South Africa’s largest online marketplace, bidorbuy, was named the winner in the Enterprise category in last week’s Clickatell Personalised Priority Messaging (PPM) awards held in the US. The winners were chosen by the judges for their innovative use of mobile messaging, to, amongst others, build close customer connections, develop effective internal communications and improve global safety and security.
Drawn from a range of sectors from emergency services to retail, the award-winners’ mobile message communications exhibited leading characteristics of successful PPM campaigns: making valuable use of the ubiquity, and push-messaging capability of the SMS protocol to deliver value for the message sender and the receiver as a result of message simplicity, contextual relevance and time-sensitivity.
“With a higher response rate than any other media type, SMS can be a highly effective method of communication to develop personal relationships with any business stakeholders – and the PPM awards prove that the days of traditional bulk mobile messaging are truly long gone,” said Pieter de Viliers, CEO of Clickatell. “We created the awards to highlight innovative ways companies are leveraging PPM to reach and influence their audience more effectively than with any other media type.”
Universal Alert, used by NASA and the U.S. Military to connect people during an emergency, received the public vote for its use of PPM. This Public Priority Award-winner, headquartered in New Jersey, tapped Clickatell’s mobile messaging gateway to simplify mobile group communications.
South Africa’s bidorbuy, won for using PPM to alert bidders in online auctions when they have been outbid, and Databuzz, a software consultancy company from Australia, won the Application Developers award for its companion service, fmSMS which allows users to send relevant SMS messages to a database of contacts on FileMaker.
