SmartMoney’s Print2Mobile2Email2Web

In a curious bit of digital hopscotch, SmartMoney Magazine tries to tie together print, mobile, email and Web in the next issue. A new Text4More program will ask readers of a magazine-within-a-magazine feature on retirement to use SMS for more information. Sending “Retire” to SMONEY (766639) will prompt you for an email address, where SmartMoney will send a PDF of more content sponsored by Genworth Financial. That PDF in turn will have active Web links to even more information online. Is this a tortured way to integrate platforms? Hard to say. In the mobile world of SMS marketers, print is notoriously poor at pushing people to a short code. TV, outdoor advertising and radio are much stronger. The argument is that you can respond to an ad or promotion immediately, without a need for email access, and the content gets delivered to you to read at your leisure on the screen.

Whether such a scheme works with specific ads and editorial remains to be seen. Cumulatively, a program like this can be helpful to a publication that is trying to build a mobile database. For instance, when we texted SmartMoney it was too early to get the email link from the upcoming issue, but the company informed us that we now were enrolled in SmartMoney “club,” which we imagine involves subsequent text messages. You can opt out with the standard return message of “stop,” of course, but over time SmartMoney could build a new database of cell phone numbers it can hit with links to content, promotional offers, etc. In fact, some publishers with active text alert campaigns are using the regular text messages as an ad platform, selling small text ads into the bottom of each alert. Ultimately, anything that helps publishers secure another touch point to their readers is a help.