Challenge

In the days before Skype made its own app for Android and iPhone – in the days before iPhone itself and the emergence of Android as a Google-backed, fully fledged mobile OS – there was a race to port Skype’s popular service to mobile phones. Coming out of CES 2007, with at least 20 competitors attempting to do the same thing, and with the assistance of SocialRadius, the rebranded Mobivox (formerly VoxLib) won what ended up being that sprint.

Mobivox retained SocialRadius for a ramp-up campaign to CTIA 2007, occurring months after CES. Not merely focused on retaining the mindshare of the mobile and tech press attending that trade show, SocialRadius also helped to craft a campaign that would position Mobivox as the first choice for all kinds of consumers when it came to the most affordable, most logical way to implement VoIP on mobile phones. This included everyone from expat bloggers living in different countries looking for cheap and affordable workarounds for calling home while away from the PC to general “super blogger” thought leaders.

Solution

• Successful press outreach to attending business, mobile and technology press at CTIA.
• An outside-the-“vox” strategy that focused on specifically targeting campaigns to verticals largely ignored by these kinds of services (e.g. cultural and ethnic bloggers).
• Leveraged firm’s existing relationship with the analyst community, which is especially key in securing leadership positioning within the mobile industry.

Results

• Coverage from top-tier outlets such as BusinessWeek, CNET, TechCrunch, GigaOM, ZDNet, among many others.
• Mobivox generated 100,000 new users in the first six months of the SocialRadius campaign, which the company directly attributed to the expat communities the firm had targeted.
• After this initial rush of press coverage, and user adds, Mobivox was acquired two years later by Sabse Technologies, the VOIP technology company started by Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia.