Here's an interesting image put together by A.X. Ian (@axian) showing the frequency of 'first tweets from my new tablet' in the 24 hours following Christmas eve. The iPad family is far in front. Microsoft's Surface barely registers:

Anecodtal data? For sure. Interesting nonethless.

Over the summer we rolled out recurring text messaging campaigns - a great tool that allows you to send the same message to a Group of Contacts at a given time. Recurring messages like these - which can be customized with frequency and duration options - are great for things you need to send out regularly, such as appointment or meeting reminders.

Last week we added a similar, but even more powerful feature - Drip Campaigns. If you've ever used email marketing software you might be familiar with 'Autoresponders.' That's what Drip Campaigns are like. Simply connect them to a Group of Contacts, set up a series of text messages to go out, each a different number of days after a Contact joins the Group and let us do the rest.

Login to your Club Texting account now to try out these awesome features!

Do you have a lot of incoming messages -- replies, Keyword opt-ins, and poll votes for example? We know that sorting through all of those messages can be a bit overwhelming. No longer!  We're excited to let you know that if you login to your Club Texting account right now, you'll be able to start creating folders and sorting messages into them. If you use the API, we'll be publishing documentation on how to create and manage folders ASAP!

Check them out now @ https://app.clubtexting.com/incoming-messages

When the Federal Election Commission permitted text-2-donate campaigns to extend beyond charity to the political sphere there was a bit of uncertainty about how it would work, how payments would settle...and most importantly, who would gain the most from it. It appears, as we head into the homestretch of the 2012 Election the winner of the text-2-donate channel is Obama in a landslide - we're talking 500:1

Last month, Obama’s campaign reported paying $84,655 in fees to m-Qube Group’s payvia mobile payment service, which manages text-to-donate programs for both presidential campaigns. Mitt Romney’s campaign paid just $1,152, Federal Election Commission records show. The fees — a percentage of the total amount raised via text — suggest that Obama outdid the former Massachusetts governor by a more than 500-to-1 ratio among texting donors.

Head over to Roll Call for lots of stats about this exciting new political tool. Visit Club Texting to learn more about Text Messaging For Political Campaigns.

According to the National Retail Federation the average American consumer will spend $80 this year on Halloween decorations, constumes and candy. Here's the key quote:

"Seven in 10 Americans (71.5%) will get into the haunting Halloween mood, up from 68.6 percent last year and the most in NRF’s 10-year survey history. Consumers are expecting to spend more too; the average person will spend $79.82 on decorations, costumes and candy, up from $72.31 last year, with total Halloween spending expected to reach $8.0 billion."

If you're in retail and you're already using SMS Marketing, these numbers should have you fired up. A given text message that will take pennies to send might lead to $80 in sales. Fire up those Halloween text messaging campaigns now! Haven't added text messaging to your marketing mix? No worries, Club Texting is free to try and getting started takes seconds. Try us now!

Want to use the Club Texting web application alongside our text messaging API? Using the web app in conjunction with our recently released Contact and Group APIs allow you to:

• Send messages inside the app or via API to your Contacts and/or Groups
• Add/Edit/Remove Contacts and Groups of Contacts via API

Ready to get started? We've got code samples for you in six popular languages:

• C#
• Java
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby

New to our text messaging APIs? Learn all about them @ the Club Texting Developer Center.

The folks at DemandForce have put together a nice infographic describing the benefits of integrating text messaging into your customer service channels. Take a look:

It looks like political text-to-donate has rapidly become a reality. Reuters reports that Americans can expect to see prominent call-to-actions in the next week or so:

In the coming days, voters are likely to start seeing a message on video screens at Obama rallies, at the end of ads or on fliers, encouraging them "to contribute $10 to Obama for America, text GIVE to 62262." The numbers spells out "OBAMA."

The campaign of Republican Mitt Romney, Obama's rival in the November 6 election, will soon start accepting donations as well, a campaign official said on Thursday. Its number is expected to be 466488 ("GOMITT"), already used to contact supporters by text.

It appears that the campaigns are wrapping up carrier negotiations:

Marking the beginning of what could be a revolution in U.S. campaign finance, the Obama campaign said on Thursday it is wrapping up agreements with Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel Corp, U.S. Cellular and T-Mobile USA - a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG - to open the floodgate for donations by text this week.

