The Communities Dominate Brands blog has a post which is a virtual call-to-arms to the American CEO to use SMS to speed up communication . We in India, of course, have made SMS a way of life (I calculated that I send/receive about 50SMSes a day), but it has surprisingly little adoption in the US…
But American executives have been horribly badly served by their cellular telecoms industry, from poor handsets to poor coverage to poor services to bad pricing to bad interconnectivity etc. It was only a few years ago that American carriers finally allowed cross-network SMS text message delivery. And until recently, SMS text messaging was not even a standard service, you had to PAY to have it turned on!
… as compared to the rest of the world…
48% of British teenagers admit to sending text messages WHILE they TALK to ANOTHER person… One third of South Korean teenagers average 100 text messages per day. The Belgian study at Catholic University of Leuwen found that over half of teenagers regularly wake up to incoming text messages from their friends. Regularly wake up. And the CEO of UK universtiy broadcaster, SubTV, Peter Miles says that it is SMS text messaging use that creates the hive mentality, the collaboration with the group, similar to the Borg character in Star Trek, which totally redefines Gen-C from its predecessor generations. This generation has an almost telepathic connection to their peers at all times. Dr Ito of Japan found that Japanese young adults now require a reply to any urgent text message within 30 minutes – being in a meeting with your boss, or in school taking an exam is no excuse. An urgent text message must be replied to within 30 minutes.
There are 2.7 billion mobile phones in use today, and the market is growing fastest outside the US (India being the fastest and China the next). This is where the mobile device is being adopted in both in people’s personal and professional spheres are a way of life. True innovation will occur in these geographies, because that’s where the most money is to be made.
But we aren’t talking merely about making money – the mobile phone as the first truly “personal” computer, the first truly “always-on” device, will change society itself – because it’ll change the very manner in which we communicate; through speed, content and reach. In this changing society, will the U.S. be left behind?