ShoutNow is Group Voice Messaging for the Rest of Us
It’s an idea so simple that you’ll wonder why it isn’t already used by everyone from your mom to your best friend. Go to a website, create a contact list, record a voice message, send it to all of your contacts in the list. You pay by the minute and the number of calls, but the service is not at all costly. Sending a one minute message to ten people costs less than a dollar. Sending a message to 150 people costs less than $10. Longer messages cost a little more, but not much.
ShoutNow is an Indianapolis-based start-up that is currently in beta, but will be launching soon. They are even developing an iPhone application which I find especially intriguing, because the service requires set-up through a web browser. This brings the portability and simplicity of Twitter to a voice application. For all of those people who use their phones to talk to people rather than as a way to send and receive messages, you now have a way to reach them.
It doesn’t take long to realize that you could use this service in so many interesting ways. Your wife is having a baby and you want to get the word out to everyone, but you really don’t want to make 50 phone calls, nor do you want to slight one relative or friend over another. Your contact list could be set up in advance, and you could take just a few minutes to blast your voice message out to everyone at once.
ShoutNow is scaled for individuals, but it can also be used for business applications as long as you follow the rules. That means you have an existing relationship with customers, have permission to call, or you are a not-for-profit institution. From a marketing perspective, ShoutNow provides a great way to cut through the clutter of email and get on someone’s radar. The negative side of this service is that some people will use it to pitch products, when in essence, ShoutNow is a relationship-building tool. Proceed with caution and use ShoutNow to start conversations, and you will make a wise investment. Use ShoutNow to generate spam, and you may find yourself blocked from calling a valued customer.
The Twilio web sevice api makes it relatively easy to integrate web apps with telephone services, enabling applications like ShoutNow to rapidly come to market. I will be keeping an eye out for ShoutNow and similar applications that bring Web 2.0 principles to the telephone, but I can use your help. Do you know about other applications like ShoutNow? I’d like to hear about them!
Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com
Share this post/Save for reference
Comments
One Response to “ShoutNow is Group Voice Messaging for the Rest of Us”
Leave a Reply
July 30th, 2009 @ 6:38 pm
[...] This post was Twitted by twilio [...]