...

The Obama campaign said agreements with other phone companies - including AT&T Inc, the second-largest after Verizon - were anticipated "in the near future."

Read more at Reuters. Want to reach out to voters? Learn more about text messaging for political campaigns.

Before you head out for your summer weekend, check out this interesting story over at TheNextWeb about our global love for text messaging:

Acision, known for its mobile messaging solutions has conducted a study into the world of the SMS. It’s a technology that is more than twenty years old but it is still one of the most widely used communications methods in the world.

So why do we love SMS? Acision worked with Internet psychologist Graham Jones to look at survey results from the UK and find out why it’s so popular in the broadband era.
...

Over half of all respondents in the survey said they still need text or would be lost without it. It should be noted that there are many Internet communications services that can be linked to SMS too.

But the main reasons why we still use a technology this old, is likely to be related to reliability, or, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.

“The findings of this study show that text messaging remains popular, and I believe this comes down to trust and reliability. If a user sends a message via a social network, it may feel less immediate, and there are more technological hurdles which could hinder the delivery. Texting however often elicits an immediate response.

Jones also feels that the expansion of choice for text-based communications may be leading users back to the devil they know, “The introduction of a plethora of new messaging services may mean that people may get confused and fall back on the reliable SMS. Running in the back of the human mind is the need to do everything with the least possible effort, and we instinctively search for the easiest way to communicate. This is why we rely on and still love text messaging.”

Read more at TheNextWeb.

The always great Mobile Marketer has a piece up today, The Do's And Don't Of Mobile Marketing. Here's a taste:

Don’t chase so-called shiny objects while neglecting the products and services in mobile that work.
Companies should stop looking at what the latest trend is and figure out what medium works best for them.

“The objectives are to sell more product, and to drive engagement and loyalty,” Mr. Hasen said. “If you spend only against the newest products, you likely will only move your business backward.”

Read all of the do's and don'ts at Mobile Marketer.

The folks over at Business Insider have put a revent Velti study about smartphone ownership and voting behavior in an interesting context:

A recent poll conducted by Velti and Harris Interactive found that among iPhone and Android voters, Obama trounces Romney. Forty-nine percent of iPhone and Android users prefer Obama, compared with 31 percent that choose Romney. The gap remains across even the income divide — among voters making more than $75,000 that own an iPhone or Android, Obama still outpaces Romney by 10 points.

The Romney campaign is already on top of it:

In just the past month, the Romney campaign has taken two major steps to promote Mitt Romney on mobile devices: It launched a Facebook mobile advertising campaign and an ad blitz with Apple's mobile iAd service on the iPhone, iPad and iTouch devices.

Read more @ Business Insider

Interesting analysis on the intersection of traditional retail and mobile marketing from the other side of the pond:

The retail industry is experiencing a revolution on a par with the introduction of plastic payments in the 1950s or the launch of the internet and e-commerce in the early 1990s. The mobile device, a gadget we check more than 200 times every day, is changing the way we discover and buy products and services.

PayPal predicts that we won't have physical wallets by 2016. Visa Europe predicts that 50% of all its transactions will be made via mobile by 2020, and retailers are already reporting that up to 12% of their traffic comes from mobile channels (eDigitalResearch, May 2011). There is no doubt the market is buzzing with expectation and retailers are starting to catch-on.

Read more at The Guardian.

Last week CTIA released their twice-a-year statistical look at America's wireless industry. A couple of highlights:

• SMS sent and received: 2.304 trillion; 2010: 2.052 trillion (12 percent increase).
• Active smartphones and wireless-enabled PDAs: 111.5 million; Dec. 2010: 78.2 million (43 percent increase).

One figure that really stood out to us was that at 2.3 Trillion texts sent and recieved, SMS has surpassed minutes spent talking on the phone (2.2 Trillion minutes)!

