Yesterday I found myself sitting at home, contemplating life’s big problems. No, not how to find happiness or balance work and family or reach spiritual enlightenment. No, those are trivial dalliances. Yesterday I was contemplating how I was going to get over this super-duper combination of sinus infection and bronchitis that I’m currently suffering from while simultaneously finding the time and energy to create the most fantastic duck costume ever…by Friday. (And you thought your life was hard.)

Of course the best way to do this would be to

1. Go to a Doc in the Box and be diagnosed with near-death syndrome.
2. Visit a pharmacy and pick up my prescribed cocktail of antibiotics and cough syrup to be taken twice a day for four days.
3. Awake from my haze just in time to rent a giant duck suit from a costume shop so I can waddle my way to a Halloween party.

But no. That would be the easy way out. Instead I sat on the floor amongst fabric and foam watching someone who has even bigger problems: The Starter Wife.

If you don’t know, The Starter Wife is a television show enjoying its second season on USA. It’s about a woman who finds herself suddenly ex-wifed in the glamorous yet vicious world of the Hollywood elite. It airs on Friday nights, but luckily for me it reruns on Sundays. So while I’m surrounded by voluminous bolts of brown feathery fur and an incomprehensible sewing pattern, I get to watch the mayhem that ensues after Molly’s journal has been stolen and all of her frenemies’ secrets are leaked to a gossip website.

About fifteen minutes and seventeen stickpins into the show, I look up just in time to see “Text SOMETHING to SOME NUMBER” disappear from the corner of the screen. After I angrily yelled at the television, I began monologuing/ad-libbing from Air2Web’s Best Practices of Mobile Marketing:

If you’re going to promote a mobile campaign on television, leave the keyword and short code on the screen long enough for me to read/remember it. Grr. I mean, quack. Whatever.

Twenty minutes later though, USA promoted the keyword and short code again, offering a chance to win a pair of Tom Ford sunglasses.

(Also from the Best Practices: The more times/places you promote your mobile campaign, the better. And, boost participation with incentives such as coupons, rebates, or prizes.)

So as I dug through the pile of fabric, paper, and stickpins to find my trusty RAZR, I said to myself, “SUN to USATXT, SUN to USATXT, SUN to USATXT.” (USA has obviously read the Best Practices guide which says to not only to use short keywords but also to use a different keyword for each venue/event, hence SUN for Sunday’s show and probably FRI for Friday’s.)

After I dutifully texted USA, I received this response:

TSW: Thx! U have 1
sweeps entry. Std msg
chrgs aply. 4 rules go 2
starterwife.usanetwork.co
m. Enter again nxt wk! 1
entry/wk. Want more?
Rply WIFE Txt STOP 2end.

Of course I want more, I thought. I’m Miss Mobile! W-I-F-E.

(By the way, that response followed 4 guidelines from the BP: 1. Always state “standard rates apply” in the initial message. 2. Provide the legal rules for sweepstakes on a website. 3. Ask users if they’d like to opt-in for future messages. 4. Give instructions for opting out in the first message.)

In response to WIFE, I received this message:

TSW: Thanks! You’ll get 5+
msg/week including exclusive
msgs for Verizon users.
Std msg chrgs apply. Reply
with WET if ur on the East
Coast, WPT if not.

I replied with WET and assumed that I’ll be reminded to watch the show a few hours earlier than the folks on the west coast. Pretty cool, I thought as I finally began cutting out the pattern shapes.

As Molly’s hour-long saga wrapped up and was put on hold for another week, I realized that mine was just beginning. After six hours, I was sicker than ever and I still had a twenty piece fabric puzzle waiting to be stitched and stuffed into the likeness of a human-sized Mallard hen. But at least thanks to The Starter Wife, I might win a pair of fancy sunglasses to wear with it.

Tags: best practices, contest, keyword, mobile coupon, mobile marketing, mobile sweepstakes, opt-in, opt-out, short code, text, The Starter Wife, USA, Verizon

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 1:59 pm and is filed under In the News, Miss Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.