Give me your phone number and I’ll text you about my brand. You can’t text back and you’re going to have a heck of a time passing it on. Who forwards text messages?
Sound interesting? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Now imagine that I’m a Mets fan. (Ok, so I am… but it’s really kind of unbelievable given the way things have gone, so you might have to just imagine it…) I don’t go to games by myself. In fact, I’d say that there are less than 10 people that I’ve been to 90% of my Met games with. It’s the same people I chat on IM with, e-mail articles to, and watch games at bars with. In fact, a bunch of us got a six pack of tickets for this season, so we’ll be at the games, needing to coordinate how people are getting there, how we’re getting the tickets, etc.
Sounds like a GroupMe chat in the making—but shouldn’t the Mets be part of that conversation? Don’t they want to know that four of us are showing up to games. Don’t they want to drop their offers, announcements, tips, trivia, etc right into our group? Isn’t the holy grail of the social media marketing world the conversation? How can you market in the conversation when you’re just talking to one person at a time?
GroupMe is changing all that. Now, you can start a sponsored conversation around the brands and events you love, and opt in to receiving relevant messages right in your group. So now when the Mets tell my group that it’s going to be Keith Hernandez Bobblehead day, we’re jumping right into “That’s cool… let’s go to Bobblehead Day” and “Yeah, I’m free then…who else is in?”
I’m very excited about how often this team rolls out new features, tests new models and just generally moves forward. This is a very interesting model for brand engagement. Agencies and brands, take note!