Monthly Archives: December 2008

Latest AT&T Promotions

Posted on by

http://www.speakinthumbs.com/

The premise of the latest campaign from AT&T is that with a full keyboard on your phone, you don’t have to abbriviate or use SMS-shorthand to communicate with people.

The above landing page will provide user-submitted translations of old SMS-shorthand into creative ways to communicate the same message with actual words.

What is NOT highlighted by the campaign on any level, is an increase in the number of characters allowed in SMS-messages. While having a full keyboard is a nice feature, I would argue few people will take this USP and utilize it to write a sentence instead of ‘LOL.’

Then I started thinking about my high-school aged cousins and their texting behaviors (likely an ideal demographic for the pricing models of wireless carriers) they text 5-6 messages per minute, all with one-to-three (ha) words either in short hand or abbrviated words. Are 13-18 year olds the targeted demographic for the full-keyboard? Hard to tell from this campaign’s site. If you take advantage of SMS-messaging, and if you had a full keyboard, would you write out full phrases instead of using shorthand?

Survey: Social Networking and Fortune 200 Company

Posted on by

“Did you know that between June 2007 and June 2008 Facebook had 132,105,000 unique visitors and has over 10 billion photos posted. MySpace had 117,582,000 unique visitors and Hi5.com had 56,367,000 unique visitors.” Source: Comscore.com

Based on survey results from a wide range of staff, contractors and employees at the Denver-based telecom giant, over 70% of the survey participants do NOT use a social networking site. While the original question was Yes/No if participants used social networking sites, the second question in the survey asks if people who responded Yes use Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Twitter or ‘Other.’ Of the 70% that said no, 80% of those people claim they’re Just Not Interested in social networking sites. Of the 30% that said yes, over 60% use Facebook, less than 50% use MySpace, less than 40% use LinkedIn, and remaining numbers are negligible.

I would argue the 18-35 age range (1973-1990) has been bombarded with the the latest generations of mass media, and become accustomed to the types of conversations and dictations the media and advertising community has been broadcasting. The social networking sites are catered to these generations, the users of the internet and multimedia as a means of communication or dialogue, and not limited to media as entertainment or monologue.

Is it a generational trend for 18-35 year-olds to be using social networking sites? Are the results of the survey reflective of the average employee not to be within this age range?

“According to the findings of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, almost 60% of Americans interact with companies on a social media site. The survey finds that 93% of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media, while 85% believe a company should not only be present, but should also interact with its consumers via social media.” Source: Pollstream

What social networking sites do you use? Or don’t? And why not? Should social networking be branded in such a way where business can occur through such a site?