Over on the Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals today, Neil Strother briefly recaps some stats released by Verisign this past week.
“VeriSign said it delivered a record 94.8 billion mobile messages (SMS, MMS, A2P) worldwide in the second quarter, up more than 82% from the same quarter a year ago. The company delivered nearly 179 billion messages globally in the first half of the year. To put this into perspective, that equates to 26 messages for every person on the planet (6.7 billion).”
That’s mind-blowing. And this is only one company!
Don’t Leave Home Without It
As Charles Landry, vice president and general manager of products and innovation at VeriSign, said in a Mobile Marketer article, “The mobile phone has become the most pervasive, personal communications tool available. We hardly ever leave home without it.” I don’t know about you, but most of the people I know get so freaked out if they forget their cellphone at home or leave it behind at a restaurant, you’d think they’d left an infant in a stroller in a mall parking lot.
He adds, “SMS is a lowest common denominator technology that is easy to use, appeals to all consumer demographics, and access to it is now 100 percent available on mobile devices in the U.S.” Let’s read that again – 100% availability of SMS on mobile devices. Wow.
Landlines and Dinosaurs
Yesterday I tweeted (@gendelibero) about Verizon Communications CEO Ivan Seidenberg’s comments to the audience at a Goldman Sachs investor conference that the company is just not interested in telephones connected with wires.
He’s right. With mobile use at an all-time high and services like Google Voice, landlines are going the way of the dinosaur.
“Video is going to be the core product in the fixed-line business,” Mr. Seidenberg declared. And the focus will move from selling bundles of video and landline to video and cellphones, he added. Does he sound like he’s crazy? Yeah… crazy like a fox!
All-You-Can-Use
Let’s not forget what makes the cellphone so popular. How about convenience, safety, and now for all of you hyper-consumers out there, all-you-can-use calling and data plans (forget about the radiation issue or the fact that people like my brother-in-law, a telco employee for many years, will be looking for a new career at some point soon.) These little gems aren’t just phones – they’re full-blown productivity stations, allowing us to do many of the things we do at our desks using our cellphone anywhere we like.
The fact that Verisign sees SMS requests from mobile phone users equivalent to 26 SMS messages for every human on the planet is a wake-up call to any marketer or organization on the fence about mobile marketing.
It’s time to get your SMS on.