When I tell people we do mobile phone voting, a common response is “Oh, you mean text voting like on X-Factor”. I then have to explain that no, we don’t use SMS for voting, we use the mobile internet instead.
Given how widespread and well understood SMS voting is, why did we chose to use the mobile internet at Live Talkback? It turns out there’s several advantages over an SMS-based solution:
- Speed. Using the internet we can provide beautiful real-time display of the results as people are voting. Not only does that provide a “wow” factor, but it encourages more people to get their phones out and start voting. In contrast, it can take up to 72 hours for an SMS to be received.
- Cost. Sending an SMS always costs someone - often the sender, sometimes the recipient. While people might be happy to spend 40p or more to vote for Joe McElderry, most people won’t do so to vote on your poll. Mobile internet is much much cheaper, and frequently free for the user.
- User experience. We care about making things that are beautiful and fun to use. With Live Talkback all the relevant polls and choices appear right on the phone, making it fun and easy to vote. Contrast that with SMS voting where the choices and number to text has to be continually repeated - and then remembered and entered on the phone.
Does this mean we’ll never use SMS at Live Talkback? Not at all - in fact one of the features we’re looking at right now is using SMS to help new users get to started easily, since entering a URL can be fiddly on some phones. But as always, the reason for using it will be to give our users an even better experience when they use Live Talkback.
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