Coke, CBS Top Keynote Short-Code Reliability Tests

Texting a few numbers to a short code from your phone does everything from letting you vote for your favorite singer to downloading a ringtone to interacting with a print magazine ad or billboard. Short codes may be a favored mobile marketing tool, but in reality, they’re only as good as their response time.

Keynote Systems put the reliability of short codes to the test in the first Keynote Competitive Research common short code study. The study measured and compared the average availability and round-trip message delivery time for 24 common short codes.

According to a Mobile Marketer report on the research, CBS and Coca-Cola tied for the best short-code reliability, meaning that they-re always available and have spent the least time offline. The New York Times, Obopay and Chase all had very high reliability rates as well.

Overall, the average response time was nine seconds, with the fastest response clocking in at less than six seconds and the slowest taking an endless 19 seconds, the study found.

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