or .xlsx on your hard drive. Next, click Choose file then find the file and click Upload. After is has uploaded you will see this screen:



After the file has been uploaded, you can match the fields to import. If you have saved your data on a different worksheet than the 1st one, you can switch to it by selecting from the drop down.



Just match up the columns with the fields you want to import. Any you do not want to import, simply leave out. When you are done, click GO.



After the upload is complete you’ll see a summary page of the download, telling you how many new people got added. If a person was already unsubscribed, then they will remain unsubscribed after an import (you will have to manually opt them back in again by going to their contacts page).

If there are any errors, you can download them in a CSV file by clicking the highlighted link. These are all the people that did not get imported, so you can go back through them, fix the errors and try again!

Note: This specifically relates to our Interlinked partners and their ability to assign credits to sub accounts they have created.

All our accounts operate on a pre-pay basis. The simple reason behind this was a post pay scenario creates significant & unacceptable risk for all our partners. If one partner runs up a large bill and disappears (it happens!), we’re left holding it. If we can’t pay then we all lose out. To mitigate the risk we require all partners to pre-pay and therefore control the payment risk!

So what happens when you want to give someone free credits or a allow them to post pay? You just credit messages from your top level to their account. This lets you move messages and keyword credits from your total allocation to their account and you charge them for it on your terms.

To access this go to the partner control panel, then under payments click “Credits” (and the “click here” link).



At the top of the page it tells you the total messages and keywords available to allocate. Simply pick out the account from the drop down that you want to credit. Enter a description, so you know what this refers to (eg 1000 text messages for a free trial) and select text messages and the quantity to allocate. Hit “Credit” and voila, the messages or keywords are moved across.

If you want to claw back an allocation (eg when a free trial has ended), just enter a negative number, eg -1000. This will return the 1000 messages to your top level account. Make sure you enter a number equal to or lower than the total available or it’ll fail!

We’ve tried to keep this as straightforward as possible and protect the interests of all our partners.

Both our services, Interlinked & SMS Gateway, have the ability to push text messages to other third party systems. This is great for integrating a website, CRM system, feedback service or anything else! Messages are simply forwarded to your site after we receive them, using a simple set of parameters.

HTTP Posts
Messages are sent via an HTTP Post. This is a super complicated, highly sophisticated way of saying that a message is sent across the internet! For the non-techies, a message is sent almost exactly the same way you would type a URL to visit a website.

There is no black art to it, it really is as simple as typing a URL in. Our server mimics this in a programming way, but the end result is the same.

A standard URL is made up of these parts and the message notifications take the same format:

http://www.mywebsite.com/sms.asp?parameter=setting

This is broken down to:
http://www.mywebsite.com - Domain name
/sms.asp - Page to handle the messages
?parameter=setting - Query string that contains the message

When setting up a URL, you would specify the domain and page. We would then append the text message info to the query string part run the full URL to send the message over to your server.

For the techies, I know this is not quite accurate, but I’m keeping it simple!

The Message
The message is contained in the query string part of the URL. This follows a standard set of parameters to pass the message across. Each parameter is lowercase, and will be URL Encoded to prevent the message breaking the URL.

SMSFrom: Telephone number of the person texting
SMSTo: Shortcode that message was sent to
SMSDate: Time of the notification: (yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss)
Network: Carrier/ network, if known
SMSID: Unique ID for this message request
SMSMSG: The actual text message being sent

Each parameter is simply appended to the URL using an & sign. All programmers can then use this to dissect the query string and pick out the message details.

Status Codes & Retries
We capture the status code from your site when we send a message on. This allows us see if the message was delivered to you successfully and provide feedback if it did not make it. These status codes are the same 404 page not found code you see when you miss-type a URL.

SMS Gateway allows you to view these directly (as it’s a developer orientated resource) by viewing the inbound message page. For more info on all the status codes, check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

Currently we don’t retry the messages. So if your system is not working, the message won’t make it. However, we’re hoping to change that in the near future.

