This week I’ve seen announcements about Office Depot launching a mobile campaign, Papa John’s now accepting pizza orders via text message and an Election 2008 website with mobile alerts from The Denver Post. Since I am a customer of all these companies I was excited to see mobile getting added to the mix. All three get Kudos for jumping into mobile. Papa John’s gets a big gold star for doing it so well.

Papa John’s Does it Right

I first saw this story when my super-dooper-story-spotter friend Angie Pedersen sent me the link to this article in Yahoo News. Score point 1 for Papa John’s PR department for doing and getting publicity about their new service. Companies who jump in later won’t be as likely to get the coverage; it simply won’t be newsworthy once everyone is doing it.

Later that same day I got an email from Papa John’s announcing the program. Score point 2 for their marketing department for announcing it to their customers. I mean really, I am on their email list, why not tell me about it?

But the biggest kudos they get is for making it so easy to understand. A customer like me goes to their desktop website and enters in up to four favorite orders. (Like when my daughter is home we always get a small cheese pizza plus our parent-size pepperoni. If she’s away we skip the cheese one.)

Then when we want to place one of these orders we just text Papa John’s “FAV1” or “FAV2”. Now neither one of us has to get off the couch to call in our order. (“If you order it, I’ll grab the door when it gets here.”) We don’t have to wait on hold to place the order. We don’t even have to tell our order to an obviously harried staff person who may or may not get it right. Plus we could even be out shopping or at a movie and decide to order pizza. With a very quick text message our pizza will arrive home moments after we do.

As soon as I’m done with this post I’m entering in my favorites so I’m ready to go. We may have to get pizza tonight just because I want to try this out. Way to go Papa John’s! (It looks so easy!)

Office Depot’s Campaign is Missing Something

This mobile marketing campaign came to my attention through the MobiAD News newsletter (which is excellent and I highly recommend subscribing to it). The Office Depot campaign seems promising with Office Depot mobile store locator, RSS feeds, text message coupons and offers, and mobile sweepstakes capabilities. Nice features.

But I don’t know where to find all this. The story in MobiAd News, an industry trade journal, just announces they have a program but doesn’t tell me how to participate. Admittedly, this is not what a trade journal would do, so I track to the main source – the press release on OfficeDepot.com. It says ”For more information on these new programs and services, including new sweepstakes and RSS registration, visit www.officedepot.com.”

At OfficeDepot.com I see nothing about the new Mobile features. There is no place to sign up to get these wonderful mobile coupons, the RSS feed has nothing to do with mobile unless I was doing it from my mobile device (but the press release said to go to the main website, so why would I be on my mobile device?).

I was also at my neighborhood Office Depot this week shopping for office supplies. I saw no signage about the mobile offerings. The sales people did not say anything to me about it. The weekly ad insert had nothing in it about the mobile campaign. Almost like the marketing department is working in a vacuum. As a customer I have no idea this is going on. I only know about it because I read the mobile trade publications.

This campaign can still be cool, they just need to get the word out to the customers.

The Denver Post Hides the Mobile Part

While reading my paper a couple weekends ago I spotted a full page ad for a new website by the paper called PoliticsWest.com. It is supposed to be a multimedia website that will share political information from both the left and the right. I would have skipped right by it except for the fact that I saw “Mobile Alerts” in the ad.

If I weren’t writing a book on mobile marketing I’m not sure that would have appealed to me, but it did. So I went to the site next time I was at my computer and remembered to bring the ad with me to my desk. (Note, this took 12 full days and if it weren’t for this blog post I would have tossed the ad a long time ago and skipped it all together.)

When I got there I couldn’t find the Mobile Alerts easily. I searched all over and finally after several minutes saw a footer text link to Mobile Alerts. Why did they bury it down there? It could be such a fun feature.

After clicking on the link I got a pop up that asked for my cell phone number and carrier but gave no sales pitch for me to sign up. What kind of alerts would I be getting? How many? What’s in it for ME? I didn’t sign up.