I sign up for lots of text message notifications from different companies, and while I have photos of my friends that show up on my iPhone and in Messages on my Mac, I don’t know how to do the same with company messages. Is there some way to associate a four or five digit number with a specific company like Amazon or Starbucks?
While apps and fancy utilities might be in vogue with some companies, I concur that good old simple SMS text messages are a great way to stay in touch with a lot of companies, and when you enable 2-step verification for your login, it’s essential that you can receive text messages from companies like eBay and Twitter! What makes it confusing is that they often come from 5 or 6 digit numbers (known in the biz as shortcodes). So can you add them to your Contacts address book on your iPhone or Mac? In fact, you can!
So the trick is to work with a company’s entry in your address book exactly as you would a friend, even including adding the company logo (my preference, at least) as if that was a photo of the person. In fact, I’m so in alignment with you here that it bugs me when any text messages show up on my phone or computer that don’t have a picture or photo associated!
I just this morning signed up for the Caribou Coffee rewards club, a service that sends updates via text message, so let me step you through how I added the company name and logo to the mix.
To start, Caribou sent me a welcome message and a perk: a free beverage! Very nice of ’em:
But seeing the number — 65017 — and the grey silhouette? That’s for the birds!
So let’s fix it.
First, launch Contacts on your Mac…
You can see that I have lots and lots of contacts, but all we’re interested in here is the “+” button on the middle of the bottom region.
Click on it to get the menu to pop up:
And choose “New Contact” to proceed, then start entering data.
You can see, I’ve entered both the company name and the 5-digit SMS shortcode for Caribou Coffee:
Where this gets fun is when we want to add a logo. To do that jump onto your Web browser and go to Google Image Search and do a search for the company name + logo:
Found a logo you like? Click on it and choose the “View Image” button to get it to show up by itself in the browser.
Then Control-Click on that image:
Choose “Copy Image” and then move back to Contacts.
Now, click on “add photo”, the grey circle just to the left of the company name. You’ll get a pop up with lots of (weird) default faces and photos you can choose from:
Instead, just paste the image you’ve saved from Google.
Contacts then gives you the ability to fine tune which portion of the image you want visible:
You can use the “+” and “-” slider to zoom in or out, and you can click-drag to change what portion of the image is actually shown. Want to have some fun? Click on the box immediately above the “Done” button and you’ll find that Contacts has a whole filtering system included.
Got it exactly as you want? Excellent. Click on “Done“.
And your’e done. It might take a few seconds for Messages to update, and getting it to sync with your phone and other devices might take a bit longer, but you’ll end up with the far more attractive logo and company name rather than that 5-digit shortcode:
As you can see, I have done the same with Twitter, Google, and Amazon, among many others. It’s actually kind of fun to get those company logos to fit just perfectly into the round photo region that Apple allows. At least, I think it’s fun.
In any case, now you know how to turn text messages from a mysterious number into a known and far more easily recognized contact on your Mac and iOS systems.
How do I add a company’s 5 digit code to the established Contact, with ALL OF THEIR info, including phone number, Address, email address and website? If entered in a phone# slot, it then has a HYPHEN in the number and fear my phone will still not recognize THAT number, as it doesn’t have a hyphen upon incoming.