Setting up a Keyword URL
This is really easy. In Interlinked, just set the keyword up as normal, then in the developer options enter the URL & page (eg http://www.mywebsite.com/sms.asp) in the “URL Alert To” box and click save.



For SMS Gateway, just click the account tab and set up a keyword. After it is added, click the “Click to configure a route” and enter the URL in!

When sending a message from our platform, you have the ability to select people within a specific ZIP/ Postal code. This is useful to target promotions for select groups of people. Furthermore, US users have the ability to select a specific state and soon an areacode!

Let’s dive in:




In the box, you can enter a ZIP/postal code. As you start typing, a list of all the available options contained within the account will appear. If you type in a city, the list will show all ZIP/postal code matches for that city. To select more than one, use a semi-colon “;” to separate, for example 75080; 75081; 75082 or NE1; NE1; NE3.

In the UK, postal codes only match the first part, ie NE1, which is known as the postcode district. When you go to the second part (the “sector” and “unit”), you end up with way too much detail, which makes for excessively complex coding!

The address options that appear in the dropdown list also contain a number in brackets. This is the number of people within that area, which is useful to ensure you have the correct location! Simply select the range, enter the zip/postcode, click Go and the number or people to send to will get updated with the number with that area.

The range uses Pythagoras (Pythagorean theorem – we found a use for it!) to work out all ZIP/postal codes within the area specified and add to the list to match. This is always going to be approximate, as the address data covers a large area and more specific data does not exist.

US Users
If you want to select people in specific states, enter the 2 letter state code. For example, enter TX for all people in Texas and NY for New York. To select multiple states, enter TX;NY;CA.

We’ll also be adding an areacode lookup back in soon. This was omitted for technical issues, but these are close to being resolved. When this is in place, you’ll just need to enter the first 3 digits of the telephone number to match all people with that code. Again, use a semi-colon for more than one (eg 713; 714; 715).

It’s only as good as the data
Remember, there is only so much we can do! All the data is based on the ZIP or postcode field. This means if the data is not in there, then you won’t be able to use this feature. Also, if the data is wrong, the results will be incorrect!

It’s an easy way to stay motivated. Picture what you want and when you lose focus or get knocked down; think back to the “prize” and remind yourself what it’s all about!

Too many times we get tunnel vision in our work. Endless customer support calls, invoices to chase or slow weeks, all of which become drains on your energy and enthusiasm. The bad news: as your company grows the jobs you don’t like only get bigger!

My easy way to work through it? Think about the bigger picture. Where do you want to be in life? Financially independent, house of your dreams or getting to experience the world? All these are easily within your reach.

When you know what you want, price it up and break it down. Say I want a £50k/year income, that’s £4k a month. Break it into 8 clients spending £500 each. 8 clients is very achievable, even in the economic downturn and certainly not an unmanageable number.

Now when I get tunnel vision on the “issue of the day”, I think back to how it’s only a handful of clients and each one gets me a step closer to my aims in life.

Did you know we’re into the 5th version of our platform? This won’t be the last enhancement, but here’s a recap!

Version 1 (2003)
The launch! We stayed up till 3am for 6 weeks running, working through every weekend getting this off the ground. The platform was aimed at bars and making data collection easier for them. It included steps like auto asking for opt-in permission and issuing incentives for doing so.

Version 2 (2004)
We moved towards a graphical layout to better display and analyse the data. We also started to refine the process for sending a message in just 3 steps, from a previous 6! This was also the start of allowing different brands to use the same underlying code. At launch, we had BarPromoter.com, FanbaseManager.com and TextYou.com all using the same code base.

Version 3 (2006)
The one that never made it! We set one with best intentions to rollout a load of updates into a new platform. This was also the year we launched into the US and underestimated the work involved! After 3 months and only moderate progress, we decided to “hold” development until we had the time available.

