Mediaburst's disaster recovery notification by text

I’ve long been a private fan of Mediaburst’s Disaster Recovery text service (“Business Continuity Tool”). While it’s effectively more or less exactly the same as any other enterprise-class messaging solution (with a nice web interface), I really like the branding.

It’s all too easy to assume that ‘normob’ (normal mobile users) ‘get’ the fact that they can use text messaging for a whole host of possibilities. Alas, normobs are generally far too busy getting on with their own business to worry about what they can do with text messaging.

I think it’s important to come up with products and services that IT directors can ‘buy’ easily. Selling a messaging gateway is fine, but if it requires the IT director to knock up his own project to create a web interface so that they can text their employees easily… well… it’s far too easy to put that project to the bottom of the ‘todo’ pile.

I remember being sat in front of clients eager to buy mobile services and was staggered when, instead of selling them a mobile gateway or mobile function, I got a brilliant reaction from our ‘Mobile Connect’ service. I used to explain that it was “like hotmail, but for text messages” because most 55 year old normobs understood that. We had much more success selling services, rather than just the gateway interfaces.

Case in point: Your huge primary exchange server farm goes down. Now, you’ve got a backup that will let your 4,000 employees carry on with business come Monday morning. But how do you notify them of the special address to use temporarily? Email them? No. That’s not quite going to work… but you can text them. Which is exactly what Mediaburst client, Davis Langdon are doing. Nice.