Will happen everywhere: Brits prefer sending text message to calling

It was bound to happen. Yet this will surprise a lot of our readers, in particular all those based in North America. But trust us. This trend is not in a "weird" country like a Finland or South Korea or Japan. If this trend happens in the UK, it will happen everywhere, including the USA and Canada.

Alan and I have been repeating the fact that SMS text messaging is an addictive service. Once you start to use it, you will never stop. Now the British telecoms regulator Ofcom, has released its findings that British users PREFER to send text messages rather than to call. Brits on average send 28 SMS text messages per week, to an average of placing 20 phone calls per week. The results were reported by the BBC at its website under the story Insights into UK Digital Habits of 27 April, 2006.

Almost two thirds of the world's mobile phone users are already active users of SMS text messaging - at 1.4 billion users (63% of 2.2 billion mobile phone users in the world today, May 2006) SMS text messaging is the most used data service on the planet, over twice the size of the second most popular data service - plain old e-mail, used only by 668 million people on the planet (and those 668 million people maintain 1.2 billion e-mail mailboxes, according to internet measurement specialists, Radicati). And for those into dollar numbers, SMS text messaging was worth 75 billion dollars of annual revenues in 2005 - thats about as much as total music sales, total hollywood box office revenues, and total videogaming software revenues - combined.

We've seen this kind of addictive behaviour in various Asian countries - the world's leading countries for SMS use are the Philippines (averaging 15 text messages per day across all mobile phone users), with Singapore second, and South Korea third. In Europe the leading countries are Norway and Ireland, both averaging about 4 text messages per person per day. But now an "average" European country, the UK, shows the same trend.

First, this is a clear sign of the advance of Generation-C (for Community) as we discuss in our book, Communities Dominate Brands. The communication method of preference for Gen-C is of course SMS text messaging. As our friend Peter Miles the CEO of British university broadcaster, SubTV likes to say about SMS usage, it turns the youth into the permanently connected cyborg like the characters in Star Trek, the Borg, as we reported earlier on this blogsite in this story "They Are the Borg". If you really want to understand SMS text messaging, read the chapter on Gen-C in our book.

Now for the relevance. First - yes, twice as many people use SMS text messaging as use e-mail. Now also SMS text messaging has become the preferred means of communications for the whole population. Not only the youth as we've reported many times. Not only for the busy executives who long ago discovered that SMS text messaging is the fastest way to communicate on the planet (much much faster in through-put than any e-mail or voice call; the only system that can hope to match SMS text messaging is a Blackberry, but Blackberries are used only by 4 million people. SMS text messaging can reach all of the 2.2 billion mobile phone users, or 33% of the GLOBAL population).

Many who visit this blogsite are PC-centric users of the web. They may be reluctant to believe that SMS can take over. I would argue that now it is high time to learn to overcome "the keypad thing" with SMS text messaging. If grandparent age people in Britain can do it, you can do it. Learn why it is the most secretive and personal of all communication - yes, in all those situations when it is impossible or inconvenient or impolite to take a phone call with your mobile, you can send (and receive) text message based communications. And when your counterpart is unable to take a call, rather than talking to a voicemail box, send the text message instead. It will reach your counterpart much faster than any voicemail you could have left.

But what of other media, banking and commerce? SMS is not only a communication method. It is a media. It can deliver your messages, your alerts, your advertisements. You can use it as your feedback channel. You can use it to get your customers to participate and vote. Like Alan likes to say, the China Idol event is the world's biggest example of democracy, ie of voting.

Learn to understand SMS text messaging. If the British population prefers SMS text messaging to placing voice calls, it will happen to your country too. It is no longer the youth, no longer the busy executives, no longer the telecoms techno-nerds like me. It will be grandparents sending SMS text messages to their grandkids. All of us will use it. The sooner you are with it, the more can you learn to take advantage of it.