Version 4 (2007)
Picking up with the changes from version 3, we re-launched with some major new features. The changes include time zone compatibility, US and UK language support (there is a difference!) and also a much more robust method of rebranding for partner sites. We also made significant improvements to the process of choosing who to send a message to and making it a much more intuitive process.

Version 5 (2008)
The latest release! This includes the language editor, so any text on the site can be changed, sub accounts for clients & partners and also inbuilt prepayment facilities. We also switched to a tabbed interface to make special requests easier to include and opened up a lot of the functionality for access by different APIs.

The future?
Who knows! As mobile technologies continue to launch and mature, we’ll update our services to include them. Generally, we like the simpler, quicker and easier approach to using the platform and intend to keep all future developments in line with this.

One of the great parts of text messaging is the delivery reports. These tell us messages are being delivered or why they did not make it, in real time. In fact, recently I sent an email campaign out and got completely underwhelmed when no one read it instantly!

The downside is lack of consistency across networks (or carriers). Whilst all US networks tell us a message failed to get delivered, only AT&T, Cricket, Dobson, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Verizon and Virgin say it got successfully delivered. This leaves out a number of carriers like Sprint and Centennial. The situation is totally different in the UK, were accurate info is sent for all networks (O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Three, Virgin, Vodafone, Guernsey, Jersey & Manx).

A delivery report will contain different status codes. We have put together broad meanings for each and split into similar categories, but sometimes a network will interpret differently and we won’t find out until further investigation.

Status code meanings are:

0: Message delivery in progress & no info has been received yet

Being in the text messaging business, text elements in advertising always have a habit of jumping out at me. Last weekend i attended a festival in Belgium (rockwerchter.be) and noticed that the wristband I was given for the campsite contained a call to action. The idea was simple, people could text WERCHTER NL or WERCHTER FR for a mobile festival guide.

This is a perfect example of how to use text messaging effectively. I'm not sure of the response rates, but I certainly saw lots of the 80,000 attendees using their mobiles to check timetables and festival maps.

Many businesses and organisations miss the point of mobile. It doesn't HAVE to be used for direct marketing, and you don't HAVE to be selling something or getting a direct ROI. But if you provide a free, useful service, your customers are more likely to remember you as good and use you again. In this case, attendees to the festival will come away with a positive feeling about the organisation of the event. Because instead of forcing them to buy expensive festival guides, or wander aimlessly looking for a particular band, they could have all the information they needed at their fingertips, for free.

So in this instance mobile was being utilised to provide a useful service, which in turn helped create a positive overall impression of the event. Oh, and obviously the good weather, great beer and awesome music helped too!

The saying goes "you gotta spend money to make money". Whilst this is true, It’s essential to spend that that money wisely. If business were about spending money to make money, why get a Harvard MBA? My wife will help you out for free!

It’s easy to get carried away. You launch a business, buy everything needed and plough as much as you can into marketing, technology and other business stuff. The problem is you’re spending nearly all the money at a time when you know the least about what you’re doing.

So what’s the answer? Don’t spend all at once. Spend a little, see how it goes. Gauge the return; did it meet expectations? After a few weeks or months, spend a little more. Now you’re spending wisely, you know what to expect and what wastes money. If this works, then should you think about making the biggest spend.

We’re going to be doing a marketing campaign. We’ve allocated a five figure amount, so it’s a sizable investment for us. We nearly fell into the trap of spending it all in one go. Then where would we be? Down a lot of money, but a few more "life lessons" richer. Great!

So we held back. We’re spending 10% on a pilot to test the waters. Next we’ll spend 30% to do a larger campaign, which is our chance to get the concept and message right on a larger scale. If that works, we’ll expand to the full target of people. The flip side? We’re only down 10% if we get it wrong.

Following on from my previous post about good design, I thought I would talk a little about how we implemented these philosophies in our latest addition to the system.

Recently we've been seeing more of demand for dedicated competition, lead generation and brochure request facilities. Many long-term clients will know that these facilities can be emulated using the current system, however, new and prospective users are generally seeking a more straightforward approach.