Read more at CTIA

If you've logged into Club Texting today you've already seen the brand new release of our text message marketing software. Some great new features include:

• XLS/XLSX Uploading - No more CSVs (unless you want to use a CSV)
• Polling And Voting - We've got a great new tool to help you build and run SMS Text-2-Vote campaigns!
• Updated Contacts - Sort, segment and browse your contacts with ease
• New APIs - Manage your contacts and Groups via the API
• New Interface - We've cleaned up Club Texting's UI so it's even easier to use!

Login now to see what's new!

We rolled out some new APIs this morning - which allow you to manage your Club Texting account's Contacts & Groups. Want to learn more? Check out the documentation here. The new APIs allow you to

• Create A Contact / Group
• Update A Contact / Group
• Delete A Contact / Group
• Get All Contacts / Group
• Get One Contact / Group

We've also got PHP code samples available; other languages will be updated soon! Get started with our text messaging API now.

Cindy Krum of MarketingLand has a great, thorough column exploring the pros and cons of running your mobile website on your primary domain or on a subdomain a la m.domain.com:

The Bing statement about mobile SEO last month, which followed Google’s announcement about the new smartphone crawler in December, has sparked some discussion, and given mobile SEO some time in the spotlight.

The debate has been interesting, but all of it seems to focus a bit too much on the wrong question. The search engines all emphatically instruct webmasters not to make decisions purely on the SEO implications, but to also consider the user experience.

While I always take this suggestion with a very large and suspicious grain of salt, I do think it is important to consider the users who access the site….as well as the marketing managers who have to promote the mobile content and the developers who maintain the site, (and who will readily tell you that they almost always get the short end of the stick, whether you are talking about mobile design and development, or just about anything else … poor misunderstood souls!).

Ms. Krum follows this intro with tables of pros/cons for same URLs/mobile URLs from the perspective of marketers, developers, SEOs and users. Read the article now.

The folks at MarketingCharts highlighted an interesting report from Millenial Media detailing just how mobile-dependent basketball fans were this March Madness:

Partnering with the IAB to commission a Harris Interactive survey of more than 2,000 US adults, the report finds that 88% of self-identified passionate fans used their mobile devices for an NCAA tournament-related activity and that 40% specifically purchased an application related to the tournament. Among device owners who followed the tournament, the leading activities were to check scores (48%), read news about teams and players (25%), check brackets (23%), and watch game highlights (20%).

Read more here.

There's an interesting opinion piece up today at Mobile Marketer - here's the gist of it:

Apple's iPhone taught consumers that sharing information about their location and other data about themselves via a mobile device can be fun and beneficial, opening the door for marketers to target consumers via mobile. However, with many brands still lacking a robust mobile strategy, marketers are looking for the next big advancement that could pave the way for the channel to reach critical mass.

“Given how important the iPhone was – and is – to defining the modern smartphone experience, it would be difficult to name any developments that came after that wouldn't trace its origins back to the iPhone,” said Chia Chen, New York-based North American mobile practice lead at Digitas.

So far, but such a long way to go:

However, despite all the advances in mobile marketing, there are still a large number of marketers doing very little or nothing in the channel. Since this has nothing to with the need for better technology or analytics, mobile marketing is likely to not make another big advance until marketers make it a bigger priority.

Read more at Mobile Marketer.

While the entire tech world comprehends the news that Facebook is buying photo-sharing app Instagram, check out this sharp analysis from Dan Frommer:

Pretty sweet deal for the Instagram team. But it’s also a brilliant move for Facebook.

Why?

• Not only does it now own an insanely fast-growing (and arguably, the most exciting) social network…
• …And the (tiny) team that built it.
• But Facebook just took down its no. 1 threat, too.

 

Read more at SplatF.

We wanted to point your way to a great post over at MarketingProfs, Four Ways to Use Mobile at Your Next Tradeshow Booth. Our favorite tip?

2. Allow attendees to use their own devices to interact with your content

What better way to get people engaged with your content and your offering than by enabling them to use their own smartphones and tablets to interact directly with your booth?

Incorporate more traditional mobile marketing tactics, such as polls or text-to-win contests, with a custom-branded app. Give your booth a unique check-in so that attendees can share their experience via social media. Stay active on social media yourself by monitoring event hashtags on Twitter, for example, or even creating one of your own.

Find all the tips at MarketingProfs. Visit Club Texting to learn more about text message marketing for trade shows.