“This message of twenty four words and 138 total characters takes you less than five seconds to consume, that is why texting is popular.”
According to a University of Pennsylvania study, the speed with which we consume information from our eyes to the visual cortex in the brain is approximately 10 megabytes per second, we hear at roughly one tenth that speed or a rate of about 102 kilobytes per second.
Just think how drastically communication has changed over the past 35 years. The first email went out in 1971, still it would take nearly 30 years before email became pervasive in society. In the mid 1990′s business still depended heavily upon voice mail, a slow and often annoying means of sharing information with colleagues in a time shifted manner. The annoying part came when people, seeking to gain favor with superiors, would copy everyone on the message. That copying continues today in email but in that there is hope.
In December of 1992 the first text message was sent via SMS or Simple Messaging Services. During the second quarter of 2008, AT&T reported that more text messages were sent from cell phones than actual calls. Texting is becoming a preferred means of communicating short messages from person to person. On June 9 of this year the US Senate held hearings from the major telephone operators in regard to pricing of texting services offered customers, and it is from those hearings that this story unfolds.
Though providers charge 20 cents per text when the individual has not chosen a texting plan, those people represent less than 1% of users. The average price per text is around a penny. The cost of providing that text is estimated to be about 0.0325 cents per text, providing the carriers with a very handsome gross margin of nearly 70%. Still, what really matters is that texting is growing at a rate approaching 50% per month and that texting is seen as fast and efficient.
This past 4th of July weekend I spent some valuable time with my daughter (16) and five of her friends. For a few minutes I was able to discuss with them their texting behavior, preferences and general insights into text messaging. Texting, it turns out, has a lot of benefits besides being efficient or quick to consume. It’s private for one, often more priviate than email, and it can be consumed discretely “even during church” according to one of the girls I interviewed. Texting has perseverence, it stays on ones handset and can be accessed at a later time. This is an added value to texting not commonly considered and from a marketing perspective, holds great promise.
The point of all this is that texting is more than the electronic version of sending notes among young kids in high school. Texting is important because it is succinct and so very quickly consumed. Character length constrictions force a succinctness that is greatly needed in communication, while also improving upon the speed by which the message is consumed. That same message above could be re-written:
“This msg of 24 wds & 138 characters takes u less than 5 secs to consume, thats y txtng is popular”
This version is now down to 21 words and 95 characters, a character reduction of 32%, while still clearly conveying the same message, only instead of taking you 5 seconds to consume, you consumed it in about 3. With the abundance of information thrown at us on a daily basis, anything that eases its consumption is good news indeed.