So the way we've addressed this is by creating bespoke 'modules', add-on's to the existing system that are available to brands, agencies and of course partners.

We've used our design rules to simplify the setting up process for campaigns. The client simply chooses the product they require and is presented with a single set up screen. For example, the brochure request module simple asks for the keyword, the response message and if it's an email or postal brochure. Any non-essential 'extra's' have been removed, like mobile web pages, personalization or message content processing. We've also built in the ability to upload your e-brochure and email!

We've included a single page reporting section, which gives you the ability to auto-generate reports and send them to designated email addresses on specific days. The reporting is also slightly different from what's come before, as we've removed a couple of rarely used graphs and replaced them with some more relevant statistical illustrations.

Personally I'm really excited about these new add-on's, as it fills the gap of a wholly dedicated, simplified service for agencies and brands. I'm looking forward to seeing how they'll be utilized by clients and partners once launched, and I'll also be asking for a little feedback on them too, in the near future.

Landing big companies is always good. One decent size company can make a start-up come to life. It’s amazing how much better life is once the pressures have been lifted and monthly income is guaranteed, every month.

So how do you get that whale of a company under control? If it’s easy, all start-ups would have a big client. Unfortunately it’s not. Each big company has internal politics, strategic plans and mixed levels of knowledge for you to work with. Looking in, you know that what you offer is perfect. The task is convincing them.

No one company is the same.
So how do you make the approach? We been in at the top, middle and bottom, each time the result is different. Working at the top makes sense: one decision can result in hundreds of venues joining up. But this becomes one very big decision, taken by someone who is pretty much putting their job on the line.

Working from the bottom-up is easier. A manager is easier to approach and can decide pretty much on the spot. The price is a minor issue, but they’ll most likely run with it (if your pitch is good). The challenge is scaling this to hundreds of outlets. It’s unlikely you can go round making the same pitch to all!

So what works?
We’ve found going in at manager level to be the easiest. They’re approachable and easier to find. Once in, work with them and impress their regional manager. This person is likely to oversee 10 or more venues. Propose a trial to them in 5 or more units and really work with those to make it a success.

After this, work a way into another region and regional manager. Once established, you are ready to approach the head office. Go armed with real stats and info from their sites, which they will use to sell your pitch internally. Somewhere they will need to explain to the finance people that X spent here gives them an extra Y income. After that signoff, it’s nearly always plain sailing!

Lastly, be patient
A big deal has always taken us around 18 months to complete, and you just can’t rush it. You’ll get messed about, interrogated, sidelined, de-motivated and thrown out to tender. But these are all good, it’s a sign of progress. Just stick to your beliefs, remain firm on price and keep pitching away to venue and regional managers.

When you do land the company changing account, it will be worth it. You’ll become financially secure, make more money than you did before and your business will be taken to the next level!

We see a lot of text messages go out and sometimes wonder, how well do they actually work? We know they are effective, but are they as effective as they could be?

Little changes make big differences. Changing the call to action, the greeting or the way the opt-out is presented will affect the responses. It takes time to learn how your customers read and respond to your company, during which you can discover what makes them buy.

How can you do this? Just send 2 different messages. The first is a normal text message; the second is a variation of that. Maybe a different greeting or type of offer, alternatively just the same message sent on a different time or day.

In the message, just use a different promo code (EG ABC123 and DEF456), then keep a note of the redemptions as they come in. At the end, add up the numbers and decide for yourself which approach worked better.

What’s more, we make this easy for you ;)



In the message sending advance options, just set up the split testing. This will send your message to the pattern of people you select. For the second message, choose another pattern of people & exclude people who got the 1st message. After you have clicked send, sit back and wait for the results!

Building software is always going to create problems. It’s unfortunate, but design and development is about tradeoffs, compromises and decisions. The key is how to make those decisions and deal with the outcomes.

