$20 Amazon card in the offing for selected ChaCha mobile customers

Over the next few days, a percentage of ChaCha's mobile users will be given the opportunity to take a customer survey over the phone in exchange for a $20 Amazon gift card. This is according to Chacha's Guide Blog, which is open for the public to peruse.

ChaCha's survey of a 'statistically significant' number of users this week (and possibly next) could help the company's statisticians figure out the following question: How much would a typical mobile user pay for ChaCha's mobile answer service? Some survey-takers might veer slightly off the road upon hearing this question since many users of textChaCha, as the mobile answer service is also called, don't know that the service won't stay free. In fact, ChaCha's mobile answer service will go 'premium' later in 2008, available for a monthly subscription.

The survey will help ChaCha's experts hone in on a better price expectation for their mobile answer service than they currently have pegged, which is somewhere between $5 and $10. ChaCha's Director of Guide Management, Esther Friend, wrote today on the Guide Blog: "The surveys are being conducted to gather useful feedback and relevant pricing information to guide us in the coming months on our strategy and priorities for a successful commercial launch."

Nearly all of ChaCha's competitors in the mobile search market offer free mobile search via SMS. ChaCha, however, is the only such SMS search service that is not based on automated search. Freelance 'guides' hired by ChaCha search the internet and various databases for customers who are away from their PC computers and need assistance. Cell phone users can send a text message - in the form of a natural language query - to 242242 and receive an answer in seconds or minutes. Currently no ads are presented on the service.

While a $20 gift card on Amazon.com is a perfect 'price point' for successfully luring in just about any customer to take a survey, ChaCha's executives may find that users will think that that price point of $5-10/month is a bit much for premium textChaCha, at least for now. During this nascent phase of mobile search, users are finding that no service, Google included, is the undisputed leader in mobile search. In this kind of market condition, users will be mostly 'test driving' services and not buying. They'll wait until a highly trusted source (in the non-mobile search market, examples include Consumer Reports, Car and Driver, New York Times Book Review, etc...) reviews, ranks, and rates the range of products and services. Until that happens with mobile search, it is unlikely that people will flock in signficant numbers to one specific 'dealer' and sign on the dotted line.