One night I was playing and singing with my group on WWOZ, and I wanted my friends and fans to be sure to listen.  What I did was sign up for a free text messaging system by Broadtexter.  This system allows you to compose a text message and schedule it to be sent at anytime in the future.  So at 5 minutes before we started, while I was tuning my guitar, my peeps were automatically getting a SMS sent to their cell phones.

After a quick sign up, you tell your fans to go to your broadtexter website, which is just for you (i.e. http://www.broadtexter.com/BurkeText), and from there they can sign up for text messages.  Then you can login to your account to write and send out messages to all of your fans everywhere, or just ona state-by-state basis.

But computers are not even really necessary after you create an account. You can send out messages from your phone (not sheduled, but immediate).Better yet, your new fans don’t have to sign up from a computer, they can sign up from any Web-enabled device like a Blackberry, iPhone or cell phone at your gigs.  This I find is most effective because at your gigs is the best time to make contact (”Out-of-sight, out-of-mind”).

The one drawback I found with this latter option is that in order to sign up on a mobile device, your fans have to type out the long URL and you have to spell it out for them. Imagine having to take a break from your set to say:

“That’s b-r-o-a-d-t-e-x-t-e-r-forwardslash-yes,forwardslash-b-u-r-k-e-t-e-x-t.” Whew!

So what I did was get another, shorter URL called fantext.mobi that acts as a portal to the mobile registration site. It is much shorter to say and spell, and the .mobi gives it a little pizzaz.

For more information see: www.broadtexter.com.