Even the simplest of ideas create conflicts between elements. Place a menu at the top of a page and it allows further room for page content. However the narrow width reduces the space for menu choices and this skews the menu alignment. Is this a bug or a design conflict?

This is what I call conflict problems - an expected action is affected by another expected action, which equals an unexpected result.

For example, say we had a text messaging program that allows you to communicate back and forth in a loop. Next, a word is programmed in, to allow the loop to be terminated (eg STOP).

What happens when this message is sent: “Stop waiting for me, I’ll see you inside”? The loop finishes, but that’s not the intended action. The user sees the loop has finished, but in their eyes the script is broken!

This is where the user can work with the programmer. Don’t just tell them you have a problem. Tell the developer exactly what the problem is and the solution for it.

It’s surprisingly easy. Cut the problem in half, determine which half is affected, and keep going. What happens when you restart the loop? Do other words have the same effect, what was the last message to work OK? Think about what you are trying to achieve and take that solution to the developer.

This way the developer spends their time building a better product and you now have a well thought out solution for this issue.

We get enquires about Txt2Screen services all the time. Nowadays, we turn them down, why? Experience has taught us better!

We used to run a Txt Screen service in 40 or so venues. This allowed a person to send a text message to a number, which was taken and placed on screens for everyone to see. It usually starts with a few happy birthday messages, moving on to suggestive remarks then outright abuse with hookers and dealers advertising their wares!

This style of abuse presents certain challenges... We built a system to filter out all swear words, telephone numbers, prices (there’s always one who texts in all beer is £1 before heading to the bar), pre-approve messages and just generally try not to cause offence.

This system worked well. The venues are all 18+, so people didn’t get too offended when the odd thing got through. However, the challenge changed. Now the software worked, we needed to get the right hardware in place. A PC running under a DJ stand, 24x7 (no one remembers to turn it off), in a hot nightclub is hardly the perfect environment.

Herein lays the actual challenge of the service. No matter how good the software is, it’s the whole package that counts. For us, this meant PCs that always just *worked* and someone on hand to call when it didn’t, which managers did call, late at night.

So why do we turn TxtScreen work down now? Whilst we can do it, we struggle with the complete package. Answering calls all the time, late at night, whilst trying to keep overused PC’s running, is easy at first. However, 6 months in it gets harder. 12 months more so, after 2 years we took a review.

We tried a lot to overcome the challenge, using only new machines with clear instructions. But at the end of the day, these had to be paid from thin margins. During our review we looked at all the stuff we did, and determined the money we made could be replaced fairly quickly.

After that, we moved on. We know now that next time we have a bright idea we must look at the complete package, including hardware, software, support and servicing. Sure, we have seen other companies do a similar service since, but as yet we haven’t seen one do it on a truly mass scale.

In the Interlinked platform, there is the ability to personalise a message. This is really useful for making a campaign relevant to the recipient, which goes on to significantly increasing their likelihood of responding.... all for no additional cost!



On the ‘create a message’ page after clicking through from the calendar, you’ll see ‘Personalize text message’ as one of the sub options. Click this to show the options.

Let’s run through an example. Say I want to start my message with “Hi Chris, blah blah blah”, just set the Add dropdown to Firstname, enter ‘Hi ‘ (note the space after Hi) and you’re done.

However, what happens when some people do not have a first name? These can be people who only texted a keyword or simply did not want to give a name when joining.

Worse still, what if there is a name but it’s really long, Hatmaguptafratarinagarosterlous anyone? This is going to use up a lot of the space in a message.

To better deal with these, we built some business intelligence in.

You can use an alternative message when there is no first name. To use this just place something in the alternative field, such as ‘Hello’. Using the max setting, a maximum length for data can be set. Then when the field is longer than this, the alternative is used.

Once you have finished, click GO and «#01#» will be placed in the text message area. This is a marker for the personalization and should not be changed. If you want to remove the personalization, simply delete the marker out. You can also repeat the process to place the first name field multiple times into a text message...just try not to overdo it!

