Cell phone users, in the United States alone, send over 4.1 billion text messages daily, double the amount of messages sent last year, according to CTIA’s bi-annual report. Wow!
When people speak about killer mobile apps, it usually involves the Iphone; however, text message still reigns supreme. Text messaging is available on all cell phones, is growing, and is used more frequently than voice.
Have you considered integrating text messaging and voice in your marketing strategy? We’re happy to show you how quickly and simply you can implement mobile into your strategy.
PS-We’re launching our web-based software for the wine industry soon. Email us for a sneak peak. In the meantime, learn more about mobile marketing at our dedicated blog: http://thumbprintsnow.tumblr.com
Earlier this year, we attended the Boston Wine Expo, where there were over 1,500 wines to taste. As novice drinkers, navigating the massive space and figuring out which wines to taste were overbearing. We found ourselves asking other event visitors, “Which was your favorite wine at the event?” or “Which wines do you recommend I taste next?”
With the Winedrip Wall, instead of asking one person, we can interact with and ask the same questions to everyone.
The Winedrip Wall allows you to turn any projector, TV screen, or monitor into an interactive, community-powered stream of discussion and wine reviews. The service is engaging and a great way to eavesdrop or share tasting notes, tips or start discussions.
The service is free; you do not need a pre-existing Winedrip account, and you can participate using Twitter, the web, or texting to 94637 (WINES).
Not only is the Winedrip Wall great for wine festivals but also for virtual wine tastings, multi-chapter groups, and retail stores who want to enhance their customers’ shopping experience.
View wine activity on Winedrip and Twitter
We have many improvements in the pipeline to customize and maximize interaction with an audience during and after events. Your feedback will influence the direction we develop. Please let us know if you encounter glitches or have suggestions.
Big changes to the home page—You can now post comments to the wine feed. You’ve taught us that having a discussion around wine is much more valuable than solely sharing reviews.
(For those new to wine, this will be an simple and easy way to learn about wine from the community.)
In addition, we’ve made a few enhancements to help you share information with friends:
- Vanity URLs for your personal and group pages.
- Share wine pages that you fancy by email and social bookmarks with friends
- Direct your blog or website audience to your Winedrip profile with a widget or button
How can we make this type of feed more valuable? Are there other services with which we should integrate? Let us know.
We love to simplify design. In an effort to make the search text box more prominent we’ve aligned it with the logo to fall in the initial sight line.
Tell us what you think.
We’ve released the foundation of our group section.
Groups are a simple way to share wine recommendations with friends or around a common theme. The structure of groups is intentionally very simple—no bells and whistles. Enhancements to groups will focus on the mission to help you receive recommendations from friends in real time.
We’ve made a few updates.
Enhancements:
- Improved browsing with guided navigation
- Identify the source of a review whether from text message, email, or web
- in-line editing of wine reviews and ratings on wine detail page
- Flag content
- Receive email notification when someone follows you
- lots of behind the scene enhancements for future product development
We hope this update improves your experience. We welcome your comments and feedback.
Hope everyone in the States loosened their belts after a wonderful Thanksgiving, and everyone else around the world had a great weekend.
This was a slow week with the holidays in the US; however, you can expect continue functionality and UI enhancements and bug fixes. Expect a few bigger announcements in the coming weeks.
Enhancements:
- improved wine page URLs for SEO
- guided navigation for wine results. as you make narrow your selection, the universe of results are recalculated and the results are automatically displayed
Bug fixes:
- auto-sizing for profile images
Kampai!
Our method is similar to sending wines through Twitter. Send your SMS to WINES (94637) in this order: wine name, vintage year or NV, a 1-5 rating, your tasting note.
The only constraint is that we ask that you send a wine name followed by a vintage year or NV, for non-vintage wines.
We have big plans to improve our heuristics as you post more wines from SMS.
We’re very excited about this one! You can text message wines to your account by sending a message to WINES (94637).
To set up your account:
1. Go to Settings and click the Mobile tab.
2. Enter 1 + your 10 digit phone number without spaces.
3. We’ll send you a text message with a verification code.
You can see the commands on the SMS help page.
How do you want to use text message to improve your wine experience?
T-mobile users: Winedrip is waiting on approval. We’ll let you know when we receive the green light.
International users: We have a ways to go to get text message up and running. Which countries should we focus on first?
