Toffeemen texts keep fans sweet

Everton drives football collaboration with SMS

Premier League football club Everton - aka 'the Toffeemen' – is offering its fans better interaction with the club and each other, through a short message service (SMS) deployment.

Partnering with mobile marketing provider Mobile Media Production, mobile advertising firm ikan-media, and web comms provider Oxygen8 Communications, Everton are now using the Shoutlive.NET platform for the SMS service rollout.

Everton's media and communications head, Mark Rowan, said, “We wanted to be able to utilise the latest mobile technology to enhance interaction with our fans and provide them with compelling mobile content that makes them feel more closely connected to the club."

Everton already delivers content over its mobile platform, but saw an opportunity with the SMS initiative. The club has done preliminary rollouts and is planning to launch further services, said Everton mobile manager Kathy Smith.

Asked why Everton chose Shoutlive, Smith said: "We've been looking for a tech service like this for a while, because we know there's a market out there for fans to use competitions, voting and the like, but we hadn't found a good fit on the maturity of the systems out there and also on pricing.

"The first SMS promotion we did was through our monthly official club magazine, The Evertonian, to win a signed football shirt from one of our away matches. We have a text comments service that had been running for a couple of weeks. The more experience we get with the services, the more we can integrate further facilities for our fans," said Smith.

The text comments come through to the Shoutlive content management system (CMS), provided by Oxygen8, "which we can monitor through an inbox and can approve quickly," explained Smith.

Everton already has Bluetooth connectivity at the ground which the club uses to send out free content along with partner advertising. "We're also moving into putting applications through Apple's App Store for iPhone. We'll have a game to be launched on iPhone in the next few weeks," added Smith.

Everton also has a WAP site and sells mobile content like goal replays, team sheets for the upcoming match, text alerts, ring tones and animated wallpapers.

The text services Everton is currently offering are separate from its other IT infrastructure. "The CMS at the back-end of our web site is managed by Rippleffect, but we run the messaging service on match days and can refer over to the web site if needs be. It's better for us to have a separate entity," pointed out Smith.

The underlying network infrastructure supporting Shoutlive.NET is being provided by voice and web comms provider, Oxygen8 Communications.

Smith said that Everton is thinking of running a Man of the Match text-in, which the club would flash on the big screen at its Goodison Park stadium around the 85th minute of a match, inviting fans to text who they think is the man of the match. "Then we'd announce it over the PA," she added.