The message length counter will auto adjust to the appropriate number of characters, after calculating the longer of the prefix + max field length, or the alternative length.

That’s all it takes to personalise a message. Some people use it to include URL’s (when combining it with their own custom data field), others put dates, amounts and other stuff in. Also remember that the actual message getting sent can be previewed on the next page under ‘preview message’. Enjoy!

We’re currently working on something a bit special here at Interlinked, but without giving the game away just yet I’d like to talk a little about design and simplicity.

The product we’re putting together requires attention to detail when it comes to layout and user friendliness. The end users won’t be ‘techies’ or developers, they’ll be management people with little time to fiddle around with extra functions and options. With this in mind, we’re trying to put together a feature packed product that’s a breeze to use.

So, what’s the easiest way to deal with presenting a lot of information on a single page, whilst keeping it user friendly? Here’s a few rules we stick to when putting pages together:

• Devise. Don’t just follow a template or use previous designs. Start from scratch, use a pen and paper if that’s what it takes to give you inspiration!
• Deconstruct. Break your pages down into simple, easy to understand sections. Just like full stops in a paragraph, headings and page breaks give your pages structure.
• Demystify. Don’t hide things away which are important. There’s no point in hiding an essential function for the sake of aesthetics.
• De-duplicate. Identify any process, step, or piece of info that’s happening twice or more when it can easily be reduced to only one occurrence.
• Discuss. While you may think you’ve just put together the web’s best page, others may not agree. Always make sure you talk to colleagues/friends to gain a new, fresh perspective. Listen to them and have an open mind, it’s far easier to dismiss constructive criticism rather than engage it!

Using rules like this helps us focus on designing with the user as the priority. And this new product definitely won’t be any different.

We’ll let you know how it works out!

When we think simple, do we mean basic? Do we assume a simple service can only perform the basic requirements of what needs to be done, which becomes inferior to others with additional features?

When building services such as Interlinked and SMS Gateway, the need to keep it simple was the biggest challenge we faced. We knew building a complicated site was not the answer. Our previous sites had been heading down the road of more features and an ever expanding scope of requirements, which just became unmanageable.

Imagine trying to be an SMS expert, email expert, data analyst expert and data security expert, all whilst trying to offer a better service! We realised this was a mistake and a path we could not sustain, so took a change of direction and started removing features.

Immediately we saw the benefits. Before, developing meant cramming as much in as time would permit. Now we could take our time and get carefully selected parts right. We spent longer planning each page, removing steps and features, questioning what needs to go in and what we could leave aside.

The interesting part of this process, we discovered, was deciding what to do with parts we did not need. As developers, a major focus is dealing with conflicts: an absolute must have element for one person is another's unneeded and irrelevant distraction. To get it right, we need to satisfy those requirements as best as we can.

We found having more time available from a shorter list of features led to better linking of features. Using a variety of techniques, we could hide stuff away, marginalise their impact on the page or just move them to a different section entirely. This actually meant we could do a better job for users on our site.

Did this make the site basic? No. We aimed for 80% of our users being able to use 100% of the site. By contrast, in the previous feature driven site we would be lucky if 80% used 20% of the site. From the feedback we’ve got, people like being able to understand the entire site, not just a small part. Now that they use all of the fewer number of features, they actually end up doing a whole lot more!

At the end of 2002, during the time of the text parties, I discovered a now defunct company in London, Satellite-b, who developed a really innovated racing game. The game was played out on screen, with people texting to pick a horse to back.

The horses would race round a track then when the race ends, the winner got a text message with ways to claim a prize. We had some fun trying this out with different bars and clubs, watching how consumers interact with it and their perceptions of what to expect.

This lead to our first real business model. The plan was to take games like this to bars and clubs, who use it to collect customer data for marketing purposes (using an opt in procedure). In return for getting the service at minimal cost, we would push out drinks promotions to their databases.

