A big hit at SXSW, GroupMe is definitely one of the front-runners in the crowded world of group messaging. Now, they’ve begun to show what they’re really made of with Featured Groups. The feature launched yesterday and will give brands an opportunity to easily engage with the focused community.
The obvious tendency for any group chat would be to create groups around specific topics. GroupMe recognized this behavior and even capitalized on it during the SXSW conference, offering up special information about events in Austin to those who created groups on the service. With Featured Groups, brands will be able to benefit from this natural behavior while offering users and official set of groups to choose from.
There are five brands on board for the launch, including Oxygen’s Bad Girls Club, MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew, Bon Jovi, and the Bonnaroo and Coachella music festivals. Joining these groups opens up the user to messages from the brand, which could include anything from news, marketing information, and exclusive content to contests, and reminders for show times.
This new feature does suggest that GroupMe has a business model and should make the service a bit stickier. Many new users of GroupMe now have a set of default groups to chose from and might actually stick around where previously they may have lost interest with no one to talk to. The success of Featured groups will hinge on how they are marketed by the brands involved and how those brands use their new mouthpiece. It only takes a few messages in a row to cross the line from informative to spammy.
While it remains to be seen whether Featured Groups will help GroupMe break from the pack, it is defnitely a smart move. I’m reminded of a young Foursquare, who forged partnerships with majoir brands to make a name for itself and to help potential users understand what the point was. This was even before Twitter had introduced promoted trends and tweets. It seems as though GroupMe may be on the right track.
via ReadWriteWeb