The old and traditional, but yet still effective way of marketing something, is to spread the word out as much as possible, to anyone and anywhere.
But in the modern days of the internet and mobile, this kind of marketing can sometimes lead to spam. For instance, when marketers try to market their products using SMS, they tend to send mass messages to all people in their gathered contacts, often sending them frequently, causing annoyance to the recipients.
This is nothing new, and Google is noticing that.
In a way to further curb spam messages on its Android platform, Google introduced 'Verified SMS' and 'Spam Protection'.
First off, the Verified SMS feature puts verified badges in messages sent from legitimate businesses that Google knows. Verified SMS will provide the businesses' name and logo, to ensure recipients that the message is certainly not a spam.
This next feature isn’t exactly new, but Google is now rolling it out more widely, initially to all users in the U.S., India, Mexico, Brazil, UK, France, Philippines, Spain, and Canada, with more countries on the way.
According to Google on its blog post:
Spam messages can come in many form. While some are true from marketers attempting to sell products, but in many other cases, spam messages can mean scam messages.
One example is when an app or a web platform is sending a one-time password. Or sometimes, even two-step verification notifications can use unknown phone numbers. In cases like this, scammers can falsify SMS messages, and ask potential victims to click on malicious links.
With Verified SMS, users can be certain that the SMS they receive comes from legitimate businesses.
In other words, Verified SMS is a real-time spam protection that warns users of suspected scam messages.
Businesses are sending trillions of messages each year, and Verified SMS can certainly reduce fraud risk while improving response rates and brand experience over text messaging.
Verified SMS demonstrates Google's continued commitment in improving the ways businesses communicate with consumers, putting business information such as a brand's logo and company overview immediately in front of text recipients.
But of course, this Verified SMS doesn't mean that SMS is foolproof.
First of all, as of the announcement, Google is just starting to gather all businesses it knows into the database, meaning that not all businesses that are legitimate are verified at Verified SMS. Second, there are many companies that are legitimate, but have not provide all the necessary information to Google to verify them, meaning that they too may not get that verification badge yet.
Still, the feature should provide some peace of mind for Android users the next time the get receive a text asking for a verification code.
Verified SMS is just one of Google efforts to improve its messages with businesses.
The tech giant also has enhanced the chats users have on Messages with Rich Business Messaging (RBM), and provided Spam Protection for messages, where Google can detect whether a link in a message might lead to an unsafe website.