plusCONNECT incorrectly identified by 3UK shortcode whois
I called mobile service provider plusCONNECT this afternoon in relation to a story I’m doing on mobile music.
A friend of mine sent me a Facebook message asking for me to download music from his friend’s unsigned band — and to do so (and pay) via text message. Neat. Social networking and mobile at it’s finest. I wanted to do a post about it. And I shall.
First though — who is the owner of the shortcode 82822 mentioned in the Facebook message, I wondered?
I did a query over at the 3UK shortcode lookup service and found that plusCONNECT was listed as the shortcode owner. I was reasonably confident that plusCONNECT were simply the ‘aggregator’ and that it would be another company behind the service.
So, I phoned plusCONNECT to find out.
A nice lady answered and I stated I had a press enquiry. She put me through to a chap who answered breathlessly. I explained my enquiry, said I was from SMS Text News. I expected a helpful response.
No dice.
The chap replied to my enquiry with words to the effect of ‘Er, yeah, er I think that is our shortcode but, yeah, I don’t know who uses it.’
I explained I wanted to give the client some promotion here on the site as I reckoned it was a smart service. But still the chap wasn’t interested.
‘Er,’ he told me, ‘Our operations manager is away at the moment. Could you call back on Monday?’
‘Well, no,’ I responded, ‘I have to publish today.’
Silence. No help. No use. Useless.
You’d think the chap could have got off his arse, loaded up the spreadsheet and queried ‘82822’ to find out who THEIR client was, so I could put their name in lights. He seriously couldn’t be bothered.
I’m rather surprised. Well, super-surprised, actually. You’d think they’d want to help out clients.
Anyway I did some googling and found that it looks as though their client using the shortcode is TuneTribe. I’m pretty impressed with what they’re doing. I whacked off a text to the shortcode as instructed in my friend’s Facebook message and, sure enough, I got a text back with a redeemable code at TuneTribe.com. Nice.
No thanks to the unhelpful chaps at plusCONNECT at all.
Any readers worked with plusCONNECT at all?
See Grant’s comment below. The 3UK shortcode whois was incorrect and plusCONNECT don’t work with TuneTribe at all ergo the above post is irrelevant.