This meant we could have a number of bars collecting data, who at the time did not have much in their budgets for such a service, then make our money from the drinks companies who try to sell to the same people. In effect, consumers would receive a text message co-branded with a drinks sponsor.

The downside of this model, which we found out much later on, is the critical mass required to make money. We needed a minimum of 100,000 people to gain interest from drinkco’s, but bars and clubs tended to hit a ceiling of data they can collect around 1-2,000 people. This means we needed at least 80-100 bars to just get to a starting point!

Not that this was a problem, merely the challenge. As with any challenge the key is to break it to smaller bite size parts. For us, we started with a few bars we knew, turned that into a pitch to an area manager, which lead to 35 bars in total on board.

A few months later and we started to realise there was just as much money to make from the bars, who initially not seen the benefits. We decided to go with that, drop the drinkco’s co-branding and focus on the bar market. The real value we soon realised, was helping them collect as many opted in customers as possible.

The lesson we learned in this story is to continually review what you do. If we never deviated from our goal of 100 bars, we would not have listened to our clients, or start ed to charge them for a service. Ultimately, this left us in better shape for the future, with fewer people to please and better money for our efforts!

In recent weeks, some of you may have noticed a few videos popping up on both Interlinked.mobi and SMS Gateway. These are designed to help guide you through using each system, whether you're a partner or a client. We've generally had little or no documentation with our products, as they've always been pretty straightforward. But with the increasing number of features available we decided we needed some.

So after some discussion, we decided the logical step was a video tour. These are becoming increasingly common due to the tools available, and with the likes of youtube and vimeo we could host videos off-site, freeing up our own servers bandwidth.

Predictably, I drew the short straw and started running through some ideas of how to present the videos. At first it seemed like a fairly easy task to me: Run through the system as I would normally do with a training call and talk into the microphone, but it soon became apparent that it wasn't that easy at all.

Listening back to myself I realised, for the first time, that I wasn't really explaining things as well as I should be. I was glossing over certain parts of the system that could potentially be very confusing to new clients, I wasn't speaking clearly enough, and above all i sounded like a robot!

So what at first appeared to be a relatively straightforward task turned into an enlightening, if laborious, exercise. I drew out storyboards to help organise each step of each process. I re-did the videos several times until I was happy that what I was saying was clear and concise. And above all I made sure that the videos weren't confusing.

In the end, not only had I produced some valuable demonstration videos, I'd also learnt a lot about how I present myself, and how I could improve on it time and time again.

But I haven't finished, I'll be updating all the videos again, and adding new ones as the system develops.

So the moral of the story? Take the time to listen to yourself, you might just be surprised at what you're actually saying.

We just finished helping one of our clients get better organise with the data within their Interlinked account, and thought we would share some of the explanations we gave them. We used the account data fields, which now effectively lets them store an unlimited amount of data!

First up, to set up account fields head over to Account Profile, then at the bottom of the page, you’ll see Account Data Fields.



To add a new field, just put a name in the box to refer to it. Once it’s added a reference like "EX50213" is displayed next to it. This lets developers refer to it in API calls, however for normal uses, just ignore this. To rename a field, just click the name to edit it, then click the tick button.

Should you decide to delete the field, click the red cross... It will ask to confirm this with your login password, after which the data for that field will be removed, but the actual person’s data (like their mobile number, name, email etc) stays unaffected in the account.

What can you do with a data field?
A data field can be used to narrow down the data set to better target messages. For example, below shows how to select people who gave their favourite night as Friday, Saturday or Sunday. When the green tick button is clicked, the results narrow to just include those people. These can then be further refined by making additional selections.




Data fields can also be used in the message personalisation section:



This allows you to add a prefix to appear before the data in the field and an alternative when there is no data in the field. A max length of the data to be merged in can be specified, which if the data is too long the alternative is used. This helps keep messages to within the 160 character limit. Don’t forget, you can always check what is sent in the “preview messages” on the next screen.

