Subject: [NEXTEL-1] A Study in Guerrilla Marketing

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 14:43:32 -0500

A Study in Guerrilla Marketing

By Elisa Batista
02:00 AM Jan. 17, 2003 PT

A company has a product it wants to sell to other businesses. It releases a study
highlighting the deficits in related products in its
industry. Moments later, the company announces a solution to the problems.

Is this clever marketing or a sleazy business practice?

For the most part, it's a typical public relations maneuver, analysts say. Companies often
dispense information on a product and
include statistics about why it is needed. But, analysts add, if a company is serious
about selling its product, it's best off not
slamming the companies it intends to bring on board as customers.

That's essentially what Keynote Systems, a company that monitors the performance of
Internet networks and applications, did
when it released a study this week pointing out that 7.5 percent of short text messages
sent over cell phones get "lost."

The study, released Wednesday afternoon, found that on average 5 percent of wireless text
messages don't reach their intended
recipient, which means phone companies that normally charge a per-message fee lose out on
the revenue. Another 2.5 percent
of messages don't reach recipients within two minutes -- the amount of time Keynote said
was reasonable to wait.

The study also ranked wireless phone companies from the slowest (Nextel, which Keynote
said needs an average of 15.33
seconds to relay a message) to the fastest (T-Mobile, which can zap messages in 12.1
seconds, on average). Keynote also
found that AT&T Wireless was pretty good at making sure that 95.5 percent of text messages
arrived at their destination,
whereas T-Mobile could only successfully route about 86 percent.

What's possibly more unnerving for the carriers ranked last in either category is that
literally a minute after Keynote released its
findings, the company sent out another press release promoting its service to help
carriers identify the source of the latency.

"Keynote only focused in on SMS (short message service) messages," said Peter Taft,
director of Nextel's messaging division.
"They don't even measure the performance of our two-way service, which is our premier
service."

Unlike SMS, which allows customers to send text notes of up to 160 characters in length,
Nextel's two-way messaging service
works on an IP network and lets customers, who are primarily business users, send messages
of up to 500 characters and
receive confirmation that the message arrived and was opened.

Keynote, which has conducted other research, but never on SMS, said it wasn't surprised by
the carriers' reactions. Generally,
the companies ranked last always have questions about how the study was conducted, said
Chuck Mount, general manager for
Keynote's wireless services division.

While Keynote hasn't yet received any carrier complaints about this particular study,
Mount said he expects some questions
and criticism.

Mount said he didn't think it was a conflict of interest to release the study and promote
Keynote's product at the same time.

"Keynote has been careful," Mount said. "We have a product offering, but it's not the only
solution out there. What we are
trying to do is draw attention to fact that performance is still slow. If it takes 30
seconds to download your website, then
customers are going to go elsewhere."

Carriers may also look elsewhere for a remedy to lost text messages.

Nextel said it has no plans to subscribe to Keynote's services.

Analysts said Keynote's findings are nothing new. Just as the quality of voice calls over
cellular networks is spotty, so is sending
a text message, said Alan A. Reiter, president of Wireless Internet & Mobile Consulting.

Some noted, however, that Keynote may have alienated potential customers by publicly
ranking carriers' SMS performance.

"Carriers will take Keynote's study with a grain of salt even though the media picked it
up," said Jupiter Research analyst Joe
Laszlo. "I'm not sure if they will win themselves a lot of customers with their SMS
solution even if this is interesting data that the
industry will grudgingly accept."

Laszlo, too, wasn't surprised to hear that SMS messages don't always reach their
destinations instantly. But he was surprised to
learn from the Keynote study that it takes longer to send an SMS message to someone who
uses the same carrier than it does
to reach someone who gets wireless service from a competing carrier.

http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,57236,00.html

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