Swarmteams is a multichannel, Smart Messaging system for mobile groups,. It helps organisations turn audiences into communities. It has been developed by the same company currently working with NESTA on Swarmtribes, for the music industry 9read The Daily Telegraph’s comments about its use here). There are a number of licenses available for free to UK musicians and arts organisations, which include sizeable bundles of free SMS messages.
Swarmteams is a many-to-many interactive system compared to MySpace/Facebook/Twitter, which are one-to-many broadcast systems. Swarmteams can therefore generate much more activity in terms of replies and follow-on messages because all the key group contact information is securely stored on a shared private server, instead of duplicated on everyone’s mobile phones.
The system is “smart” because each user can decide how they want to receive messages – e.g. if “I’m online ping me, but if I’m offline text me”.
Its multichannel in that all messages can be sent and received by SMS, IM, email and web. Any Swarm member can:
- instantly broadcast to every other member of their swarms;
- ask their swarm a question to answer or forward to other swarms;
- start a multichannel interactive chat with their whole swarm;
- send out messages with optional links to a core swarm who forward them to a whole community.