So without further ado, I’m pleased to tell you that the Global Messaging Awards are now open for entries until 31st May 2010. If you enter before 28 April, it’s £95 to enter, between 29th April and 17th May, it’s £145 to enter and after that until the closing date, it’s £245. So get your skates on if you’d like to take advantage of the early bird entry fees.
With ten different categories of awards this year, anyone involved in the messaging community will find something that they can enter. To enter just visit the awards web site awards.160characters.org, choose the right category and complete the form. The 2010 categories are:
- Messaging Infrastructure or Platform
- Messaging Application or Service: Public Sector
- Messaging Application: Business
- Messaging Application: Consumer
- Innovation in Messaging
- Best new Marketing Campaign Using Messaging
- Mobile Financial Services Solution
- Messaging Application or Service: Social Use
- Effective Use of Mobile Ticketing
- Telematics/Telemetry/M2M Messaging
I’m particularly interested to see what the entries will look like for the ‘Best New Marketing Campaign using Messaging’ and the best Consumer Messaging Application.
SMS is still alive and kicking and is still on the increase. It seems that with each new mobile technology that’s adopted, the volume of messaging just increases. Which is fantastic news. It might not be the sexiest technology out there, but it’s very convenient and it works on every phone. I think there’s a lot of mileage yet in SMS based services and marketing. And no, I’m not talking about sending bulk SMS advertising – I’m talking intelligent use of SMS. Let’s see who enters!
Not every mobile user is able or wants to access an App Store and the savvy mobile companies realise that to reach out to the mass market text messaging is still the way to go. Whether it is to offer bank account updates; to pay for content; to allow machines to ‘talk’ to machines; or to deliver business messages to your team or customers - SMS is the method of choice. And that doesn’t include the messages sent to friends and family.
In fact, the Mobile Data Association recently reported that the UK sent an average of 11million messages every hour - an increase of 23% on 2008 and an increase of 70% in just two years.
This year’s awards are once again organised by 160 Characters and the awards ceremony will be held during Informa’s Global Messaging Congress, held at the Victoria Park Plaza Hotel in London.
The panel of judges will be headed up by Mike Grenville, CEO of 160 Characters and is made up of industry experts who all have experience of how to put SMS to best use.
The final closing date for entries is 31st May 2010.
More information on the awards can be found here - awards.160characters.org
