How push notifications helped me get tickets to Oprah

Photo: Oprah.comTen years. I’ve been trying diligently for a decade to score the hottest tickets in television. And I did it! But not without the help of technology.

At the end of August, I got an e-mail from an Oprah Winfrey Show staffer offering me two tickets to a September taping. Practically shaking, I responded, “Yes!” with as much e-mail enthusiasm as possible. (Did I mention that I’m an Oprah fanatic?)

While the prospect of going to the Oprah show is exciting to me, I won’t bore you with my bragging. Instead, I wanted to tell you about how push notifications got me to that point.

Since 1986, the Oprah Show reservation process has changed as many times as Oprah’s hairdo. Most recently, it has fully embraced technology, offering access to virtually all tickets at Oprah.com.

This past year, the Oprah Mobile app debuted. When I downloaded the application, I was asked first to sign the No Phone Zone pledge, and then if I wanted to allow notifications, such as ticket reservation alerts.

Enter push notification.

Since I opted “in” for alerts, the Oprah Show sends me updates that appear on my smartphone in the same fashion as a text message. As Kipp Bodnar blogged on HubSpot, “Push notifications are a real-time interaction with users and provide a utility and experience that email can’t match.”

A few days before September reservations opened, I got a push notification. A little green “O” icon at the top of my smartphone took me to a message about the reservation window on Oprah.com.

The push notification acted as a reminder and gave me a call to action. I knew where to go and when to request tickets. As luck would have it, one of my requests was granted.

Push notifications have the potential to be incredibly invasive. Notifications should not be sent lightly, but when done properly, especially with a call to action, the impact can be far greater than e-mail.

Sure, this technology can be used to push tickets, weather forecasts or app updates but what other innovative ways have you seen push notifications used? What are you pushing?