I was at my friend’s hotel bar the other night and had the usual great time dancing to the live bands they have playing 7 days a week. This is a special bar with a very interesting business model – because in fact it hosts a television show that highlights up and coming new bands with interviews of the band members and several of their songs played on TV where the bands can demonstrate their talent to a live “studio” audience. The business model is interesting because rather than have a music studio as a major expense, my friend has a revenue making bar which he uses to make his television program.

The TV program may only be shown on the public network which is notorious for having low ratings, but it certainly does have a strong following with the bar-patrons and the fans of the different bands and the TV ratings for my friends music show has been steadily growing even though the total network is relatively flat.

Having a few quiet ales with my friend, he explained how he built up the “brand loyalty” for both the bands and his TV show. And it was here where I saw a very fast way to use technology to grow a business and loyalty with its customer base. The technology is called “Text to Screen” and it is where people send text messages on their phones – which we all know everyone has at least one mobile phone, and the messages can be shown on television and on the web.

My friend uses “text to screen” within his hotel for the audience to vote on songs they favor and for them to request songs to be played. And he also promotes it on his television show for competitions and viewer ratings of the different bands. The collective results of sometimes hundreds of incoming text messages get tallied up in real-time and shown both on the TV screen and the Internet, so there is a real-time interaction with the audience. I’m very impressed with this clever use of technology.