Know Now, Know Later…justKnow

I don’t get it…CTIA has nothing mobile on their site, even though they are ALL about wireless/mobile. Nothing on their contact us page, no way to put directions to their office on mobile phones, no way to put their event listing on mobile phones as bite-size SMS reminders, no convenient mobile links to their news or articles (unlike the New York Times), no send to phone capability on their event calendar, THE most obvious place to put justKnow and Send to Phone Plus to make that page STICKY…

Curious. justKnow could solve this utter lack of a mobile component (and then some!) in about…5 minutes flat. They could try it out for FREE, even, just like everyone else! I just don’t get it, but I hope CTIA justKnows.

Just noticed NYT has just added send-to-phone on all their articles. Too bad they didn’t get justKnow’s Send to Phone+. They could have added export to calendar, send to mobile and telephone, and send to email — for immediate (know now) and scheduled (know later) sends — all in one easy and inexpensive service.

Just posted a comment on the Bits Blog:

I got on facebook primarily because a few friends were bugging me to get on it. I did it to appease them, but also to research it from a marketing and advertising perspective (admission, I’m in the industry). A few weeks into it, I decided to populate it with more info about myself since more friends were finding me. The moment I said I was “in a relationship”, up popped an ad for engagement rings. Targeted? Yup, I’d say. The better question is its relevance.

Truth is, though I’m in the ad and related industries, I’m not much of fan of how advertising works…in the traditional sense. In this still new world of ecommerce and ad-based internet business models, I’m not too impressed that people are still thinking inside the “old” ad box. There’s a completely new mechanism to have very precisely targeted and relevant ads through a service called justKnow, which, among many other things, tidily bridges internet and mobile through Self-Direct Marketing which is non-intrusive (http://justknow.com/media). Still, it’s up to people to think outside the box to feed it the information/ads that people want/might find useful and yes, relevant.

If I’m on a real estate site, looking for rentals or homes in any particular area, it’d be extremely useful and relevant to have ads from local merchants in that area…for me and for those merchants. As well, it would be relevant to see ads from moving companies that service that area or global relocation services. justKnow is the mechanism that lets you precisely target those kind of relevant ads, but again, it’s up to people to get out of the mindset of blanketing everyone with irrelevant, annoying ads. That kind of thinking is what I don’t like about my industry. Instead of pure numbers and ad sales, let’s make sure it benefits everyone, from the end user, to the merchant and to the community in which they both live and thrive.

According to a recent article on iLoopMobile, about 15-18% of mobile phone users have phones that are capable of accessing the Web. About 5% of them actually do access mobile Websites. Compare that to about 99% of all mobile phones having SMS/text messaging capability, with 87% of those mobile phone owners having sent and/or received a text message. Talk about having a much broader reach! justKnow, which gives sites Send to Phone+ capability (in simplest terms, letting visitors send themselves site info to their mobiles via SMS), is faster, cheaper, easier and far more effective a foothold in mobile marketing than doing a mobile Website. Self-direct marketing is not instrusive and is totally spam-free. These factors are vitally important to mobile users who are extremely protective of sharing/giving out their mobile numbers.

doApps.com mylighter flashlight iPhone app

Nevermind SMS, wow…iPhone Apps RAWK! We lost all power in our building the other day, which meant no elevators, because losing all power meant not even the backup emergency generators were working. Not good news being on the 22nd floor and needing to get out of the building to get on WiFi to work! iPhone to the rescue; downloaded this neat (and very funny) flashlight app, plunged ourselves into blackout conditions in the stairwell, and then descended 22 floors (note: we didn’t use this particular flashlight setting, but it gave us a good laugh) to daylight, coffee, and WiFi. Life is good. Life is funny! Yes, even when we had to CLIMB 22 flights of stairs several hours later…

Cool! We totally forgot about it, but we used justKnow to remind ourselves that The Soloist premieres today…we scheduled the reminder a few months back, and of course, justKnow worked like a charm…got the email, the text message (SMS), and the phone call (we’d already exported it to iCal and Outlook calendars). Yes, now we’ll go see the movie! Talk about a marketing call-to-action that works. It’d be cool if every Website I visited had justKnow on their site. I could just send myself the info I wanted right at that moment, or set up a time to have it sent when I KNOW I’d be able to make good use of the info later.

Interesting to see who has send-to-phone functionality on their sites and who doesn’t these days. Since I’ve been tracking it (unscientifically, for about a year or so), not much has changed. Yahoo! offers it on their local maps pages. Starbucks uses it for their store locator, but it’s pretty buried. Evite has send-to-phone for their e-invitations. Yelp and Citysearch both have it, as does cars.com. Considering that SMS/text messaging is so prevalent, useful and ubiquitous, it’s curious that not many Websites give their users an easy way to “take” little parcels of their info to their mobile phones except a few handful. Self-Direct Marketing (what we call this transfer of information made by the user) is a powerful way to jump into mobile marketing.

That’s the funny thing about start-ups and writing a blog for it…you wait for some incredibly enlightened, intelligent, lengthy post to be your very first one, and then, wham!…a year could go by. But blogs aren’t always about lengthy, intelligent posts (yep, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it). Among many other things, it’s also about SEO, sharing info, throwing quick ideas out there and seeing what sparc’s up. That’s what SparcPlug is about…sparc’ing ideas. And that’s what justKnow is about…empowering knowledge by sharing succinct pieces of information, not just among people but among the applications and devices we rely on most and use daily. I mean, just look at twitter…140 characters making up a succinct piece of info that’s important to someone. So, here we go…diving in.