Allison at Qtags wrote to me recently asking me to check out her new service for advertisers. Not being all that text savvy, I didn’t get it at first. Now, I do.
Her July 21st post helps explains the concept.
The goal of qtags is to help an advertiser’s customers more easily remember them, and to more easily find them online.
Here is how the qtags ‘text to web’ service works —
1) Advertiser chooses a keyword & displays it on any media (print, radio, billboards, in-space, on-pack, on apparel, at events..).
2) Interested viewer / listener / reader texts the keyword to 78247
3) Texter gets a 160 charact txt message from advertiser & a web-link is placed in the texter’s inbox. The web-link takes the texter directly to the appropriate page on-line, and can be updated by the advertiser anytime, real-time.
Yikes, it’s Cue Cat for cell phones:-)
That’s not the first time I’v seen a cue cat comparision – but truly, qtags is very different. [Disclosure: I’m Allison Gower, one of the founders of qtags] Here are two critical elements that differentiate qtags from cue cat.
1 – qtags does not provide user information to advertisers or any other party. The purpose is to help people remember things they like, not to collect data or be added to mailing lists. 2 – the text converts to a web-link. We store a user’s links all together, in their secure qtags inbox – so it is an easy reference library. A user can view links through inbox, or can choose to send them through RSS to any desktop.
A Big Day For qtags
Thursday was a big day for my client qtags.
First, Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek interviewed company co-founder and president Allison Gower.
They spoke for about 30 minutes about Allison’s blog, the lessons she’s learned from blogging as a startu…
qtags vs. cue cat
Not surprisingly, there have been a few comparisons of qtags to cue cat. (see AdPulp for one of them). I’d like to quickly point out two critical ways in which qtags is different from cue cat: 1 – qtags are