"Help" means help. "Stop" means stop. "Logomachy" means ???

My family likes to watch "Dancing With The Stars". One of the fun things about the show is that you can vote for your favorite dance couple by SMS text. The way that it works is that you send the text "vote" to the short code that represents your favorite couple. So for instance send "vote" to 3405 like the following:

A few seconds after sending your vote, you get back a response saying your vote has been received.

Most TV viewers would probably leave it at that. But since this blog is about "mobile", and our topic is really about SMS, I decided to explore the limits of this service and test what other keywords are supported by the "Dancing" short codes.

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) publishes a best practices document that is considered to be the standard description of how SMS short code programs should work. The document recommends that all short code programs recognize standard keywords that are meant to help the consumer use the service in a way that promotes full disclosure. The document also recommends that all short code programs recognize certain keywords like "HELP" and "STOP" as a way to give users proactive control over how they interact with the service.

Just for the fun of it, I sent both "HELP" and "STOP" to the short codes of a few of the other dancers on the show, here are the results:

"Help" to 3407, and "Stop" to 3412 didn't return the results I was expecting.

Instead of returning a text message describing what options are available, it looks like "Help" is being processed as a vote. Same for "Stop".

So in my example "Help" and "Stop" seem to do the same thing as "Vote". In this particular instance, the "Dancing" short code program doesn't seem to be following the guidelines described by the MMA.

Just for the fun of it I decided to send one last text value to short code. I would pick a word that the service would definitely not understand and I hoped I would get back some type of helpful message.

Here is the screen shot, I'll leave it up to you to see what I did.

Keynote has automation technologies that can help test how a short code responds to different keywords sent to it. Maybe you work for a carrier, sms aggregator, or application house that has responsibility for 100's, or 1000's of short codes. If you need to audit all of them for MMA compliance, that might not be a fun task if you have to do it manually. Or are you exposing your company to some type of "risk" if you are not doing it all?

If you haven't seen our other recent blog posts, check out what we call "MITE" which is an automated testing tool that supports the ability to send and receive SMS messages.

In case you are wondering click here to find out what my "word" means.

Comments

[CS]

This campaign would actually be on a specific carrier and would be over a short-short-code. These short-short-codes normally falls under the respective carriers requirements and rules and do not necessarily need to follow any of the MMA guidelines for best practices.