GroupMe Featured Groups, which debut Monday, give brands an opportunity to both create and engage in group messaging conversations about them. Through the "Featured" tab within GroupMe's app, users will now be able to create and join groups relating to the TV shows, artists and events of select launch partners, which include MTV (which previously employed Fast Society in a group texting campaign for Skins) and the Coachella Music Festival.
The idea, says co-founder Jared Hecht, was born out of looking at how users were already interacting on the service. "We found these use cases that were pre-existing on GroupMe … [so we] amplified them and added va lue," he told me in a conversation last week.
GroupMe users at SXSW may have already seen similar, as during the conference, the company encouraged attendees to create SXSW-related groups, which resulted in more than 2 million messages being sent through the service.
Now, the company will use the "Featured" space to routinely showcase brands, such as Oxygen's "Bad Girls Club" and rock band Bon Jovi. Once users create or join groups relating to them, the brands will then have the ability to engage by sending messages, answering fans’ questions, sharing photos or posting special promotions, among other possible activities.
For MTV's "Randy Jackson Presents America's Best Dance Crew," fans will both get bonus content and the opportunity to chat with the cast, as crew members will randomly participate in some of the groups that get created. In a statement, MTV’s vice president of mobile Michael Scogin says of the partnership, "Group messaging is … especially relevant...
