A Fiver a Friend
12 November 2009

Huddersfield Town FC's manager Lee Clark is the voice behind a RelayStation broadcast to season ticket holders today telling them about a new ticket offer … bring along your friends to the next match for just a fiver to help fill the stadium and give us great atmosphere. The broadcast was timed ahead of the club's match against Wycombe Wanderers, which is dedicated to the charity Help for Heroes.

A significant number of flood risk management schemes have been completed by the Environment Agency in England since 2007, protecting thousands of homes in the most vulnerable areas. Some of these schemes – such as those around Hexham in Northumberland – have already been put to the test.

A number of other steps have also been taken. The government has set up a Flood Forecasting Centre, which will bring together the expertise of the Met Office and the Environment Agency to deliver earlier and more accurate flood warnings. When disaster struck in 2007, many were unaware that they lived in flood risk areas and were certainly not aware of the information available to them. But since then a further 124,000 people have registered with the Environment Agency's free flood warning service, bringing the total registered to 433,000. In the three years to 2010/11, government will invest over £2bn in flood risk management, resulting in the protection of an additional 145,000 homes.

According to research firm IDC, SMS campaigns that use common short codes (the five- or six-digit number to which consumers send text messages in order to get information from a company or to participate in a contest) can result in response rates of up to 10 percent. This compares with response rates of three to five percent for email, and less than one-tenth of a percent for direct mail.

Despite the mature state of the SMS market in Western markets, worldwide messaging revenues are set to almost double by 2013 according to a new report from Portio Research. Portio's research suggests that SMS will continue to be the cash cow of mobile data revenues for some time to come. Portio says that traffic volumes and revenues continue to confound predictions and are expected to keep growing throughout the global economic downturn. Indeed the whole mobile messaging industry, worth $130 billion in 2008, is predicted to be worth $224 billion by 2013. The report ventures that there is nothing likely to stop continued growth of mobile messaging in the short term, driven by a cocktail of ubiquitous SMS, media rich MMS, and enterprise based mobile email.

With France caught up in the energy crush over Russian gas, energy giant EDF is using text broadcasting to send messages to the mobiles of consumers asking them to minimise the use of gas at peak times. With the draw on the national grid at historic levels, consumers are also being asked to be prudent with the use of electricity after 8pm.