I started my mobile career in the late 1990s when today’s smartphones were science fiction.
At that time SMS was it. The earliest text services were greeted with the kind of global fanfare now reserved for the launch of the-next-best-social-network-thang. Or Visa and Mastercard and AMEX and PayPal and Google and Apple partnering for the all singing all dancing P2P payment service.
The thing is. Text services are no longer sexy.
You cannot sling an angry bird with it, or use it to insert an image of a sofa into your living room. Media and advertising agencies have abandoned the ubiquitous text to win service in droves in favour of a prancy iPhone app that does anything or nothing at all.
What I find interesting though is that SMS is STILL one of the most popular means of communication in the world.
It is still the primary reason why a 15-24 year old buys a phone. It is still used a staggering 5000 to 10000 times a month by some individuals to chat with their mates. (This volume is feasible by “text bombing” all your friends at once. Mine would disown me.)
Telcos are handling mind-boggling message volumes from consumers choosing to receive their Facebook and Twitter updates via SMS.
My Mum uses it to chat with her friends around the world. During the last earthquake in Christchurch she got so overwhelmed by the flood of texts from her over-70 friends she nearly had a meltdown. Her fingers don’t work that fast.
I book meetings with CEOs of major enterprises via SMS.
Major enterprises are integrating SMS capability into their nastiest and most hard core enterprise systems as standard. It is becoming particularly crucial in the emerging trend towards social CRM. SMS is a cost effective way to communicate instantly and non-intrusively with your customers.
It is still the most useful way to reach large bases of people in a natural disaster, to inform them that their plane is running late, to deliver a voucher, or inform that a bill needs to be paid urgently.
There was a good article posted yesterday in mobilecommercedaily about the integration of SMS within your broader mRetail and smartphone strategy. It made me think of all the large private and public sector organisations that are quietly cracking on with plugging SMS services into the core of their customer relationship management strategies and processes.
I love the possibilities opened up by smartphones but even more I love seeing yesterday’s frivolous mobile technology become business as usual today. I don’t mourn the slow down in text to win campaigns. I welcome the evolution of SMS towards everyday normal use by today’s enterprises to extend their communications reach.
I also take my hat off to telcos in some markets who have sweated blood and endured a lot of grief in their endeavours to protect customers from spam. Those years of effort have paid off and say much about the willingness of those customers (now) to openly engage with public and private sector organisations via SMS and the mobile.
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