Data fields are also shown in other places, like viewing/editing a person. The same data fields are also available in the excel import section, so just map an excel column over to the data field and it will get imported when you click OK.

Restrictions
Data fields can’t contain more than one entry per person, so in the favourite night example, you would not be able to set a person to having Saturday & Sunday. However, to work around this, simple create a 2nd field.

Think before you collect!
All in all, the data fields should be useful to allow careful selection of people to send targeted messages to. However, it’s only ever as good as the data contained. So if you have 10 different misspellings in the same field, it will show all 10 in the selection process.

I would suggest thinking what you really want to achieve, then question if you really need all of them and rationalise it to about half of what you came up with, then start with that!

Ever come across this situation before?? We use to get it all the time when talking to prospect clients, but thankfully less and less now...



And the follow up



These were produced by http://bringtheloveback.com/ for (amazingly) Microsoft

Maybe an overstatement, but with the successful launch last Saturday of the Palm Pre, it looks like we now have a viable alternative to the iPhone. Could this mean the start of Galactico (or “Superstar”) handsets rolling out over the next few years?

We’ve seen previous launches of handsets that really push the boundaries. Back in 1999/2000 Nokia release the 3210, with interchangeable covers, predictive text, hidden antenna and “Snake”... a phone aimed at the youth market, which people paid up to £200 for! After that, Sony Ericsson and Motorola both launched handsets pushing the boundaries further, using cameras and slim line models.

Since then things went stale in the innovation department. Looking back, it’s no wonder the iPhone & Touch did so well, it’s simply filling a gap for people wanting handsets that work for them. It’s still amazing that Nokia, Microsoft, Sony Ericsson and Blackberry messed up and never released anything to push the innovation boundaries.

With the Pre launched, it looks like we are back on the handset innovation highway with each new Galactico getting more involved with our lives than ever before. Sure some companies will get it wrong with their attempts, or just miss the boat entirely, but there are still plenty of new concepts to leverage off the solid handset foundations laid by Apple and Palm.

With the iPhone & Pre, there are 2 great handsets to choose from. How long till we see a 3rd, 4th or 5th?

Way back in October 2002, whilst investigating other ideas for texting, I stumbled on an idea from a company based in London, Pocket Generation, running an innovative night out with text messages.

The concept was fun: A person signs up and gets a text message to meet 3 other people in a random bar and gets a codeword to identify their group. After an hour, another message goes out for the groups to go to a different bar and join another group, to become 8. Later, a message is sent to go someplace else and join up with another group. For the finale, the different groups (now 16 people each) get VIP invites to a secret after show party to finish up the night!

I headed down to Shoreditch to try it out for myself, and had a fun night out... it’s more fun and friends, than dating as you don’t really know what will happen next or who is in the group. It’s safe as well, with the groups getting pretty big and you never got stuck with the same people for too long.

A few days later, after discussing with the company in charge, we agreed to launch a pilot in Newcastle. I got 32 people together and set up the whole show, telling people to bring tubes of smarties to identify each other, and give them something to eat along the way. All in all, the response was great and set the path to promote it more heavily for the start of the following year.

It was at this time that the company name “Text-A” didn’t really gel with the current business activities, so myself and Cal Morton, who sharing the same office as me, started going through different domain names to come up with an alternative. After many hours, Cal casually mentioned TextYou, I checked and it was available, so we became TextYou – much to his regret later on!

After rolling out as much promotion for the event in February, including posters, (free) radio publicity, newspaper articles and getting my car branded up with TextYou written down the sides in great big letters, 16 people signed up for £10 each. Sadly that night was also the night of a big snowstorm and led to a wash out.

After analyzing the concept for a few more days, I decided to embark on a slightly refined version of something else I had seen from the company in London. I was trying to take the business to a higher level and felt that all the promoting work going in, for an event once a month, was too risky if the weather turned, or not enough people signed up.